The Fear Dispositif

The Fear Dispositif Michael J. Shapiro (bio) Luis Lobo-Guerrero. Insuring Security: Biopolitics, Security and Risk. London: Routledge 2011. US130 (hardcover), 178 pp. ISBN 978-0-415-58343-5 In Tony Scott's film Man on Fire (2003) (based on A. J. Quinnel's novel by the same title (1980) ), John Creasy (Denzel Washington), an unemployed ex CIA operative/assassin, takes a job as the bodyguard of the nine-year-old daughter, Pita (Dakota Fanning), of a wealthy Mexican industrialist. The film drama takes place in a fear-gripped Mexico City, where crime syndicate kidnappers are targeting wealthy citizens. The film is well shot with images, moods, tonalities and juxtapositions that capture much of the variety of scenes, persons, structures, and interrelationships constituting "Mexico City. " Although the film narrative is clumsy and the dialogue often cliché-ridden, for purposes here, the film's focus on kidnapping and the personae, apparatuses, and historical forces that lead to the job that Creasy takes exemplify the contemporary situation of private securitization or risk management that is central to much of Lobo-Guerrero's analysis in his Insuring Security. Briefly, the families in Man on Fire, unable to count on policing apparatuses for protection against kidnappers, take out kidnapping insurance. However, in order to maintain their policies, they are required to hire bodyguards to keep the premiums manageable (in the case of the novel version, which takes place in Italy), or to keep the policy from being cancelled (in the case of the Mexico City-located film version). In order to appreciate the circumstances of the contemporary security problematic that Lobo-Guerrero's masterful investigation reports and conceptually figures—as he treats kidnapping/ransom issues among many others, drawing on a wealth of critical philosophical perspectives—I want to begin this review with reference to a historical encounter that speaks to the singularity of what is involved in insuring security at present. The writer, Barry Lopez, reports a conversation that took place in the arctic region in 1924: "A central Eskimo shaman named Aua, queried by Knud Rasmussen, a Danish anthropologist, about Eskimo beliefs, answered, 'We do not believe, we fear'. "1 Aua's response reflects the then Eskimo way of managing security. In their everyday lives, they practiced an epistemology of fear in order to protect themselves from (for example) marauding polar bears or frenzied Walruses during a hunt. To have fears in their case was to be constantly alert to imminent danger. In contrast, "we" (in contemporary industrial/commercial societies) practice an epistemology of belief because for us, security is mediated by various agencies: insurance companies, the Defense Department, the police, the army, and so on. Rather than being individually alert to our environments—reading the landscape, peoplescape and bioscape as did the Eskimos reported by Lopez—we consume information about risks and ways to rely on agencies that reduce them. While fear is an epistemological attentiveness, located in the individual body in the case of the Eskimo hunters, "fear" in the contemporary city and nation state evokes a complex dispositif; it is located in an apparatus rather than in single alert bodies. To elaborate, we can note that in effect, the Eskimo hunter is his own human capital. In his case, risk reduction involves honing (time-investing in) observational skills. In contrast, those at risk now are best viewed as commoditized, vulnerable persons and collectives that constitute capital both for predators and protectors. As a result, a complex security apparatus (a dispositif) emerges, and a perspicuous mode of analysis must diagram that apparatus. The theoretical initiation of the term, dispositif, belongs to Michel Foucault who used it to refer to "a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions … the said as much as the unsaid … the elements of the apparatus. "2 Accordingly, the kidnapping/ransom dispositif in the film version of Man on Fire consists of a networks of ex-intelligence operatives, a crime syndicate, media commentators disseminating media discourses on the problem, corrupt police officials at various levels, federal officials, lawyers, insurance companies, banks, and various technologies of communication. In his chapter, "Kidnap and Ransom. . .