Vigilant subjects
| Author | R Guy Emerson |
| DOI | 10.1177/0263395717747129 |
| Date | 01 August 2019 |
| Published date | 01 August 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2018
Article
Politics
2019, Vol. 39(3) 284 –299
Vigilant subjects
© The Author(s) 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395717747129
DOI: 10.1177/0263395717747129
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R Guy Emerson
Universidad de las Américas Puebla, México
Abstract
A vigilant subject foregrounds the terrorist event, working immanently to its development and
disrupting its realisation. Individuals are tasked with spotting the antecedents of future attacks in
the present so as to ward off catastrophe and with being mindful of processes of radicalisation so
as to counsel against extremism. A vigilant subject monitors others – as much as himself or herself
– according to proscribed conduct, while at the same time he or she co-evolves with uncertainty
in order to prevent emergent threats: be they those yet to materialise (signs of an attack) or yet
to be even thought of (signs of radicalisation). This vigilant subject is explored through two cases:
the British Transport Police campaign to make commuters aware of, and report, terror-related
activity and the Prevent duty that asks university staff to limit students being drawn into terrorism.
Keywords
emergency, governmentality, risk, security, vigilance
Received: 7th July 2017; Revised version received: 31st October 2017; Accepted: 12th November 2017
This article explores how individuals are invited to prevent acts of terrorism. It does so
through two cases: the ‘See it. Say it. Sorted.’ campaign run by the British Transport
Police (BTP) and the Prevent duty applied to universities throughout England and Wales.
The first is diffuse in targeting commuters on rail networks throughout the United
Kingdom. The second is more targeted and explored in relation to higher education insti-
tutions. Together, these cases reveal a multi-focal approach to how individuals are to
combat terror as it emerges. If the first asks passengers to be mindful of potential attacks,
then the second calls on university staff to prevent individuals being drawn into terrorism.
Although both ask individuals to be weary of the signs of terrorism, they do so in different
ways. ‘See it. Say it. Sorted.’ speaks of tangible threats, while Prevent duty focuses on
opaque processes of radicalisation. Both operate amid a degree of uncertainty; however,
the BTP campaign looks for certain cues – abandoned bags – while Prevent duty centres
on an emergent threat – the shift from vulnerability to radicalisation. The former solicits
individuals to be attentive to attacks that have not yet taken place, and the latter mandates
action on threats in the process of materialising. These two processes are charted in terms
Corresponding author:
R Guy Emerson, Departamento de Relaciones Internacionales y Ciencia Política, Universidad de las Américas
Puebla, Sta. Catarina Mártir. San Andrés Cholula, Puebla C.P. 72810, México.
Email: guy.emerson@udlap.mx
Emerson
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of vigilant subjecthood: working amid the immanence of terror to stop attacks from
unfolding.
Vigilance overcomes complexity ontologically rather than epistemologically. The
uncertainty of terrorism is not overcome, but necessitates constant readiness in identify-
ing problematic activity. The restrictions of knowledge are circumvented by subjects
implementing strategies to minimise exposure to harm while maximising attentiveness to
others and their surrounds (O’Malley, 2000: 465). These strategies are explored through
technologies of vigilance, technologies that collapse self-government into political gov-
ernment. Advertising campaigns and training modules are vehicles for such technologies
by operating on the basis of uncertainty and converting it into a ‘modality of governance’
(O’Malley, 2000: 461). To give the future a governable form is to make it actionable in
the present. This is done via non-linear imaginaries in which future terrorist threats are
immanent to the present. Immanence is not only ‘home-grown’ terrorists emerging from
the population but also future attacks with their antecedents in processes apparent today,
thereby compelling action over not yet materialised threats. Vigilant subjects work on the
basis of this conditioned futurity to emerge as the first line of defence in preventing ter-
rorist attacks. Security governance ‘expects the unexpected’ (Aradau and Van Munster,
2012) to make it governable, works amid ‘unknown unknowns’ (Daase and Kessler,
2007) to condition individual conduct, and productively exploits life’s ‘contingent hap-
penings and effects’ (Dillon, 2015) to imagine such happenings and pre-empt their effects.
Vigilance is explored in three parts. The first outlines technologies of vigilance as the
fold between subject and government or, specifically, how individuals govern themselves
in relation to monitoring others. Vigilance is positioned amid, yet expands upon, tech-
nologies of domination and the self – introduced by Foucault and expanded upon by
Deleuze – so as to govern through contingency. The second investigates ‘See it. Say it.
Sorted.’ to reveal how it instils vigilance less by educating the public on the objective
causes of terrorism than by affectively holding future threats in the present to legitimate
the anxieties from which vigilance emerges. The third explores the Prevent duty. If the
BTP campaign conditions conduct by securitising the social field from which individuals
emerge, then Prevent duty conditions emergence itself. It stipulates how higher education
professionals are to be mindful of risks as they move about their workplaces and how to
respond to threats that have not only not yet fully formed (signs of radicalisation) but also
not yet even emerged (vulnerable individuals).
Vigilance and bio-political security
Vigilance is consistent with bio-political security as one of a plethora of ways in which
contingency informs socio-political life (Aradau and Van Munster, 2012; Dillon, 2015;
Dillon and Reid, 2009). Within this trajectory, the article speaks from literatures on event
preparedness (Anderson and Adey, 2012; De Goede, 2008; Lentzos and Rose, 2009) and
critical resilience studies that govern through the catastrophic event (Brassett and
Vaughan-Williams, 2015; Chandler, 2014; Coaffee, 2013; Coaffee and Fussey, 2015;
Malcolm, 2013). Specifically, the article focuses on the event itself or, better, on how
vigilant subjects operate immanently to the event, to not only disrupt how it unfolds but
also to rework the processes of emergence amid uncertainty. Indeed, the two exploratory
cases reveal different ways of operating in the event: by conditioning emergence (Prevent
duty) or conditioning the field of emergence (BTP). Vigilant subjects, like other bio-
politicised lives, are made possible through contingency – a contingency that, in turn, is
286
Politics 39(3)
the basis from which one is an entrepreneur of one’s self (Foucault, 2008), from which
one is innovative and adaptive (Dillon and Reid, 2009), and from which one governs oth-
ers (Deleuze, 1988).
So too is vigilance consistent with literatures that recognise how institutions, profes-
sions, and individuals are increasingly tasked with preventing catastrophe, rather than
state apparatuses (Coaffee, 2013: 248). Vigilance draws on empowerment (Cruikshank,
1994), responsibilisation (Isin, 2002), and participatory and citizen-led security initia-
tives (Bulley, 2013; Rogers, 2013). Vigilant subjects are informed and responsible mem-
bers of self-managing communities (Dean, 2010: 196) are activated as security
‘stakeholders’ and are encouraged to monitor themselves, their communities, and others
(Jarvis and Lister, 2010: 182). They operate amid an ethos of suspicion, wherein ‘perva-
sive anxiety’ becomes a ‘valorous act of citizenship’ (Fournier, 2014: 318), where ‘good’
citizens are on the lookout for ‘suspicious’ subjects (Vaughan-Williams, 2008: 64), and in
situations where everyone ‘is potentially the police’ (Doty, 2007: 132). Less vigilantes
operating outside of the state rationale – Johnston (1996) and Abrahams (1998) – they are
subjects central to its continued operation.
Vigilance operates at an emergent level. Commuters are to anticipate the next attack
before it happens, and teachers are to spot radicalisation before an attack is conceived. To
work within emergence differs from some discourses of resilience that operate after the
event to encourage individuals to learn from crisis (Duffield, 2012: 480). Although works
on anticipation, pre-emption, and risk have problematised this chronology (Adey and
Anderson, 2012; Anderson, 2010; Anderson and Adey, 2011; Aradau and Van Munster,
2007; O’Malley, 2010), vigilance is specifically forward looking in how it informs indi-
vidual conduct, thereby overlapping with what Coaffee (2013: 242–243) calls a ‘first-
wave’ of resilience literature, more proactive than reactive. Yet, vigilance’s future
orientation is less overcoming past wrongs than operating presently on the basis of
‘increasingly uncertain and traumatic futures’ (O’Malley, 2010: 488), less emergency
planning that rehearses official responses to catastrophe than acting in the event
(Anderson, 2015: 61). Like preparedness, vigilance sutures the possibility of future risk
onto the present. It does so, however, with the aim of immanently disturbing rather than
preparing for the consequences of known attacks. It is less...
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