Security’s Archive
The residue of singular elements of past events becomes lodged in security’s futures. Thus, the singular relations and elements of mobile bodies and things, as Alain Badiou suggests, retroactively inscribe the event as such. The attribution of risk to the relations of a credit card, a hire car, a cell phone number after the September 11 2001 terror attacks – this chain of associations is inscribed in present techniques of risk scoring and security protocols that seek to secure against future events. The incalculable and singular elements of Lockerbie, Detroit, Times Square, Russell Square – a chain of associations that may never be repeated or encountered in the same way again – these become the perennial archive of pre-emptive security. And yet, the ethical present can never be founded upon pre-emptive futures. For then, the plural claims of what Henri Bergson called “an incalculable multitude of remembered elements” can never be heard.
