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89 4 State of the Art JulIA SCHER’S dISINSCRIPTION OF NATIONAl SECuRITy When at long last he came out of hiding to offer a word of solace or an official statement of fact, the president of the United States said, “We are being tested.” In the meanwhile the mayor of New York suddenly came alive with language and filled the telecommunicational spaces with quiet grandeur. Both understood that they were being tested—or more precisely, perhaps, retested, since they were riding waves of repetition compulsion and responding to some failed anteriority; they had both been subjected to the blows of delegitimizing narratives of which they were, for the most part, themselves the origin. On this day the president ducked out of sight for many crucial hours, withholding language and the semblance of public dignity. The other one, the mayor, on-site, rose to the occasion, offered language and future without, for once, compromising the exigencies of mourning. The prez, when he came back to something like language, repeated that the nation was being tested. He is said to have been transformed by the test, to have of a sudden understood his task and destiny, to have recognized the precise contours of evil. The calamity of September 11 marked, according to the national rhetoric, the beginning of a new test site. The internal folds of the new test site multiplied the stakes of constitutional democracy and threw its meaning, by the overwhelming pressure of emergency, into technological fast-forward—that is to say, into regression. Once again the engine of perfection that characterized the Gulf War—the technological theater of deployment, the unrivaledvirtualsophistication—ragedagainstrecalcitrantlandscapes.Butmore significantly, the state of exception provoked by the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon decisively shifted the focus of state from conventional tropes of governance to those principally of security. The immeasurable grief caused by the missions allowed for the violence of the shift to pass with only a whimper. The modern state has always had a thing for security. Obviously. In an unpublished work of the 1970s Michel Foucault had outlined the gravity of such a shift, pointing, as Giorgio Agamben reminds us, to the fact that “security as leading principle of state politics dates back to the birth of the modern state. 90 Hobbes already mentions it as the opposite of fear, which compels human beings to come together within a society.”1 But not until the eighteenth century did the thought of security come into its own. The concept of national security has made any lucid citizen and alien shudder with anxiety. It is the ironclad concept by which any number of abuses get smuggled into the precincts of an otherwise vigilant social expanse. It is so strong a concept, so powerfully allied with restorative efforts of symbolic repair, that it singularly resists demystifying incursions. Who could argue with a felt need for security? Who would be so mindlessastoriskBatailleanderisionattheveryimpositionofapossiblesecurity as something worthy, legitimate, and desirable? From the security blanket to unalloyed military assertions of urgent need, the regime of security holds sway over us unlike any other statement of irrefutable political purpose. If there is one artist who has insisted with exemplary prescience on articulating the premises of such a political mutation, it is Julia Scher. Her work has consistently brought into focus the dependency of our nation on the complexity of surveillance systems and the persistent determinations of a security state which, her work argues, stands in a contestatory relation to democratic institutions and tropes. Agamben argues that the shift to the security state is irreconcilable with democracy. Scher, while relentlessly critical of the security tropes around which her thought is organized, offers an even more disturbing view. She in effect meshes the deadly zones of security measures with the pervasive yet hidden problem of technological seduction. Hers is a site of acute political sensibility that remains open to infiltrations, psychic leakage, and unaccountable contaminations. Alongside the sinister crackdowns of state she locates life-forms of S/M wish fulfillment, entering a hypothesis of a Schreberesque reception system that uniquely welcomes the invisibly penetrating rays of high technology. Her insight does not stop at the intrusive probes of the security state or traumatic arrests of the electronic capture but explores the secret complicities, the unavowable concessions made to invasive control. She posits the nearly post-human body as that which blossoms open to the pulse of technological encroachment, as that which thrives on the intrusive threat and offers itself...

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