Mastering the Future: Power and the Futural Logic of Security
Torsten Menge
“Only the bad guys build things that last forever,” the author la paperson suggests in a discussion of settler colonial structures and the potential for subversive agency from within them. The statement draws our attention to the violent effects of “mastering” the future by aiming to make us—or better, some of us—more secure. In this short piece I will follow their suggestion to explore the futural logic of concepts of security and power. I do this to think through the ambivalence of this idea of securing the future. On the one hand, it seems appealing; of course, we would want to secure a future in which we can live meaningfully. But on the other hand, it seems dystopian because securing the future (which is never just my or our future but the future of others who may have very different ideas about what a meaningful life is) in one way forecloses other futures. This ambivalence—which comes out in many of the contributions to this roundtable—is a starting point for thinking through what a politics that does not rely on a security frame may look like.
The concept of security has an inherent future-oriented character: To secure something is to ensure that I will have control over it in the future. I am (now) secure in my possession or enjoyment of X only if I am able to enjoy X, use X, or have access to X in the future. My possession or enjoyment of something is not secure if it can be taken away from me tomorrow or at some later time in the future, even if it is not currently being challenged. For example, at-will employment is insecure because even if my boss appreciates me now and does not currently consider letting me go, I can be fired at any moment in the future without recourse.
This futural orientation of security motivates Thomas Hobbes’s well-known security dilemma. Even if there is no occurrent danger to my life, my possessions, or other things I value—that is, even if no one is currently trying to take away or destroy something I value—as long as others have the ability to do so, I am not secure. Even potential threats, which do not yet exist, but may come to exist in the future, are relevant to my current sense of security. In the absence of a social order that can protect me from future harm, it is rational for me to strike first to protect myself from those who may pose a threat to me now or in the future. But the known fact that this is a rational response to insecurity makes everyone more insecure because it makes everyone a threat.
Hobbes’s proposed solution to this dilemma is the sovereign state, which is supposed to provide security for all. But the security dilemma re-appears: Unless the sovereign can address any potential threat, we are not really secure. Thus, we need an absolute sovereign, which now becomes the biggest threat to our own security. This dilemma helps us see what kind of “problem” security is: Framing human concerns in these terms intimates an unsolvable problem because security aims to master what is essentially an open future, one that cannot be fully mastered. It is instructive that in the case of Guinea's Autoroute Le Prince, which Clovis Bergère discusses in his contribution, the state frames youth, and its still open future, as a security issue. But an open future is not inherently insecure. Zahra Babar points out, for example, that states and other actors make migrants insecure or frame them as vulnerable, while neglecting how migrants perceive their own futures. Diala Hawi emphasizes how people's perceptions of, and even need for, security differ based on a multitude of factors. Together, all these contributions raise the question of how we can and do relate to an open future in ways that are different from the Leviathan's.
Hobbes’s state of nature thought experiment focuses on the social dimension of security/insecurity, but the issue is broader. As an example, consider the invention of grain agriculture as a solution to food insecurity. In contrast to foraging, domesticating crops has made our food supply more reliable and less dependent on forces that are not under our control; it has arguably made us more secure. But at the same time, it has created all sorts of new security problems: For example, growing crops requires specific ecological niches which we may or may not be able to maintain. Moreover, creating and maintaining the ecological niche necessary for agriculture may have all sorts of detrimental side effects, for example, new infectious diseases as a result of close cohabitation of humans and non-human animals. Agriculture requires new forms of social organization, which might fail or may lower many people’s wellbeing. Finally, reliance on a relatively narrow basis of nutrition has caused other skills for navigating and managing our natural environment to atrophy. Ironically, making the future more reliable by securing our food supply through grain agriculture has made us vulnerable, in new ways, to the surprises of the future. Are there ways of relating to the open future of our ecological relationships that do not aim to master it?
If we think about social power as a response to insecurity (as Hobbes does), we can see that power shares with security its futural logic and its character as an unsolvable problem. In a recent paper, Mikko Joronen and Mitch Rose suggest that our thinking about power needs to start from a recognition of fundamental human vulnerability: “To live is to be vulnerable, and all uses and forms of power need to respond to this condition”. This vulnerability, I think, is not just the vulnerability of biological organisms but more specifically the vulnerability of meaningful human life. Arguably, all meaningful action is done for the purpose of some future end, and insecurity closes down the open future that is needed to pursue meaningful projects. As long as I am insecure, I have to focus on ensuring my own survival and cannot focus on pursuing any other future ends. Creating and maintaining power, Joronen and Rose helpfully suggest, is a response to this vulnerability. It is a way of trying to hold the future open, at least for some, to pursue meaningful projects, although this may, and often does, create more precarity and insecurity for others. But no power can fully make our vulnerability go away, because all power is limited and precarious. Indeed, as we see in Hobbes’s move to absolute sovereignty, the perceived lack of power and security can provoke ever more violent attempts to secure what can never be fully secured.
In response to this dilemma, Joronen and Rose (2021) suggest that we need a conception of politics that takes this fundamental vulnerability seriously. It requires being “less enamored” with power and in extension, I take it, with security. While Joronen and Rose do not spell out what such a conception of politics would look like, their suggestion raises important questions: What alternatives do we have to thinking about fundamental human concerns and conditions for meaningful human lives outside of a security frame? What kind of orientation towards the future would such alternatives require? What would a politics look like that does not aim to “build things that last forever”? Many of the roundtable's contributions gesture toward alternative ways of thinking. Bergère points to Judith Butler's suggestion that precarity is not addressed by security but only by a form of "livable interdependency." Shamaileh emphasizes that people sometimes deliberately choose risks and insecurity, raising the question of what values and orientations motivate them. Reflecting on experiences of statelessness, Haya Al-Noaimi suggests a collective consciousness characterized by a tolerance for contradictions and ambiguity. All these suggestions take seriously the violent effects of attempts to secure the future and the ambivalences of notions and experiences of in/security. At the same time, they point, I think, to the virtue of courage—understood as the ability to live well with the inevitable risks and vulnerabilities of human lives — as an alternative to the orientation of mastering the future. An interdisciplinary Critical Security Studies hub is an excellent space to collectively imagine what a courageous politics that avoids "mastering the future" could look like.
references
Joronen, Mikko, and Mitch Rose. 2021. “Vulnerability and Its Politics: Precarity and the Woundedness of Power.” Progress in Human Geography 45, no. 6: 1402–18. Read More.
Hobbes, Thomas. (1651) 1996. Leviathan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Read More.
La paperson. 2017. A Third University Is Possible. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Read More.
Lear, Jonathan. 2006. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Read More.
Scott, James C. 2017. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Read More.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Torsten Menge is an assistant professor in residence in the Liberal Arts Program at Northwestern University in Qatar. Menge's work is situated at the intersection of philosophy, political theory, and social ontology. His current research focuses on the nature and boundaries of political communities.
citation
To cite: Menge, T. "Mastering the Future: Power and the Futural Logic of Security." In Developing Critical Security Studies from Doha, edited by Hermez, S., Doha: #IAS_NUQ Press/Beirut: Arab Council for the Social Sciences, 2024.