1The United States of America is an anxious place. A vast security apparatus surveils citizens and noncitizens. A vast but overstretched military aims to preserve sea lanes, protect a network of overseas bases, and secure a continental mainland that is increasingly vulnerable to cyber-attacks, biological weapons attacks, and missile attacks. Even more significantly, a culture of vigilance shapes art, commerce, and even everyday interactions. People regularly submit to full body scans in airports and doomscroll social media posts that are in many cases barely distinguishable from snuff films. Citizens in each of the fifty states seem united by anxiety more than anything else. Is this new? What happened?
2Russ Castronovo’s American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability takes the present obsession with security and safety as a starting point, but the book quickly sets out to correct two misconceptions about the twenty-first century security state. First, Castronovo suggests that “security” has functioned as the framework for understanding safety, privacy, and whiteness not only in our time but throughout US history and even prior to it. Second, he suggests that a national security framework presumes a united, domestic purpose that has never been the case. One struggles to determine the national interest when individuals within the nation-state have divergent aims, as they necessarily do. In short, we should not be asking about new events that have triggered changes in American culture but about the latent potentials that have enabled the proliferation of security thinking.
3The problem, from Castronovo’s perspective, is social contract theory itself. In the first chapter, he provides the reader with thirteen “propositions” about how security thinking functions, propositions that cut against the just-so story of the social contract of early modern thinkers such as John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. We do not live in the political systems that these thinkers envisioned, and perhaps we never did.
4Understanding Castronovo’s paradoxical propositions is critical to understanding his project, and so I will beg the reader’s indulgence as I list all thirteen here:
1. Security is an “affective condition.” It is a “matter of aesthetics”: not just politics, but art (21).
2. Security needs fear to persist. The homeowner buys an alarm system and the state invests in a domestic surveillance regime because each is afraid.
3. Efforts to increase security produce insecurity, producing a need for greater security. Even if a capable regime allows individuals to become blithely unaware of potential new dangers, its very success paradoxically encourages those outside the security perimeter to act with renewed anger.
4. If the aim of a security apparatus is to manage every potential threat (to “[d]estroy every single pest,” as Castronovo characterizes the project of some characters in James Fenimore Cooper’s settler novels), then that apparatus will paradoxically produce the very terror it aims to eliminate (29). If you aim for total safety, you will always be afraid.
5. A security apparatus will endlessly demand more information, but the information itself will overwhelm the system. This problem is obvious in the age of big data and the Internet, but Castronovo suggests that it was even visible in eighteenth-century efforts to understand populations statistically and thereby control political space. There is never enough information, but there is always too much information to digest.
6. Insecurity can produce cohesion and collective action. Recall Ronald Reagan’s promise that an alien invasion could produce collective peace among all human beings. And yet, paradoxically, a security apparatus with “tight controls, borders, surveillance” and other restrictive features actually produces suspicion and paralysis. People come together in war, but not in the War on Terror (34).
7. Some security is a precondition for freedom, but political freedom cannot exist in conditions of total security. Freedom requires some insecurity.
8. Security is almost always a form of negative liberty, in Isaiah Berlin’s formulation. Security is freedom from danger, fear, or threat rather than an entitlement to act or have some discrete benefit.
9. Security is an attempt to regulate time by anticipating and avoiding negative outcomes in the future.
10. Insecurity is profitable. In a capitalist system, individuals can profit from the friction of insecurity. Investors pay for insurance against loss. Military contractors profit from the need for protection, as do cybersecurity companies and global business consultants.
11. The ultimate goal of security is to eliminate uncertainty—to leave nothing open to interpretation, imagination, or speculation. The agents of the security apparatus seek to know the future.
12. Security, in the North American context at least, aimed to protect “whiteness” and white people. Castronovo points to efforts by settlers in Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century to both expand the range of their settlement and protect themselves from attacks by Lenape fighters enraged by the loss of their land.
13. People in a complete security regime will be unable to make their own decisions about risk, instead ceding those decisions to a centralized power.
5To illustrate each of these propositions, Castronovo takes the reader back through the literature of the American experiment, from James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers to Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno to James Grady’s Six Days of the Condor.
6The security paradoxes Castronovo observes have been a part of the colonial and later the US regime, but these paradoxes are only intermittently visible. According to one version of US history, the United States was not attacked in its home territories between the end of the War of 1812 and the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Aleutian Islands in the early 1940s. US citizens experienced a degree of security unprecedented in human history. According to another version, the United States was in a nearly permanent state of war throughout the nineteenth century, with the Seminole, the Comanche, the Lakota, and others. US citizens were under permanent threat in their homeland. Both stories are true. Castronovo, then, is interested in surfacing how the first story enabled Americans to imagine themselves in a stable social contract and how the second enabled them to imagine themselves as living in conditions of permanent threat.
7Castronovo’s approach is apt, especially now, because he takes seriously the kind of political philosophy that is circulating among thinkers of the populist Right. These thinkers include not only Hobbes and Locke but also Carl Schmitt, the twentieth-century German theorist whose “friend-enemy distinction” has become a touchstone for populists. As Castronovo observes, Schmitt’s distinction between friends and enemies simplifies politics and clarifies assessments of “national interest,” and yet it generates insecurity by producing enemies without and enemies within through its exclusionary simplification. All attempts to use politics to create security, Castronovo observes, paradoxically create insecurity.
8Ultimately, American Insecurity raises two questions, both exemplified if not entirely answered in the writing of Herman Melville. First, the reader of American Insecurity must ask if something has decisively changed in the twenty-first century. Has the United States become a more anxious, more insecure place? Castronovo’s answer is that, if we look in the right places, we see that it was always as vulnerable and insecure as it is today. Consider Melville’s short novel, Benito Cereno, in which an American sea captain finds himself standing aboard a Spanish slave ship, unaware that the African captives hold the Spanish crew hostage. The American captain, Amasa Delano, perceives the danger and yet dismisses his instinctive dread until the final moment, when the Spanish captain finally reveals the truth. Benito Cereno is a story of insecurity, of how the attempt to enforce an unjust order produces vulnerability.
9And yet Benito Cereno also reveals that some Americans, at least, regarded their insecurity as a simple fact of life. As Castronovo discusses, the novel ends with the American and the Spanish captain discussing the threat. The Spaniard is shocked to his core, but the American observes that “yon bright sun has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves” (Melville, 2018a 169). In other words, why worry that you were nearly killed by people who despise you when it’s such a nice day? This is one path out of anxiety, although it is hardly a path away from violence itself. Upon reflection, I suspect that Castronovo’s study reveals both that American insecurity is longstanding and that a distinctive American type, capable of brutal violence but psychologically untroubled by risk, is less common in the halls of power than in times past. He has been replaced by a type capable of brutal violence and absolutely obsessed with the risk that such violence produces.
10Second, Castronovo concludes by asking if there is a path out of the vulnerability paradox that has so defined American history and culture. The struggle for safety produces vulnerability, and the more we fight to be safe the more we place ourselves at risk. Here, a more obscure Melville story provides the answer. “The Lightning-Rod Man” appeared alongside Benito Cereno in The Piazza Tales in 1856. In that story, a travelling salesman sells safety. “Zig-zag irradiations” could strike a person anywhere and at any time (Melville, 2018b 171). How can one be safe? For Castronovo, this story illuminates Melville’s understanding of risk as paradoxical. The anxious and risk-averse should stop asking how to ensure total safety but whether total safety is, in fact, the best and highest good.
11Castronovo’s book reveals the cost of pursuing invulnerability: a gigantic security apparatus that paradoxically increases risk. And yet he concludes on a note of uncertainty. We have yet to find a way of being “secure with and among others” without the need for the violence of security itself (235).