If I listened closely it was only vague numbers and vaguer facts, completely detached from how such business transactions took place in the actual world, how they struck people’s lives, how they cut into the earth. If I understood correctly, the divisions were entertainment, food and biotechnology, natural resources, banking and investment, communications and what seems to be some sort of private military, though no one directly said so. The various euphemisms for killing were not particularly ingenious. [...] And yet as I listened I couldn’t hear even a smudge of reality in his approach, in his economic ontology, in his pure spun computer models of pure fantasy, where only money mattered and everything else was either a resource of an obstacle. All he talked about was the future and there was no future. They would be no future if people like this, language like this, was in charge.

— Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor ¹


During the keynote session of the Anxious to Secure stream at transmediale/conversationpiece, Isabell Lorey, author of State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious, and David Lyon, author of Surveillance After Snowden, presented their respective takes on precarity, insecurity, and governance under the political-economic order of neoliberalism. In what follows, we try to make explicit some questions that the session provoked for us, outline our response from a geographic point of view outside Europe, and suggest—by way of a somewhat oblique but especially relevant literary refrain—a concept of anxiety that might enable and embolden ongoing action against the violence of precarization and the insecurities created by the surveillance state.

1 / Anxious Questions

Our first question addresses the transmediale framework more than the session itself: what does it mean to make the thematic point of departure “anxiety”? Let’s be clear: we’re not saying whether one should or shouldn’t start with anxiety, we just want to ask about how this point of departure, reference, or focus, creates a particular navigational logic with respect to the discourse and the situation one is describing. The main concern, and one which we could detect in various “Conversation Pieces,” is that the concept of anxiety, however diverse its experiential qualities, seems almost indelibly bound to assumptions about a normative condition. To say this another way: anxiety has some heavy conceptual baggage. Linguistically, culturally, and even politically, it is assumed to be an aberrant condition. Of course, anyone who saw conversationpiece will know that the contemporary “normative” condition of anxiety is one of the key reasons to begin with anxiety: even if it once was, it is no longer an aberration but the norm. Anxiety is now a ubiquitous, dominant condition from which relief should not be expected. This increasingly normative condition of anxiety, and the precarity which it forges, then begins to verge, on the one hand, toward a kind of existential condition absent of any political history and, on the other, toward an absolute situation wherein the various means of evasion, escape, and counter-politics are dismissed as redundant in advance. In what follows, we want to pay attention to the ways in which anxiety is normalized and the ways in which “normalization” becomes operative as an index of anxiety.

Our second question, which assumes a certain mode of exhaustion after the #Brexit vote and the increasingly common appearance of fascist discourse in Western Europe and North America, is whether or not “neoliberalism” still exists. Or, perhaps more correctly, whether capitalism and neoliberalism are sufficient terms to describe the terrifying admixture of political apathy, fascist excitement, climate migration, and ecological collapse currently unfolding on the European political horizon. In Indonesia, an anxious geography to which we will turn our attention below, we’ve had some difficulty in recent years trying to map the strange and often contradictory assemblage of forces, actors, and interests onto an abstract territory of political economy. But we get the feeling this might be true for a number of other thinkers and researchers elsewhere. What’s at stake in the descriptor of neoliberalism? Is the generic description of the neoliberal annihilation of society worth the trade-off for the short-hand thinking it creates about localized instantiations of political and economic violence? Is capitalism so far gone, irreverent, unpredictable, and omnicidal that our clinging to “neoliberalism” is more a sign of nostalgia than analysis? We’re definitely not sure, but we’re concerned that the umbrella under which various forms of violence were, for a time, understood as part and parcel of the same neoliberal logic may be, in part, obscuring the view of an even more terrifying political economic horizon.

Our third question is about the logic of instantiation. How does a fine-grained, precise knowledge of the instantiation of a given diagram of violence—say, for example, the diagram of neoliberalism, which we heuristically take on here—inform the articulation of a diagram as a tool of resistance? Or, plainly, how does the struggle on the ground inform a description of violence (whether diagrammatic or not) that would otherwise remain too abstract to be practically useful? In what follows, we try to traverse a line through an anxious geography in order to explore the discourses of security and insecurity, precarity and precarization, from a complimentary, if at times exacerbated, point of view.

2 / Anxious Geographies

The two of us didn’t watch conversationpiece in the auditorium of the HKW, but online, via fiber cables, optical tubes, and micro-flickers of light. The lectures were a pause we were afforded while doing field work for our respective research projects in Indonesia. Thus, our appreciation of and response to the anxieties of security presented in this keynote was refracted through a particularly intense geographic lens that both distorted and clarified the terms of discussion set forth by Lorey and Lyon. Moving from more theoretical questions to an experiential description of the anxieties of security where we work, several processes are both illustrative of, but also in their scale and violence in excess of, the anxieties of security described. In trying to think these events alongside the theoretical debate, we hope to extend the struggles against the precarity and insecurity of urban residents in Jakarta and rural inhabitants of Sumatra and Kalimantan (Borneo) into a discourse which has largely been developed in Europe.