Facing Airport Security: Affect, Biopolitics, and the Preemptive Securitisation of the Mobile Body

Abstract

This paper explores how the mobile body and, specifically, the face have become a site of observation, calculation, prediction, and action in the process of moving across borders. The paper explores how in the circulatory space of the airport/border, the body's circulatory systems, biological rhythms, and affective expressions have become objects of suspicion—mobile surfaces from which inner thoughts and potentially hostile intentions are scrunitized, read, and given threatening meaning by the newest modes of airport security and surveillance. Examined according to the vectoral modes of historicity and virtual possibility, as well as the internal and external play of intention and feeling, the paper uncovers an increased attention to differential axes of mobility—of past and future, surface and interior. The paper situates these techniques within the preemptive biopolitical securitisation of mobility across borders which, it is argued, has found its referent object in the primal realm of affective capacities.