First of all, thank you for inviting us to this panel.
I feel really honored that we have the possibility to talk
with you about our book in this setting.
So thank you very much.
As Christine already was saying, the book is co-edited
by Marc Schraulenberg and Ronald Franzstaede, and lots
of other really good authors.
I'm very glad that they were willing to write in this book.
It's also multidisciplinary.
It's not only criminologists in the book.
It's also anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists
who is working on architectural, urban space design stuff.
So in that sense, it's quite multidisciplinary.
I would start with what it is not, maybe,
because we have discussed the book with some
of our students as well.
And when I got back the word of what they thought of the book,
it kind of came back to me as if we were starting
a new current in criminology.
Well, I think originally we never set out to do that.
That's for sure.
And I still think that's not at all the idea.
We didn't mean to start a new current
or a cultural criminology 2.0.
That was never the plan.
The idea was just to add something
to the current hegemonic debate on security.
And since that had wider repercussions that could also
apply to criminology, that's why we
called the book Positive Criminology,
not to confuse with positivistic criminology,
because that is what it is definitely not.
Well, how about what is the book about?
I will first try to explain it to you in a very simple way,
bring it home to you a little bit in very simple wordings,
so to warm you up a little bit and then give you
a little bit more complex concepts.
What is it about?
Well, yesterday night, and I must admit quite early
this morning, I did some participant observation
as a good cultural criminologist, originally
anthropology-trained academic should
do in this specific particular species of academics
that are called common sessionists.
And I must say that I observed quite a lot
of positive criminology yesterday night.
And early morning, I saw some human connectedness
for the people who were for the first time
on the common sessions.
I saw some active rituals of community building,
feelings of belonging starting to create.
I heard sometimes the word feeling who.
So I thought, yeah, that one fits to it as well.
Even saw some careful friendships develop,
and maybe even a little teaspoon of love,
especially when the liquids started
to flow a little bit more abundantly.
So I think in very simple wordings,
we could say that's what positive criminology is about.
Now, to make it a little bit more complex
and to escape the idea that we're back in the 60s,
what we really wanted to do is we
wanted to criticize the security discourse,
the current hegemonic security discourse,
that we see not only in public debate and in politics,
but also in academic debate and in criminology,
more particularly.
This security debate is all about the rise
of the security complex in contemporary Western nations.
It's about different practices, discourses, techniques
of security, including new surveillance technologies,
risk management of criminals, preventive risk management
of non-criminals, even security-centered urban design.
And all of this added new layers to the punitive turn
that David Garland has written about,
amongst others, very extensively.
So we see processes of securitization
in which all kind of social issues
are framed in a way of as if all social issues are
dealing about security.
And what we thought is problematic about this kind
of repressive security approach and thinking
is that it's limiting in two ways, according to us.
It's limiting in a practical way, in the sense
that if we analyze situations only
in this theoretical framework, we
might risk seeking solutions that are too narrow
or simply wrong because we defined the social problems
in an incomplete way.
So that's a practical risk.
And critically and academically, we
believe we ignore certain notions that
should be in the security debate just
because we debate it in a certain way
and with certain concepts.
Thereby, we often take for granted current power
relations and subdued voices that
could add a lot to the debate, but we're not really
including them in it.
And by that, this might put us at risk
of having a tunnel vision.
And I think that's the main reason to write this book.
When we started off with it, we didn't
want to be anti-security.
We didn't want to stop at criticizing
the current hegemonic debate.
We wanted to go one step further.
It's always easy, especially for academics,
to criticize something.
But we wanted to think about, could we
imagine alternative ways to think about this?
And then that shouldn't be too hard, you would say,
if you look at the word etymologically, security.
And if you look at, for example, the Dutch and the German
word, feilgeit, and it comes from old vision,
feilgeit.
And this has strong connotations with connectedness,
friendship, friendliness, sharing, caring, et cetera.
So that are very positive notions of security.
But if we look at the hegemonic debate,
we are generally only talking about protecting ourselves
against all kinds of insecurities,
and generally in quite a repressive way.
So we were thinking, and we did a workshop
on that with several scholars in criminology and beyond,
about let's think about more positive notions of security.
In doing that, that could be, according to us,
more democratizing in the sense that maybe also
the subdued voices would be heard
in that alternative way of thinking.
It could be transgressive in the sense
that it transgresses the boundaries
of the current debate.
It could even be empowering and maybe even liberating.
That's what we hoped for.
And we set out on this annual war.
And actually, we had a hard time.
I remember Simon telling me some days ago,
this was one of the hardest paper I ever wrote.
Because to really think of new concepts
and think of it in a new way when the hegemonic debate is
so dominating, that's really, really creative labor,
I would say.
We did it with a lot of fun, though.
And this is the results.
It's a book with two parts.
The first part is more theoretical imaginations.
So it's more on the theoretical thinking
about what we don't like about the current debate,
but more particularly, what we would like to add.
And then there is a second empirical part.
And that's more bottom-up, like, OK, what can we
see when we do, for example, ethnographic field work?
What kind of notions come up?
And we extensively use notions from other disciplines,
as well.
And we will go into that a little bit further
in the presentations to come.
Thank you.
Thank you, Brenda.
OK, we continue with Simon.
I have to admit, when we went to the workshop,
I was utterly defeated.
I mean, I've written on the security state, the punitive
turn, and then these nutters were asking me
to try and think about security in a positive light.
And I was utterly defeated.
And it wasn't really till I got back to England
when I was sitting in my garden.
And I was certainly thinking about, what went wrong?
I certainly seem to have some ideas.
So the first question I posed with my fellow author
on this, David James, was, well, what went wrong with security?
If you look back at it to its Latin roots,
then at one point in time, it would
appear that security or securer tasks
belonged to care, curer.
But then somehow, it seems that there occurred a divorce.
And securer tasks became, if you like, care less, uncaring.
So it seemed to us that if you wanted
to try and regain a positive concept of security,
we needed to somehow rearrange a marriage,
try and bring care back into security.
And the way we did that was through the metaphor
of gardens and gardening, which might appear to some
to be a bit problematic for reasons I'll come back to.
Now, a number of people, philosophers, poets,
over the centuries have tried to use the metaphor of gardening
to understand societies and how people should behave within them.
Everything from the metaphysical poets down to people like Locke,
all the way through to sociologists like Ernest Gellner, who
talked about the modern state as a modern gardener, a formal garden
that had been created as a decisive act of human engineering
and like wild gardens of pre-modern societies.
And I'm a gardener.
I love my garden.
And I thought that, well, surely this is some way
to approach understanding security in a sense that evokes a positive notion
of care, because you have to care for a garden if it is to survive.
You have to water it.
You've got to give your plants nutrition.
You have to tend them.
You've got to stop things from coming to overgrown.
You've got to pay attention to the ecology of this place.
And doesn't that evoke a kind of positive concept
of security in some sense?
Isn't this about caring?
But then, what about Bauman?
Didn't Bauman also write about gardens?
Didn't Bauman tell us that the Nazis did no more than applied
elementary principles of garden design to the social body?
And didn't the application of gardening principles
to the social body license kind of necropolitical outcomes of the worst
kinds?
Because as he points out, part of the business of gardening
is also about waste management.
Gardens produce waste.
Gardens have these things called weeds in them,
healthy plants that are out of place, cultivars we don't want to see.
The Nazis had a clear vision of the kind of garden they wanted to create.
And they went out of their way to sort of create this garden.
They had a clear sense of the kind of species
they wanted to allow to grow and nurture in this garden.
They cared, albeit a very conditional notion of care.
And they didn't let existing cultivars stand in their way.
And all they did, as far as Bauman was concerned,
is they macrostructured reality in the light of their preconceived vision.
And they ruthlessly tore out the weeds.
They spent an inordinate amount of attention
and devoted incredible resources to the problem of waste management.
And six million Jews and hundreds of thousands
of other objective enemies were duly slaughtered in the process.
So what looks positive in gardening, at least when considered
biopolitically, would appear to license practices
of the very, very worst kind.
So maybe using the metaphor of gardens
to try and get to a positive sense of security
would appear destined to failure.
However, I started to get into, and it's funny how your research
takes strange turns, I started to get into Nazi horticulture.
I was looking at the work of Walter Lange.
And it's interesting to note that the Nazis,
now, Bauman evokes, for his garden,
it's a large formal regimented garden.
It's the garden that Bauman evokes in his discussion of the Nazis.
Actually, the Nazis were much more into wild gardens
of the English naturalistic variety pioneered by Capability Brown.
Actually, the Nazis condemned formal gardens
as being Southern European, which is interesting.
And it's got me to thinking, well, wait a minute.
I start looking into this gardening stuff a bit more.
So I duly picked up a book on revolutionary gardens,
which I found in a secondhand book shop in London.
It's funny how you want some material,
and you don't know where to look.
And then all of a sudden, you walk along
on some serendipitous process.
Oh, look at that.
So I got this book, and it had all this stuff on Nazi gardens.
But then it suddenly took me to explore
a whole range of other gardens.
And I started reading about this guy called
Walter Manning, who's an obscure gardener in America
at the turn of the century, when his visions of wild gardens,
then his griller gardens and anarchic gardens.
And if you start to use these as a template for thinking
through a positive concept of security,
it takes us in a very different direction
to that sketched out by Bauman.
We can imagine gardens in which diversity is encouraged,
where you just celebrate the inclusiveness of things.
Inclusive gardens are designed to be attractive to threatened species.
One does not have to have these megalomaniac visions
of monocultured perfection to arrive as a basis
for modeling your garden.
And nor do we need to evoke the spectra of the extreme gardener,
which is what Bauman does.
A person as this phobias about waste clearance hates the weeds
and feels obliged to eliminate them.
So what we try and do is to try and hold up
as a template for reorganizing our kind of society
in a way that recognizes difference in diversity,
in which a certain level of chaos and anarchy would figure.
And we kind of conclude the chapter by returning
to the wonderful, wonderful book written by Richard Sennett
many, many years ago, The Uses of Disorder.
If you haven't read it, look at it.
It's brilliant.
Because what he argues in it is that part
of the problem of modernity is a movement towards what he calls
purified societies populated by purified people
with purified souls, people who hate difference, who
in the face of difference turn around to people just
like themselves, who ruthlessly try and annihilate anything
that's different from themselves.
And we thought that this is a good way of looking back
on fascism and Nazism, and that therefore what we were seeing
in our anarchic gardens was precisely a celebration
of what he argued was necessary for human beings
to be positive and human.
And that's a measure of disorder and anarchy
in their social lives.
And so we basically conclude by saying
that if you want to use gardening as a template
to model society, anarchic gardens,
guerrilla gardens pose a positive template
and enable us to do so.
Because within them, you don't get extreme gardeners.
You get temperate gardeners anchored in compassion,
who are sanguine about the weeds, which
is the subtitle to our chapter.
And of course, if you have that kind of garden,
then that takes you back to precisely what
Jeff was arguing was under threat in our societies.
We need to celebrate pluralism.
We need to celebrate diversity.
We need anarchy and disorder in the social body.
And all we did is try and find some way in which we could
try and accomplish that.
Thank you.
The chapter I was involved in was co-written by a PhD
candidate, Deanna Dardouche, who is
co-supervised between Kent and Utrecht.
I should say that first.
The second thing is I would further
echo this etymological interest in the word security.
I think the Latin securitas, which
comes from seipura, without care, I think Simon made
this point, is a term that is riddled with absence.
It's an absence.
It's a negative security.
But I think what is also very interesting
is this other word insecurity, insecurity,
which is an absence of an absence.
So we're dealing with something which is entirely
nihilistic in its conception.
Conceptually, there are two kinds of security.
The first kind of security is a security to certain goods,
such as health, welfare, housing, employment, and so on
and so forth.
Then there is another kind of security,
which is a kind of security from threats, from dangers,
from enemies.
And it is the latter kind of security
that dominates security discourse today,
particularly in an age of the war on terror.
What we should do is just go back
to when these ideas of security from were born.
They were born right at the beginning of early modernity
with the thoughts of Hobbes.
Hobbes offered us a contract.
He said, look, if you have a contract with your sovereign,
with the ruler, your ruler will protect you from enemies,
from dangers, from conflict, from a war of all against all.
And what is interesting in this kind of origin
of a particular kind of security discourse with Hobbes
is that it runs all the way through to today.
We live in a Hobbesian regime of security.
But there is an alternative to this,
which was produced by Spinoza.
Spinoza had an alternative way of looking at security,
looking at governance, looking at the state.
What Spinoza said is very interesting.
And in fact, it's fairly simple and straightforward.
What we need to do is to get together as individuals
to form a collectivity, a collectivity that
maximizes our power to make a good society.
But what Hobbes is offering us is a reduction of our power.
We give up our power.
We give up rights.
We give up our capabilities and capacities
to do things for the sake of being governed.
What this adds up to is that we surrender to fear.
We surrender to enmity.
And in that surrendering to these negative effects,
we subscribe to a kind of voluntary servitude.
And what this does is ultimately make us more governable,
so that in an age of security in which we are dominated
by fear and enmity, by hatreds, we become more governable.
And this is a way of understanding politics today,
not just the kind of politics of the war on terror,
but a politics which engages in the same kinds of affects.
So we are in the age of a war on terror
in which we fear the dangerous other.
We are also in an age in which we fear the migrant.
We fear the foreigner, in which we fear crime, in which,
in fact, the best kind of crime to fear
is by a foreign criminal.
This is fantastic.
This is the great specter of the foreign criminal.
We fear difference.
I think Simon alluded to this.
We fear multiculturalism.
And I say this we, I'm talking about these affects which
circulate around the social field, which
are retailed by the populist, radical, and far right, which
actually dominate in some kind of way
the way in which we talk about politics today.
It is a very strange situation that a bunch of weird, fearful,
hateful people somehow recruit our mainstream politicians who
say, well, we must answer these people.
We must speak to these people.
No, we mustn't.
This is not.
We don't have an obligation to do this at all.
So what do we do about this?
Do we resist this kind of negative, negativistic,
nihilistic mode of security?
Actually, this is an interesting question,
because resisting is, in a sense, a kind of negation.
So I think we're kind of bound up
in this kind of negation of the negation again.
I think what we have to do is to try
to construct an alternative kind of security,
you might want to call it, a counter security.
This is a security that will make us,
and again, I'm kind of echoing what Simon is saying,
this is a security that will make us less, less
governable, less fearful, less full of hatred,
a security that will recruit our capacity to work together
as collectivities to make a better society.
There is, at the moment, in sort of counter politics,
if you like, a preoccupation, I think,
with a politics of refusal.
I think Zizek has said, the only thing that we can do now
is to refuse.
And I think the answer to this is found in Hart and Negri.
Hart and Negri interrogate this notion
of a politics of refusal.
And what they do is, again, something
which inspired what we wrote.
What they do is to say, or I should perhaps say,
imply things that I want to say to conclude.
There must be some kind of moment of refusal, yes.
But the moment of refusal is just a kind of turning point.
It is a way of turning away from something
which is negative towards something which is positive.
And the way in which we should engage with this turning point
is to go back to what Spinoza said, which
is to enhance our capabilities, to enhance our capacities,
and to do this with a kind of joy, a joyful attitude, which
brings in ideas of a joyful culture,
a joyful and expansive way of understanding
how we relate to each other.
We should turn away from fear and enmity,
these negative effects which make us more governable,
and embrace a form of joyful coming together
to make a better society.
That's it.
Thank you, Phil.
So these were two of the theoretical bright minds,
I would personally say.
I was in the second part of the book
to give you also some idea on that,
on the very empirical bottom-up thoughts about what security
could look like and where we went wrong in the thinking
about security, or where we did not necessarily went wrong,
but we went in a tunnel vision.
My chapter was called Fluid Security, Home, Care,
and Belonging in Prostitution Migration.
And it was based on fieldwork of about 10 years in Marseille,
France.
And the main argument is that in the current imaginations
of security, the concept is associated to and framed
in particularly in notions of fixity.
Like security is something that is linked to being fixed somewhere.
We feel secure when at home.
And when we talk about what is home,
we generally come up with ideas on the place
where we feel at home.
If you theorize that a little bit more,
then you come to the idea that in order to build a home,
we invested space with our own identity,
and we made it a place.
And a place is generally a fixed notion.
It's the place where we are rooted.
Well, the word already says it.
Our roots are in the soil.
We are tied to the territory, a territory
that we once appropriated.
We made it our own.
And we invested it with our identities.
And it's a place that is nearby.
It's close to us.
We know it very well.
We belong there.
And we feel safe there.
And this fixity, if you want to make it a little bit
on a more macro level, it's about the nation state
where we feel at home.
We do not call that our homeland.
We call that our homeland for a reason.
So it's a place.
It's a fixed place which we want to defend
against dangerous others.
That's the general idea behind it.
And I argue in my chapter that this hegemonic representation
of what being secure means is heavily raised, spaced,
and gendered.
And I hope to be able to give you some idea of that
in this short presentation.
Now, if security has these connotations
of belonging to a certain physical place and territory,
then you can imagine that when you are mobile,
when you are traveling around, or when you are temporarily
at places where you obviously do not belong,
where you are out of place or considered out of place,
it's automatically, in a logical reasoning,
an insecure condition.
And it's insecure in two ways.
First of all, it's in the sense that you are in danger,
or supposed to be in danger.
And in a second way, you are perceived
as a danger to the people who are already living there.
And this is particularly the way that Bulgarian prostitution
migrants are being perceived in Western societies
where they end up in.
So they are supposed to be in danger themselves.
They are in insecure positions.
The whole debate surrounding prostitution migration
of Bulgarian women to Western European cities.
The dominant discourse is one of human trafficking.
It's the one that's immediately evoked
when we talk about prostitution migration.
Human trafficking, having all kind of associations
with organized crime networks.
And Phil was already saying it.
The foreign criminal is the worst other that we can fear.
So these notions of being in danger
because you are not fixed is very much surrounding
the whole prostitution migration phenomenon.
However, if we look from empirical reality
and you talk with these women and you see how they are living,
then this is not the whole picture.
And I don't say that they're not in danger sometimes.
I would be the last one to say that.
But it's not the whole picture.
It's just part of the picture.
And that was also what I was referring to when I said
we end up in a tunnel vision.
Some points from the fieldwork to illustrate that.
One thing that I saw in the fieldwork
is that home, which is so much associated with being
the place where you are safe, where you are with family,
you belong, et cetera.
But home is not only where the heart is.
But as I said before, home is also, for many people,
the place where the hurt is.
And for these women, that is particularly the case.
The hurt is at home.
Because at home, they are economically insecure.
So there is financial insecurity.
Many of my respondents had a socially inferior position
at home, being a woman in a quite gendered society,
in the sense of having a subordinate role.
Oftentimes, being the youngest daughter with a number
of brothers kind of disciplining you.
And moreover, many women experienced abuse at home.
So home was not really that safe place
that we generally believe it is.
Moreover, this stereotypical idea of the evil foreign trafficker
who actually trafficked them to Marseille
was most of the cases a family member or a neighbor.
So in that sense, it was not that evil, weird, strange,
faraway person.
It was someone coming from this area, this space called home.
So in a way, being in motion, leaving home
was for many of these women the best option to achieve security
and not vice versa.
So it was not like leaving home was the only way,
was actually a situation of danger.
It was for them in their perception
the best way to achieve a certain way of security
in a financial as well as in a social way.
And I quote myself, well, sorry.
By going to France, these women find
a way of replacing their fixed role as women
and as Bulgarian unwanted others in an evolving Europe
with physical and social mobility, which they believe
can help them to achieve a better
position in the social fabric.
So actually, they believed they would achieve more security.
And moreover, belonging to this place called home, home
and belonging is not only a physical place and territory.
And that's the second argument I made in my chapter,
is that home can also be a place that
is more mobile and more fluid in the sense
that these women, while away from home,
they are not like in a continuous impasse continuously.
While they are in this liminal place of temporarily being
somewhere else, they are actively imagining their home
in Bulgaria in a very active way.
And that was brought home to me most clearly when I asked them,
when you are here in Marsaia, preconceived as I
was about ideas of home, I thought they are away.
So they should make themselves a new home here somehow.
Because I thought that everyone needs a fixed home.
I was in that state of mind as well.
So I asked them, when you are here and staying in this hotel,
do you make yourself a home?
I thought something like fix photographs to the wall
or something.
How stupid was I not to realize that feeling at home
is not necessarily a fixed place?
And they told me that so obviously
when they were kind of laughing in my face.
And they said, no, no, nous sommes ici en passage.
To begin with, we are not here to stay.
We are here in passage.
And se pas et ternel, it's not for always.
So also in time, they see it as a liminal time
that they are there.
It's not forever.
And they illustrated that by telling me,
putting pictures on the wall, they
looked at me as if I was from another century.
And they took their mobile phones.
And they said, why?
You know, here's my family.
Look at, these are the parties we had.
This is the things we did.
And that was, for me, the most obvious way
of remembering home, having a home.
You can do that in very mobile ways.
There is mind work involved which can constitute
your feeling of home.
It doesn't necessarily have to be a photograph pinned
on the wall.
And to conclude, I think the security debate
would do well to pay more attention to security
in motion, to belonging to a community even
when you are at distance.
You can still belong, building up community
while you are being absent.
And in short, to think about a more dynamic, fluid idea
of security.
That would be the bottom line of my contribution.
Thank you.
Thank you, Brenda.
Thanks to all of you.
And since this all sounds so beautiful and convincing,
I want to challenge you right away and ask,
isn't this all just too nice and cuddly?
And isn't this all already understood and captured
by present forms of governance that make us, you know,
that make us behave as if we are part of some responsible
community in our neighborhoods?
We are planting little flowers in front of our, whatever,
sidewalks.
And so isn't this and everything affect and aesthetics
in urban security governance that I can think of?
And wouldn't the embracing of this kind of positive critique
of security perhaps disallow us to critique those other forms
of security governance that are already happening?
Or is this too cynical?
No, I mean, it is interesting.
But when you look at the dominant forms of design
of urban spaces, I mean, these are forms of design
that are oriented towards saving us from danger
in terms of traffic design, in terms of designing out crime,
in terms of the use of CCTV cameras.
This is the most important and dominant way
of designing most of the environments in which we live.
I mean, I walk around the university.
I see design that is not to do with the beauty of flowers
and much more to do with the ordering of space,
making it more predictable.
So I think that would be important.
I mean, I'm not saying that we don't do beautiful things.
But I'm saying that the relationship that we
have with security and the securitization of spaces
is one which is a very negative one.
And it is one that not only surveys us and orders us
and orders our movements in spaces,
but it is also one that makes us more
governable by installing subjectivities that actually
want this.
This is the problem.
If we want this order, we install subjectivities,
or subjectivities are installed, that actually are very happy
to have the power taken away from us,
and very happy, the word happy is not really the right word,
that will collaborate with the power being taken away with us
for the sake of order.
I take a slightly William Burroughs like,
and they evoke the concepts of the hard machine
and the soft machine.
On one hand, it's, I say like, late modern societies,
they're not unsophisticated.
It's like a drag act with menaces.
On one hand, you say they pay lip service to diversity,
equality, fraternity.
And yet, you've got to understand,
when we start to look at beneath the surface of how
there's nice plants that are out there,
it's how sophisticated late modern societies
are at hiding their violence, the principles
of urban security, or to make everything appear good.
You shouldn't feel worried.
You feel safe as long as you shop appropriately.
But what happens if you don't shop appropriately,
then all of a sudden, those classificatory systems,
those regulatory systems of control will bear down on you
and you will be excluded.
I mean, so I think that if you're going to move towards,
we've got to make a difference between the semantics
and the deep grammar.
The deep grammar is an exclusionary hard machine.
It's a very dangerous machine.
Hence, I've spent what post are you guys
to suddenly suggest, well, come on,
how else can we think about security
in ways that don't just reinforce this,
or just pay lip service to its services?
When you said that I immediately,
the word responsibleization came to my mind,
in the sense that, yeah, you could say we are encouraged
to actively and positively participate in our society.
In the Dutch, politics at the moment,
we even have a word for that.
It's called, parti sipparti mat shapay,
which literally means, yeah,
society in which we should participate.
But I think that's kind of,
not the kind of positive security we are talking about,
because this, parti sipparti mat shapay,
the need to participate in the social care of,
for example, the elderly in our societies.
It's top down, mainly, and forced from the governments,
because they can, or they do not want,
or they can't, they can't,
finance the elderly homes anymore.
So now it's thrown back to us,
and we should be responsible to do that ourselves.
I think that is not really what we are talking about.
It's rather, because in this sense,
they only want certain kinds of participation.
I mean, if there would be a group of illegal migrants
claiming as part of city space,
and saying this is our way of participating in this society,
that would really not fall under the idea of,
parti sipparti mat shapay, that our government would have.
So in that sense, yes, we are being responsibleized,
but it's so much top down,
whereas, as Phil really rightly argued,
would be so much more interesting to see
what are the capacities and the voluntarily,
people voluntarily building connections
and trying to take care of their surroundings
and the other people around them from the bottom up,
instead of being forced to do so,
because the government counts
or doesn't want to afford it anymore.
That's two different things.
All right, thank you.
I think we should open up to you guys,
and you should bring up your comments and questions
to our panelists.
Yes.
I don't believe that.
Phil mentioned something about Troy
when we were coming together.
I'm not sure if that sounds like a fucking video.
But, that's not my question.
I'm not taking the pro rule this week,
the economy went into it.
And, I kind of see it coalesced in this area more or less.
I didn't, who's this dude?
He said, they're capable.
He failed.
So, I think you could do something like that.
No, no, you're absolutely right.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think this,
I'm using a very, this is a terrible tick
of kind of cultural, you know,
it's kind of cultural studies talk, isn't it,
it's that kind of stuff.
No, but I think what is true to say
is that there are affects, sentiments,
which flow through the social.
And, which we can't entirely disconnect ourselves from
because they flow through us.
We have a relationship with them.
What kind of relationship we have with them
is the question, you know,
do we succumb to the security discourse,
dominant security discourses?
Do we say we've got to do something about terrorism?
Do we say we've got to protect our borders?
I mean, the worst thing I hear in British politics is,
look, migration is a problem.
We have to do something about it.
It doesn't, you can't ignore it.
You have to have a policy that is related to migration.
I mean, I want to refuse this completely.
So the we, this we is the social.
It doesn't mean that there isn't a diversity
within the social.
It doesn't mean that we are obliged to collaborate with
or give our assent to those affects
which flow through the social.
Does that make sense?
I mean, what's the alternative to we talk?
I talk, I, I don't know.
I'm not sure about that either.
Anyway.
Yeah, I think that's, sorry, I think, I think that's,
I think that's really interesting what you say,
because in fact that it might be the case
that that has animated quite a lot of radical politics.
And I'm not sure how far that's got us.
I mean, I'm, you know, I'm interested by this notion
say that, okay, can I just, I'll say something theoretical.
The, in Foucault, Foucault's society must be defended.
He speaks about the rise of a particular politics
of combat and war in the 19th century.
Part of this politics is dialectics.
Part of this politics is struggle against another.
Part of this politics is also the way in which
we secure our borders against enemies.
Part of this politics is also how we
deal with internal enemies.
So actually there's a kind of this,
there's a flow of affect between what we might want
to call social struggle and critique,
and actually all the very things that actually
we would want to be against, as it were.
So I think we have to be very attentive to this.
So for example, if we start saying how bad the world is,
and we allow that affect to dominate
the way in which we think about the world,
we render ourselves inactive.
If we start saying we have to fight the enemy,
we start doing exactly that which is the problem
that we want to solve.
So I think maybe it means that we have to sort of
adopt a different kind of affective engagement
with our politics, which is why I think people like,
I mean for example, Hart and Negri,
or Deleuze for example, have sort of advocated
something a lot less reactive and something more active.
The notion of reactive is to say look there's the action
which I don't like and I oppose,
but that doesn't actually imply that you do anything
that is positive or active, apart from fight
that which you oppose.
This is not to do with constructing a good society,
it's to do with hating stuff and fighting against stuff.
I mean it sounds a bit hippy, doesn't it, a bit?
I just don't know.
I suppose it's kind of, you know,
it's embedded in both, but that's it.
All right, more challenges, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, part of how we got there,
you know, a lot of the continue over,
you know, is the impact, the learning impact
which the learning impact can be a little bit,
I don't know if it's too long, but,
well let me just bring a round of applause
to everyone and to the people who have hated the work
that they've been doing, that they've been responsible
for the work that they've done for us.
I know that you all are proud of them
and that you've restored the sense of freedom.
You know, you can talk much about some one of the streets
to be that way, home-mixed to a little bit more
and that we've got our own spirit,
you know, that we've got more and more
that we can do to set the cycle of the fantastic
and the great amount of freedom
is a whole new kind of stop.
There's nothing that I'd like to do in the back
that we really want to come up with a sign
that we're going to be able to do completely.
I think it was really about, you know,
and I hope that you were, you know,
like already the government that we've wanted
to do this once, you know,
and I think that it's a good start.
It's a good start, and, you know,
in the vision that you've really been a part of,
and that's what you've been doing back then, you know,
to the school's advice, and you really start to think
that all this history gets back to the well-being side
that you've been in and that you've really wanted
to sort of point of an interesting number
that has really gone back to silence
and you've really developed a new story.
The community is just now struggling
to do that and that and all of that kind of feeling.
It's a normal start, a normal, really good start.
It's a piece of advice that I've shown you
and the direction you can have time
and piece of attention to the way you work,
where you work, and where you're from,
and the direction you're going to start,
and I don't know if you've said the word,
but if you're not present now,
then you need to be part of it.
If you've said the word, that's fine.
It's something that the community needs to do,
and that's what I think.
And the third point, you know,
and that's why I'm going to start again,
but I guess it's quite the time
to be part of the community at the moment
and to be kind of helping out with that.
But in terms of the community,
I think the community is going to be very,
very high-high in the sense that we started
to make this community a great way in this world
and we know that we're going to be part of the world
and we're going to be part of the story
and we need to be part of the story
because that community,
that's all that's possible.
It's really long in testing
for the integration, accurate participation
in the job story,
and it's very important to be part of the story
because we have a million people here.
Okay, I think Dave, thank you so much.
Do you want to reply to this?
Jane Jacobs is one of my heroes,
and yes, I mean, the whole point is,
is what I think we're saying here,
the previous point is,
I think these positive conceptions of security
have been there and they've been theorised
in all different fields.
Part of the impetus to try and get it here
was that I think there's a sense on the part of the left
that we've probably gone pretty far in our critique
of our understanding of the kind of the forces
of exclusion and repression that dominate our present,
and yet quite clearly there's lots we can learn
from other things.
I say I went back to Richard Sennett,
but at the same time in the same course
I was delivering on open security
under open studies, which was actually in a prison.
It was very much evoking her ideas as well,
and I think also, as you say,
that's a lovely picture of just what does this mean in practice?
Is it just empty hippie talk?
Well, actually, I think that picture of a vice-president
talking to gang members,
one of the quintessential others of our time,
that just shows you what is the possibility
of realising this kind of stuff in practice.
I mean, also, yes, back into the whole point here,
we've got stigmatised, de-industrialised populations,
the social ghosts, as Geoff calls them,
that are there that we're being asked not to recognise
or allow squatting bands now in various cities
that once acknowledged it.
I mean, this is a whole turn-against kind of difference,
and so clearly, foregrounding the need for disorderly environments
is a political struggle.
We have to sort of get behind,
and many people in this room already are.
So I think that this book was simply an attempt to try and say,
hold on, no, we've got the critique.
What does a new concept of security look like?
What might it look like?
Do you guys want to answer?
All right, but after that we take some student questions,
start thinking about them.
No, no, Geoff, go ahead, please.
No, no.
But they are known, so I just said, please do think of them.
LAUGHTER
CHUCKLES
I'm not sure whether we need that,
in the sense that even though the government did take more care before,
I think there was a lot of caring already going on.
Also, back then, it was not like as if we have to learn it now from the government.
I think it's a natural inclination that we have to take care of ours,
of the people, of the beloved ones.
So in that sense, I'd rather see this as a governmental project
to shift some of its tasks,
at least were its tasks before,
to shift it to not only civilians, not only citizens,
but also to private parties taking care of some of the caring.
So I'm not sure if we need to be encouraged to do that.
I would rather see it as a governmental project
in order for the government to be able to push away these tasks.
And I'm not saying that it's wrong, though.
And there could be really some...
Maybe it could help in stimulating some initiatives of citizens.
Maybe the thing that I would be troubled about
is rather that they want some participation in a certain way
according to a model that they designed.
Well, it sounds a little bit they and us,
but I mean, it's rather designed from above.
And I think that a lot of initiatives from below
would not fit that model.
And that's rather what I'm worried about.
I think this is actually, if I'm correct me if I'm wrong, Phil,
what Phil means by servitude,
is that in the sense of spoiling us,
in the sense of a good parent who is giving lots of presents,
it's also disciplining us in a certain way that we should behave.
And in that disciplining us also taking away some of our activity
and our action in doing it ourselves and our own getting into action.
So in that sense, are we spoiled
and are we happy with every present we got?
I have a little bit more two-sided vision on this
in the sense that we were spoiled
but maybe we were also discouraged
to develop certain capacities that we originally had.
So as I was saying, some initiatives are not stimulated.
It's just certain initiatives that are being accepted.
Thank you.
Okay.
So let's continue with Jeff and then take these students.
Okay.
Jeff tells us to do it.
Yeah.
My question is, is this active approach
to creating a better society from this bottom up?
In respect to actually the very makers
in the sense that people have been an object of power for so long,
we've been subject to part of the community.
We don't need to demand females.
You know, in this time of subject history,
we've been exposed for so long.
What will happen when we do take this active sense
and try to create some sort of quality of security?
It feels like this is what governments have been doing themselves
for so long, even during the time,
that they were doing as well.
And I don't think that that was just a thought down
of the bottom up.
It was something that was fermenting in society itself.
Well, you have to remember that the Nazis only wanted to,
they were social engineers, extreme gardeners.
And I think part of the, you know,
I think it was it that said we still live in the shadow of Auschwitz.
We still, you know, these negative security obsessions
still haunt our presence, you know,
the surge towards imprisonment in places like the United Kingdom,
the construction of outsiders.
It's, you know, we're still in court within that impasse.
I think when we got back to say Richard Sennett
and he was saying, well, one of the reasons why this is that,
you know, sorry to step back a bit,
gardeners always create different kind of gardeners, all right?
If you have a regimented garden,
you will get an extreme kind of garden.
One goes with the other, okay?
Because if you're faced with all those weeds out of place
in a garden where only some things are supposed to survive,
you will eliminate those weeds.
And that's what the fascist state was about.
But what we're trying to say is that, well, wait a minute,
there are all sorts of interesting gardens
and there are different kinds of gardening practices
and there are different kinds of temperate gardeners.
And in a world where, you know,
key figures of our time are the security officers,
private security officers, policemen,
the extended policing family,
actually in a world where differences are under threat
in all sorts of ways,
then actually trying to post a costume of,
well, what constitutes a more temperate kind of social guardian?
Now, it could well be the case that you start to unleash
a bit more anarchy and disorder in the urban environment,
and that could be quite unsettling for a lot of people.
But living with, I think, what Jock would call
the vertigo of modernity, that's part of the process, isn't it?
Remember, this is what Jock was always about as well.
You let multiplicities thrive.
It's no longer anchored into a philosophy of being,
but of becoming.
And I think this is if you want to get back into delusion work.
So I suppose the positive security at the centre
of what we were proposing is a much more anarchy,
quite strange, quite dangerous kind of exhilarating,
but, you know, who knows where it will go next?
It's about unleashing possibility, which I think is what
your paper was about, Phil, unleashing our potential.
Whereas, in fact, we live in societies that too often
close it down, and this gets back to perhaps your point.
You know, so how do you create societies where people
desire not just their own subjugation,
but the subjugation of others?
How do you reverse that?
And I think that is getting to the heights
of what we're trying to suggest.
Now, I don't think there are blueprints for this.
Just great examples and practices we all can learn from
and apply and develop elsewhere.
So it's about a politics of assemblage, reassembleage,
and contestation.
All right, yeah.
Wherever the mic is.
No.
I mean, I think positive criminology
is another version of critical criminology, I guess.
And I mean, if you were to say, why don't we have instead
of mainstream criminology and critical criminology,
plain criminology, I would say no.
I think we have to have critical criminology.
So I mean, and I think critical criminology is that criminology
which interrogates the world, interrogates law, control, harm,
crime, in terms of power relations
and how we might seek to understand crime
and harm in terms of those power relations
and how we might want to undo harm
through undoing certain kinds of power relation.
And I think in some sort of sense, this positive criminology
is kind of another version of critical criminology.
But not, I mean, I think the origins, as Brenda said,
of this project was based, I think, in the concept of security
and trying to discover a kind of positive security.
And I think it's the relationship between critical criminology
and the issue of security that I think preoccupies us.
I think that would be the answer to, that would be my answer.
I would try to also give you an answer from the very concrete,
empirical reality in my study is that whose interests are at stake,
what kind of problems could it solve that cannot be solved
with the current hegemonic debate.
I think if I look at the prostitution migrants,
Bulgarian prostitution migrants in Marseilles,
whose interests are at stake by seeing them as dangerous others,
I think that's an extreme raised notion.
It has everything to do with the forming also of the European Union.
Whom do we feel could be us, could belong to us,
and whom are still vehemently feared.
And even though Bulgaria, Romania do belong to the European Union now,
it's not really the fellow Europeans that we are quite happy with yet, as of yet.
And that can be explained also by theories of Sigmund Bauman.
They are not socioeconomically at the same level, so they cannot consume.
These women are being consumed, we could say, and thereby feel a need.
So whose interests are at stake?
I think if we look at their notions of security and try to give that a voice,
which is indeed a very critical, criminological thing to do, I would say,
I would believe that in all debates concerning prostitution policy, for example,
then for once the ones whom these policies concern are actually having a voice in that debate,
which is currently not at all the case.
I mean, we see this whole...
Their interests would be part of the debate.
And right now, I don't think that is the case.
The debate, the prostitution policy in Europe, is all about our needs for security.
It's not about their needs for security.
So that's what we could win.
I'm just offering my own biographical take on that.
I didn't get it.
Positive security was originally what the workshop was about, and I just didn't get it.
I mean, I've written on the security state with John Lee.
I've written on the punitive term, penal excess.
I didn't get positive security.
It's only when I started thinking, basically being prodded by these guys,
to say, well, come on, there must be something better than simply turning around
and saying how the state is dismantling social life as we know it.
So to me, it was always a debate within critical criminology.
So we've documented the punitive term.
We're starting to look at new state formations,
the rather dangerous processes of neoliberalization, individualization, and so on.
So I think it was just really to try and wake up a debate
at a time when we seem to be mapping out governing through crime.
Sorry, I'll finish there.
And so it was just that that's what provoked this exploration.
Thank you.
The notions of living, fluidity, and movement,
academic and academic-minded approaches to joy,
the security of time, units of healing,
and it reminded me of the last cyclist, a radical bicyclist,
who used all of that importance to pull intersections
into a sort of zone of safety while the ride has to be,
while acting upon the others, they didn't go away.
And counseling also, I think one of the things that was clear,
those who were not understanding of the action,
this was building their own kind of business,
there was also 300 streets,
the US now homeless camps that have run by homeless people
and their own, their own security of police.
So I'll give you an example.
My question is, and my sense of this,
is that those are all from the very moments in which the authorities came down
and asked that part of how a security state works
is to eliminate other forms of social security.
So this is Dr. King's question,
how does this joy and fluidity deal with the fact
that almost any attempt to do what we're talking about
will live in that part of the very security state
that finally underlined?
Thank you.
Yeah.
I can give it a try to give you a reaction.
Yeah, actually, that's the problem, I think,
and that's also an answer maybe to Fritz's question,
that this is actually what will take place,
and how can we prevent that from taking place?
I think we don't know that yet,
but I would say, but this might sound very hippie-like again,
we should continue trying.
We are in an era in which organization from below
does have much more chances, I think, than in other eras,
even though on the same time we have the muscle power of the state
and trying to gain control,
but there are all kind of places and digital places as well,
where people actually do find each other,
link up with each other for a common cause,
and distance is not anymore in our disadvantage.
I mean, we can cross that distance now so easily in our minds,
so in that sense, well, I'm a very positive person,
so maybe too much, but in that sense,
I think we should try,
and maybe it is true that we will time and time again,
but then again, we also shouldn't make the mistake, I believe,
to see power as this kind of anonymous thing
that is all the time repressing us.
Power is also people in the end, it's not like some anonymous force,
and these people might also get seduced,
so maybe that's also a way out.
Alright, we get...
Maybe seducing power.
I mean, I would just say, one thing about, say, a homeless camp,
and I think a very important thing would be to ensure,
to start constructing a politics which makes connections
between those with homes and those without homes,
that's really important, and of course,
to interrogate what the people with homes feel is security.
What is the relationship with the police?
How accountable are the police?
I mean, can we, in our connections with the homeless,
then determine a different kind of policing,
which then doesn't mean that the homeless have to form
self-defense committees against the police.
I think the other thing, just very, very quickly,
with schools and gangs,
that's a really good point that was made by David.
I think, as I understand it,
one of the purposes of the kind of work you do
is to transform gangs which seem to be caught in cycles
of territoriality or violence,
or sort of struggle against, into gangs that are affirmative,
that strengthen their collective sense,
that try to do something positive rather than get involved
in stuff that reproduces exactly what the state wants them to do.
I mean, and I think, again, with schooling,
I mean, the best kind of schooling is that kind of schooling
that interrogates the type of power and discipline
that orders children, you know, that sort of,
that seeks to install obedience as the main form of education,
as an educational tool.
I mean, this is crazy.
I mean, you know, that therefore stops the notion
of an expression of power and creativity.
I mean, that's, I think, I mean, an attitude to schooling
and to gangs, I think, is sort of very, very much
consonant with the concept of positive security
or positive criminology.
We'll take five more minutes, okay.
So we do have two more questions.
But at the same time, the notion of let's do a poem,
let's protect our voters and speak with our own and be safe.
So, yeah, if we change it, the notion of hope
would change to a good extent.
The goal is a spirit.
But how do you do that without meeting people,
both crazy and insecure and anxious and disinventable?
I'm all for a bit of disembeddiness.
I mean, that's part of the problem is, you know,
it's part of the way I think that negative security works.
And it's interesting if you read some of Pidega's writings,
you know, he'd really elevate the home as a space,
again, go back into the roots of Nazis,
you know, the idea of being rooted and so on.
And that's a conventional way to think about security.
We live in sedentary societies, you know, the border,
the wall, the fence are the key kind of defining features,
you know, whereas I think much more,
we need a much more rhizomatic,
much more radical disembedding.
It's about those forms of actually to be more secure,
we maybe have to become more insecure.
Actually, that disembedded feeling, that notion of actually,
yes, you are confronting something strange and different in your life.
I mean, this is why I think we were having conversations,
who was it earlier with, about the work of Zimmel,
you know, this idea about how you create vibrant spaces,
cities should be vibrant, inclusive,
and yet dominant designs move us against it.
So I've got a feeling that actually we do need to sort of like,
it should all be unsettling.
If people aren't unsettled, then that's disturbing,
because that should be rocked, you know,
this is about the uses of disorder again,
confronting difference in your life, recognising it and valuing it.
Ah, some do, and they're the interesting ones.
Watch them.
Just one note on hippies,
I'm always minded with Johnny Rotten's injunction says,
never trust a hippie.
I think it really has to do with questioning ourselves very fundamentally,
in the sense that our feelings of home,
they haven't been always like that.
I mean, people have been nomads before, you know,
it's not like, it's so natural for us to think of home as a fixed thing,
but if you consider the fact that home isn't always safe,
and if you're open to that kind of doubt and ambiguity and unsettledness,
which we should allow more in our lives, I believe,
then maybe this could work,
but it does indeed demand you to at least be open to doubt,
notions that are so fundamental to what we need to feel ontologically secure,
and we believe we need that to feel secure
and to feel ontologically secure in our existence.
But do we really need that conception of home to feel secure?
That would be a very fundamental question.
I think Ulf Hanatz once said in his book,
we always want to be rooted, but people are no trees,
they do not have roots, they have legs,
and that's something we might want to try and realize a bit more.
You can feel secure in motion, and maybe that's not for everyone,
maybe it's not, I don't know,
but we could at least try to doubt the things that make us most secure.
So do we really need them for this feeling of security?
I'm willing to doubt it.
All right, thanks so much.
Very last and short question, Amadeer.
See?
Oh, sorry.
Okay, I suggest that's our last round.
Everybody makes their final statement, make your best out of it.
I would say, personally, instinctively, I'm an anarchist instinctively,
but that's the way I feel,
but I also realize that we can't throw off the state,
we can't throw off power,
we have to think about how we can configure it,
and how we can figure how we relate to each other in terms of power.
So we can't step outside power, it's impossible.
So how do we configure that?
I mean, that is, in a sense, driven by a certain kind of anarchist sensibility.
There's no doubt about that.
The only thing about this notion of security
is this negation within security, so without care.
So we could say, let's embrace insecurity,
but in a sense, I think that's something we should be prepared to do,
but again, that's a sort of trajectory into absence, without care.
And I think what we have to do is go into a trajectory
which goes into something which is much more positive and creative.
And so again, in a kind of post-anarchist way,
which is still also anarchist,
I would say that we have to not think of the without of power
or the without of government,
but how we might want to govern ourselves in really entirely different ways,
which actually involve a lot of experimentalism and creativity.
I can only add, yes, I think.
I don't think we get too confused by these labels.
I find it to be slightly critical, Brenda et al.
I'm not too sure where the concept of positive criminology came from,
but I think it's a rhetorical concept,
more than a sort of like staking out an entirely new branch of criminology.
I think we're just having a conversation with ourselves about
how do we think about security.
I mean, as an anarchist, I find a torn between on one hand,
a desire to throw things down, but then it's the other side of it.
How do you build things back up and in what kind of interesting form?
Yeah, well, I think I will not add too much to that,
but maybe it's not necessarily anarchy that we need,
but rather allowing more ambiguity and more doubt
and more not automatically assuming that if power falls away
or if we resist it, then automatically this will be the result.
I think, will it be the result?
Are there spaces where we can govern more from below?
We could just be more open to think about places,
room space where we could do that and not necessarily totally overthrow power.
That would be the anti-security discourse, which we do not want.
It's rather we want to put something next to it that could,
in which we embrace creativity, creative ideas,
starting from a more positive notion.
So I hope that's an answer to your question.
Okay, thank you so much.
Thanks to all my panelists and to all of you.