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Who Knows What's Going On? Mapping New Security Landscapes in Contemporary Espionage Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2015

ANDREW PEPPER
ANDREW PEPPER*
Affiliation:
School of English, Queen's University Belfast. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article explores whether or to what extent the contemporary espionage novel is able to map and interrogate transformations in the post-9/11 security environment. It asks how well a form or genre of writing, typically handcuffed to the machinations and demands of the Cold War and state sovereignty, is able to adapt to a new security environment characterized by strategies of “risk assessment” and “resilience-building” and by modes or regimes of power not reducible to, or wholly controlled by, the state. In doing so, it thinks about the capacities of this type of fiction for “resisting” the formations of power it wants to make visible and is partly complicit with.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 49 , Special Issue 4: Fictions of Speculation , November 2015 , pp. 775 - 792
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2015 

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References

1 Allan Hepburn, Intrigue: Espionage and Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 277.

2 Ibid.

3 Timothy Melley, Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction and the National Security State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 43.

4 One of the key starting points for this line of thinking is Jean-Paul Sartre's famous 1947 book What Is Literature?, in which he deals with the figure of the committed or engaged writer and the idea that such a writer has a duty to take a stand against injustice and exploitation. To do nothing, he suggests, is effectively to side with the status quo. In the context of the contemporary espionage novel, the figure who best epitomizes this “commitment” is John Le Carré, who has spoken out against the affront to liberty posed by the US-led security–intelligence nexus. But Le Carré's work, like that of Steinhauer and House, cannot simply oppose the political and security establishment because his protagonists are “insiders” who, while often critical of particular policies and practices, have to find ways of operating within state institutions and according to procedural norms.

5 Having made a larger claim about the capacities of the espionage novel to map this new security landscape, I have chosen to focus on these three areas for the purposes of brevity and clarity, but there is much more to be said about the genre's reflections on other aspects of this landscape, e.g. surveillance technologies, border controls, data-mining, the financial profiling of terror suspects etc.

6 Rancière, Jacques, “A Few Remarks on the Method of Jacques Rancière,” Parallax, 15, 3 (2009), 114–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 122.

7 Melley, 28.

8 Leander, Anna and Munster, Rens van, “Private Security Contractors in the Debate about Darfur: Reflecting and Reinforcing Neo-liberal Governmentality,” International Relations, 21, 2 (2007), 201–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 204.

9 Chandler, David, “Resilience and Human Security: The Post-interventionist Paradigm,” Security Dialogue, 43, 3 (2012), 213–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 217.

10 Aradau, Claudia, Lobo-Guerrero, Luis and Munster, Rens van, “Security, Technologies of Risk, and the Political,” Security Dialogue, 39, 2–3 (2008), 147–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 148.

11 Ibid.

12 Olen Steinhauer, The Tourist (London: Harper, 2010), 36. All subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text and refer to this edition.

13 Hepburn, Intrigue, xiv.

14 Bigo, Didier, “Security and Immigration: Toward a Critique of the Governmentality of Unease,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 27 (2002), 63–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 75.

15 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004), 56.

16 Beck, Ulrich, “The Terrorist Threat: World Risk Society Revisited,” Theory, Culture & Society, 19, 4 (2002), 67–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 74.

17 Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede, “Introduction,” in Amoore and de Goede, eds., Risk and the War on Terror (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2008), 5–19, 9.

18 Olen Steinhauer, The Nearest Exit (London: Corvus, 2011), 64. All subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text and refer to this edition.

19 Olen Steinhauer, An American Spy (London: Corvus, 2012), 67.

20 In this sense Steinhauer's speculations are better understood as premediations rather than risk calculations which are always future-oriented. De Goede notes that while risk and premediation “proceed from a shared desire: to imagine, harness and commodify the uncertain future,” premediation, unlike risk, “is not about the future at all, but about enabling action in the present by visualizing and drawing upon multiple imagined futures.” See de Goede, Marieke, “Beyond Risk: Premediation and the Post-9/11 Security Imagination,” Security Dialogue, 39, 2 (2008), 155–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 159. Also see Grusin, Richard A., “Premediation,” Criticism, 46, 1 (2004), 17–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Olen Steinhauer, “You Know What's Going On,” in Otto Penzler, ed., Agents of Treachery: Spy Stories (London: Corvus, 2011), 387–435, 399.

22 Brassett, James, Croft, Stuart and Vaughan-Williams, Nick, “Introduction: An Agenda for Resilience Research in Politics and International Relations,” Politics, 33, 4 (2013), 221–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 222.

23 Ibid., 223, original emphasis.

24 Ibid.

25 Howell, Alison, “Resilience, War, and Austerity: The Ethics of Military Enhancement and the Politics of Data,” Security Dialogue, 46, 1 (2015), 15–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 16.

26 Reid, Julian, “The Disastrous and Politically Debased Subject of Resilience,” Development Dialogue, 58 (2012), 67–80Google Scholar, 74.

27 Rose, Nikolas and Miller, Peter, “Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government,” British Journal of Sociology, 43, 2 (1992), 173–205CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 177.

28 Richard House, The Kills (London: Picador, 2013), 8–9. All subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text and refer to this edition.

29 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 200.