Radiant Security
Migration's anxious remediations
J.D. Schnepf
It’s July 15, 2021, and on the five o’clock news El Paso’s NBC affiliate reports that Border Patrol agents in the Big Bend Sector have uncovered seventy-four undocumented migrants from Central and South America hiding in travel trailers. A black-and-white image appears on the screen and against a dark background viewers can make out the faint white edges of a truck and trailer. The outer walls of the trailer are transparent; all that remains visible of its structure are the stark lines of its frame. Several human forms composed of white light occupy the space within it. One appears to sit on a set of stairs, head in hands, while another reposes on the floor. Behind these figures lie translucent, almost invisible forms. The perspective is perhaps foreshortened; these could be the rounded crowns of human heads but it’s impossible to tell. Seconds later, the image is replaced on the screen by a color photograph taken from inside the travel trailer. As if to dispel any confusion, the photo shows young men and teenage boys—refugees from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Ecuador, and Peru—sitting shoulder-to-shoulder within.
Rather than address the longterm effects of U.S. imperialism across Central and South America and the exploitative, brutal conditions to which its violent interventions gave rise, U.S. cable news programs frame the flight of migrants to the country’s southern border as rife with uncertainties. Emphasizing the number of travelers and their undocumented status, the El Paso news plays into what certain rightwing politicians and political pundits stoking white supremacist xenophobia deem an unprecedented national security crisis. This supposed crisis threatens to exhaust finite resources and destroy an immigration system already under strain. At the same time, the story also points out that human smug- gling schemes introduce other uncertainties, not just for the future of the country but for the wellbeing and the safety of the migrants. According to the chief patrol agent for the Big Bend Sector, “[t]he coordination and collaboration between the agents and the Texas Department of Public Safety resulted in multiple migrants being rescued from a very dangerous situation.”
Perhaps it’s not surprising that the report—and the images that accompany it—appeal to uncertain feelings about the longterm future of the country and the more immediate future faced by migrants. Uncertain affects have long sustained the U.S. security state. In their recent review of the affective and emotional dimension of transnational security regimes, Samar Al-Bulushi, Sahana Ghosh, and Inderpal Grewal write that these regimes can “mobilize fear and uncertainty” to “manufacture consent.” For scholars versed in national security affects, the post-9/11 U.S. counter terrorism apparatus harnesses and instrumentalizes imaginary uncertainties and ungoverned fears to authorize state power. In these accounts, feelings of uncertainty mixed with feelings of fear seem a natural pairing. Still, zeroing in on uncertainty—a relatively minor affective paradigm of natural security—disentangles it from more prominent affects like terror and fear.
Psychoanalytic categories lend themselves to the task. Freud was adamant that fears, frights, and other bad feelings had shades of difference that risked being missed if left lumped together. “‘Fright’, ‘fear’ and ‘anxiety,’” he wrote in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “are improperly used as synonymous expressions; they are in fact capable of clear distinctions in their relation to danger.” Fear “requires a definite object of which to be afraid,” while fright is “the name we give to the state a person gets into when he has run into danger without being prepared for it.” Anxiety, on the other hand, names a state that arises when no definite object is present but preparation has commenced. “Anxiety,” as Freud puts it, “describes a particular state of expecting the danger or preparing for it, even though it may be an unknown one.” Marked by expectations and preparations prompted by unknown dangers that may never come, anxiety sets itself apart from both fear and fright as a state organized around future-oriented, anticipatory temporalities. Beholden to the unknown, anxiety dwells in insufficient information, unknown probabilities, and hasty calculations. It surmises without evidence, worries without proof, conjures phantoms without cause.
Black-and-white images like the one featured on the El Paso news have come to shape and coax out popular perceptions of threat to national and migrant life alike, as well as their uncertain projections into the future. Produced through an algorithmically assisted data visualization known as X-ray backscatter imaging, these hazy visualizations come into being in the routine process of scanning vehicles and cargo at international land border crossings and seaports as goods make their way along trans-American shipping routes to the U.S. To put this technology in context, it’s now commonplace for computer-assisted border security systems to commandeer forms of radiant energy like the X-ray to extend surveillance capabilities beyond the visible spectrum. The visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is remarkably narrow, consisting of radiation with wavelengths between approximately 380nm and 760nm. At the lower energy end of visible radiation is near infrared radiation; moving beyond this toward the radio region of the spectrum, wavelengths are the longest. But as you move from the visible portion of the spectrum and toward the higher electromagnetic frequencies, you enter high-energy bands of ultraviolet (UV), X-rays, and gamma rays. The wavelengths in this region are so small that they can interfere with atoms and molecules, catalyze chemical reactions, and cause cancer in humans and animals.
“Beholden to the unknown, anxiety dwells in insufficient information, unknown probabilities, and hasty calculations. It surmises without evidence, worries without proof, conjures phantoms without cause.”
In its bid to control the U.S.– Mexico border and the people and commodities crossing it, the U.S. has securitized the atmosphere and with it the full spectrum of radiant energy by determining where radiance is targeted, how it is captured, and what it makes visible. Radiant security in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands is ensured through various technological measures. These include radio waves projected by U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Tethered Aerostat Radar System, which detect low-flying aircraft, as well as infrared sensor systems and Vehicle and Dismount Exploitation Radar (VADER) used by Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) to identify human movement below. It also takes the form of dental radiographs forcibly performed on migrant children held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers, and large-scale gamma-ray imaging systems to picture perceived threats. It appears as radiation detection equipment designed to combat radiological terrorism, as well as the “shade surplus in security space and shade deficit in public space”—an asymmetry that, as architectural design scholars Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller show, unevenly distributes damaging UV radiation to migrants. In these ways and more, invisible radio waves, infrared, UV rays, X-rays, and gamma rays are pressed into service on behalf of the U.S. national security project.
This sweeping project of radiant border security is enmeshed with global racial capitalism and the circulation of commodities across controlled borders with seamless efficiency. The X-ray backscatter image thus satisfies the congruent desires of national security and supply-chain logistics. For the critical theorist and philosopher Alberto Toscano, images produced during logistical operations are visualizations “shorn of the subjective, reflective, contemplative features generally ascribed to an artistic representation, as a representation for a viewing, judging subject (be it individual or collective).” Unlike images intended for artistic representation, “[t]he logistical image is considered primarily in its informational functionality, as an element in a concatenation of actions, or in a flow, which is ultimately not different in kind from other logistical components (charts, material, transport, etc.).” A subcategory of Harun Farocki’s operational image—an image that does things in the course of machinic operations rather than an image that represents—the logistical image allows us to consider the X-ray backscatter data visualization as extracted and decontextualized from the waypoint of international trade and border security from which it materialized. What visual knowledge gets produced when the logistical image is dislocated from its site of origin, remediated, and diffused through popular culture to represent migrant life for the American public? What happens when the image is used by the security companies who sell the backscatter technology to U.S. Customs and Border Protection? Or when the image is reproduced for public viewing on The New York Times site? What new meanings accrue when the backscatter image enters serial form as it did in 2019 when the White House posted it to Instagram?
In the latter case, where the X-ray backscatter image is presented in serial form, new questions arise regarding the anticipatory temporalities of anxiety and expectations formed around the unknown. In Cartographies of the Absolute, Toscano and Jeff Kinkle argue that in early twenty-first-century narrative arts—ranging from David Simon’s television series, The Wire, to Roberto Saviano’s nonfiction book, Gomorrah— a narrative pattern is established in which peering inside the shipping container momentarily disrupts global circulation’s smooth veneer to expose “the bodies in pain that its abstraction erases.” This theme, they suggest, betrays a “primordial anxiety about logistics.” Although they don’t address the border or the backscatter image, Toscano and Kinkle’s perceptive linking of the seamless standardization of logistics to bodies in pain through a moment of transparency reappears in the cultural logic that organizes the meaning of border backscatter pictures. In the borderlands, digging below the supply-chain surface reveals the dark underbelly of global capitalism’s vicious exploitation of migrants. While Toscano and Kinkle conclude that the revelation of human immiseration functions as both allegory and prelude to a new confrontation with the opacity of global capitalism’s sheer scale, I’ll show that in the age of what Patricia Stuelke calls reparative empire, serial forms now organize the horror of this revelation as an occasion to anticipate liberal humanist interventions by agents of the U.S. security state.
By tracing the X-ray backscatter image’s recontextualizations and popular serializations, this essay considers how these images organize national security fantasies of anticipated unknowns in the form of pending threat and humanitarian rescue. But can images disorganize these fantasies? Turning finally to the question of what it might look like to disrupt the anticipatory temporalities of national security and the affective states that attend them, I’ll look at the serial art of activist-artist Alex Rivera. Constituted of what Rivera describes as “three small stories,” The Borders Trilogy (2003) presents a series of short documentaries, each less than four minutes long. The final docu- mentary remediates the X-ray backscatter image as part of its attempt to explore the relentless regulation of international labor and commodities under national security and capitalist globalization in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
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How were X-ray backscatter security images described by the engineers who invented them and the companies that marketed them to the U.S. government? American Science and Engineering (AS&E), the security company behind the surveillance image that features in Rivera’s documentary trilogy, was one of the world’s most prolific commercial manufacturers of radiant security technologies when Rivera released the trilogy in 2003. AS&E’s chief competitor in the backscatter X-ray technology industry at the time was Rapiscan, a subsidiary of OSI Systems. In 2016, OSI Systems acquired AS&E; since then, it has gone by the cumbersome name of Rapiscan | AS&E. Rapiscan purchased the rights to the X-ray backscatter detection security system after inventor Steven W. Smith applied to patent it in 1991.
Although the technique of backscatter detection had been around for decades, its security applications had yet to be exploited. In his patent application, Smith argued for the ingenuity of his invention by claiming that “[s]ecurity systems are presently limited in their ability to detect contraband, weapons, explosives, and other dangerous objects concealed under clothing.” U.S. security practices were falling behind, he argued, due to factors including advances in new weapons materials, the public’s low tolerance for manual inspection, and the carcinogenic risk inherent in high-energy radiation exposure which posed limitations on existing screening methods. The solution he proposed reads as an account of the backscatter image’s mode of production. Direct a calibrated dose of radiation at the human body and, instead of collecting the rays that pass through the body—as a medical X-ray does—use electromagnetic sensitive detectors near the radiation source to harvest the X-rays that scatter away from the body at different intensities. Variable scatter would provide meaningful data, Smith’s application concluded, because:
Soft human tissue scatters a significant amount of X-rays due to the relatively low atomic number of oxygen which predominates its composition. Bones near the surface of the body produce much less scatter due to the higher atomic number of calcium which makes up their structure. Concealed objects, especially metals, can be easily visualized in the images due to their significant differences in atomic composition from the background human tissue.
Practically, scattered X-rays could be converted into electronic signals. Sent to a computer for processing, the signals yield an image that indexes radiation’s subatomic touch. Far from the non-intrusive alternative it is sometimes touted as (Homeland Security describes their scanners as “Non-Intrusive Inspection Systems”), Smith’s patent explains radiant imaging technology’s bombardment of the body. Though Smith’s patent doesn’t delve into the details, biophysicists have pointed out that the X-ray’s high energy raises the risk of injuring human tissue, rearranging chromosomes, and catalyzing cancer in the course of producing images for the system operator’s perusal. These potential physiological effects reframe the supposedly hygienic security work of electromagnetic detection as what Martha K. Huggins, Mika Haritos-Fatouros, and Philip Zimbardo would call “violence work.” The security patent discloses how the racialized violence of border maintenance is elemental, acting on the body at subatomic scales. Despite such concerns, patent number 5,181,234 was granted in 1993. This would open the door for the rapid development of large-scale radiant security imaging apparatuses including full-body scanners, drive-through vehicle inspection systems, and cargo container inspection along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Rapiscan | AS&E markets this technology by bestowing the X-ray backscatter image with the quality of pictorial realism on their website despite the image’s computer-generated provenance: it assures potential clients that the “photo-like images are easy-to-interpret,” and that this quality “significantly enhances the ability of operators to quickly understand and interpret scan results.” While framed as a matter of smoothing out procedural inefficiencies in the cross-border supply chain, the text nonetheless intimates that the scans introduce interpretive challenges for the national security agents trained to assess them. The uncertain meaning of the images recurs throughout the backscatter imaging literature. In fact, Smith flagged the trial of interpreting the radiant image in his patent application as well. There he proposed keeping a record of previous images so that current scans could be compared to earlier ones, as well as artificially augmenting the image edges of concealed objects and “suppressing the edges of internal anatomy that produce confusion in image interpretation.”
The company’s site also betrays the contingency of its data visualizations by offering up shifting accounts of what, exactly, an image created from data is. On the one hand, when the images are described as “revealing both the presence and exact position of the organic components in the scanned object,” imaging is used as a technology of transparency, unveiling a reality inaccessible through human perception alone. On the other hand, X-ray backscatter imaging is a technology of anticipation, crafting perceptibility out of formlessness with the algorithm’s predictive assistance, as when the site assures clients that, through imaging, “even inorganic objects ... are given shape and form.”
“The very concept of the threat thus requires imaginative projections of probable disaster within the present. As threats persist, they imply that the future is always about to happen, drawing out the time and mood of unfocused anticipation.”
The predicament of whether seeing by backscatter reveals visual reality or creates it is perhaps most acutely portrayed when the corporate language toggles between material objects and metaphysical threats. While Rapiscan | AS&E generally promises that its imaging system can detect material “components” or “objects,” occasionally the language escalates, and this same system “reveals metallic threats” and “highlights organic threats.” Threat mitigation is the parlance of the vehicle X-ray imaging industry: a competitor’s site, for example, promises “[d]etection technology that preys on threats.” Of course, the claim that technologies can visualize threats is not surprising given the paradigm of preparedness that coalesced in the U.S. after 9/11. Drawing on the preemptive relation to the future that marks anxious national security affects, preparedness is the alibi for the existence of the security imaging industry. Under this paradigm, an unknown threat is ever-present, carrying with it a potential violence, a harm that may or may not come to pass. The very concept of the threat thus requires imaginative projections of probable disaster within the present. As threats persist, they imply that the future is always about to happen, drawing out the time and mood of unfocused anticipation.
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Throughout the nineties and the decades that followed, the government-industrial nexus of border security and international trade channeled anxiety and uncertainty through the work of threat detection, hastening X-ray backscatter technology’s development. The resultant logistical images were remediated and circulated well beyond the various borderland sites of their production. One now regularly encounters radiant security images in the newspaper, on the nightly news, and on social media. While security companies turned to the language of photography and obscure national threats to shore up the unstable meaning of the forms fleshed out in black and white, the American public interpreted these images in multiple ways, with an image often accruing powerful and sometimes contradictory cultural associations. “X-ray images functioned, and continue to function as icons, fetishes, and artifacts of health, life, sexuality, and, most significantly, death,” writes Lisa Cartwright. And while X-ray backscatter imaging requires a different technique than the conventional X-ray image that Cartwright refers to, the backscatter image is regularly recruited to illustrate many of these matters in the idiom of unknown dangers to migrant health and the anticipation of migrant death. This shift marks a notable turn away from government and industry’s focus on the security threat and toward the threat to migrant life now pictured as hanging in the balance.
A 2011 story from The New York Times, for instance, featuring a remediated logistical image intended to illustrate the headline—“X-Ray Scan Reveal 513 Migrants in 2 Trucks”—describes how migrants bound for the U.S. were found “suffering from dehydration” while “packed together in near-suffocating conditions.” It concludes by likening the backscatter image to “an eerie black-and-white window into a world where $7,000 buys a small patch of space in a cramped truck with breathing holes punched in the roof, but no guarantee of making it all the way to the United States.” With lack of air, water, and hope, the migrant travelers’ dissipating health and the anxious expectation of future death looms throughout this account. Evidently unfamiliar with the history of U.S. imperial violence that gave rise to the brutal conditions from which South and Central American refugees flee, the author of the story regards the radiant image as a portal through which he can glimpse the death-bound embodiment of inhumanity in a world he mistakenly believes is different from his own.
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If the public perceives X-ray backscatter images depicting human forms crossing borders as capturing an instant in the anticipatory process of unfolding death, then placing the remediated image in a series situates it in time. In doing so, it opens up the possibility that this process might be interrupted—that another outcome might be possible. Reflecting on conventional seriality, Shane Denson tells us that “serialization is a process of managing temporalities—keeping track and reminding readers/viewers of past events, for example, while creating suspense, managing expectations, and maintaining interest in future developments.” Denson’s account casts serialization as a use- ful form for reckoning with unknown dangers. If, as we have seen, X-ray backscatter images traffic in the anxious affective state of uncertain futures, then serialization, through its formal management of time, serves to organize expectations and, in doing so, bring order to the world.
Take a case drawn from the Trump White House’s official Instagram account. Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign famously traded in racist rhetorical claims that migrants moving north across the U.S.-Mexico border posed a threat to U.S. national security. During his tenure as president, border securitization remained central to his administration’s public messaging. To spread this message, the administration circulated surveillance images generated by radiant security technologies to demonstrate their control of the border on social media. On July 3, 2019, the White House’s official account uploaded four images captured at a cargo screening portal on the Southern border the night before. The first image in the post features a CBP computer monitor glowing in a darkened room. Its edges frame a filmy black-and-white backscatter image on the screen, as if to reproduce for the platform user the radiant image’s instrumentality as just one of the “logistical components,” in what Toscano calls logistics’ “concatenation of actions.” The postures of the white, enfleshed forms on the screen imply both directionality—ventral and dorsal—and an air of fatigue, redolent of the pose the standing body holds in cramped quarters. Clustered between columns of small, rounded objects, the figures on the screen appear translucent, as a darkness shrouded by a veil. Another human form lies on its back on the horizontal bed of the semi-truck, with knees bent and feet flat on the floor.
“Last night, 12 children, a pregnant woman, a convicted felon, and 19 other illegal aliens were found locked in a produce truck at a checkpoint in Arizona,” reads the post’s caption. “The driver, charged with human smuggling, kept the refrigeration off, so they were trapped inside where it was over 97 degrees with no way out. THANK YOU to our heroic Border Patrol agents,” it concluded, “whose vigilance caught this smuggler and potentially saved lives!” Read through one interpretive frame, the caption betrays a didactic itinerary, enlisting Instagram users as citizen-agents of the security state by instructing them in Border Patrol agent activities like backscatter imaging interpretation and vigilance. Zooming in on individual wrongdo- ing, it also displaces the systematic necropolitics of the administration’s border management onto an anonymous driver-smuggler who stands in here alongside the “convicted felon” as the criminal figure of migration: a threatening agent caught sowing the conditions for mass death. Yet, at the same time, the caption draws on the discourse of anti-trafficking’s sentimental, liberal humanism. Sentimental discourses, as Lauren Berlant explains, “indulge in the confirmation of the marginal subject’s embodiment of inhumanity on the way to providing the privileged with heroic occasions of rescue, recognition, and inclusion.” Here, the focus shifts to the trapped, overheated innocents onboard while insulating global racial capitalism from reproach. Anxiety’s future-oriented anticipatory temporalities, its unsure predictions of death’s imminence, supply just the affective conditions necessary for heroic agents of the security state to step in and benevolently return the migrants to life.
Such an interpretation of the post is abetted, moreover, by Instagram’s formal properties. In 2017, the photo- and video-sharing app introduced image sequencing through its carousel feature, allowing users to share multiple images in a single post. The advent of the carousel meant that the vertical navigation standard, originally established by user-experience designers for desktop computers (a computer mouse’s built-in scroll wheel is always vertically oriented), was now accompanied by the horizontal scrolling (or “swiping” on touchscreen devices) of images. Online, users described the carousel feature’s affordances in narrative terms: posting in series allowed users to “tell a story through pictures.” One image now followed the next in an implied chronological, processual relation.
With the platform’s serializing capacity in mind, one notices how the horizontal movement in sequence from the X-ray backscatter image to the three following photorealist color images imparts the security image with the technocultural powers of prediction and detection. In these images, men, women, and children sit on the concrete ground, the aftermath of CBP border agent intervention. In the first image, a small boy—having escaped the container’s lethal conditions—stands in front of a border agent, his face digitally blurred. The agent seems to hold the child next to boxes of food and juice as if captured in the act of migrant revivification. In the next two images of the series, the container is now plainly empty, its former human cargo on display. To view the four images as a series is to reinvest the radiant security image’s uncertain human forms with the full humanity doled out by border agents through rescue and nourishment, while revealing the open interior of the shipping container for the viewer, as if to restore and reassure us of the transparency of global trade. Here we might recall the images from the El Paso newscast: the backscatter X-ray image comes before the photorealist color image to manage the viewer’s expectations through a narrative pattern that anticipates the rescue that follows detection.
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Finally, we can turn to Rivera’s The Borders Trilogy to consider the interlocking narratives and unusual sequential form it employs to recount the federally-sponsored acts and agreements that have resulted in localized, human immiseration. The first two documentaries in the series are in color and assume the conventional look of media produced from the perspective of a human observer. “Love on the Line,” the first documentary, contextualizes scenes of families meeting while physically separated by the westernmost segment of the border fence: embracing, picnicking, and holding their children through the metal slats. It references Clinton’s 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which made it possible to punish some legal immigrants residing in the U.S. for visiting their countries of origin. The remaining minutes feature informal interview segments with some of the separated family members over the audible waves of the Pacific. The second short piece, “Container City, USA,” echoes the first in form but tracks the transit of goods rather than the stasis of people. Against the geopolitical backdrop of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, the film ironically documents a “container invasion” plaguing Newark, New Jersey, the detritus of the logistical operations attending what Anna Tsing has called supply-chain capitalism. Before piles of empty shipping containers that overwhelm the port, a city councilman, a resident, and a port-authority spokesman stand before the camera lamenting the unsightly stacks.
Unlike the first two films, the third film, entitled “A Visible Border,” engages with remediated radiant machine vision. A title card reading “The following image was captured at the Mexico/Guatemala Border, using technology developed by American Science & Engineering, Inc.” gives way to a tight closeup of a filmy white protrusion set against a dark background. Despite the variance in visualizing technique, this final film will prove to be a thematic iteration of the previous ones, an uncanny repetition on the theme of global capitalism and border security. The matter-of-fact voice of a market analyst speaks of advances in border imaging technologies over the closeup and continues as the image slowly spins clockwise while pulling away from the camera’s fixed perspective, resolving itself into a cargo truck loaded with crates of bananas and the ghostly white anatomical forms of humans sitting in small compartments among them.
Rivera’s decision to place this X-ray backscatter image last in his trilogy’s formal structure matters because it arguably divests the security image’s cultural associations with a predictive foreknowledge. Remediated and serialized in this fashion, the radiant image loses its anticipatory power of detection, its coaxing of anxious speculations. But more than this, by placing the backscatter image in the final position of the trilogy, serialization intervenes in the security state’s ordering of migrant life at the border. Rivera wagers that serialization can undo the fixed temporal sequence of detection and rescue.
“[S]urveillance techniques and technologies aim to capture bits of visual, aural, or biometric ‘remains’ that can serve as stable pieces of evidence in the future,” writes Elise Morrison in Discipline and Desire. Removed from the flow of global trade activity and preserved in digital form, the X-ray backscatter images produced through the U.S. border security regime and its data-intensive technologies circulate beyond their context as a component, to acquire those “subjective, reflective contemplative features generally ascribed to an artistic representation” that Toscano denies to the image in its functional role. In their circulation, we’ve seen how these images come to serve as evidence for multiple plots through the processes of remediation and serialization. Importantly, in the case of The Borders Trilogy, radiant security imaging isn’t the starting point of the migrant story. This isn’t to suggest that a vision of the hopeful, heteronormative migrant family marks the starting point of Rivera’s alternate narration, but rather that his empha- sis falls on the immigration acts and trade agreements that have conditioned the circumstances of Central and South American since the Clinton era. Positioned in a sequence that highlights the degradations that occur in a system of global capitalism and its attendant international agreements and hardening immigration rules, the X-ray backscatter image is demystified, shorn of its anxiously predictive function and reframed, finally, as the output of an operation that serves global capitalism and the security state.