Taming an Uncertain Future by Stockdale Liam P. D.;

Author:Stockdale, Liam P. D.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783485024
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Unlimited Model

CONCLUSION

The proliferation of preemptive rationalities in the security context has led to a significant rearticulation of what the very idea of “security” is understood to mean. In particular, vibrant post-Cold War scholarly debates about proper referents and threats have effectively been reframed in a decidedly temporal way, as a radically uncertain and potential catastrophic future has been inscribed as that which must be secured against. The pursuit of this understanding of security requires a political rationality which allows human agents to act upon the future through anticipatory interventions in the present, and this chapter’s discussion has attempted to develop a detailed conceptual account of the practical logics underpinning such anticipatory rationalities. In particular, the discussion cataloged how preemptive security governance relies upon a form of temporal manipulation through which our relation to the future is radically modified. Specifically, all future potentialities must be considered potentially imminent, since only then can a mere abstract potentiality trigger the sorts of affective responses necessary to make it politically actionable in the present. Building on these points, it was also argued that there is more to understanding how preemption operates than this conspicuous process of temporal manipulation. Two points are of particular note in this respect. The first is that the perpetual imminence of catastrophe that this temporal manipulation presupposes translates into a highly compressed timescape of political praxis. This dynamic of temporal compression militates against liberal democratic political and judicial norms, since the time for deliberation about available evidence and proper courses of action is overridden by an apparent need to act now. Relatedly, the second point is that preemptive modes of governance depend significantly upon the role of affect, in that the “gut feelings” of decision-makers are crucial to its practical operation. This is because the underlying imperative to act upon an inherently unknowable future, combined with a compressed political timescape, precludes the taking of action on the basis of a carefully considered weighing of empirically verifiable evidence. Rather, what Massumi calls “affective facts”—constructed on the basis of affective responses to mere potentialities—form the primary basis for preemptive decisions. In addition to explaining how the logic of preemption functions as a political rationality, these points provide a preliminary indication of the degree to which the adoption and implementation of anticipatory governance rationalities entails radical modifications to the way political power is organized and exercised, both in the security realm and beyond. It is to this theme that the next chapter turns.

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