The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security Beyond Probability - Brossura

Amoore, Louise

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0822355604 ISBN 13: 9780822355601

Casa editrice: Duke University Press, 2013

Riassunto

Since September 11, 2001, the imagination of "low probability, high consequence" events has become a distinctive feature of contemporary politics. Uncertain futures-devastation by terrorist attack, cyber crime, flood, financial market collapse-must be discerned and responded to as possibilities, however improbable they may be. In The Politics of Possibility, Louise Amoore examines this development, tracing its genealogy through the diverse worlds of risk management consulting, computer science, commercial logistics, and data visualization. She focuses on the increasingly symbiotic relationship between commercial opportunities and state security threats, a relation that turns the trusted, iris-scanned traveler into "a person of national security interest," and the designer of risk algorithms for casino and insurance fraud into a homeland security resource. Juxtaposing new readings of Agamben, Foucault, Derrida, Massumi, and Connolly with interpretations of post–9/11 novels and artworks, Amoore analyzes the "politics of possibility" and its far-reaching implications for society, associative life, and political accountability.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull'autore

Louise Amoore is Professor of Political Geography at Durham University in Durham, England. She is the author of Globalization Contested: An International Political Economy of Work, editor of The Global Resistance Reader, and a coeditor of Risk and the War on Terror.

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THE POLITICS OF POSSIBILITY

Risk and Security Beyond Probability

By LOUISE AMOORE

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5560-1

Contents

Acknowledgements...........................................................
ix
INTRODUCTION. On the Politics of Possibility...............................
1
Part I. TECHNIQUES.........................................................
1 ON AUTHORITY. Probabilities for a World of Possibility...................
29
2 ON RISK. Securing Uncertain Futures......................................
55
Part II. SPACES............................................................
3 ON THE LINE. Life Signatures and the Writing of the Border...............
79
4 ON LOCATION. Reconciling Security and Mobility...........................
105
Part III. EFFECTS..........................................................
5 ON AESTHETICS. Security's Objects and the Form of Data...................
129
6 ON A POTENTIAL POLITICS. Toward an Ethics of the Unanticipated...........
155
Notes......................................................................
177
Bibliography...............................................................
203
Index......................................................................
217

CHAPTER 1

ON AUTHORITY

Probabilities for a World of Possibility

Weather energy goes round in circles, runs down corridors, cascades down stairways.It diffuses, regathers, reforms, diffuses again. It moves in jets and trickles, isdivided by layers thick and thin. It's always moving through one system to another,taking different shapes over time. That's why there'll always be the unexpected.The number will not help you solve that problem directly. But if you want helpwith your war ... the extent of the unexpectedness can be modified, increasingthe probability of prediction. Don't think of the date for your invasion, or you willmake a prison for yourself. Think of your data instead. How does it fit into thesurrounding context? —Giles Foden, Turbulence, 190

In 1944 in a remote Scottish village, Henry Meadows, a young mathematicianworking for the UK's Meteorological Office, seeks the secret Rymannumber that will make possible the crucial five-day advance forecastingof the weather for the D-Day landings. In Giles Foden's novel Turbulence,a depiction of the relationships between prediction, probability, weather,and war, the strategic decision on the date of invasion is but the visiblesurface of a series of frenetic backroom calculations and disputes betweenforecasters. As Foden's protagonist Meadows complains, acknowledgingsomething of the performative force of his forecasts, "it was as if we werenow expected not just to predict the weather but make it, in order that thevast ensemble of men and machines could at last be unleashed upon theenemy." His mentor, and the author of the much sought after equation,Wallace Ryman has warned him not to focus on the analogue reading ofpatterns of past weather events, or the "prison" that is the date of the invasionitself, but to observe the differential layers of the weather system, toallow for movement, circulation, and the unexpected. Yet Meadows's colleaguesare uneasy at what they see as the inferential "approximation" beinginvited into their statistical calculations of future weather. "The Americans'analogue models," objects his superior, "use historical data statistically toextrapolate how current weather will develop." "With the greatest respectto our allies," replies Meadows, "I don't think that is what Ryman was talkingabout. He would say you could have hundreds of years of data and stillget it wrong. You might pick up some quasi-periodic phenomena but thesingularities could be completely against the grain." Statistical extrapolationfrom a series of past weather events, Foden's character tells us, couldin itself represent a danger to sovereign judgment, missing, as it might, thesingularities against the grain, the outliers that elude the series.

In Foden's novel the authorization of a sovereign decision—on the basisof which the lives of two and a half million men, and perhaps a war, couldbe secured or lost—is displayed in its vivid complexity. Behind the visibledecision to authorize the invasion are multiple layers of numbers, calculations,science, laws, disputes, errors, guesswork, gut-feelings, and instincts.The dispersal of authority into this complex network, we might say withIan Hacking, is one specific means by which the sovereign is lent objectivityvia number. In the sovereign decisions on the exception, it is preciselythe declaration of emergency and special measures that clears space forthe dispersal of decision into multiple authorities, plural enumerations. IfWilliam Connolly's sense of an exception as the that which decides, the that"comprised of a plurality of forces," is to be brought into conversation withthe rich histories of science and statistics of Hacking or Lorraine Daston,then what is needed is an analysis of how authorizations multiply underthe positional sovereignty of the state. How, in short, do multiple layers ofnumber and calculation authorize, and become authorized by, the sovereigndecision on exception?

In this chapter I focus on specific instances of the designation of exceptionaltimes, the institution of necessary measures, and the authorizationof particular forms of number. As in Foden's world of forecasting to "modifythe extent of the unexpected," I am interested in how specific forms ofprobability have been contested or adopted as credible for use in apparentlyobjective sovereign decisions. On the one hand, the "approximate"speculative knowledge of commerce and economy—otherwise thought tobe a poor basis for a security judgment—appears to be invited into governmenttechniques during times of war. On the other, it is precisely by meansof sovereign enrollment in the strategies of war that economic knowledgesof circulation and laissez-faire are afforded the kind of credibility otherwisereserved for science, medicine, and law. The question of whetherRyman's number could be credibly deployed in a sovereign decision is aquestion of the allowable extent of the incorporation of possible elementswithin probabilistic statistical models. Forecasting the weather five daysin advance in the 1940s, and even today, demands more than statisticalextrapolation—there are gaps, and these gaps are filled with computermodels, subjective probabilities, equations, disagreement, intuition, andexpectation. Likewise, the absence of long-term historical "threat" data onevents such as terrorism has encouraged more speculative and imaginativeforms of calculation. Where data on past events are incomplete or absent,probabilistic knowledge is loosened to incorporate assumptions about thatwhich is merely possible. I illustrate my point in this chapter with referenceto two such instances when forms of probability and statistical knowledgewere enrolled within the complex of sovereignty: the accounting practicesplaced at the service of the state in the governing of population in WorldWar II, and the computer science and consulting practices enlisted withinthe so-called war on terror of the twenty-first century.

The histories that I discuss here, though, should not be interpreted asa linear course from what Stephen Collier calls the "archival-statistical"model, exhibited by the move from Price Waterhouse in Britain duringthe 1940s to the data-led consulting of IBM and others in the twenty-firstcentury. In 2002 IBM acquired the consulting arm of Pricewaterhouse-Coopers,making it possible for them to promise the "integrated businesssolutions" of information technology coupled with systems consulting. Ina limited sense, there is a common thread linking the wartime accountingof Price Waterhouse to the contemporary homeland security solutions ofIBM—effectively they became the same organization. It is a thread that Ihope will dispel some of the myths of a post-9/11 radical break with the pastand turn to science and technology. My concern, though, is not with thetelling of a single linear story of authorizations at times of war but ratherwith the distinctive practices of enumeration and statistical analysis thatmake the authorization of exception possible. In Britain during the 1940s,the state's deferral to "expert" systems of identification and classificationwas strictly a "preventative" measure, designed to prevent future shortagesof vital commodities. Such prevention, as Giorgio Agamben understandsit, "prescribes and produces order," in contrast to preemptive measures that"intervene and guide disorder." In the contemporary authorization of possibilisticknowledge, like Foden's modification of the unexpected, the apparentorder (of the weather, economy, security, and so on) is merely onestatistical representation among many others. "We have to alter our datagathering," urges Foden's Ryman, "make sure we realize what we are lookingat, and be prepared to approximate where we cannot measure." It isprecisely this altering of data gathering, to approximate beyond the limitpoint of measurement, the very modification of the unexpected future, thatcharacterizes the contemporary enrollment of systems of numbers intosecurity.

Necessary Measures: Counting, Accounting, and War

In his discussion of the relationship of the state of exception to war, civilwar, and insurrection, Giorgio Agamben describes the "transformationof a provisional and exceptional measure" designed for circumstances ofemergency into a "technique of government." The contemporary state ofexception, via the emergency measures of two world wars has, he argues,witnessed the expansion of executive powers and the gradual erosion oftheir boundary with juridical and legislative powers. For the exception to,as Walter Benjamin predicted, "become the rule" and enter the domain ofgoverning daily life, the institution of temporary necessary measures itselfneeds to become routinized, even ordinary. The world wars served animportant function in this regard, providing "a laboratory for the testingand honing" of emergency measures so that they may be deployed as morepermanent practices of governmental control. Understood thus, war is thevisible face of the authorization of exceptional measures, while the laboratoryit affords to techniques of governing provides a more durable space inwhich exceptional measures may be lent greater permanence. Agambendevotes much of his work to the exposition of how emergency and necessityemerge as a means of authorizing a perennial exception. The questionof measures, though, or the means of counting and accounting for emergencythat are developed in the laboratory of war, has received much lesscritical attention. Consider, for example, Agamben's citation of Franklin D.Roosevelt's emergency powers for fighting economic crisis during the GreatDepression:

I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of ourpeople dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems....I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommendthe measures that a stricken Nation in the midst of a stricken worldmay require.... But in the event that the Congress shall fail to takethe necessary measures ... I shall ask for the one remaining instrumentto meet the crisis—broad Executive power to wage war againstthe emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if wewere in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

Agamben's focus on how war is used to declare an exception is not limitedto the special circumstances of military war itself but extends to thestrategic imagination of all governmental problems as problems of war. Towage war against the emergency is to govern the population as one wouldgovern a stricken and impoverished household—to manage scarcity, to allocatefinite resource in ways that differentiate between competing claims.Thus the exceptional granting of extended executive powers extends to the"unlimited power to regulate and control every aspect of the economiclife of the country." The necessary measures are not merely the militarymeans to wage war but are precisely of the economy itself, dwelling withinthe capacity to govern what circulates, to decide what moves and whator who should have movement circumscribed. And yet the economic lifeAgamben alludes to here is not simply, as he seems to suggest, one distinctdomain for the use of warlike exceptional powers. It is, rather, one of themost significant conduits for the authorization of new authorities and thevery defining of new powers. The governing of economic life becomes anelement within the field of sovereign power, such that the measures ofeconomy define what is possible for the sovereign decision. In short, whenconsidering questions of necessary, provisional, or emergency measures, itmay be as important to think about what is meant by "measures" as it is toreflect on the nature of emergency.

If one interrogates the measures that are instituted as necessary measuresamid war—the systems of enumeration, accounting, and measurement—theidea of exceptional measures that become the norm begins to look quitedifferent. For the measures, derived as they are from economy, are alwaysalready normal or of the norm as such. What are the prosaic and ordinarymeasures of necessary measures? What is the system of accounting in thedesignation of emergency powers and how is this accounting made possible?To declare a "war against the emergency" and instigate "necessarymeasures" for a "stricken Nation," it is necessary to have a means of knowingthe population. The "making up" of a people, a population, a nationaleconomy, is made possible, as Ian Hacking has put it, via "the enumerationof people and their habits." The sovereign authority to declare exceptionand institute necessary measures is not meaningful without a measure thatmakes population classifiable, countable, and, in a sense, accountable fortheir norms, habits, and behaviors. As Jacques Derrida proposes in relationto how the full force of law is authorized, there is a "mystical foundation ofauthority," a credibility that is ascribed to the actions of police who are notthe police, "faceless figures" who are not content only to enforce the lawbut "to intervene whenever the legal situation isn't clear, to guarantee security."The institution of necessary measures produces new authorities whointervene to promise to guarantee security—statisticians, accountants, andactuaries whose economic savoir becomes part of the field of sovereignty.As temporary, necessary measures appear to become permanent ways ofgoverning, the laboratory of war authorizes plural "faceless figures" to refinethe exceptions and exemptions.

Authorizing by Numbers: The Accountants in World War II

Throughout the first eighteen months of the Second World War, the Britishgovernment did not institute emergency measures in the domesticeconomy. In terms of the rationing of food and the regulation of wartimefood supply and commodities pricing, the government was "limited both inknowledge and preparations." In part, the absence of a set of emergencymeasures for the management of possible future shortages is explainablein terms of the absence of a defined problem of scarcity. In the known pastevent of the First World War, the prices and supply of non-food consumergoods were not subject to controls. "The problems of the Second WorldWar existed in the First World War," documents the official civil historyof wartime measures, "but the controls did not." It is this process of theidentification of a problem, a set of deficiencies in past practices, that isintegral to the authorization of new techniques of enumeration. Economicproblems, in the strict sense of problems of circulation, supply, and exchange,do not simply appear as defects to be remedied, they must insteadbe represented as problems, made recognizable so that, as Peter Miller hasput it, "another way of calculating can be made available." In Britain duringthe 1940s, the identification of the problem hinged on the question ofnumber—on the perceived inadequacy of data, the paucity of information,and the inability to deal with future risks. Faced with the problems of howto administer civilian production and consumption under wartime conditionsof restricted foreign exchange, shipping, transportation and fuel,raw materials and labor, the British Board of Trade defined a problem ofaccounting: how to account for, and thereby control and limit, the civilianconsumption of goods. The collection of accurate statistical data on thepopulation was, in effect, thought to be the condition of possibility for makingwartime decisions in the face of an unknown future.

When, in the early 1940s, the British Board of Trade began to devise anaccounting system for the emergency rationing of commodities, they identifiedtheir problem in terms of statistical knowledge of the population. Theboard's "deficient statistics" on past household consumption, it was held,made it all but impossible for the government to adopt "a forward-lookingmind" capable of the foresight for "advance appreciation of wartime problems."In the absence of reliable statistical data on past patterns of consumption—sowent the argument—decisions on rationing could take nomeaningful account of likely future effects. How, for example, could decisionsbe made about the regulation of clothing manufacture for the armedforces and for utility civilian use in the absence of meaningful archives ofpast data on textiles manufacture? How could standardized rationing levelsbe established without statistical knowledge of how much flour or butteror how many yards of fabric a household normally consumes? What wasgovernment to make of the "apparent variations in need" among a civilianpopulation whose "production effort" underpinned "the power of thefighting services"? If rationing was to mark an exception from the normsof consumption in daily life, then how could the exception be decidedwithout knowledge about "what is normal" or "what is happening"? Sucha deviation from the norm could not be achieved, it was argued, without"up-to-date statistical information," "sample surveys," and "census data."In short, the sovereign capacity to decide on the exception relied in largepart upon a knowledge of economy and household that would otherwise beimpenetrable to the state.

(Continues...)

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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Duke University Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2013
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0822355604
• ISBN 13: 9780822355601
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 232
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
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