Taming an Uncertain Future

Temporality, Sovereignty, and the Politics of Anticipatory Governance

Liam P.D. Stockdale

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783485024
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia politica

A popular cliché in contemporary public discourse holds that we live in a time of increasing uncertainty; that the next catastrophe is perpetually imminent and yet increasingly beyond our capacity to foresee. The future, in short, is becoming much more difficult to control. One consequence of this increasingly widespread understanding of the future is that societies have turned to anticipatory governance strategies based on such concepts as risk management, the precautionary principle, and pre-emption to manage human affairs. This book takes an in-depth look at this trend by using the example of the ‘pre-emptive security’ strategies deployed in the post-9/11 War on Terror to develop a critical understanding of how the proliferation of such anticipatory governance strategies affects the way political power is organized and exercised. The book also makes a wider case for taking issues of time and the future more seriously in the study of contemporary global politics in particular and the social world more generally.

Chapter One

Introduction

Temporality, Futurity, and the Political

In one of the more memorable passages from his Confessions, Saint Augustine muses perplexedly about the nature of time. “What, then, is time?” he asks, before proceeding to offer what is perhaps the pithiest articulation of the paradoxical relationship between human subjectivity and temporality found in the canon of Western philosophy: “if no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not” (1968, 40). This at once simple and profound observation captures well the point that while all human subjects are in some way fundamentally aware of time, it remains perpetually beyond our capacity to fully grasp, and thus eludes cogent conceptual articulation. Indeed, even a cursory parsing of the voluminous philosophical literature on the subject reveals that, on the one hand, time is recognized as central to the most basic questions of intellectual inquiry and human existence—“[it] is a fundamental aspect of all that occurs, a boundary condition on phenomena” (Turetzky 1998, xi). On the other hand, it also becomes apparent that there likely exist as many temporal understandings as there are philosophical orientations; as many theoretical articulations of time as there are theorists to articulate them (see, for instance, Adam 2004; Bender and Wellbery 1991; Elias 1992; Gale 1968; Grosz 1999; Koselleck 1985; McClure 2005; McCumber 2011; Turetzky 1998). Thus, although humanity is unlikely to develop a universally accepted understanding or conceptualization of time, the point remains that our relations to time form a fundamental part of the human condition. As Kimberly Hutchings, paraphrasing Kant, puts it, “Time . . . conditions all our experience of ourselves” (2008, 3).

Yet our interactions with time are by no means wholly harmonious. Quite the contrary, as it is our status as beings in time that is a primary source of the difficulties and insecurities that in many ways define the human experience. As Bonnie Honig argues, “Time and man . . . are agonistically related,” in that the free activities of human subjects “interrupt would-be time sequences,” while the vicissitudes of time in turn impinge upon human freedom (Honig 2008, 108). In the context of this agonic relationship between humanity and temporality, the desire to manage the latter by exerting some degree of influence over it emerges as a critical imperative in human affairs. Thus, what social theorist Barbara Adam refers to as a “quest for time control” can be detected to varying extents across all forms of social and cultural production—from philosophic, to religious, to political activity—such that the social world as we know it is constituted to a significant extent by concepts and practices that are intimately concerned with the management, governance, and even mastery of time itself (Adam 2004, 19–20, 124, 152; see also Luhmann 1982, 274). Time is thus fundamental to shaping the human experience, and the imperative to control, or at least govern, time can be understood as a crucial undercurrent in the ongoing constitution and operation of the social world.

These two insights might initially appear to relate primarily to broad philosophical questions about the character of existence and the nature of being; however, they also serve as a point of departure for this book—a study whose subject matter is not the phenomenological or eschatological but the political. Indeed, in the chapters that follow, I am interested in critically exploring how temporality more broadly—and the imperative to control the unfolding of the future in particular—is embedded in the epistemic foundations and practical operations of contemporary rationalities and mechanisms of societal governance.

A TEMPORAL LENS

The analytical importance of time has long been recognized across the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities, whose primary subject matter is the realm(s) of human affairs. Indeed, prominent works from the past several decades in anthropology (such as Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other [1983]); sociology and social theory (such as Barbara Adam’s Time and Social Theory [1994]); history and historiography (such as Hayden White’s Metahistory [1973]); and (continental) philosophy (such as Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative [1990])—among many others—have all dealt explicitly with humanity’s relationship to time in their respective disciplinary contexts. In the study of politics more specifically, theorists have long recognized the centrality of temporal questions to the elemental issues of societal governance with which they are concerned. Major works of political theory such as John Gunnell’s Political Philosophy and Time (1987) and Sheldon Wolin’s Politics and Vision (2004) directly address the relationship between time and how we think about the political. To be sure, interest in time has ebbed and flowed with the intellectual currents of disciplinary inquiry, but an underlying sensitivity to the importance of taking time seriously has nonetheless characterized the scholarly ethos of these areas of study whose subject matter is the world created by humanity.

Moreover, we are currently witnessing a resurgent interest in questions of time more broadly, and futurity more specifically, among scholars in these and related fields. Most often prompted by normative concerns relating to such issues as the perceived acceleration of life in late modernity (Hassan and Purser 2007; Rosa and Scheuerman 2009), the specter of ecological collapse wrought by the increasingly unsustainable lifestyles many now take for granted (Atwood 2008; Bastian 2012), or the emergence of other ostensibly new threats whose catastrophic potentialities seem to destabilize our traditional relationships to the future (Beck 2002, 2008), a wide variety of authors are beginning to train their gazes upon the temporalities of the social world by adopting what can be termed a “temporal lens” that “puts time . . . front and centre” in their analyses thereof (Ancona et al. 2001, 645). This scholarly trend is particularly constructive for examinations of contemporary politics, in that some of the most significant political dynamics of the current moment stem from shifts in the broader political imagination which have brought explicitly temporal questions very much to the fore (see Agathangelou and Killian 2016; Lundborg 2012; Hutchings 2008). For instance, the growing influence of narratives proclaiming the onset of a “world risk society”—characterized by the erosion of our ability to control the unfolding of the future to an extent that affords us an adequate degree of ontological certainty in the present, and exemplified by such inherently global problems as climate change, financial crises, and transnational terrorism—suggests that time in general, and the irruptive contingency of the future in particular, have become discursively framed as pressing problems that must be actively addressed through political channels (Beck 1999). This discourse is mirrored in practice by the widespread emergence of societal governance strategies that are explicitly oriented toward taming an uncertain future through anticipatory action in the present (Anderson 2010a; de Goede and Randalls 2011). Such strategies—which are often described in terms of “risk management,” “prevention,” “preemption,” and so forth—can thus be understood as “attempts to control time,” and are becoming increasingly prevalent in myriad areas of human affairs across the globe (Kessler 2011, 2181). This combination of an epistemic shift toward a focus on overtly temporal problems and a concurrent practical shift toward future-oriented governmental logics has thus in many ways “reconfigured the politics of space into a politics of time,” such that the temporal has (re-)emerged as a primary site and subject of governance (Kessler 2011, 2181).

Of course, the novelty of this emergent “temporalization” of the political should not be overstated, as the political realm has been concerned with controlling the unfolding of time and taming the contingency of the future since long before Machiavelli exhorted his prince to master fortuna. Yet this ongoing (re-)framing of temporal contingency as a political problem—and the attendant proliferation of strategies and mechanisms of government developed more explicitly for this purpose—suggests the need for in-depth engagement with the politics of time and futurity in general, and logics of anticipatory governance in particular. A growing number of scholars across multiple disciplines have begun to critically interrogate certain specific elements of these wider issues; however, there is still much work to be done with respect to theorizing the idea of anticipatory governance in primarily abstract, conceptual terms—particularly regarding its attendant implications for the organization and exercise of political power in the liberal democratic polities that are at the forefront of its enactment. A primary contribution of this study, therefore, is to provide a book-length engagement with precisely such questions.

The remaining chapters thus develop a sustained exploration and critique of the logics underlying the anticipatory political rationalities whose global proliferation has made it increasingly important to foreground questions of temporality and futurity in political analysis. The term “political rationality” is used here to denote a “discursive field within which the exercise of power is conceptualised,” which combines “justifications for particular ways of exercising power” with “notions of the appropriate forms, objects, and limits of politics” (Rose and Miller 1992, 175). A political rationality can thus be understood as the epistemic framework that guides political action in a certain context by both articulating the sort(s) of problem(s) to be addressed and providing a program for action through which political power can be mobilized toward these ends. This book seeks to explore and explain the sort of politics that anticipatory rationalities aimed at taming an increasingly uncertain future make possible when deployed as mechanisms of societal governance. In this respect, the core argument hinges on a claim that the practical implementation of anticipatory political rationalities requires a paradigm of political power closely reminiscent of that which is associated with a politics of “exceptionalism,” as theorized most notably by Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben, and their subsequent interlocutors. Political exceptionalism describes a condition in which juridical limitations on the actions of a sovereign authority are diminished to the point of practical irrelevance. In other words, it signifies a political circumstance characterized by “serious distortions in the restraining effects that the rule of law . . . [has] on the arbitrary exercise of power,” such that those with the capacity to deploy sovereign power are effectively placed beyond the law (Huysmans 2004, 327). This book develops the argument that such a form of political authority is enacted by anticipatory rationalities of governance because the latter are concerned with controlling time by acting upon potential futures, and since these futures are inherently unknowable, a highly arbitrary form of political decision-making that relies upon imagination and speculation is required to make acting upon them practically possible. The chapters of part II in particular emphasize that the paradigm of political power required by such preemptive logics of action conspicuously resembles that which underlies a politics of exceptionalism, thus suggesting that mechanisms of anticipatory governance have the potential to significantly alter the character of political subjectivity, particularly when implemented in a liberal democratic polity. In short, therefore, this book foregrounds temporality and futurity by developing a critical theorization of the exceptional forms of political power that are enacted by the logics of anticipatory governance whose global proliferation makes such a foregrounding of temporality and futurity important in the first place.

An in-depth engagement with the politics of anticipatory governance requires extensive analysis of particular instances in which these sorts of strategies and mechanisms are enacted in practice. While any attempt to explore all the areas of human affairs in which they have become prevalent could not be accomplished in a single volume, it is nonetheless possible to develop conceptual insights relevant to a broader critique of anticipatory governance through a more detailed examination of one particularly prominent manifestation thereof. This is the path followed by this book, as the subsequent chapters develop a thorough engagement with perhaps the most conspicuous example of anticipatory governance in the contemporary global political context: the widespread deployment of “preemptive” strategies toward the governance of (in)security. Indeed, the post-9/11 rise of transnational terrorism as the dominant issue in the global security imagination has placed temporal questions more generally, and the taming of the future’s contingency more specifically, at the core of the contemporary politics of (in)security (Anderson 2010b). This is because the specter of terrorism has become largely framed as a radically irruptive, catastrophic potentiality inhabiting an ultimately unknowable security future that can thus only be adequately governed through anticipatory interventions aimed at stopping the proverbial “next attack” before it occurs. The proliferation of such future-oriented rationalities thus constitutes perhaps the most notable development in the post-9/11 global security climate (Dershowitz 2006; Ericson 2008), and also represents an archetypical example of the future-oriented “temporalization” of the political discussed above. Accordingly, this book’s wider concern with highlighting the importance of foregrounding temporality and futurity in political analysis and more specifically exploring what is at stake with the rise of anticipatory governance rationalities will be pursued through an in-depth critique of how the problem of temporal contingency has been prioritized within the global security imagination and responded to through the development of security strategies premised upon governing the future through preemptive interventions in the present.

To put all of this another way, the project developed in this book is oriented around three principal tasks, which can be understood as follows: (1) emphasizing that questions of temporality and futurity should be given greater attention in the study of (global) politics, and providing a book-length illustration of how this might be done which especially highlights the critical potential of doing so; (2) establishing a foundation for a thorough conceptual critique of anticipatory governance rationalities, whose global proliferation provides a primary analytical impetus for taking temporality and futurity more seriously; and (3) offering a comprehensive critical interrogation of one particular manifestation of such rationalities in practice—namely, the preemptive regime(s) of (in)security governance that have emerged within the context of the post-9/11 global War on Terror. That all three tasks are principally concerned with conceptual questions is indicative of the primarily theoretical character of the book, as the subsequent chapters collectively represent an attempt to critically think through how questions of temporality and futurity—and the imperative to exert agentic control over both—are crucially embedded in contemporary modes of societal governance. It should also be noted that these three tasks do not directly correspond to the book’s chapter divisions, but rather are interwoven throughout the various arguments developed therein.

Framing this book in the preceding way is useful because it helps to highlight its key contributions. In this respect, the concern with demonstrating how we might take temporality and futurity more seriously in political analysis contributes to broader disciplinary debates in political science and international relations (IR) regarding the proper subject and scope of scholarship. Indeed, this book seeks not only to show what adopting a “temporal lens” for the study of the political might look like but also to emphasize that doing so is both methodologically prudent—since questions of temporality and futurity increasingly underpin the key dynamics of contemporary (global) politics—and analytically productive—since doing so enables the development of innovative readings of key conceptual and practical issues. This hints at the contributions embodied by the second and third tasks mentioned above, which relate to the critical potential of foregrounding temporality and futurity in this way. In this regard, the book’s attempt to think through the implications of the ongoing “temporalization” of the political through the rise of anticipatory governance mechanisms elicits significant critical insights into the way political power is organized and exercised in the contemporary moment. Specifically, by tracing how the resurgent imperative to govern time through future-oriented political rationalities requires what amounts to a politics of exceptionalism in order to be functionally implemented, the arguments developed in this book provide the epistemic basis for a thorough critique of anticipatory governance as an idea on both conceptual and normative grounds. Moreover, because these arguments are developed through a sustained engagement with the realm of global (in)security governance, the book also contributes to the critical literature in IR and security studies in two notable ways. First, by suggesting that exceptionalist politics are presupposed by the logic of anticipatory governance itself, it offers an innovative, conceptually oriented intervention that contributes to explanations for the widespread proliferation of exceptionalist practices in the post-9/11 era—a topic that has been of paramount interest to critical security scholars over the past decade (Neal 2009). Secondly, by arriving at these insights through an in-depth theorization of how anticipatory rationalities have been applied to the governance of (in)security in particular, this study develops a highly comprehensive conceptualization of what has been termed “preemptive security” in the context of contemporary global politics (de Goede 2008, 162; Stockdale 2013; Sullivan and Hayes 2010). My understanding and use of this term follows the existing literature on the subject, in which “preemptive security” refers generally to “security practices that aim to act on threats that are unknown and recognized to be unknowable, yet deemed potentially catastrophic, requiring security intervention at the earliest possible stage” (de Goede, Simon, and Hoijtnik 2014, 412). While much critical security scholarship has been concerned with problematizing the various state practices and policies that fall under this classification (Amoore 2014a), the extant literature has devoted less attention to describing and unpacking this approach to (in)security governance in more general or abstract conceptual terms. Filling this gap thus represents a key contribution of this book.

The book’s aims should thus be broadly understood in the spirit of self-identified “critical” scholarship, which seeks to “re-open assumptions that have grounded our political thought” and develop alternative understandings of pressing political issues and concepts in the contemporary context (Edkins and Vaughan-Williams 2009, 2). However, it is particularly important to recognize that the critical insights developed in the following chapters are in many ways ultimately the result of the analysis being conducted through an explicitly temporal lens. In this respect, this book shows that a move to take temporality and futurity seriously is demanded by the emergent dynamics of the current (global) political moment, and doing so will also productively facilitate criticality in the study thereof.

A NOTE ON METHOD AND APPROACH

As is perhaps already clear, the chief contributions this book seeks to make are almost entirely conceptual in nature. Indeed, the subsequent chapters consist primarily of in-depth exercises in theoretical argumentation and conceptual analysis that are the result of sustained critical reflection upon the issues in question. With respect to questions of method, therefore, this book deliberately draws upon the precedent set by Hedley Bull when he prefaced The Anarchical Society—which would become one of the most important works in the history of IR scholarship—by describing it as “an attempt to deal with a large and complex subject simply by thinking it through” (Bull 1977, xiii). While I have no pretensions about this book achieving a similar level of renown to Bull’s, my effort to grapple with how questions of temporality and futurity, and logics of anticipatory governance embedded in the constitution and operation of contemporary (global) politics should be understood as employing his “method” in this respect.

Yet, while principally concerned with conceptual problems and arguments, there is also an empirical component to the analysis, as I make references of varying depth throughout the text to practical manifestations of anticipatory governance strategies in the context of contemporary global security. It should be stressed, however, that these direct engagements with such instances are undertaken not for the purpose of developing any detailed empirical account thereof, but rather to further flesh out conceptual arguments relating to how anticipatory governance mechanisms—of which these practices are prototypical examples—operate. In other words, the purpose of the empirical components is to provide a degree of concrete grounding for the conceptual claims that comprise the core of the book’s contribution, and should thus be understood as a series of illustrative examples that have been chosen on the basis of their explanatory capacity. It is worth briefly identifying some of the more prominent examples with which I engage to better demonstrate how they are utilized in this way.

• Chapter 3’s discussion of the qualitatively unique character of post-9/11 applications of preemption to questions of (inter)national security is partially illustrated through the Obama administration’s use of “predictive assessments” in the creation of flight “watchlists” that ban individuals from travelling by air in the United States. Subsequently, what I describe as the inherently productive aspects of this contemporary politics of preemptive security are illustrated in part through an examination of the American FBI’s counterterror strategy which uses paid informants to recruit individuals suspected of terrorist sympathies for the purposes of goading them into devising plots that can then be preemptively foiled.
• Part of chapter 4’s conceptual analysis of the logic of preemption as a political rationality considers how it compresses the temporal window of political decision-making. This point is illustrated with reference to both the character of American political debate around the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the 2005 killing of Jean Charles de Menezes in London’s Stockwell underground station. The latter example is also used to illustrate the role of affect as a driver of anticipatory decision-making, particularly in the security context.
• Chapter 5’s examination of the relationship between the logic of preemption and the politics of exceptionalism utilizes several ill...