TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction by Limor Samimian-Darash and Paul Rabinow - Limor Samimian-Darash, Paul Rabinow
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226257242.003.0001
[liberalism, insurance, uncertainty, calculability, government, security, responsibility]
Examining how insurance has been imagined and practiced in various historical configurations of liberal governance, this chapter explores the diverse ways in which security, uncertainty, and freedom change their meanings quite radically. Nineteenth century liberalism emphasized individual foresight as a technique for governing uncertainties (such as the free market) that were imagined to be essential to freedom. Around the turn of the 20th century, the institutions of insurance became perhaps the fundamental site in which state policy repositioned and sought to reduce uncertainty in the name of a new “modern” configuration of freedom and security. By the late 20th century, however, yet another reconfiguration was underway. It is common to view this latter, “neoliberal,” turn in terms of winding back “the state,” deregulation, and promotion of individual responsibility. Yet these developments, arguably, are more about increasing uncertainty and decreasing the calculability of the future than they are about “states” or “individuals” as such. In this light, liberalism appears historically engaged with the question of how much uncertainty, and of what kind, is essential to freedom. (pages 1 - 10)
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Economics and Entrepreneurialism
One. Uncertainty Makes Us Free: Insurance and Liberal Rationality - Pat O'Malley - Pat O’Malley
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226257242.003.0002
[liberalism, insurance, uncertainty, calculability, government, security, responsibility]
Examining how insurance has been imagined and practiced in various historical configurations of liberal governance, this chapter explores the diverse ways in which security, uncertainty, and freedom change their meanings quite radically. Nineteenth century liberalism emphasized individual foresight as a technique for governing uncertainties (such as the free market) that were imagined to be essential to freedom. Around the turn of the 20th century, the institutions of insurance became perhaps the fundamental site in which state policy repositioned and sought to reduce uncertainty in the name of a new “modern” configuration of freedom and security. By the late 20th century, however, yet another reconfiguration was underway. It is common to view this latter, “neoliberal,” turn in terms of winding back “the state,” deregulation, and promotion of individual responsibility. Yet these developments, arguably, are more about increasing uncertainty and decreasing the calculability of the future than they are about “states” or “individuals” as such. In this light, liberalism appears historically engaged with the question of how much uncertainty, and of what kind, is essential to freedom. (pages 13 - 28)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Two. The “Cool” Organization Man: Incorporating Uncertainty from Jazz Music into the Business World - Eitan Wilf - Eitan Wilf
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226257242.003.0003
[organizational studies, jazz metaphor, innovation, creativity, uncertainty, work-related anxiety]
This chapter explores the ways in which the idea of jazz music as the quintessential art of productive risk-taking and flexibility in the face of uncertainty has been incorporated into organizational theories and practices aimed at improving the functionality of the 21st century organization. It argues, first, that the incorporation of the jazz metaphor into the business world has been motivated by the realization that this metaphor is productive of an organizational structure that is not only flexible enough to cope with unexpected events but is also capable of producing unexpected events that can be further developed into and function as innovations in fields in which to remain stagnant is to perish. Second, it is claimed that the incorporation of organizational templates from jazz represents a mode of legitimation and naturalization of a new work-related form of uncertainty—namely, creative uncertainty—and its concomitant affective manifestations such as anxiety, which are becoming prevalent in knowledge-based organizations. Through the selective appropriation of the practice of jazz improvisation, organizational theorists have legitimized this new work-related form of uncertainty and its potentially problematic affective manifestations, reframing them as productive resources for the organizational management of uncertainty, as well as for employees’ self-expression. (pages 29 - 45)
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Three. The Gaming of Chance: Online Poker Software and the Potentialization of Uncertainty - Natasha Dow Schull - Natasha Dow Schüll
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226257242.003.0004
[gambling, uncertainty, risk, calculation, technology, digital media, subjectivity]
The rise in popularity of online poker has come with a rise in the development of software that allows gamblers to track and analyze opponents’ (and their own) play behavior. At first glance it would appear that players use the software minimize and manage uncertainty—but on closer inspection, it becomes clear that the tracking software serves less to diminish than to potentialize uncertainty. Although some features reduce uncertainties by turning them into statistically calculable risks, the preponderance serve to help gamblers abide and strategically engage with uncertainties that simply cannot be converted into known risks, and to actively foster and play with new uncertainties. Poker software and the enterprising practices of reflexivity associated with it are tools and techniques for “gaming” uncertainty rather than for overcoming, taming, or eliminating it. In their experiments with these tools and techniques, players are experimenting with forms of self-governance oriented toward the open-ended indeterminacy of uncertainty rather than the limiting, definitional project of risk calculation. These forms value performance over outcome, multiple data points over single events, virtual over real time, and potentialization over actualization of the self. (pages 46 - 66)
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Security and Humanitarianism
Four. Policing Uncertainty: On Suspicious Activity Reporting - Meg Stalcup - Meg Stalcup
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226257242.003.0005
[police, intelligence, counterterrorism, suspicion, discernment, prevention, pre-emption, anticipation, United States]
Several of the men who would become the 9/11 hijackers were stopped for minor traffic violations. In government inquiries and in the press, these brushes with the law were missed opportunities. But for many police officers in the United States, they were moments of professional revelation, and also personally fraught. Officers replayed the incidents of contact, which lay bare the uncertainty of every encounter. In the Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative subsequently launched, routine reporting of suspicious activity was developed into steps for discerning, identifying and sharing terrorism-related information with a larger law enforcement and intelligence network. Through empirical analysis of counterterrorism efforts and related scholarship, this chapter discusses three technologies of security, focusing on how each deals with uncertainty. “Prevention” arises from the roots of risk, where uncertainty is a function of lack of knowledge, while “preemption” deals with potential uncertainty by creating possibilities. In “anticipation,” suspicious behaviors are taken as the precursors of a threat that is still in virtual form; officers and intelligence analysts cultivate the capacity of discernment in order to detect suspicion, and capture these forerunners as they actualize. In so doing, they are constituted as subjects who work in a mode of uncertainty. (pages 69 - 87)
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Guantánamo’s Catch-22 - Rebecca Lemov
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226257242.003.0006
[Guantanamo Bay Detention Center, scientific torture, coercive persuasion, brainwashing, enhanced interrogation, agnotology]
This chapter explores how the United States' detention center at Guantanamo Bay (GBDC) has created a situation in which over one hundred fifty remaining detainees, most held for more than a decade without being charged or tried, become a new source of paralyzing uncertainty. Prisoners' dossiers and data-sets stack up as the result of ongoing interrogations—circulating online via Wikileaks and other projects—even as their sources' status as legal, political, and human subjects is constantly in tension; through these dynamics, an intellectual, geopolitical and moral double-bind is created. Turning to the history of coercive interrogation in the second half of the paper, the double-bind comes further into focus: although there has been a demonstrable continuity in interrogation technique from the Cold War to the War on Terror, there has been an immense change in how the subject of interrogation is viewed and in a sense produced. Once conceived as a unified “self” made the target of manipulative incentives and brainwashing attempts — and therefore the repository of a valuable ideological orientation to be fought over and potentially converted—he is now seen as a source of actionable intelligence and data-extraction even as his status reveals the changing contours of agnotology, or systematic ignorance. (pages 88 - 104)
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University Press Scholarship Online
Five. Guantánamo’s Catch-22: The Uncertain Interrogation Subject - Rebecca Lemov - Rebecca Lemov
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226257242.003.0006
[Guantanamo Bay Detention Center, scientific torture, coercive persuasion, brainwashing, enhanced interrogation, agnotology]
This chapter explores how the United States' detention center at Guantanamo Bay (GBDC) has created a situation in which over one hundred fifty remaining detainees, most held for more than a decade without being charged or tried, become a new source of paralyzing uncertainty. Prisoners' dossiers and data-sets stack up as the result of ongoing interrogations—circulating online via Wikileaks and other projects—even as their sources' status as legal, political, and human subjects is constantly in tension; through these dynamics, an intellectual, geopolitical and moral double-bind is created. Turning to the history of coercive interrogation in the second half of the paper, the double-bind comes further into focus: although there has been a demonstrable continuity in interrogation technique from the Cold War to the War on Terror, there has been an immense change in how the subject of interrogation is viewed and in a sense produced. Once conceived as a unified “self” made the target of manipulative incentives and brainwashing attempts — and therefore the repository of a valuable ideological orientation to be fought over and potentially converted—he is now seen as a source of actionable intelligence and data-extraction even as his status reveals the changing contours of agnotology, or systematic ignorance. (pages 88 - 104)
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Six. Global Humanitarian Interventions: Managing Uncertain Trajectories of Cambodian Mental Health - Carol A. Kidron - Carol A. Kidron
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226257242.003.0007
[risk, uncertainty, global, intervention, trauma, Cambodia, Buddhism, worldviews, resilience]
Critics of humanitarian intervention and the global dissemination of trauma-related therapeutic discourse and practice have problematized the politics of global mental health intervention in “high-risk populations.” Building upon the “Holocaust model” of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, according to the illness construct of Transmitted Effects of Trauma (TET) descendants of genocide, mass violence, terrorism, and natural disasters continue to be at risk of pathology even centuries after the foundational traumatizing event. Trauma brokers warn that TET may take on epidemic proportions. Practitioners monitor, gauge, and classify individuals, communities, and nations and the level of risk and uncertainty they face. This paper critically evaluates the global policy and technologies of governance of trauma victims ‘at risk’. Cambodian mental health discourse will be analyzed, while ethnographic interviews with Cambodian descendants will illustrate resistant responses to intervention. Hybrid discursive formations of psychological discourse and practice and Khmer culture-specific senses of personhood and suffering are constituted and harnessed to institutionally manage and govern the “disorder” of potential mental health uncertainty. Problematizing the policies and technologies of uncertain mental health, interviews with trauma descendants present resistant Buddhist world views on death, suffering, and fate incongruent with conceptualizations of risk and uncertainty within global humanitarian policy and interventions. (pages 105 - 122)
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Seven. The Malicious and the Uncertain: Biosecurity, Self-Justification, and the Arts of Living - Gaymon Bennett - Gaymon Bennett
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226257242.003.0008
[biosecurity, avian influenza, global health, malice, ethics, salvation]
In 2011, virologists in Europe and the US used simple but powerful methods to make H5N1 influenza—bird flu—transmissible by air between mammals. They justified their work in the name of global health preparedness: by identifying the genetic bases of transmissibility, they would help public health officials anticipate potential pandemics. Officials in the US responded critically in the name of biosecurity and “dual-use”: by identifying these genetic bases researchers also equipped potential malicious actors to engineer a pandemic. A future of biological terrorism was set against a future of biotechnical salvation. This chapter chronicles how the H5N1 affair unfolded and tells the story of the political uncertainties it generated for scientists and policy makers. It explains how these uncertainties were ultimately managed by appeal to tacit moral certainties underlying the notion of “dual-use”—the assumption that the under-determined potentials of technology can be dealt with through attributions of good and bad intentions. It argues that this turn to dual-use reactivated an older moral posture toward dangerous futures—malice—which presumes that evil is only in the world and not also in oneself. Tracing a genealogy of malice, it shows how contemporary biosecurity policy operationalizes an idealized view of science, decoupling the problem of uncertainty. (pages 123 - 144)
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Environment and Health
Eight. What Is a Horizon? Navigating Thresholds in Climate Change Uncertainty - Adriana Petryna - Adriana Petryna
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226257242.003.0009
[climate change, scientific uncertainty, abrupt change, time horizons, tipping points, prediction, recovery, geoengineering, environmental ethics, extinction]
This essay analyzes the shift from incremental to exponential accelerations in atmospheric CO2 and its implications for the science and governance of climate change. It examines some of the models and tools that scientists are developing to address and manage environmental uncertainty, as well as their emerging forms of scientific monitoring of increasingly unpredictable ecosystemic behaviors. A central question concerns how such sciences contribute to prospective thinking about how natural systems and societal infrastructures might adapt to imminent ecological dangers linked to climate change. The essay shows how a scientific predication toward ecosystemic “tipping points” has ushered in a new kind of intellectual labor, a horizoning work, involving the construction of empirical tools and appropriate “scaling rules” for recognizing and keeping a “safe distance” from unsafe ecosystemic thresholds. Here the notion of horizon acts as a kind of contemporary equipment for managing and sometimes mitigating complex futures. The horizon also sets a stage for contemplating relations between nonparametric realities and a social science of survival. With a public increasingly enamored with magic bullet solutions to the problem of climate change, the essay’s conclusion explores alternative frameworks of prevention and biomanipulation as antidotes to intensifying pressures to geoengineer. (pages 147 - 164)
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Nine. Sentinel Devices: Managing Uncertainty in Species Barrier Zones - Frederick Keck - Frédéric Keck
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226257242.003.0010
[biosecurity, bioinformatics, preparedness, sentinels, birdwatching]
In the last twenty years, new diseases have emerged when pathogens have crossed species barriers: mad cow disease, avian and swine influenza, Ebola, Nipah, and West Nile viruses. These spillover events are linked to transformations in the environment: industrial breeding, deforestation, urbanization, and climate change. The correlation between these environmental transformations and zoonoses highlights the emergence of species barrier zones, reflecting new ontological uncertainty that demands mathematical modeling and specific case studies. The chapter looks ethnographically at the management of zones of uncertainty at the human/animal interface. I show how virus hunters develop devices to capture threats that affect humans and animals in common. These devices can be called sentinels, as they perceive as actualities catastrophes that remain potential. Considering metaphor of virus hunter seriously, I compare the uncertainty of the hunter to the uncertainty of the virologist in their relation to animals and in their future action. Relying on participant observation of microbiologists in Asia and Europe, I look at the public health management of zoonoses from the perspective of those who produce data on the invisible paths of microbes. If policies of preparedness for emerging diseases face uncertainty, they encounter an ontological uncertainty in the relation between humans, animals, and their common environment. (pages 165 - 181)
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Ten. Spaces of Uncertainty: Governing Urban Environmental Hazards - Austin Zeiderman - Austin Zeiderman
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226257242.003.0011
[cities, urban, space, risk, uncertainty, zoning, governance, environment, hazards, future]
While uncertainty has long preoccupied attempts to plan, build, and govern cities, urbanists now assume that it has become a fundamental feature of the global urban condition. With the widespread notion that we now live in turbulent times—economically, politically, and ecologically—uncertainty has become normalized within urban theory, policy, and practice. As a result, urbanists now grapple with the challenge of reacting to varying degrees, as well as different categories, of uncertainty. Municipalities worldwide are experimenting with how to manage populations, events, and environments whose characteristics and behaviors cannot be known or foreseen. This chapter examines approaches to governing the uncertain future in Colombia, focusing specifically on their implementation in the self-built settlements on the periphery of Bogotá. It examines the designation of these spaces as “zones of high risk” and the everyday work performed by government officials responsible for determining the risk of landslides within them. Reflected in this policy is a technique of government that initially seeks to evaluate the likelihood of events and estimate potential damages throughout the city. However, an ethnographic approach reveals that, in practice, the field of intervention becomes a space of uncertainty that need not be measured to be managed. (pages 182 - 200)
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Afterword by Paul Rabinow and Limor Samimian-Darash
Notes
References
List of Contributors
Index
