Premediation K

Introduction	1

Link: Terrorism	2

Link: Security	3

Link: Risk	4

Link: Policy Action	5

Link: Precautionary Politics	6

Impact Shell	7

Introduction

the affirmative’s political landscape is dominated by a logic of premediation, in which the future itself is always-already mediated as a system of risk and uncertainty. post-9/11 foreign policy decisions are infected by disaster scenarios and tainted by a culture of urgency.

De Goede 2008 [Marieke, Senior Lecturer at the Department of European Studies of the University of Amsterdam. Beyond Risk: Premediation and the Post-9/11 Security Imagination. Security Dialogue 2008; 39; 155.]

Imagined terrorist futures have become ubiquitous in media, policy and consulting. Richard Grusin has coined the term ‘premediation’ to describe[s] the way in which news media and cultural industries map out ‘as many of the possible worlds, or possible paths, as the future could be imagined to take’ (Grusin, 2004: 28). For example, one member of the Bush administration recounts how, in the days and weeks after 9/11, White House Situation Room meetings were dedicated to imagining the worst: ‘What about poison in the New York reservoir system? What about a private plane flying into a nuclear reactor?’ (Taylor, 2007: 5). Or, as one journalistic celebration of pre- mediation puts it, ‘Imagine your most unthinkable nightmare of the next terrorist attack. Now try to imagine something even worse’ (Fagan, 2001). Such imaginative practices respond to the 9/11 Commission’s call for scenario testing and are thought to enable the preemption of security threats (see, for example, Dershowitz, 2006). Though not new, the political importance of premediation and its ability to inform security action in the present has significantly increased in the post-9/11 context.

Link: Terrorism

The affirmative’s attempt to prevent terrorism operates within a logic of premediation, whereby future risks are imagined and controlled through calculative policies.

De Goede 2008 [Marieke, Senior Lecturer at the Department of European Studies of the University of Amsterdam. Beyond Risk: Premediation and the Post-9/11 Security Imagination. Security Dialogue 2008; 39; 155.]

Premediation is a promising term to denote the discursive economies through which terrorist futures are imagined, because it draws attention to the cultural practices of mediation at work. It draws attention to the cultural work performed by news media and entertainment industries, as well as by security ‘experts’, consultants and policymakers – whom Didier Bigo calls the ‘managers of unease’ – in envisioning possible terrorist futures (Bigo, 2002; see also Huysmans, 2006). The close conjunction between the Hollywood culture industry and these ‘managers of unease’ has long been noted by authors like James Der Derian (2001), who coined the term ‘military–industrial–media–entertainment network’ to denote this nexus. For example, Der Derian (2005: 30) notes how, shortly after 9/11, the Institute for Creative Technologies in California – which, according to its website, is dedicated to ‘building partner- ships between the entertainment industry, army, and academia’ – began to gather Hollywood screenwriters and directors in order to ‘create possible terrorist scenarios that could be played out in their Marina del Rey virtual reality facilities’ (see also Campbell, 2003: 59–64; Boggs & Pollard, 2006).

Link: Security

The affirmative’s obsession with security revolves around an attempt to premediate and manage risk.

De Goede 2008 [Marieke, Senior Lecturer at the Department of European Studies of the University of Amsterdam. Beyond Risk: Premediation and the Post-9/11 Security Imagination. Security Dialogue 2008; 39; 155.]

Security premediation is enabled through a broader turn to risk management as a security technology in diverse domains of modern life (Simon, 2007; O’Malley, 2004). In the ‘war on terror’, technologies of risk manage- ment foster new security initiatives, such as automated passenger screening at borders and the risk-based detection of suspicious financial transactions (Amoore & de Goede, 2008; Amoore, 2006; Sparke, 2006; Zureik & Salter, 2005). This deployment of risk in the ‘war on terror’ articulates two worlds of post-9/11 globalization: the world of legitimate and productive movement that is to be fostered and expedited, and the world of illegitimate and suspect movement that is to be stopped, questioned and detained. It is on the basis of risk assessment and calculation that ‘legitimate’ flows of money, goods and people are to be separated from the suspect, illegitimate and underground. As Sparke (2006: 13) writes of risk-based ‘smart border’ technologies, their promise is to deliver ‘economic liberty and homeland security with a high-tech fix’.

Link: Risk

The affirmative’s dependence on risk analysis is an attempt to premediate and commodify systemic uncertainty.

De Goede 2008 [Marieke, Senior Lecturer at the Department of European Studies of the University of Amsterdam. Beyond Risk: Premediation and the Post-9/11 Security Imagination. Security Dialogue 2008; 39; 155.]

Risk and premediation, then, proceed from a shared desire: to imagine, harness and commodify the uncertain future. They share a technological history through their appeal to uncertainty as both a source of threat and a spur to creativity. As Pat O’Malley (2004: 4) shows in his exploration of particular representations of risk in management literatures, uncertainty was never just a threat to be subdued or eradicated, but was always celebrated for fostering ‘entrepreneurial creativity’ and ‘transformative power’. According to O’Malley (2004: 5), Uncertainty . . . is to be the fluid art of the possible. It involves techniques of flexibility and adaptability, requires a certain kind of ‘vision’ that may be thought of as intuition but is nevertheless capable of being explicated at great length in terms such as . . . ‘governing with foresight.’ Both premediation and (particular forms of) risk management straddle the paradox of celebrating uncertainty while desiring to eradicate it – fostering booming business practices in the process (see Baker & Simon, 2002b; Lobo- Guerrero, 2007).

Link: Policy Action

The affirmative’s demand for immediate policy action reinforces the causes and symptoms of premediation as a political mindset.

De Goede 2008 [Marieke, Senior Lecturer at the Department of European Studies of the University of Amsterdam. Beyond Risk: Premediation and the Post-9/11 Security Imagination. Security Dialogue 2008; 39; 155.]

At the same time however, there are substantial differences between risk assessment and what Grusin calls premediation. Most importantly, premediation is not chiefly in the business of forecasting. As Grusin (2004: 28) argues, ‘premediation . . . is not necessarily about getting the future right as much as it is about trying to imagine or map out as many possible futures as could plausibly be imagined’ (emphasis added). Thus, whereas the logic of risk and forecasting centres on prediction of the future, premediation is more self- consciously ‘creative’ in imagining a variety of futures – some thought likely, others far-fetched, some thought imminent, others long-haul – in order to enable action in the present. This is a difference not just in logic or purpose, but also in method: as Grusin (2004: 29) puts it, ‘a weather map does not premediate tomorrow’s storm in the way in which it will be mediated after it strikes’. Instead of the disembodied, statistical and at least seemingly objective method of the forecast, premediation scripts and mediates multiple futures ‘in ways that are almost indistinguishable from the way the future will be mediated when it happens’ (Grusin, 2004: 29). Arguably then, premediation is not about the future at all, but about enabling action in the present by visualizing and drawing on multiple imagined futures (Amoore, 2007b). Indeed, as we have seen above, the 9/11 Commission emphasizes precisely this call to action in the present when it understands the challenge of imagination to be ‘to figure out a way to turn a scenario into constructive action’ (9/11 Commission, 2004: 346, emphasis added).

Link: Precautionary Politics

The affirmative’s insistence on precaution is part of a broader politics of premediation.

De Goede 2008 [Marieke, Senior Lecturer at the Department of European Studies of the University of Amsterdam. Beyond Risk: Premediation and the Post-9/11 Security Imagination. Security Dialogue 2008; 39; 155.]

Through its self-conscious deployment of imagination, premediation can be understood to address itself to risk beyond risk (Ewald, 2002: 249). The imagined catastrophe driving premediation is seen to be simultaneously incalculable and demanding new methodologies of calculation and imagination. In this sense, it is akin to a politics of precaution, which, according to Claudia Aradau & Rens van Munster (2007, 2008) is the dispositif through which the ‘war on terror’ has to be understood. ‘Precautionary risk’, write Aradau & van Munster (2007: 101) ‘introduces within the computation of the future its very limit, the infinity of uncertainty and potential damage.’ It is in this very computation of the future at the limit, of course, that financial practices are historically experienced. Indeed, Melinda Cooper (2006: 119) draws out this affinity with speculation when she writes of the logic of precaution: ‘If the catastrophe befalls us, it is from a future without chronological continuity with the past. Though we might suspect something is wrong with the world . . . no mass of information will help us pin-point the precise when, where and how of the coming havoc. We can only speculate’ (emphasis added).

Impact Shell

the affirmative’s politics of premediation produces its own insecurity.

De Goede 2008 [Marieke, Senior Lecturer at the Department of European Studies of the University of Amsterdam. Beyond Risk: Premediation and the Post-9/11 Security Imagination. Security Dialogue 2008; 39; 155.]

Indeed, it becomes important to ask, as does Masco (2006: 2), ‘what kind of cultural work is performed in the act of making something “unthinkable”?’ Perhaps three tentative answers can be given here. First, as Masco (2006: 3) himself points out in his ethnographical investigation of the ‘unthinkability’ of nuclear disaster in the Cold War era, such an act produces ‘its rhetorical opposite, namely, a proliferation of discourses about vulnerability and insecurity’. This is also a lesson of Tsing’s analysis of the performativity of the conjurings required to entice financial investment. Regardless of whether gold was really to be mined in the Indonesian forest, the conjurings of Canadian investment company Bre-X succeeded in bringing about financial flows and popular investment (Tsing, 2001: 158; Tickell, 2003). It is disturbing to contemplate that security premediation may have similar performative effects. In Raban’s novel, the TOPOFF exercises confront citizens with the fragility of their urban lives. As the exercises create roadblocks, smoke plumes, traffic jams and disaster scenes all across the city in the name of security, they leave the novel’s protagonists bewildered and afraid. ‘How could you explain to a child that “homeland security” mean[s]t keeping the homeland in a state of continuous insecurity?’, wonders one of the characters (Raban, 2006: 14).

thus, the logic of premediation generates insecurity, turning the affirmative case. this undermines the affirmative project, because the management of uncertain dangers creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. vote negative to reject the self-reinforcing anxiety of premediation.

the affirmative’s selective imagination of risk leads to myopic policy analysis.

De Goede 2008 [Marieke, Senior Lecturer at the Department of European Studies of the University of Amsterdam. Beyond Risk: Premediation and the Post-9/11 Security Imagination. Security Dialogue 2008; 39; 155.]

Third, I would emphasize that articulating the unthinkable by necessity leaves things unthought – as, for example, in the case with LTCM, which went bankrupt precisely through the one thing it failed to imagine. It is interesting to see, more generally, that stress testing often is not particularly imaginative. Frequently, stress scenarios are based on events that have already occurred in some form or another: a stock market crash, a hedge fund default, a radical increase in oil prices. Rather than, as Grusin (2004: 28) has it, articulating ‘as many of the possible worlds, or possible paths, as the future could be imagined to take’, premediation includes some things into the symbolic order while leaving others out. In this sense, premediation draws ‘lines of sight’ that are necessarily incomplete and insufficient in themselves (Amoore, 2007a). This inclusion-by-exclusion of some unthinkables into the symbolic order depoliticizes them, makes them profitable and potentially plays a role in bringing them about.

thus, the affirmative is responsible for the unthought disasters of an unpredictable future. the maps of premediated politics are useless in the face of radical uncertainty. while the affirmative attempts to control this uncertainty, voting negative reveals the truth that risk is a catastrophic fiction.

De Goede 2008 [Marieke, Senior Lecturer at the Department of European Studies of the University of Amsterdam. Beyond Risk: Premediation and the Post-9/11 Security Imagination. Security Dialogue 2008; 39; 155.]

Perhaps precisely because of its ability to foster current action, we could argue that premediation has itself become the catastrophe (Coutin, 2008). Not only does security premediation offer a fantasy of control and rational management of the uncertain future that ‘depoliticises the limits of knowledge’ (Best, 2006: 13–14); more worrying still is the fact that premediation is performative. This does not mean that disastrous imagined futures will inevitably play out, but it does mean that the imagination of some scenarios over others, the visualization of some futures and not others, entails profoundly political work that enables and constrains political decisionmaking in the present. We have seen that the sleeper-cell narrative enables juridical action and legal change. We may similarly ask how TV’s premediation of the Iraq war analysed by Grusin had an effect on the actual unfolding of the war when it happened. Perhaps even more than fostering imagination, premediation limits our imagination and the uncountable ways the uncertain future could have played out. Moreover, premediation fosters societal fragility in a number of ways (see also Ericson, 2007). We have seen that the disruption of daily life and the visualization of disaster feed into popular feelings of insecurity. Premediation has the ability to foster societal fragilities and resentment, while disregarding its present victims as ‘collateral damage’.

ALTernative:

Because the affirmative’s tendency towards premediation is a violent imposition and institutional attempt to order and manage the world, I offer an alternative of releasement from the politics of risk. Clare Geiman writes:

What Heidegger is calling for here is a radical departure from politics as we have understood it up to now, that is, as the human agent’s personal or collective attempt to systematically order and control both physical and human nature. Heidegger offers no principles of justice, no treatise on the proper organization of institutions, no way to guarantee a better future—in short, no systematic guidelines for action whatsoever. The utter indeterminacy of what Heidegger is calling for leads many to accuse him of reckless and stubborn quietism in the face of pressing issues facing humankind. But it is precisely Heidegger’s point that the conception of politics (and of thinking itself) as the violent and willful imposition of a “program” on Being is what we need to let go of. He calls us to consider that the factors that drive our modern politics, in all its plurality, in the direction of the consolidation of power and control and (sometimes subtly but often violently) in the direction of conformity and homogenization cannot in turn be effectively overcome by exerting a counter force, by attempting to control and secure the human drive to control, by demanding conformity to another universal norm. Gelassenheit, on the other hand, [Releaseement] means, in part, letting politics as the polos come to us. Heidegger argues that the “being-with” and interaction that would make up a more vital and essential human community require that we risk “exposure” to the other (a word he tries to “care”) and suggests that it is a mistake to think that we can properly engage and listen to others so long as we are simultaneously protecting and advancing our own separate spheres and identities. The openness that would appropriately situate human Being is only possible in the move away from all attempts to systematize and control, from all attempts to fix the historical appearance of Being in some manageable form. Heidegger is calling for a new kind of respons-ibility, one that has its measure and only safeguard in the willingness to risk openness and let be. This of course entails a very real political risk, yet it remains compelling that the best way to confront large-scale violence is to reshape our personal and political action in such a way that it is fundamentally nonviolent. Poetic thinking points to just such a move.

Clare Pearson Geiman, "Heidegger's Antigones." 2001. A Companion to Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics. Ed. Richard Polt and Gregory Fried. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Trinity Prep JN	Premediation K	Tournament of Champions

Jake Nebel	2009	Last Updated: 5/1/09

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Index

Jake Nebel

2009-04-02

Trinity Preparatory School