Pre-emption

NOTES ON CONTEMPORARY MAPPINGS OF PRE-EMPTIVE POWER IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE

Our challenge in this new century is a difficult one: to defend our nation against the unknown, the uncertain, the unseen and the unexpected.
Donald Rumsfeld

The face of the enemy appears in the haze of the future…
Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt.

The threat as such is nothing yet- just a looming.
Brian Massumi

It is our contention that pre-emption is one of the more predatory modalities of power wielded today and that it will only become more so in the second decade of the century. This essay restricts itself to summarising recent political and philosophical analyses of the practices of pre-emption that have re-emerged across the war on terror.

It should be read as an introduction to pre-emption as a mode of capture control and modulation of futurity as mapped in the invaluable research undertaken by Brian Massumi, Melinda Cooper, Todd Haynes, Luciana Parisi and Steve Goodman, Erik Davis, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt and Philip K. Dick among others.

The concept of pre-emption emerged as a mode of power when US foreign policy shifted from defence to security after September 2001. The humiliation of being caught with ‘our pants down’, informed the move from what Negri and Hardt call an attitude of ‘reactive war’, that responds to external attacks to an ‘active attitude’ that aims to pre-empt attack.

By September 2002, the National Security Strategy of the United States of America was arguing that ‘The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction – and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act pre-emptively…America will act against emerging threats before they are fully formed’. (National Security Strategy, 2002: 14, 4).

Pre-emption is not a new concept in international law; traditionally, however, the right of pre-emption authorized a state to counter-strike when it had warning or visible evidence of an imminent attack.

Melinda Cooper points out that what is radically new about the doctrine of war outlined in National Security Strategy of September is that it specifically authorised itself to use pre-emptive action against a threat that is not so much imminent as emergent; ‘a threat whose actual occurrence remains irreducibly speculative, impossible to locate or predict’.

Unlike the reliable enemy of the Cold War, Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney insist that today’s terrorist networks and rogue states are oblivious to the persuasive force of mutual deterrence. In Cooper’s words ‘Their movements are incalculable, uncertain in time and place, of indeterminable cost- and this, we are told, is precisely why the US can’t afford to wait.’p.124.

From the perspective of Empire, Negri and Hardt state, it is the presence of the enemy that demonstrates the need for security. ‘Thus this enemy is no longer concrete and localisable but has now become something fleeting and ungraspable like a snake in the imperial paradise. The enemy is unknown and unseen and yet ever present, something like a hostile aura’.

What Erik Davis calls the ‘paranoid futurism’ of pre-emptive logic relies not on rational debate, or as has become perfectly clear, on the distinction between real and imagined threat; instead, it relies ‘on the manipulation of imaginative possibility. That is, though terrible things have always hovered in possibility space, those terrors became so imaginable, the threat so ‘real’ as to justify a new order of American power and control.’ Techgnosis, p.401.

If the doctrine of pre-emption is radically new from the perspective of military law, then pre-emptive logic as an instrument of statecraft that ‘endows’ our suspicions, fears and panics with an ‘active force of law’ is experienced as a form of perception management which animates fears, actualises threats and legitimates the catastrophes it warns against.

Our present might also be understood, according to Parisi and Goodman, as the third and latest modality in a genealogy of cybernetic control, each of which has operated historically through practices of simulation whose object is to control futurity.

Pre-emption, as such, is founded, on what Cooper calls our collective ‘apprehension’ of the future, as threat; it is this uncertainty that paradoxically ‘founds’ the self legitimizing authority to use of violence.

In Massumi’s terms, ‘post 9/11, governmentality has molded itself to threat’. Massumi’s analysis of the ‘time form’ of threat is critical to an understanding of pre-emption. A threat does not have a substantial form; instead it has ‘a time form’, that is ‘a futurity’, which, nonetheless, has the paradoxical capacity to ‘fill the present without presenting itself’.

A threat, understood as the ‘future looming’ casts a ‘shadow’ on and in the present. That shadow of the future, lurking in the present, is fear, or dread, or apprehension or suspicion or ominous anticipation. These can all be understood, in Parisi and Goodman’s terms, as ‘modes of sensitised contact with bodies not yet actualised’.

A threat can be formulated as the ‘future cause’ of a change in the present. A future cause is not a cause in the normative sense of the word; it is a ‘virtual cause’ or to put it another way, a ‘quasicause’. A threat is a futurity with a virtual power to affect the present quasicausally.

Massumi argues that when a governmental mechanism makes threat its business, it is taking this virtuality as its ‘object’ and adopting quasicausality, as threat, as its ‘mode of operation’. That operational modulation of quasicausality goes by the name of security.

Beyond the geopolitical rationales for security, employed by Empire’s critics and acolytes, the neoliberal politics of security, Massumi argues, operates through this non-linear force of quasicausality.

Pre-emption is a series of variables for predicting, representing or invoking quasicausality. The first mode of pre-emption as deterrence, which parallels Cooper’s notion of the ‘future-representative’ which might be mapped according to the Cold War, which we might renamed, following Negri and Hardt and Marker’s A Grin Without A Cat as the Third World War, a future is simulated in order to be avoided. Here simulation in the service of deterrence revolves around the statistical probability of the ‘unfolding of a certain outcome.’

In the second mode of pre-emptive intervention, which maps onto what Cooper terms the ‘future predictive’ a future is prepared for by being played or run through. Simulation in the service of pre-emptive intervention engages dress rehearsals, thereby adjusting the likelihood of an event to occur by actually making it happen.

Pre-emptive-intervention functions through what Parisi and Goodman call ‘a strange paradoxical feedback’ to activate ‘the future at every turn.’ Cooper argues that the doctrine assumes that the only way to survive the future is to become ‘immersed in its conditions of emergence, to the point of actualizing it ourselves.

The future it calls forth is effectively generated ‘de novo’ out of our ‘collective apprehensiveness.’’ Pre-emption transforms our generalized alertness into a real mobilizing force, compelling us to become the uncertain future we’re most in thrall to.

Parisi and Goodman continue past this to argue for a third mode, the future invocative, that coincides with the present an era that we might nominate, according to SubCommandante Marcos, as the period of the Fourth World War ongoing since 1991.Equally, we might name it as the period of Restoration, in Alain Badiou’s term.

Negri and Hardt argue that the implications of todays pre-emptive strikes and preventive wars in the name of security extend within and outside the national boundaries. Security must be situated within the wider field of biopower, that is ‘producing and transforming social life at its most general and global level.’ (p20) (Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, p.20)

This broad statement can be elaborated upon by which by Cooper’s conclusion that the ‘extension of pre-emptive warfare to include the sphere of environmental and biopolitics conflates the eternalization of war with the evolution of life on earth- as if permanent war were simply a fact of life with no other end than its own crisis driven perpetuation.’ (p129)

Here control enters into a new mode of pre-emptive engineering in which futurity is modulated. Control is dominated by what Parisi and Goodman call pre-emptive engineering which ‘instigates’ disaster, making it happen at ‘every turn’ not just in ‘localized controlled conditions’ but by taking hold of what they call ‘the biotic matrix’ understood as ‘the contagious fabrication of life’

Their analysis operates at another scale from Negri and Hardt’s emphasis on ‘general and global life’. But an apocryphal Bush tautology offered by Massumi might help to illustrate the operationality of this mode of power across scales.

The future, Bush is reputed to have promised, will be better tomorrow. But ‘tomorrow’s future’ concludes Massumi, is here today, as ‘virtual cause. And America is neither stronger nor safer than it was yesterday. If anything, it is more precarious than ever because the form under which the promise of tomorrow is here today is ever-present threat.’

The ever present threat, delivered as promise and experienced as contact with incipience, is actualized through nonlinear and quasicausal operations of pre-emption that no one can fully control.

Precisely because of this, Massumi cautions, these operations are capable of ‘possessing’ each and every one, at the level of their ‘bodily potential’ subjecting us to ‘be individually what will have collectively become.’

To be individually what will have collectively become: a formula such as this is the temporal torsion specific to pre-emption.