The Time/Space of Preparedness

Introduction

Contemporary politics is increasingly defined at the horizon of unknown, yet catastrophic future events. ¹ Alongside a wide range of calamitous events such as climate change, extreme weather, pandemics, and technological collapse, the “next terrorist attack” has become one of the main fixtures of the collective imagination of future catastrophe. “Next Terrorist Attack on the US Not Matter of If, but When,” titles an insurance news journal (Jakes Jordan, 2006); “Another Terrorist Attack Coming Soon?” asks the media (Page, 2006). In short: “Are We Ready for the Next Terrorist Attack?” (Cote, 2007). Concerns about the next possible attack are by no means restricted to the public or the media. Politicians and intellectuals, too, are increasingly worried about what the future may harbor. For instance, Bruce Ackerman (2006), in thinking about the role of courts in producing short-term measures to deal with terrorist attacks, justified an emergency constitution on the assumption of a possible catastrophic attack:

September 11 was merely a pinprick compared to the devastation of a suitcase A-bomb or an anthrax epidemic. The next major attack may kill and maim one hundred thousand innocents, dwarfing the personal anguish suffered by those who lost family and friends on 9/11. (p. 2)

The next attack is not simply one in a series of similar past and present events, but a worst case scenario or that could radically disrupt the present. Although the colonization of the future (e.g., through credit and insurance) has been a central feature of modernity, contemporary concerns with the worst case have significantly altered our relationship to the future, as policy makers today face the paradoxical question of how to “think the unthinkable,” “know the unknowable,” or “expect the unexpected.” In this context, preemption, precaution, preparedness, and resilience have all been described as privileged practices to make unexpected future events palpable and governable (Anderson, 2010). ²

Under the signifier of catastrophe, the governance of the future has led to what Matthew Hannah (2010) has called actionism, the fetishization of the intransitive verb “to act,” as the only proper response to the future. This actionism has led to a plethora of interventions on infrastructures, cities, populations, be those citizens or noncitizens. In human geography, recent work has become increasingly interested in the way in which “acting out” future terrorist attacks creates political and spatial realities (Anderson, 2010; Bialasiewicz et al., 2007). A range of authors has pointed out the effect of “the next attack” on the design of urban and metropolitan landscapes (Coaffee, Hare, & Hawkesworth, 2009; Collier & Lakoff, 2008; Galison, 2001; Graham, 2004). However, what remains unexplored is how the future event itself is spatialized. The unknown event is made governable, we argue, through a particular circumscription and understanding of the space in which it unfolds.

In an attempt to contribute to thinking about the spatial imaginaries at work in technologies of futurity, this article therefore interrogates the co-constitution of temporality and spatiality in practices of preparedness. Claiming that preparedness exercises map the future in spatial terms, we argue that these practices enact a withdrawal of time, as the uncertainty of the future event is displaced on the management of space. The separation of space and time implies that actions are not focused on understanding the conditions of possibility of the disruptive event but on the management of spaces and behavior that are considered out of place. By focusing solely on spatial arrangements, they obscure an understanding of the temporality of events and defer thinking about the future event as both spatially and temporally constituted.

The Temporality of the “Next Terrorist Attack”

The deployment of catastrophic imaginaries of the future in security governance differs in important respects from typical modern understandings of temporality and ways of acting on the future. In his excavation of historical time, Reinhart Koselleck (2004) has identified two types of modern temporality: rational prognosis and the philosophy of historical process (p. 18). Until the 16th century, Christian temporality was rendered by “the constant anticipation of the End of the World on the one hand and the continual deferment of the End on the other” (Koselleck, 2004, p. 11). The rational forecast became the counterpart to religious prophecies: “the future became a domain of finite possibilities, arranged according to their greater or lesser possibility (Koselleck, 2004, p. 18).” Yet both prophesied time and prognosticated time are based on a form of static time in as far as both introduce the past into the future (Koselleck, 2004, p. 22). By contrast, the philosophy of historical process considers the future as fundamentally unknown and characterized by (fast-forward) speed. Combining rational prediction with the expectation of salvation in the representation of progress, it does not draw its roots from the past understood as either a static tradition or a reservoir of examples. Rather than the end of the world—as in prophesied time—modernity defines the future as progress. As Frederic Jameson (2005) summarizes, modernity “demands a memory of qualitative social change, a concrete vision of the past which we may expect to find completed by that far more abstract and empty conception of some future terminus which we sometimes call ‘progress’” (Jameson, 2005, p. 284).

These two conceptions of time have been brought together in the modern conception of risk. François Éwald (1986) has identified the idea of risk with the birth of insurance as a technology for calculating future events and making them amenable to interventions in the present. Risk is a calculation of the future, based on archival and statistical knowledge of the past. At the same time, however, risk management contributes to modernity’s dislodgment from static time by allowing a capitalist colonization of the future through credit and insurance. More specifically, it has been argued that insurance embodied the possibility of progress by recasting conflictual class relations into a new, harmonious relationship between equal citizens and the state (Éwald, 1986). Against this view, others have objected that insurance merely uses the future to secure the present and thereby denies the possibility for any radical change or revolution. By tackling the forms of social relation rather than the structures of society, insurance de-dramatizes social struggle and avoid the partisan appropriation of the state (Donzelot, 1988). On this view, the future becomes an “extended present” (Nowotny quoted in Adam, 2003, p. 73) rather than something qualitatively different from it. Hence the temporal effect of insurance is not simply the future that needs to be ordered against uncertainty and “dangerous irruptions”; rather, it is between present and future, defined as the time of indefinite continuity and processual progression. As two risk-management experts have argued about terrorism insurance, the insurance industry contributes to the social and economic continuity of the country (Kunreuther & Michel-Kerjan, 2005).

Catastrophic events in the future upset the modern temporality of risk. This does not mean that catastrophes have not been understood to function both within a logic of prophecy and progress. History is replete with invocations of catastrophes to come. Insurance experts also know that catastrophes can be integrated within a dispositif of governance—catastrophe risk insurance names a new object for risk knowledge and practice.

Yet catastrophes to come also challenge these forms of knowledge and practice. First, catastrophes are considered unknowable, unexpected, and unpredictable. Faced with the possibility of a “next terrorist attack,” the model of rational forecast reaches its limit. Although security professionals, intelligence agencies, and the insurance industry continue to develop models to calculate or estimate the risk of a terrorist attack, they also recognize that today’s challenge comes from what former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, (in)famously referred to as unknown unknowns—things we do not know we do not know. The discovery of unknown unknowns as a separate field of intervention has led security experts to invent new modes of governance irreducible to risk calculations. The difference is well captured by the Insurance Information Institute (2010):

The fact that acts of terrorism are intentional and that the frequency and severity of attacks cannot be reliably assessed makes terrorism extremely problematic from the insurance standpoint. Many insurers continue to question whether terrorism risk is insurable. Large segments of the economy and millions of workers are exposed to significant terrorism risk, but the ability to determine precisely where or when the next attack may occur is limited. (p. 7).

Second, imaginaries of “the next terrorist attack” appear to interrupt the temporality of progress and repetition, crisis and system, by introducing the radical rupture and transformation of lived time. Although disasters, emergencies, and crises have been a continual, if not constant, concern in the problematization of how to govern through risk, catastrophic futures disrupt progressive, linear, and serialized understandings of time. Imaginaries of terrorism reintroduce a dynamics of unexpected transformation and radical break that set it apart from such related notions.

For governance purposes, catastrophe, then, appears as the intensification of disaster on a gradual continuum of destruction, the extension of risk to limits of probability calculation and the redeployment of emergency planning to tackle the worst case scenario. For example, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency training on risk and disaster management locates events on an emergency–disaster–catastrophe–extinction scale, where catastrophe is defined as “any natural or manmade incident, including terrorism, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the population, infrastructure, environment, economy, national morale, and/or government functions” (Department of Homeland Security, 2008). Unlike emergencies and disasters, which can be tackled with existing local and national resources, catastrophes radically challenge existing technologies and processes. The “next catastrophe” is the catastrophe that can radically disrupt and destroy our way of life. It needs to be thought, as Frédéric Neyrat (2008, p. 35) puts it, as situated in-between the accident (which can be insured and does not disrupt historical continuity) and apocalypse (the ultimate discontinuity).

How is this dynamics of radical disruption and interruption made actionable in the governance of counterterrorism? The “next terrorist attack” as a worst-case scenario increasingly requires preparedness knowledge and practice through scenarios and exercises which are “exploring ways to aid you in preventing, handling, and recovering from a terrorist attack” (National Counter Terrorism Security Office, 2008). “Expecting the unexpected” (National Counter Terrorism Security Office, 2003) relates to the future through the use of exercises and scenarios, which are modalities of knowledge deployed to offer answers to the challenge of nonprobabilistic events that do not occur and reoccur with statistical regularity and thus challenge actuarial technologies (Aradau & van Munster, 2007; Cooper, 2006; Éwald, 2002; de Goede, 2008). ³ According to Lakoff (2007), preparedness becomes “an especially salient approach to perceived threats when they reach the limits of a rationality of insurance” (p. 247).

Stephen Collier (2008) has noted that there has been a move away from the archival–statistical knowledge involved in risk prevention to an enactment knowledge that is produced by “acting out” future threats in order to understand their societal impact. Lee Clarke (2005) has dubbed the name “possibilistic knowledge,” which has its basis in the imagination of the unthinkable and which has come to supplement—or even supplant—the probabilistic knowledge of risk management. While Collier and Clarke point to particular elements of the new modes of knowledge, we have argued elsewhere (Aradau & van Munster, 2011) that it is conjectural knowledge, understood as the search for the insignificant details or clue to the future event, that captures different modalities of knowledge and practice, from catastrophe insurance to worst case scenario planning and exercises. After 9/11, exercises have reemerged as an important methodology in emergency management or civil protection. Initially developed as part of generic emergency planning, exercises have been increasingly promoted as best practices to deal with worst case scenarios of the future.

In a widely accepted definition, “[e]xercise is the generic term for a range of activities that test emergency response readiness, evaluate an emergency response plan, and assess the success of training and development programs” (New York Consortium for Emergency Planning Continuing Education, 2007). Exercising is one of the main components of preparedness which tests ongoing plans and trains staff to respond to the eventuality of an attack (Anderson, 2010; Borodzicz, 2005). According to the UK Civil Contingencies Secretariat, “[p]lanning for emergencies cannot be considered reliable until it is exercised and has proved to be workable, especially since false confidence may be placed in the integrity of a written plan” (Civil Contingencies Secretariat, 2009). While public and private actors are increasingly required by law to set up exercises and test emergency plans, exercises are also not a new form of knowledge and are traceable to the Cold War. ⁴ As nuclear threats challenged the limits of prediction, of the knowable and the probable (Kahn, 1984), exercises functioned as “prosthetics” for a new mode of thinking about future threats. After 9/11, exercises have returned as rehearsals of the future with the objective to train responses to the unexpected consequences of a terrorist attack.

To understand in which ways the imagination of “the next terrorist attack” in exercises and scenarios bears on the future, it is important to explore the practices through which the future event is rendered knowable, its uncertainty reduced in order to make it manageable. Preparing for the worst needs to consider both the temporality of the unexpected event and a spatial imaginary where the catastrophe is played out. Yet, preparedness exercises—whether they consider a terrorist attack or some other issue—generally start with clear delimitations of space (and time) that reframe the unknown, uncertain, and unknowable future into the “thinkable” materialities of space. Consider the following example:

A series of powerful explosions hits the transport sector in the larger Copenhagen area one morning during rush hour. The attacks are directed against a S-train at Høje-Taastrup station, an IC-train between Copenhagen Airport and Tårnby, a metro at Nørreport station as well as a bus on Østerbrogade close to the neighbourhood where the embassies are located. ⁵

Once the space of the event is made familiar and knowable, time can be subordinated to this understanding of spatial proximity and containment. As Johannes Fabian (2002, p. 16) has argued, the spatialization of time has entailed the construction of difference as distance. The reversal takes place in the case of the next terrorist attack: The radical difference of the event is actionable through proximity and familiarity. The actions of the emergency services can therefore unfold according to clock time. For example, in the ARGUS exercises, organized by the National Counter-Terrorism Office in the UK, the timing of the response is as follows: 5 minutes after the attack, 15 minutes, 40 minutes, 2 hours, sometimes 2 weeks or 2 months. Each time interval requires predetermined actions and processes. The first 5 minutes are about communicating with those around, 15 minutes about “taking control,” 40 minutes about reassuring those around, 2 hours about working together with the emergency services; longer times are about business continuity and return to normality. This is also the “clock time” during which local security managers need to take responsibility for the response. They are required to inhabit the future as a place in which rules and mnemonics “tame” uncertainty and the unexpected. Thus, during the first 15 minutes, security managers are required to take control of the situation by simple action-words such as “survey,” “assess,” and “disseminate.” When contacting the emergency services, the mnemonic CHALET contains all the indications for information needed: C (casualties), H (hazards in the areas), A (access to the location), L (location of the incident), E (emergency services required), T (type of explosion). ⁶ Mnemonics are equivalent to protocols of actions, easy-to-remember constructions which create the illusion of linear time and allow subjects to navigate spaces and places.

Preparing for the Next Attack

What is the political import of these clear delimitations of space on our thinking about the future? How do time and space interact in preparedness exercises? What happens when space as a static, “empty” container is co-produced in connection with the linearity of response as clock time? To understand the ways in which the imagination of “the next terrorist attack” bears on the future as a temporal and spatial category, it may be useful to briefly reflect on some observations in geography on the connections between time and space. Geographers have repeatedly pointed at the need to consider the spatial dimension alongside the temporal one (see, e.g., May and Thrift, 2001). Particularly given the unifying potentiality of the time of progress or prognosis under conditions of modernity, they have warned against the tendency in social sciences to absorb difference along a single temporal axis.

In her critique of Laclau’s clear differentiation between temporality and spatiality, Doreen Massey (1992) shows this separation to be fallacious. The association of space with depoliticization and time with politics in Laclau is underpinned by the assumption that space is associated with a particular kind of time, the time internal to a system, such as cyclical time, reproduction time or everyday time. By exclusion, temporality then becomes only the time of grand changes. She locates a similar fallacy in the shift that Fredric Jameson (1991) has noted between modernity and postmodernity, the former being associated with abstract time and the latter with concrete space. Jameson’s reduction of space to the unrepresentable and the chaotic let loose by postmodernity is made possible by the imagination that space allows movement in all direction while temporal events need to be connected and placed in a sequence. A strong separation of time and space impedes our understanding of how broad social processes may play out unevenly in different locations (Lefebvre, 1991; Massey, 2001; Soja, 1989). Or as David Harvey (1995) puts it, “the geographical imagination is far too pervasive and important a fact of intellectual life to be left alone to geographers” (p. 161). ⁷

Rather than different paradigms of modernity/postmodernity or modes of (de)politicization, Massey suggests that spatiality and temporality are co-constitutive. Her argument about the co-constitution of time and space is an important one, as it is equally important to be aware of the “withdrawal of time” that can take place in analyses that privilege the spatial component. Harry Harootunian (2005) has convincingly argued that a shift toward the privileging of space over time has taken place in area studies where postcolonial discourse represents “capitalism (sometimes dismissed as another Western metanarrative) as a movement in space rather than time that might disturb local certainties but not necessarily reproduce its original conditions of social existence imperially and mechanically” (p. 35).

In spite of these insights about the co-productivity of time and space, the spatial dimension of preparedness exercises and its relation to the temporality of the “next terrorist attack” has remained underexplored. Preparedness knowledge has been read through the lens of temporal disruption as disruption within existing modes of knowledge. ⁸ Yet counterterrorism preparedness emerges through particular time/space practices that gain plausibility relationally. In preparedness exercises, the unknown future is spatially rendered as consisting of bare containers that are simultaneously open and closed. It is this dual nature of urban spaces that appears to raise a problem for the “next terrorist attack.” On one hand, they are open “locations with comparatively limited protective security measures which afford the potential for terrorists to cause mass casualties” (Home Office, 2009; National Counter Terrorism Security Office, 2010). On the other hand, they are contained; buildings which can collapse, glass that shatters, squares that intensify the effects of explosion, and monitored exits and entrances which impede access in an emergency. These spaces need to be rendered less open—for example, by integrating different forms of checked entrance or by designing (in)visible urban defenses (see, e.g., Coaffee et al., 2009)—but the reduction of openness also turns the spaces into death traps. Contained spaces can cause more casualties, both in terms of people’s lives and infrastructure, which in turn leads to a concern with landscaping and the use of blast-resistant glass in urban (re)development projects.

The spatial rendering of the unexpected event that unfolds under clock time mobilizes a set of technologies concerned primarily with the management of space and access rather than thinking catastrophe as a temporal event. Building maps, maps of exits and safe spaces as well as local maps with possibilities of evacuation and routes for the emergency services are, as Tracy Davis (2007) remarked about civil protection exercises, important “conceptual aids to conceiving, prioritizing, and ordering remedial action” (p. 64). The uncertainty of the event is transferred on to the manageable spatial uncertainty of access: It is mapped out in spatial proximity and familiarity. Consider the following scenario of the exercise “Joint Response” (City of Sunderland):

It is Friday 19 July and the school holidays are due to start. There are a number of events on over the weekend including Feel the Noise at Newcastle Racecourse, an Asian Festival in Newcastle, a summer fete at St John Boste RC Church and an international conference at the Holiday Inn, Washington. A sports day is due to take place at Ayton Primary School later in the afternoon.

Weather conditions overnight were war and humid with a slight breeze. It is now very warm and sunny with clear skies [. . .]

The weather forecast for the weekend is for more of the same and many people are looking to take a long weekend break. There is already a lot of holiday traffic on the roads and Wasthington Services are becoming extremely busy [. . .]

In recent weeks the UK has been on a heightened state of alert, following a number of terrorist incidents overseas and increased intelligence reports from the US, who have advised various European countries of possible terrorist activity and East European issues have also come to the fore. ⁹

The detailed set-out of the scenario is not exceptional. Most scenarios consider such meticulous detail as the necessary paraphernalia to create a realistic impression. Yet the abundance of details is not simply used with the purpose of achieving realism. Details also create a forensic, rather than foresight, imaginary that is as much spatial as it is temporal. The details provide spatial clues for the disaster to come and the responses to be undertaken. For example, the background already tells of crowded, congested spaces, a mixture of public events and holiday-makers. It “prepares for” the potential catastrophic event through an extension of spaces where crowds are likely to gather. The exercise background already contains the clues for the future event through an analogical relation with other terrorist incidents as well as an unnamed “Eastern European issue.” It soon transpires that the exercise is about a chemical terrorist incident: a lorry carrying different chemicals is involved, which “appears to be registered in Poland.”

As the response unfolds, it also becomes apparent that acting in the future is about the management of space, access, surveillance and traceability of entrance, exits, and movements. The question then becomes how to govern public places: “In airports and stadiums you can monitor access, they are contained. Public spaces are not contained.” ¹⁰ Crowds are inserted in these public places, in a renewed displacement of uncertain events: The crowd is an uncertain subject, their reactions unpredictable. Secure Futures, a U.K.-based company focusing on technological innovation to respond to national security challenges, formulates its crowded places programme in terms of panic and traditional crowd psychology: “Crowds and public places are very difficult to protect and if tragedy or danger strikes, it can often mean mass casualties, major damage as well as widespread panic and fear. There is a loss of control, communication and containment” (Secure Futures, 2010). However, here too space is singled out as providing the solution against insecurity and panic. For instance, a “protected space” away from glass can offer survivors the much needed protection and calm against a possible terrorist attack.

As a consequence, the temporal unexpected, the potential interruption suggested by the etymology of catastrophe (an overturn, a “reversal of what is expected”) is interpreted spatially as what is out-of-place: behaviours and places that somehow do not fit into familiar spatial arrangement. A campaign by the Metropolitan Police in the United Kingdom has targeted things as different as taking photos, housing or using mobiles. “You see hundred of houses everyday,” the ad says. “What if one has unusual activity and seems suspicious?,” it continues. No indication is given of suspicious activity, except that it doesn’t fit “normal day-to-day life (Metropolitan Police, 2008).” Similarly, the project “i-Watch,” an antiterrorism community watch program introduced by the Los Angeles Police Department to educate people about what behavior is truly suspicious, includes the following behaviors and activities to report:

Preparing for the “next terrorist attack” shifts attention to a space that is constituted through the distinction between the normal and the abnormal, that is, what is out of place. The space of normality is uniform and static, known and familiar, and the temporality associated with this spatial framing is physical clock time, the linear chronology of response and prevention. Although preparedness assumes the “next terrorist attack” as a worst case scenario with potentially catastrophic consequences, the actionism promoted is not focused on understanding the interruption, the disruptive event. Rather, the space in which exercises function is normalized through linear temporality. Thus, the situation explored in ARGUS is that of normal everyday life—the pre-evental circumstances of the bomb explosion are not explored. Once preparedness is in place, the main question is not “what happened?” or “why did it happen?,” but “what to do?” and “what decisions to take?.” What counts is not what happened but how to act in a space populated by numerous objects, data, sensorial stimuli, and people.

This space, however, tells us little about how we relate and might want to relate to the future. Instead, the taming of the temporal uncertainty of the future through spatial arrangements leads to a withdrawal of time. The future is seen to function in a positivistic epistemic mode, where the solution to future threats is not to understand their origins, conditions of possibility, and emergence, but to accommodate these threats through spatial ordering and mapping. As a result, differences between kinds of events and their spatio-temporal conditions become immaterial to their governance. The withdrawal of time, cuts individuals from the social and political conditions in which events happen and locates them within an empty-container space. The social is excavated from counter-terrorism as the future is rendered as an abstract container-space. Social relations are only constituted in the anticipation of, response to and recovery from the next terrorist attack. At first sight, it would appear that safety managers are expected to engage in activities that we might regard as “social.” They are asked to coordinate a response to an emergency by taking measures such as deciding whether to “evacuate” or “invacuate” customers and staff, taking down their details so they can be contacted by police as witnesses, spot early signs of stress and trauma, and get everyone home once it is possible to do so. However, these relations are temporary, shifting, and contingent and are subsumed to the imperatives of legal responsibility and economic survival. Spatial arrangements exclude the problematization of time-as-interruption by the co-production of static space and clock time. Business continuity and legal tort are the forms of status governance sustained by the state.

Conclusion

The “next terrorist attack” has increasingly shaped the modalities of knowledge and practices entailed in the governance of an unknowable and unexpected future. In futures studies, Edward Cornish (2004) has compared “futuring” or the exploration of the future with the adventurers who explore unknown spaces filled with dangers. For futurist explorers, the space encountered is essentially an “empty space,” a terra nullius, on which they are to imprint their knowledge. Taking seriously Cornish’s intimation that the future is made actionable and governable through spatial mapping, this article has argued that counter-terrorism exercises have made the worst case scenario actionable through the spatialization of the unexpected, which in turn has resulted in a withdrawal of time as heterogeneous, coexisting temporalities. Preparedness exercises rely on particular spatial arrangements—crowded places, unmonitored public spaces—which map the temporality of response onto the linear model of clock time. By focusing on spatial arrangements, preparedness suspends questions of more heterogeneous forms of temporality and thus reduces the future to spatial dichotomies of secure/nonsecure, crowded/noncrowded, and private/public spaces. The assumptions underpinning the spatial arrangements of preparedness exercises are those of presence/absence—some spatial arrangements are more conducive to an effective response to a terrorist attack whereas others are not. This dichotomous arrangement is made possible through a double move. On the one hand, preparedness exercises defer considerations of temporality as interruption by co-producing uniform space and linear clock time. On the other hand, the spatial imaginaries have come at the expense of a temporal understanding of their origins, which further detach individuals from social and political processes and changes. As a result, preparing for the next attack effaces the surprise and contingency of the social by privileging the imaginary of legal responsibility and economic survival over other sociopolitical relations.