Reactions to the Future: the Chronopolitics of Prevention and Preemption

In an interview, Michel Foucault described the dispositif as “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions” [1]. The extension of this notion is almost limitless and is of little help when it comes to identifying a particular dispositif. Foucault, however, adds, that a dispositif “has as its major function at a given historical moment that of responding to an urgent need” [1]. Against the background of a dispositif’s strategic function, we may indeed characterize preemptivity as dispositif, because it is an answer to a variety of temporal problems, which slowly amalgamated in the 1990s of the last century: the fear of scarce resources in the future, the perception of slowly acting public authorities, the experience of fast-spreading pathogens in a globalized society, etc. As an allied answer to these and similar problems, the dispositif emerged in the 1990s; however, it became visible in its entirety only after 9/11.

Attentive readers will immediately notice the omission of the past. In fact, there is no reason to exclude the past from the domain of chronopolitics except this: Concerning the past and its difference to the present, historians have presented by far more elaborated concepts such as politics of memory, identity politics, and politics of traditions. The past and its relation to the present constitute such a finely chiseled terrain of reflection, research, and theory that describing and analyzing it in the name of chronopolitics would be comparable to using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.