Preemption, precaution, preparedness: Anticipatory action and future geographies

By Ben Anderson. 2010

The paper focuses on how futures are anticipated and acted on in relation to a set of events that are taken to threaten liberal democracies. Across different domains of life the future is now problematized as a disruption, a surprise. This problematization of the future as indeterminate or uncertain has been met with an extraordinary proliferation of anticipatory action. The paper argues that anticipatory action works through the assembling of: styles through which the form of the future is disclosed and related to; practices that render specific futures present; and logics through which anticipatory action is legitimized, guided and enacted.

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Citations in the corpus

Securing with algorithms: Knowledge, decision, sovereignty (2017, background): “…those who have long studied the anticipatory techniques of preemptive or premediated security (Grusin, 2010; Amoore, 2013; De Goede, 2012; Aradau and Van Munster, 2011; Anderson, 2010; Uncertain Commons, 2013), here the embodied ontological form of the algorithm itself is the central focal point.”
The new profiling: Algorithms, black boxes, and the failure of anti-discriminatory safeguards in the European Union (2014, background): “Anderson (2010: 792) thus adds that precautionary measures seek to act before an identified threat reaches a point of irreversible damage, and thus distinguishes precaution from preemptive measures.”
Locative media and data-driven computing experiments (2016, background): “Accordingly, the associations identified in these datasets are the ‘excess’, what is becoming, escapes and goes on (Anderson, 2010), emerging from data-driven preemptive measures for mitigating, acting upon and governing unknown futures of any city.”
Models of best practice in flood risk communication and management (2014, background): “Transformed into a calculable risk, the uncertain prospects of future flooding become manageable through an open horizon of conscious choices among various possible precautionary, preemptive, and preparedness actions (Anderson, 2010).”
A feel for numbers: affect, data and education policy (2015, background): “…p. 92) Following a concern among affect theorists to analyse how senses of anticipation can be mobilised and modulated as a vector for control (e.g. Anderson, 2010; Massumi, 2010), Webb and Gulson illustrate how policy discourses can intervene directly in practice through affective sense-making.”