What Data Make Possible: Louise Amoore’s The Politics of Possibility

Louise Amoore’s The Politics of Possibility is theoretically sophisticated, empirically engaged, and highly relevant to our contemporary milieu. This is a most admirable combination. First, the book’s theoretical sophistication is evident in its thoughtful engagement with a wide swath of leading contemporary political theory. Amoore ranges with ease and insight through Foucault, Deleuze, and Agamben, as well as other contemporaries such as Jane Bennett and William Connolly. In so doing, her achievement is to leverage the work of these thinkers so as to generate new insights that do not merely repeat the already-well-known formulations of the masters of the prior generation (not to mention the masters of the current generation). Second, Amoore’s sophisticated use of theory is enhanced by her careful scrutiny of empirical contexts. These inquiries range from the micro-politics of RFID tags embedded in passports to the micro-histories of punch card tabulating machines to micro-computers and the governmental adoption of data mining algorithms originally developed in a consumer context. The investigation always remains close enough to its objects to reveal them in their exquisite detail. Third, the impact of the book makes itself felt because of the decisive importance of its problematic, which is one that cannot but be a site of critical anxiety for anyone who has their eyes open to the political valences of the now. Our contemporary is one that is witness to a still-emerging milieu of information, algorithm, surveillance, capture, borders, and databases. An entire political apparatus is being composed right before our eyes, indeed right beneath our fingers. It is interesting to note, then, that Amoore traverses this emergent field by way of a focus on the security state as an elaboration of an assemblage of techniques, devices, styles, and subjectivities all committed to a politicization of possibility. It may be, however, that this narrowed focus on the state as the primary actor is not only out of proportion with the broader assembly Amoore is taking the pulse of, but also invites the analysis in its conclusion to rehearse some all-too-standard tropes of resistance that seem insufficient to the diagnostic acumen the book forces upon the reader.

Amoore’s key idea of a “politics of possibility” is jarring at first but resonant upon inspection. One might expect a politics founded upon possibilities, options, and maybes. But the focus here is not what theorists have been led to expect: here we meet a politicization of possibility itself. Amoore conceptualizes this politics of possibility along three vectors, each of which is detailed in one of the book’s three parts. In Part I the focus is on techniques: mid-century commercial accounting technologies, their subsequent adoption by the state, and changing notions of risk and risk calculus. Part II is about spaces: borders and border control, and redefinitions of space via locative devices that do not plot an object on a pre-defined grid of coordinates but rather locate it midst a milieu of relata (some of the best bits of the book are here, which is unsurprising given Amoore’s disciplinary background in Geography). In Part III the book shifts to effects: here the collection is a little looser as Amoore pivots from the diagnostic project of the first two parts to consider aesthetics, visualization, and imagination as fields of political potentiality in mounting resistance to the politics of possibility—here, I might add, potentiality returns as the politics of the perhaps that one had already expected.

As a sampling of the style of insight afforded by the first two parts of the book, consider Amoore’s discussion of the security state’s redeployment of data analytic techniques originally developed in the context of consumer marketing research. Amoore’s account follows the history of a collaboration between IBM researcher Rakesh Agrawal and the British clothing retailer Marks & Spencer which led in 1993 to a research paper that remains “the world’s...