Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life

9. Infrastructure and Event: The Political Technology of Preparedness

243 Infrastructure and Event: The Political Technology of Preparedness andrew lakoff and stephen j. collier 9 As a number of analysts have argued, contemporary citizenship is simultaneously political and technical (see, e.g., Barry 1999; also contributions to Ong and Collier 2005). Thus, for example, access to material systems of circulation—such as water, electricity, communication, and transportation—is critical to participation in collective life. Indeed, demands for such access are often sources of political mobilization. This collective dependence on what we might call “vital systems” also fosters new forms of vulnerability. Threats to the operations of these life-supporting systems may come from a number of sources: natural disasters, terrorist attacks, technical malfunction, or novel pathogens. The prospect of such catastrophic threats now structures political intervention in a number of domains. Exemplary instances in which the failure to protect the functioning of such systems has caused major political fallout include the outbreak of mad cow disease and the European system of food supply, the attacks of September 11 and the system of air transportation, and Hurricane Katrina and systems of flood management. In this chapter , we describe the development of technical methods to identify and manage these threats to vital systems. The prevalence of these methods—and the common assumption of their necessity—suggests one answer to the question, how are political demands materialized today in programs of technical response? Through such methods, a 244 ANDREW LAKOFF AND STEPHEN J. COLLIER range of significant “things” is internalized within political reason. The chapter describes how critical infrastructure—and specifically the vulnerability of critical infrastructure—has become an object of knowledge for security experts in the United States. The production of such knowledge, we will suggest, is one part of a political technology of preparedness that addresses itself to a variety of possible threats. This political technology generates knowledge about infrastructural vulnerabilities through the imaginative enactment of a certain type of event. By the term political technology, we indicate a systematic relation of knowledge and intervention applied to a problem of collective life (Foucault 2001).1 In this case, the political technology of preparedness responds to the governmental problem of planning for unpredictable but potentially catastrophic events. It works to integrate an array of material elements—ranging from switching stations to chemical plants to oil pipelines and network servers—into political organization. Such political attention to the material underpinnings of collective life is not in itself new or surprising. Since the eighteenth century, experts have seen “the government of things” as one of the central tasks of state rationality (Foucault 2007). Thus current approaches in science and technology studies (STS) that draw attention to the salience of material artifacts to politics follow a long tradition of technocratic thought. From the vantage of critical analysis, what is important to specify is how, at a given moment, such technical artifacts as electricity networks are taken up as problems of collective existence: according to what rationality, and with what aim, do material things become political? The chapter begins with a brief description of current critical infrastructure protection efforts in the United States. These efforts focus on mitigating perceived vulnerabilities to potentially disastrous events. It then turns to a key moment in which this relationship between infrastructure and event was developed—cold war civil defense. Here the chapter describes how the practice of “vulnerability mapping” worked as a way of generating knowledge about urban life in the shadow of nuclear attack. The chapter then follows the trajectory of imaginative enactment as a planning technique during the cold war and shows how this method of generating knowledge Infrastructure and Event 245 about vulnerability gradually extended to other types of threat. In closing, we suggest ways in which this story about recent developments in security expertise might be linked to broader discussions of the contemporary politics of technology. Infrastructure and the Problem of Vulnerability In a 2003 essay on “Infrastructure and Modernity,” Paul Edwards posed the question of how to link detailed studies of the underpinnings of large-scale sociotechnical systems—which focus on issues such as the negotiation of standards and the problem of interoperability between systems—to questions raised in social theoretical discussions that emphasize the centrality of technological systems to modern life (Edwards 2003). He suggested that the differences between these two scales of analysis—one emphasizing the micropractices of technical experts in specific domains and the other making broad, general claims...