Always Be Prepared

Abstract

We would appear to live in an era when the power of fiction is on the wane. Despite many private universities' endowments' growth to record heights during an ongoing (and partially college-fueled) pandemic, literature departments face uncertain futures and the ranks of un- and underemployed literary critics grow with each PhD defense. The import of fiction in such a historical moment is far from obvious. While we might turn inward for answers—to the classic work of Fredric Jameson and Edward Said, to more recent work in the digital and environmental humanities, or to the accumulating, never-to-be-published dissertations of the unhired—Lindsay Thomas asks us not merely to consider how we read and analyze literary and popular fiction. Rather, in her monograph Training for Catastrophe: Fictions of National Security after 9/11, she asks us to widen our understanding of where, how, and why fiction is produced in the post-9/11 United States, often in forms that fall outside the traditional purview of literary critics. In her effort to understand the post-9/11 US national security state, Thomas turns away from traditional literary objects and toward the fictional productions of the state itself, including training videos, educational comics made by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Centers for Disease Control, tabletop disaster scenarios, and the “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign. This archive of “preparedness materials” does more than show how the state has imagined specific and discrete disasters; Thomas uncovers how these materials use the power of fictionality “to train people to respond to potential future disasters in particular ways,” as the incessant need to “prepare” for every conceivable disaster becomes an end in itself (9). In doing so, Thomas makes an undeniably strong case for the importance of fiction in our contemporary moment, though the resulting picture is far from rosy.The book opens with a striking image: in 2007, the Department of Homeland Security collaborated with SIGMA, a consortium of science-fiction writers and futurists, “to discuss possible future threats to national security” (1). Understanding 9/11 as a “failure of the imagination,” the department turned to science fiction, and fiction more generally, as a way of “creating knowledge about things that haven't happened” (2). This confluence of literature and the state is exemplary of Thomas's core claim that the role of fiction for national security is far from incidental. In fact, Homeland Security stands alone as “the largest federal funder of and advocate for the value of fiction in the United States today,” eclipsing more culturally celebrated initiatives like the National Endowment for the Arts (10). The empirical connections as demonstrated by the SIGMA conference or the Homeland Security budget undergird but do not constitute Thomas's argument, however, which is primarily formal. The book demonstrates how preparedness materials use particular understandings of fiction to produce a particular kind of knowledge, forming “the cornerstone of the national security paradigm known as preparedness” (3).As Thomas argues, the paradigm of preparedness is a fundamentally fictional enterprise (which is not to say it is not also a material one). In this way, she distinguishes herself from other works in security studies such as Joseph Masco's Theater of Operations, Brian Massumi's Ontopower, Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages, and Paul N. Edwards's The Closed World, all of which she draws on. Her core insight emerges not, as in the work of other literary critics, from analyses of literary novels about the post-9/11 world or pop cultural disaster movies that mediate or critique national security; she understands national security itself as a specifically fictional enterprise. This is not to say that national security materials are simply propagandistic lies; as Thomas demonstrates, these materials often highlight and embrace their own fictionality, as in the Centers for Disease Control's comic Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic. The Centers for Disease Control is not trying to convince anyone that a zombie apocalypse is going to happen, but the logic of preparedness insists one prepare for such an event anyway, simply by virtue of that the fact that it can be imagined: “Preparedness operates, in other words, not by tricking people into believing that fictional disasters have actually happened, or even that they could actually happen, but rather by asking people to treat explicitly fictional events as if they are real” (5). Much like literary naturalists from Émile Zola to Richard Wright who wrote novels with scientific aspirations, the “empiricist epistemology” of preparedness allows “fictional disasters” to “function as models of what could or what is likely to happen, and, like scientific models, they are unreal in that they describe or enact things that don't actually exist” (27). We see this epistemology at play when Thomas analyzes the discussion of Hurricane Katrina alongside Hurricane Pam, a fictional disaster that was imagined as part of a Federal Emergency Management Agency preparedness exercise. Information gleaned from this fictional hurricane is, in the mouths of politicians, treated as empirically demonstrated fact, as when Joe Lieberman states that a direct hit on New Orleans by Katrina would have caused “67,000 deaths” because “that is what the Pam exercise projected” (qtd. 30). These are “epistemological, not ontological, similarities,” however; no one has been tricked into thinking that Pam was a real hurricane (27). Nonetheless, “there is actually no epistemological difference between a fictional hurricane and an actual hurricane in the context of preparedness” (30).As Thomas's research demonstrates, the state acknowledges the unreality of fiction but nonetheless maintains that fiction produces knowledge, and in this sense proves more confident in the power and relevance of fiction than many a literary critic. Thus, while scholars of the novel or contemporary fiction will not find extended close readings of canonical authors here, Thomas's book is invaluable for any reader concerned with the uses and abuses of fictionality for (and against) life. While the literary novel is one means through which the power of fictionality takes form in the world, Thomas asks us to expand our understanding of the material (and often dark) purposes to which fiction is put in the contemporary, securitized environment of the US.After establishing this fictional epistemology in the book's first chapter, Thomas continues to trace how different fictional concepts have been deployed by the security state across four additional chapters. The second chapter, which will be of great interest to theorists of the realist novel, argues that preparedness materials produce a form of realism distinct from the literary tradition. Drawing on the work of Catherine Gallagher, she argues that literary realism operates at the intersection of plausibility, probability, and verisimilitude to produce a sense of reality rooted in the probable or likely. Realist texts, of course, engage with and often rely on the improbable (one might consider how the plot of Balzac's realist urtext Père Goriot hinges on Rastignac's highly improbable success at gambling), but Thomas argues that the realism of national security evades the questions of probability altogether by an emphasis on the possible. Thomas traces this sense of realism to the Cold War nuclear scenarios of the RAND Corporation's Herman Kahn. The RANDian scenario uses “the language of quantitative analysis to ground its authority” while occluding actual probabilities (59). Instead, the scenario relied on the asserted authority of the analyst, whose job was not to predict but to produce “narrative simulations of possibilities” (59). By focusing on the possible, the analyst need not even address likelihood, as “improbable events, while unlikely to occur, are nevertheless equally as possible as probable events” (59). The end result of this idea of realism is thus “not that there is no difference between fiction and reality but rather that fiction has a reality all its own”: if a scenario can be imagined, it can and should be prepared for (54).Thomas further examines how the specific fictional concepts of genre, character, and plot—as wielded by the state—train subjects to prepare for disasters as discrete, future events rather than ongoing, systemic ones. In considering genre's power “to produce and structure expectations,” Thomas makes her lone turn to the novel through the airport thrillers of the former national security advisor Richard Clarke (76). By applying conventional structure to formally similar but informationally varied diegetic content, these novels train readers “to understand the future in conventional terms, according to the strictures of their genre,” in much the same way as non-novel forms such as active shooter trainings (98). Readers/trainees are taught to conceive of all disasters, regardless of particularity, as generalizable and interchangeable. In this way, preparedness compensates for its own ineffectiveness, as when the failures of the response to Hurricane Katrina, upon investigation, are revealed not to lie with the state but with the primarily Black victims who failed to adequately prepare. In her discussion of character, this empirical disavowal of Black people's death and suffering is connected to preparedness materials' use of address and figuration.While preparedness materials often include nominally diverse casts, these characters are evacuated of particularity and rendered into the figure of the “resilient individual” who is “almost nonhuman, even nonliving, in their flexibility. Their inhuman ability to survive brings them to the brink of objecthood” (122). By rendering nonwhite characters as generic (and thus implicitly white) “heroes,” preparedness materials foreclose the critique, or even the acknowledgment, of structural and economic forces that predate discrete disasters in favor of individual training toward the inevitable disaster to come. Finally, Thomas considers how a particular “hermeneutics of suspicion” is deployed by projects such as the “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign to train people to imagine (terrorist) “plots” by placing “random, decontextualized objects” within “a narrative context” (178). For example, a backpack in a training video is not in itself important and indeed is not highlighted formally by the video; it is merely one of many objects contained within a static, seemingly objective frame. However, the backpack gains retrospective significance when it is revealed to contain a bomb. The viewer is thus trained to perceive every piece of information as potentially, or even inevitably, culminating in a terrorist plot unless their own intervention prevents such plots from developing. Such readers must “anticipate the end before it happens” in a mode of perception that is formally rooted in fiction rather than empiricism (178).The strength of Training for Catastrophe is its close examination of the internal dynamics of the preparedness paradigm, which explicates how this “process of manufacturing consent among participants” uses fictional concepts to achieve “the consent, however implied or nominal, to continue waging endless war ‘elsewhere’ in the name of national security” (29). The book has less to say about the degree to which this consent, supposedly manufactured, was actually obtained. The US invasion of Iraq produced the largest antiwar protests since the Vietnam War, but this empirically observable lack of consent could not prevent conflict without the substantive muscle of political power. This lack might explain the apparent consent of the governed more than the fictional logic of preparedness materials. The ultimate import of these materials might be better ascertained by a fuller account of how capitalist compulsions structure people's encounters with the state that seeks to train them. Despite often knowing they are engaging in security theater, the individual traveler ultimately submits to TSA regulations—removing their shoes and being blasted with X-rays—not because they have consented to a fictional reality but because they, materially, must get to where they are going (quite possibly as a condition of employment) and lack an alternative means to do so. Of course, an Althusserian understanding of ideology would maintain that the material practice of submission nonetheless constitutes a certain ideological adherence, and Thomas's book in this way provides an indispensable examination of how subjects have ideologically narrated their materially unavoidable adherence to the logics of national security.One of Thomas's primary tasks is to demonstrate that the power of fiction, often discussed in glowing terms, need not be liberatory. Her hope is that the book “puts to rest the idea that such a use of fiction is necessarily progressive, radical, or critical. Imagining new possibilities can be used to constrain political action just as easily as it can be used to encourage it” (200–201). She accomplishes this goal decisively enough that contesting the point might seem like willful or hopeful ignorance.Her book nonetheless demands that we ask if there is an alternative to this ghastly state of affairs, and it provides several in the form of countertexts to the state's materials, including the poetry of Audre Lorde and Jordan Peele's 2017 film Get Out. These texts (neither of which, notably, is a novel) are seen as critiquing and perhaps offering alternatives to the preparedness paradigm. Thomas's most evocative and convincing countertext, however, turns out not to be a text at all. In her epilogue, Thomas discusses a community coalition, Stop Urban Shield, which formed to shut down Urban Shield, “a SWAT team training and weapons expo” in California's Bay Area (201). Stop Urban Shield waged its campaign on both the material and fictional levels as it imagined “preparedness programs that support health and well-being over militarization, social services over policing” (203). The fact that this campaign used fiction for good, however, does not undercut Thomas's claims. This use of fiction is not redemptive for the form as a whole, which remains entangled with the workings of the security state. Rather, what should inspire us from Stop Urban Shield is the coalition's collective, expansive, and insistent nature; it is this “expansive, resolutely social definition of fiction, one that accommodates an understanding of its collective benefits,” for which Thomas ultimately advocates. Such fiction will be of value not by providing “better materials focused on how individuals can prepare themselves for disasters” but by helping enable “collective action against the current practices of the U.S. national security state” (205). This dire need for collectivity, however, cannot be resolved within fictions themselves, although their capacity to aid in its realization cannot be dismissed a priori. Rather, only collective action, through material struggle, can cross the threshold separating the imagined and the real. What role fiction, in the end, can contribute to that struggle is a question that will have to be answered in the streets.