Abstract
Control rooms routinely deal with happenings that might become events. They attempt to hide events and their possibility from the users of infrastructure by undertaking various forms of action to stop events coming to pass. Based on ethnographic research in a motorway control room, in this paper we describe how events are grasped and handled and subject to the effect of control. Focusing on how the promise of control is provisionally achieved through detection–diagnosis–response work, we show how control room action is situated on the ambiguous line between event and non- or quasi-event and involves making happenings that might be or might become events into their opposite: non-events, or routine occurrences. We use the case of the work of control rooms in dialogue with Michel Foucault on the relation between ‘government and event’ and Lauren Berlant on ‘modes of eventfulness’ to challenge the emphasis on the event as dramatic transformation in some current research on securing life and some geographical work on events. Paying close attention to what control rooms do shows the multiplicity of relations between government and (non)event, and invites us to expand the ‘modes of eventfulness’ that social and cultural geographers learn to sense and disclose.
Highlights
Les salles de contrôle s’occupent systématiquement d’occurrences qui pourraient devenir des événements
We argue that the ordinary work of control rooms, the actions of detecting and diagnosing events and responding, has much to teach geographers about events
We summarize control rooms as a particular kind of site/process that deals with events and express and enact a particular relation between government andevent: a logic of detection–diagnosis–response
Summary
It is to suspend claims about the event’s irruptive force and follow the multiple ways in which government relates to events of varying forms and types.‘Event’is simultaneously; that which government might, intentionally or otherwise, produce; that which is in excess of government to be feared and stopped or halted; that which changes in form and intensity through the actions of government; and that which is a more or less intense problem that government thinks-feels, problematizes, and responds to This starting point disrupts some of the ways in which‘the event’has been discussed in existing geographical research on how liberal life is secured today. To characterize the specific relation or relations with events in control rooms?
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