Moving Through the Future

Abstract

From Bergson’s “spatialization of time” to Deleuze’s concept of the “time-image,” it seems clear that time is central to any theory of movement. But what happens to our ability to “move” chronologically through time in the era of preemptive governance and the statistical management of populations? This chapter looks critically and evocatively at what is happening to time in the era of catastrophic risk and how subjects adjust to their own “dividual-ization” in the biopolitical assemblage of preemptive temporality, drawing on the work of Sarah Lochlann Jain. In her studies of the cancer patient’s body in time and risk, Jain argues that “living in prognosis” is a way of moving, albeit one that problematizes attempts to move through linear time. Unable to either anticipate or/and preempt future risk with certainty or mourn a clear and inevitable death, prognosis places the body in the in-between of statistical calculation, ever vulnerable to the emergence of new threats unforeseen, marking a shift in subjectivity and a sense of “the end before the beginning” for bodies sensing their own suspension between life and death as calculated. What happens to memory in such an assemblage of time? This piece offers a critical glimpse into a new and emerging turn in approaches to the governance of traumatic memory, now visible in neuroscience research and humanitarian psychiatric outreach following disasters—preemptively modifying the brain or environment in advance of a potentially traumatic future event. But preemptive approaches fail to eradicate memory in its nonlinearity, instead burning into memory the very trace of preemption itself, the insecurity Massumi argues is produced in the seeking of preemptive securitization, future haunting effect. Memory gets caught in the same temporal contradictions of prognosis time.