Governing Future Emergencies : Lived Relations to Risk in the UK Fire and Rescue Service

The 21st century has born witness to myriad changes in the way the world is secured from the many emergencies that continually threaten to disrupt it. This book concentrates on two such changes. First, it takes stock of the ever-increasing development and diversification of data and digital technologies that security organisations have at their disposal. Secondly, it examines how these digital devices have fostered a new direction in which security agencies primarily conceive of emergencies as so many risks of the future. Emergency governance has undergone what might be called an anticipatory turn here, with digitally rendered and imagined scenes of future contingency becoming cause and justification for intervention in the here and now. Rather than scrutinising this turn at its most spectacular heights in the domains, for instance, of warfare or counter-terrorism, the book explores the facilitation of risk governance through digital technologies in a more quotidian incarnation; namely by tracing the steps that the United Kingdom’s Fire and Rescue Service (FRS) take to govern fire emergencies whose potential has been identified but have yet to unfold. Delving into the FRS, the book maps out a digital infrastructure that includes various software, institutional processes, multiple forms of risk calculation but also human beings, relations and consciousness and an array of material spaces in which these things exist. Accentuated here is how these components assemble to produce projections of future emergencies on a number of sensorial registers. This infrastructure is shown, in turn, to inform and shape a catalogue of refined modes of action through which interventions on future emergencies are made in the present. Engaging in depth with this infrastructure, the FRS provides an understanding of risk as a lived relation, risk as an organisational ethos whose liveliness is founded upon and reverberates through the relations existing between those people and things operating in the FRS to make sense of potential fire emergencies. Using the concept of lived relation as a foundation, the book develops a critical understanding of anticipatory governance by grasping its resonance with issues emanating in the wider field of security, showing how security figures as a set of practices that rely upon and cultivates affective conditions, that enrols the force of elements like fire into its institutional arrangement, that draw on an array of knowledges to exercise power and, in the process, that instantiate new forms of subjectivity. Acknowledgements 6 Contents 7 Abbreviations 8 List of Figures 9 1: Introduction 10 1.1 Introduction 10 1.2 Risk and Reproblematisation 17 1.3 Methods and the Digital Infrastructure 20 1.4 Chapter Outline 22 References 27 2: Genealogies of the Future: The Emergence of Fire Governance in the UK 30 2.1 Introduction 30 2.2 The Great Fire of London 33 2.3 The Insurance Brigades 36 2.4 A Public Good and Private Enterprise 39 2.5 Fire and War 48 2.6 Conclusion 53 References 55 3: Assembling Interfaces to Make Sense of the Future 58 3.1 Introduction 58 3.2 The FRS’ Digital Infrastructure and Interface 61 3.3 Interface and the Fusion of Cognitive Capacities 66 3.4 Routines and the Unintentional Consequences of Interfaces 70 3.5 Conclusion 73 References 75 4: Exercising Uncertainty: Aesthetic Renderings of Future Emergencies 77 4.1 Thinking Aesthetics, Complex Uncertainty and Decentred Performativity 77 4.2 Designing Exercises 81 4.3 Performing Exercises 82 4.4 The ‘Realism’ of Simulated Futures 87 4.5 Affects, Attunement and Contingency: The Making and Remaking of Protocol 88 4.6 Conclusion 91 References 93 5: Big Data, Subjectification and Preventing Fires 95 5.1 Introduction 95 5.2 Bringing Big Data into the Fire and Rescue Service 100 5.3 Governing the Vulnerable Subject Through Prevention 104 5.4 Counter-Conduct, Counter-Subjectification 105 5.5 Conclusion 114 References 116 6: Be Prepared, To Protect: Detournement and the Forces Behind Governmental Logics 118 6.1 Affective Conditions of Preparedness in Fire Governance 122 6.2 Protection and the Elemental Materiality of Security 128 6.3 Orchestrating Relations Through the Regulatory Reform Order (2005) 130 6.4 Conclusion 134 References 136 7: Conclusion 139 7.1 Lived Relations to Risk 139 7.2 The Politics of Data and Technology 142 7.3 Times of the Future 145 7.4 Risk’s Absence as a Critique of the Present 146 References 149 Index 151 Through an exploration of the United Kingdom Fire and Rescue Service (FRS), this book examines how the emergence of digital technologies, combined with a policy emphasis on risk, have fundamentally transformed the way society is secured against emergencies. Forms of anticipatory governance have developed in which interventions are made in the present but are oriented towards, and justified through, digitally rendered visions of future contingencies. At the same time, risk is understood as a 'lived relation': a set of pervasive knowledge found to cut across and constitute everyday life in the FRS. It is by inquiring into such practices and the new modes of power they support that the book engages with, investigates and conceptualises anew some of the key geo-political issues that characterize security and emergency governance. Appealing to scholars interested in risk, digital technologies and their involvement in matters of governance, the book outlines the forms of knowledge now deployed to make sense of and govern the future. It demonstrates the affective and material forces enrolled in emergency governance and elaborates on the range of temporal entanglements that underpin actions taken to govern emergencies yet to unfold. Ultimately the book explores the genealogies inscribed into risk's present mobilisation and asks the reader to consider how we are made subject to forms of governance oriented towards the future?-- Provided by publisher Front Matter ....Pages i-xiii Introduction (Nathaniel O’Grady)....Pages 1-20 Genealogies of the Future: The Emergence of Fire Governance in the UK (Nathaniel O’Grady)....Pages 21-48 Assembling Interfaces to Make Sense of the Future (Nathaniel O’Grady)....Pages 49-67 Exercising Uncertainty: Aesthetic Renderings of Future Emergencies (Nathaniel O’Grady)....Pages 69-86 Big Data, Subjectification and Preventing Fires (Nathaniel O’Grady)....Pages 87-109 Be Prepared, To Protect: Detournement and the Forces Behind Governmental Logics (Nathaniel O’Grady)....Pages 111-131 Conclusion (Nathaniel O’Grady)....Pages 133-144 Back Matter ....Pages 145-149