AFTERWORD Episodes or Incidents SEEKING SIGNIFICANCE Paul Rabinow Episode: “A significant incident: an event that és part of but distinct fom ‘a greater whole and that often has specific significance." Incidents “Something that happens..an event that may result ina criss.” “The essays collected here display an extravagant range, depth, and scale of insights, reflections, and explorations covering an extensive array of topics. At fist blush, these topics appear to form a quite heterogeneous set, if they form a set at all That being sai, these chapters and their toples cluster around the question of what to make of a burgeoning constellation of expetts and the frequently incongruous (or inconclusive) claims to expertise that these experts produce, That clustering of claims and interpretations grouping episodes and incidents so as to make sense ot them operates ata second-order level. These papers are acute observations of other observers observing. Such second-order observation provides something that the majority of other experts, in their claims to immediate relevance and significance, seem unable to do: intelligently and tentatively provide the contours of those rmilieus into which they intervene, with attention to the fact that theirinterven- tions might conteibute to shaping those milleus. Of equal import, the chapters convincingly provide a preliminary Identification of the venues for the analysis land evaluation of the flow of data these experts are authorized to contend with, make sense of, aid propose responses for—in first-order terms. ‘Such clustering, such set-making, such second-order ordering, of cours, Is. no accident. The chapters in this volume have been assembled precisely with anawareness ofthe existingheterogeneity of topics a well asthe need tobe attentive tole ationality o ationalities that may well e linking them now orn the neat future, The editors have brought together authors who proceed ftom a broadly «omion working hypotess or orientation, to witht these heterogeneous topics provide aient sounding points fr an early cartography ofan emergent problem- space, The chapter provide evidence and arguments that this problem-space, if {eis such, contains numerous indications of ts signticance--sclentiicall, poi cally and ethically. These soundings advance through detailed attention to and accounts of incidents and episodes; thy righty eschew claims to epochs or wholly formed fel of significance, Tek igorows abstention from pushing the mate- nial farther than i actualy deserves i, to my mind, the stength of these report. These chapters are stating points fo inquiry; they ae serious initia formulations, not conclusions ‘hus, we lear about a vast ange of incidents and episodes: the framing of debates over the salty of ood in France the mutually contested understandings of global bi migration paters; the tact knovledge required to bla polio vinus from is DNA sequence; now nurses and doctors ready themselves for potential «epidemics: the multiple aspets of containment procedures and preparenes tac ties; the different undertekings of diverse NGOs; the state of play of axganization, ‘and reorganization in federal and international bureaucracies; the role of shadow ‘organizations in the world and the place of such knowledge in the imagination of self-styled hard-heatla! and sincere experts; the production of an imaginary of virtual terrorists, and she practices of official counterterzorist; the growth of vast budgets for security planning and implementation, Throughout, we learn of the ever accelerating expansion of expertise and more expertise, and the warlike rumblings of diverse organizational contests over tertitory and authority. {In sum, reading these chapters fn and of themselves provides an education, ‘They are instructive aboat how knowedge-dependent are major sector ofthe contemporary world; how these knowledge dependent sector interface wih and tami fom the mlcopactics of everyday ie aswel as stage global native Inde pages we encounter an ever growing and steming\y neverending tonan of daa, facts, interpretatons,contesations, dputations, demonstatins, ne corrations inferences, dtuctionscbuseation anda pervaeserseofcontson, cloaked for the public—and most tellingly, for many of the experts themseives—in. eclarations of assurance and reassurance ‘This cacophony of experts and expertise is permeated with and molded by affect waves of urgency and vigilance. The imperative to be attentive to that which, ‘might be or is emerging (or in some cases, we suspect, Is probably already present) is heartfelt (as the old metaphor would have it) and deeply cathected (asan older knowledge system would put it), The range of affects associated with this urgent need to know covers and infleets an equally impressively wide spectrum of other affects, sentiments, passions and moods ranging from fear, care, shame, guilt, pride, arrogance, humility, and the like, to the occasional touch of despir. and then, infrequently it seems, there ate touches of humor and splashes of ironic dlistancing from the utter seltimportance of ital. ‘What is one to make of this porridge of affect and truth clatms? One must never lose sight of the fact that these experts operate within a partially self constructed set of milieus and venues characterized by a vertiginous whipping. ‘motion of too muuch information countered but not complemented by too litle information, There are too many incidents and too few events; oo many episodes and too few plausible natratives. This information imbalance as well as is assocl- as but it does attaln ated significance vacuum is hardly restricted to security dma a specific salience there, That assemblages are taking shape and being recemposed, projected, and critiqued is certain. The significance of allthis activity remains far from clear even though there is a constant and insistent demand to mk (> ‘Thus, we learn about a range of diverse yet seemingly consonant preparedness practices in domains concerning what we eat, what we drink, how we trivel—the ecology of our innards as wel as of spatial configurations large and small: At the same time we earn about the industry of Insurance and its steady probabilty series, painstakingly built over the decades of construction of social modernity (both capi- {alist and socialist) when avalanches of numbers may have stripped individual ats and the cosmos of their semantic underpinnings but at east demonstrated regular land sepeated patterns. What good Is probability thinking if events do not occur ‘and recut? Today, while such probability-based insurance rationality is certainly sill present in certain well swept comers like life insurance, more recently—as the chapters in this volume demonstrate—attention and technical repowerhas been‘tured instead toward incidents and episodes that do not belong to such verifiable series and whose consequences are not only not strictly calculable but imagined on. the basis ofthe aforementioned work's being catastrophic or disastrous ot traumatic ‘0s vital or crucial or clical. Of course, which of these qualiiers is the right one is ‘not yet stabilized either in an institutional sense or in the cultural imaginary. No ‘one can say with certainty what to think about security; bu that does not prevent an ever increasing body of experts from being paid, trained, cultivated, and incited 10 recite what they know or claim to know. The best of them may deploy subjunc- tives but nevertheless continue to speak and write and prognosticate and imagine and plot and evitique ina crescendo of production of serious speech acts. For the ‘most pat, such truth claims are cast analytically and affectively in outdated modes, ‘What, site all (s the mathematics appropriate to incidents and episodes? As old Luhimann seemed to have taken great pleasure in saying: the future is uncertain and contingent, so act now! Or prepare to act as soon as possible or whenever it is the right time to do so, That tine might be soon, or gone, or never to come, or ust around the comer, or about to happen, or eventually certain to appear, it seems. On the second anniversary of Husricane Katrina, there had not bbeen any major hurricanes passing through New Orleans. There will be, of that we are certain, But are we prepared? Are we secure? Ate we safe? To pose the ques tion isto answer it but not yet to espond appropriately. Was Katrina an event? An. episode? Or an incident? Which models and which strategy will provide the best answer to those questicns? Act now! The future depends on i day, the situation seems to be the opposite of Purgatory In the Christian purgatory, souls waited for an indefinite amount of time—divine temporality be- fore passing on to the heavenly spheres that eventually awaited them, In a purga- totfal reyime, intercession might or might not help; but it certainly could not burt tierce there seemed to be something to do. And regardless of who was acting, and whose influence might or might not count, one thing was apparently certain: if ‘you made it to purgatory you could only remain there or ascend. Purgatory was the Christian answer to tragedy: ‘Today we seein to be in another kind of antechamber, awaiting the descent Into catastrophe through the single episode whose vetualities were andl ate incal- culable and which may or may not be part of a series or regular pattern. We are not even certain when we might descend or where we might descend to, Today. |e seem to have moved from the narrative simplcities of Christian purgatory into some contemporary Buddhist space of seemingly endless hells with their demons, antechambers, imagined trials, and travails, all the while not knowing whether this is all the torment ofthe sou! the tumultuous end of some airport, city, water supply, nesting pattern, viral mutation, or vaecine run amok. We do nt know ‘whether we have encountered bureaucracies unleashed or in utter stasis, an lessons learned ot mutilated ffom an earlier Armageddon that did not take place, perhaps because it was prevented and contained or detersed. In the contemporary world, “The Tibetan Book ofthe Dead seems more relevant than Seneca's notebooks. So, let's plan, interpret, decipher, decode, analyze, synthesize, diagnose, con- test, approve, improve, convince, deery, denounce, and raise holy hell. And above al, act now! Not acting has consequences even if they are not knowable, Given. that, let's imagine, script, narzate, role play: the theater of the virtual has never been more apropos. And if nothing happens? Perhaps something ominous has been forestlled. Who knows for sure? {As billions of dollars circulate in venues of expert uncertainty, one might wonder whether the ocean's temperature continues 0 tise, as reports emerge of lacicrs cascading sheets of ice into the waters of what used to be the Gulf Stearn. (One might wonder whether obscure terorists in Islamic lands are transmitting and teaching that tacit Knowledge of viral manipulation they learned at MI" or Stan ford; or whether the potential unteashers of viral Uureals sxe the builiant graduate students who have trained their whole lives to succeed and can no Jongerstand the delay of living, choosing to accelerate things by hacking their way into ignominy ‘and fame. Is that new unclassified bacteria an escapee from a Tab; or isit simply the evolutionary product of the vast gorging markets of the prosperous Chinese, ‘where untold bounty of vital things yield both error and selectivity betore tying parasitically along trans-Siberian and trans-Pola routes, eventually dropping their feces over the industrialized chicken farms of Egypt—or was itn Egypt hat they picked up the mutations in the fist place? And has your grant been approved by the Committee on Human Subjects? |And is your patent application being submitted to the DoD or to the CS. Patent ‘office? And what if intellectual property is being infringed in the mountains of