Citation

Hu C. Environ. Plann. D Soc. Space 2018; 36(1): 96-113.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/0263775817729377

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This essay examines the temporal logics of contemporary disaster management. I discuss episodes from the expansion of the global disaster management complex--in the United States after WWII, and in Indonesia after the New Order--to characterize the form of futurity established through the technocratic administration of systematically-envisioned catastrophe. Disaster management projects a shallow future whose indeterminacy does not stimulate aspiration toward transcendence of the given, but rather motivates an endless procedural loop of anticipation and pre-emption in order to delay the destruction of the present order. Disaster management thus refashions "action" as the postponement of the future, and in doing so explicates a basic but neglected temporality of liberalism--that of vigilance toward continually-renewed danger.

Language: en