Networks Actual and Potential: Think Tanks, War Games and the Creation of Contemporary American Politics

Baxstrom, Richard; Khan, Naveeda; Poole, Deborah; Singh, Bhrigupati

doi:10.1353/tae.2006.0009

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Instead, scenarios secure the legitimacy of hopes by giving them what, after Massumi (2005b), we could term an ‘affective value’ based on their status as ‘affective facts’. Scenario building as a procedure emerges, we should remember, as part of the ingraining of modes of anticipation based on ever vigilant ‘threat‐perception’ in the networks that link think tanks and the state/military apparatus (Baxstrom et al 2005). Defined not by their predictive value, that is a truth value based on their correspondence with reality, scenarios function by establishing ‘threats’ or, in the case of the two reports, a relation between ‘opportunities’ and dwelling at the nanoscale.…”

Section: Scenarios and Disclosing Opportunitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such anticipatory practices are embedded in government and governing – note the development of networks of preemption in relation to biosecurity in the case of Avian Bird Flu, for example (Braun 2006) – so their use in the case of nanotechnology is far from unique. Nor are they new, their contemporary post Second World War origins lie in the relation between think tanks such as the RAND Corporation and the US government (Baxstrom et al . 2005), yet their current ubiquity raises important questions.…”

Section: Conclusion: Nano and Anticipatory Knowledgesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Hope for nanotechnology: anticipatory knowledge and the governance of affect

Anderson

2007

Area

105

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This paper describes how hopes can be, and have been, placed in nanotechnology. Focusing on two recent UK government reports into the future of nanotechnology, by the DTI/OST and MoD, the paper describes how the disclosure of the nanoscale as a place subject to intervention, the act that is taken to define nanotechnology, can be understood in the context of anticipatory knowledge practices that create futures. Because the object of such practices are virtualities, such as opportunities and threats, the paper argues that affect is transversal to both nano-technoscience and anticipatory governance. In conclusion, I open up a set of questions about anticipatory knowledges and argue that the ground that enables hope to be placed in nanotechnology is the event that defines nano -to simultaneously reduce 'life' to matter and to multiply 'life' into a limitless set of materialities.

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Section: Scenarios and Disclosing Opportunitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Conclusion: Nano and Anticipatory Knowledgesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hope for nanotechnology: anticipatory knowledge and the governance of affect

Anderson

2007

Area

105

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“…But relatively less attempt has been made than in the anthropological literatures on power, law, and the state to address economic experience and reasoning in relation to the rhetorics and programs that directly shape that experience and to the theory (or doctrine) that justifies it (although for cases, see Kaplan 2003;Maurer 2002;Mitchell 2002). Modeling by think tanks is crucial here, but our literature is again focused more on the state than the economy (see Baxstrom et al 2006). Doubtless there are many more creative allusions to futures in emergent cultures than I can encompass.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prophecy and the near future: Thoughts on macroeconomic, evangelical, and punctuated time

Guyer

2007

American Ethnologist

671

366

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A view from 1950s and 1960s Britain suggests that the public culture of temporality in the United States has shifted from a consequential focus on reasoning toward the near future to a combination of response to immediate situations and orientation to a very long‐term horizon. This temporal perspective is most marked in the public rhetoric of macroeconomics, but it also corresponds in remarkable ways to evangelicals' views of time. In this article, I trace the optionality and consonance of this shift toward the relative evacuation of the near future in religion and economics by examining different theoretical positions within each domain. In conclusion, I suggest that the near future is being reinhabited by forms of punctuated time, such as the dated schedules of debt and other specific event‐driven temporal frames.

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“…Networks, societies and other organizations may embody atmospheres (in part through the repetition of meetings and other singular-generic occasions) and function atmospherically. In their critical account of the emergence of the 'think tank' as site/scene for thinking, Baxstrom et al (2005) argue that think-tanks have a 'habitual mode of ''thinking-feeling'''. Their examples are security related think-tanks, principally RAND, which produce concepts 'linked to the affective mode of ever-present threat perception, panic and anxiety'.…”

Section: Neoliberal Atmospheresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neoliberal affects

Anderson

2016

Progress in Human Geography

138

107

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The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Neoliberal Affects AbstractClaims about neoliberalism and its geographies frequently involve assumptions about the affective life of neoliberalism and/or neoliberal societies. However, existing cultural approaches to neoliberalism as a discursive formation, an ideology or governmentality collapse a concern with affect into a focus on the operation of signifying-subjectfying processes that make 'neoliberal subjects'. Political economy approaches only make implicit claims about the 'mood' of neoliberal societies. In this The paper aims to supplement cultural analyses of neoliberalism. Whilst there are significant differences and tensions in how representation and signification are understood, cultural work on neoliberalism has been primarily concerned with specifying the effects of signifying-subjectifying processes. The emphasis has been on how neoliberalism as an economic-political formation is discursively or ideologically articulated and expressed, in part through the semantic construction of various supposedly neoliberal things (bodies, identities, subjectivities, and so on).This is important and necessary work. A concern with affect is not other to a concern with signifying-subjectfying mechanisms. But, it is to recognise them as but one form/process of mediation, inseperable from a Euro-Modern version of 'culture'.What a concern with neoliberal affects does, then, is multiple the forms/processes of mediation by attending to how the 'feel of existence' is conditioned and conditions.

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Networks Actual and Potential: Think Tanks, War Games and the Creation of Contemporary American Politics

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Hope for nanotechnology: anticipatory knowledge and the governance of affect

Hope for nanotechnology: anticipatory knowledge and the governance of affect

Prophecy and the near future: Thoughts on macroeconomic, evangelical, and punctuated time

Neoliberal affects

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