Paper short abstract:

In this paper I analyze how scenarios work as technologies of uncertainty, both in their conceptualization of the future and, especially, in their enactment. I further argue that in their execution, scenarios generates uncertainty as a form of knowing and practicing the future.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I examine scenario planning as a central technology within the Israeli preparedness apparatus. I analyze how the scenario works as a technology-based uncertainty, both in its conceptualization of the future and, especially, in its enactment. Though designed to challenge responders, the scenario does not represent a worst-case event but a plausible one. Moreover, although the scenario is based on a preselected, well-designed event, I argue that once practiced, it is actualized as a multiplicity of subevents, or incidents, that the various participants sometimes enact with unexpected consequences. With this technology, participants are directed neither toward predicting the future nor toward discovering the best solutions for an unknown future. Rather, the technology generates uncertainty through its execution, from which new problems are extracted.

The analysis adds to recent studies of security and preparedness that track the emergence of forms of securing the future that speak to a nonquantifiable mode of governing, one that responds to the problem of future uncertainty rather than risk (O'Malley 2004; Samimian-Darash and Rabinow 2015). However, rather than focus solely on how the scenario, as an uncertainty-based technology, conceptualizes the future and approaches that problem (Samimian-Darash 2013), I examine how it works in practice. I thus explore how, in its execution, scenario planning generates uncertainty as a form of knowing and practicing the future.