the wherewithal

The day after the British government raised the UK terrorist threat level to severe, foreign secretary David Miliband came onto the Andrew Marr show to tell him that—in respect of the threat posed by Al-Qaeda ‘the danger remains very real’. He went on: ‘You’ve seen this week that the Home Secretary has thought it right to raise the threat level back to the level it’s been for most of the period since 9/11…It remains the case that we need to be extremely vigilant.’ At more or less the same time, I was reading Massumi’s essay on the US system of colour coded terror alerts (currently sitting at a relatively becalmed yellow (for ‘elevated’), I note).¹  (If I had more time and I wasn’t just a little intimidated, I would be tempted acquiesce to the shouty instruction on www.terror-alert.com to ‘PUT A REAL-TIME TERROR-ALERT WARNING ON YOUR WEBSITE’). Given this serendipity, what has Brian Massumi to teach to David Miliband?

Massumi opens with a Bushism: ‘The future will be better tomorrow’. Says/said Bush. (Except that it is likely he didn’t and that Dan Quayle, as Massumi notes, did. But that…is not the point.) For Massumi, this mangled bit of syntax speaks to the particular relationship to the future that these alerts have. They address not only the British/American citizen, but also the future. They address the future by promising a better tomorrow, that might one day progress gently from yellow to blue. And maybe, just maybe, one day from blue to green (the sylvan world of a ‘low risk of terrorist attacks’). But, argues Massumi, in so doing they also bring the future into the present. The future becomes a (Deleuzian) ‘virtual cause’—an effect of which may be—but not necessarily is—fear. The future, populated by not yet to be’s and possibly might happens, is invited to act in present, but–in all its colour coded vaguery—retains more than enough ambiguity/indeterminacy for the general public to be unable to respond in any meaningful way (what, for instance, might being extremely vigilant practicably involve?). As Massumi says, ‘A threat is unknowable. If it were known in its specifics, it wouldn’t be a threat. It would be a situation—as when they say on television police shows, “we have a situation”—and a situation can be handled. A threat is only a threat if it retains an indeterminacy.’

It is precisely this indeterminacy that David Miliband both invokes and struggles with in his interview with Marr. He—presumably—knows more than us, having access to some of the intelligence that has informed the raised threat level. He of course can’t convey this to us/Marr. But even so, this intelligence is still ambiguous. Even with his likely access to a wealth of intelligence information, for Miliband, the indeterminacy of the threat differs only by degree. Perhaps nothing will happen, but perhaps it will. Perhaps the intelligence is wrong, or perhaps he doubts it. Or perhaps plotters will bungle, or perhaps they will attack somewhere else. But all he has to give to Andrew Marr is the threat level. And a face set to stern. And the danger that remains ‘very real’.

Of course, this latter invocation of the hyper-real is something of a tautology: dangers are inherently real; they differ only by the amount of danger, not their reality. Swimming in a flood of doubt, Miliband strikes for reality, but finds it insubstantial, leaving him foundering to find another, realer version.

But rather than judge, perhaps Milliband and Massumi might be made to agree. Miliband evokes a real that not only transcends what we know, but also what he knows. A real that is a part of/immanent to, yet beyond what it is possible to know. Where Miliband finds the very real is perhaps where Massumi also might find ‘the virtual’, that realm of sheer potential, folding together pasts, presents, futures, with what could and should have been. Either way, such a meeting of minds is entirely in this spirit; after all, as Massumi says, ‘The virtual is a lived paradox where what are normally opposites coexist, coalesce, and connect.² That being the case, Massumi: meet Miliband.