For all its effects in terms of rearticulating the modes of subjectivity that the FRS organise themselves around and instantiate, it is also important to think of the MOSAIC software discussed in Chap. 5 as emerging through a process wherein the FRS acquire software from private developers and apply it for their own purposes. This kind of redeployment bears semblances to what Mackenzie Wark in Molecular Red (2015), borrowing from the situationists, refers to as a detournement in software form. For Wark, detournement refers to processes underpinned by a refraction of ‘ affects, perceptions, and concepts from one domain of labour to another’ (2015, 218). Detournement helps to explain further risk as a lived concept. Everyday practices of technological customisation like that witnessed in the previous chapter demonstrate another route taken by the FRS to better know and to articulate risk. The forms of risk profiling that are in part underpinned by the customisation of MOSAIC rise to the fore by assembling and synthesising together discrete data streams. The consolidation of risk profiles here relies, at the same time, on the insertion of things which exceed the digital infrastructure altogether. Detailed case histories of past events come into contact with the probabilistic calculations newly acquired software make. Detournement thus pulls into encounter with one another heterogeneous forms of knowledge. But it can also be unpicked in terms of its political ramifications. As noted in the last chapter, one matter which arises with MOSAIC is the increasing influence of private companies and their interests in issues of governance. Although refashioned and redeployed, software developers begin to bear influence in the practices of government through the software and data they sell. Furthermore, the fact that data other than that which are digitally available are synced into risk’s rendition begs questions and raises concerns regarding the transparency of governmental practice. Checked and verified against fire investigation case histories, the risk profiles applied to general populations are shaped by material that, because of its very confidentiality, would have been untraceable if our examination was to only focus on the FRS’ use of modes of knowledge that have been generated solely through digital technology. By taking a more expansive view, we were able to identify how forms of knowledge beyond the digital technologies that the FRS have at their disposal are ingratiated into prevailing renditions of fire risk and those especially vulnerable to fire.

Looking back to how this book started, in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, it might not come as a surprise that the appropriation and application of software is not the only form of detournement that a day in the life of fire risk governance bears witness to. Regardless of their location, the FRS are never too detached from the broad strokes that animate the security context of the Western world. Along with the software they use, the FRS’ consolidated strategic approach to governing fire emergencies is one that sits in tow and develops with the broader perturbations of the wider security apparatus. Along with buying databases and exporting data, it appropriates and redeploys different strategies used to mitigate the effects of emergencies such as resilience, response, preparedness, prevention and protection. These strategies might be better thought, as others have discussed, as governmental logics (Collier 2009). A number of things might be made of the term governmental logics. In line with Wark’s emphasis in relation to detournement, governmental logics must at some point be granted some kind of affective status. In other words, such logics shape and organise the embodied and felt courses of action taken by responders to govern emergencies. On the one hand this element of governmental logics might be judged by its specific outcomes. Here logics are realised in terms of how the labour of response is divided, involving questions concerning who attends the emergency with what resources, where and, indeed, what authority is embedded in the set of actions that are carried through when formalised by a specific logic.

Complicated by affect, logics might be said to mediate the encounter between emergency responders and the event itself. Governmental logics can thus be referred to as ontogenetic in the way that Brian Massumi uses the term (2011). The action taken in the deployment of a governmental logic always rests on and produces concurrent renditions and imaginings of the object-event to which it is oriented. But for Massumi, it is important here to emphasise what he refers to as the ‘politicality of process’ (2011, 13) embedded in ontogenesis. ‘Process’ (ibid.), for Massumi, ‘is only perishingly about being. But it is everywhere and always about powers of existence in becoming’ (ibid.). What ontogenetic qualities mean when it comes to engaging with the set of strategies crafted to govern emergencies is that the courses of action honed and enacted not only carry with them particular articulations of the emergencies to which they attend. Rather, the ongoing enactment of a governmental logic makes and remakes the sense of the event that proliferates and which it seeks to control. Following Brassett and Vaughn-Williams on resilience (2015), a performative potential is realised anytime an authority decides on a particular course of action to be followed in governing an emergency. In deciding the strategy to be used, the contours of the event’s reality are carved out.

Different forces shape and underpin the array of strategies that can be deployed to both formalise courses of action and, at the same time, articulate the emergency in some form. In his work on the techniques and strategies used to govern in and through emergencies, Ben Anderson (2010) has shown for instance how anticipatory modes of governance bear nuanced, yet crucially important differences from one another in terms of how they constitute temporal relations between their executors and the events they address and govern. Being anticipatory, all such strategies of course engage with and think of the emergency as a future state of affairs, rather than a traumatising event of the past or an inchoate malaise unravelling in the present. But each strategy will attend to the future emergency at a different point in its potential occurrence. We might take a comparison between preparedness and prevention to exemplify Anderson’s argument here. Whilst as seen in Chap. 5, prevention, on the one hand, is used to eliminate the risk of an emergency from occurring altogether. Preparedness, on the other, seeks to ensure the mobilisation of resources in instances where attempts to stop the risk through prevention have failed. Each strategy has a different effect in terms of reinforcing or maintaining the normalised life that emergencies threaten to disrupt. Whereas prevention seeks to stop an identified threat from occurring in the first place, thus allowing for the continuation of the regular rhythm of socio-material order, preparedness assumes that emergencies cannot be stopped and takes steps to deal with the disruptions that emergencies provoke when they do occur.

For Massumi, the ontogenetic articulation of emergencies by strategies used to govern works backwards too. An emergency’s rendition, in other words, shapes the possible range of strategies that can be used to govern it. So in emergencies pre-determined as ‘natural’, authorities must find ways to act within them, according to their apparently inexorable nature. Modes of governing are not only legitimated, however, by the way in which emergency events are represented. Rather the particular form that a strategy comes in appears necessary and beyond debate, with any other approach pre-emptively assumed to fail. This is evident in Massumi’s writing about what he refers to as the indiscriminateness of Hurricane Katrina: ‘Given the indiscriminateness of the environment’s autonomous activity… environmentality must systematically work the “regulation of effects” rather than the cause’ (2015, 22). For Massumi, the indiscriminateness of the events is pivotal here. Bearing no target beyond widespread damage, the prescribed ‘nature’ of the emergency means that response, as specific governmental logic, is required and that there is no space for any preventative forms of action.

Below, the book turns to consider through the lens of ontogenetic processes the enactment of two such governmental logics which have been appropriated and applied to the case of governing fire emergencies. The chapter first shows how preparedness, as a generic strategy of emergency governance, is ingratiated into the daily life of attending to fire emergencies as risks. The chapter then turns to address how modes of protection are brought to bear on fire risk governance. Albeit in different ways, both of these logics offer further insight concerning the different sites of power that take an increasingly influential role in the FRS’ operation and the problems that emerge therein. The chapter pays close attention here to the affective and material forces that, via the adoption of specific governmental logics, get enrolled in emergency governance and what affect these forces have on understandings of fire risks that proliferate.

6.1 Affective Conditions of Preparedness in Fire Governance

In its incarnation in the FRS and indeed across the broader security apparatus, the construction of ‘being prepared’ is slippery in terms of the set of relations it bears to emergencies and the overall, ongoing perception of emergencies its practitioners operate through. At once it is anticipatory. To prepare and be prepared involves taking action and entering into an affective state that develops in lieu of an event which appears with varying degrees of accuracy on the horizon. At the same time it is a style of government that does not attempt to stop emergencies from happening. Being prepared sees emergencies as inevitable and accounts for attempts to mitigate their effects. When an emergency is prepared for, it is already adjudged as beyond the grasp of much of the anticipatory arsenal that governments possess. Nascent within the logic of preparedness is the belief that emergencies at best stretch and, at worst threaten to overwhelm, the capability of the state overall. Huge budget cuts to emergency response implemented by the government in the UK since 2010 has meant that this understanding of emergencies as inexorable forces able to compromise any mitigatory resources the state has at its disposal have intensified in recent years. In 2013, for example, the government was criticised for the slow response and lack of preparedness for flooding emergencies that drastically disrupted the functioning of infrastructure across the South East of England.Footnote 1,Footnote 2 This criticism was levelled at the government even though the South East in many respectsFootnote 3 receives more public funds than any other area of the UK despite being simultaneously the richest area.

Carrying with it an immediate rendition of the emergency encountered whilst reflecting conflicts of interest between different spaces, the political and ontogenetic implications of preparedness rise to the fore here. But how does preparedness become enacted and shape fire governance operations in particular? In short, it does so by attempts to ensure that proportionate human and non-human resources are ready to, and capable of, affording response in a way that acclimates to the belief that the next fire emergency is a matter of when, not if. Leaning on Pete Adey and Ben Anderson’s (2012) work, it is evident that, in developing preparedness and being prepared, authorities assert power in situations by opening up an ‘interval’ between the present and a future characterised by emergency. This interval is seen to create the possibility for informed, reflexive decision making to establish and coordinate response efforts. For the authors, an interval is a temporal state that governments work to position themselves in to create the opportunity for intervention. Drawing on exercises similar to those discussed in Chap. 4 and how they create atmospheres of perceptible urgency, the authors show how intervals operate through the establishment of affective-based encounters between responders and the imminence of the event to which they will attend. That is, the relations that hold between responders and the potential emergency situation are framed to induce bodily states that enable the governmental logic of preparedness to be enacted.

This notion of interval can be developed further still with the case of fire governance. What fire governance allows us to see in particular is how intervals are moments and encounters opened up in a way that speaks to the technologically mediated nature of relations between responders and potential emergencies. In other words, how intervals are crafted in a way that is facilitated through the digital technologies that those governing fire have at their disposal. Considered as something that emanates from and is organised through technologies, intervals can be thought of as temporally punctuated and affectively felt in other ways too. Relying in part on technologies which are in continual operation, intervals always exist potentially; as moments that can be suddenly brought into effect as and when required. Intervals are not just temporary fleeting moments, then. Instead, they exist somewhat as a general condition to the life of emergency responders who have to be ever-alert for the next emergency. Intervals are thus enrolled as an element in the everyday routines through which risk is brought to life in emergency response.

Extending understandings of the interval in these ways requires a return to a moment spent in the FDNY’s control room in Brooklyn and reflecting on the alertness of operators there. Ushered into his office by his secretary, the Fire Chief I had arranged to meet turned to face me with his phone resting between his chin and shoulder. Through hushed, frustrated utterances, he directed his secretary to take me to see the control room whilst he rounded up his call. Peering to the furthest wall as I crossed the threshold in the control room, I saw an array of massive wide screen monitors side by side. On one, a news presenter outlined a story’s latest development whilst a ticker at his midriff moved longways indicating fluctuations in stock prices and sports scores. Maps of the city were projected on another screen. These maps were adjacent to real-time reports concerning the operation of the city’s infrastructure. In front of these three gargantuan screens were three short rows of workstations occupied by control room operators. After introductions I was taken through all the uses of different sources of information that were present. The operator described how these screens, which effectively track local and national events, run all through the day and night so that, if a fire or another emergency takes place, information can be sourced from a wide range of sources. Beyond the screens themselves, further information will be harvested from the operator’s own interface with the computer immediately in front of them by checking social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. In the event of a fire, these various sources would be accompanied by information generated via communications with firefighters on the scene.

The control room thus described shows that a variety of media sources, without any explicit intent from their developers, will be used for the purposes of emergency preparedness. But what happened next in the control room was just as important for discussions of emergency preparedness. In the middle of taking me through this abundant collection of technology, the operator was informed of two fires taking place simultaneously in Mid-Town Manhattan. Immediately on reception of this news, my physical existence seemed to disappear in the eyes of the operator. I was forgotten all about as he quickly swivelled his chair away from me and towards his computer screen. Here he began to assemble every information source possible at his disposal to aid response personnel on their way to the scenes. Fire engines were tracked as they moved through traffic. Simultaneously, requests were sent for information regarding the availability of special resources such as cherry pickers and breathing apparatuses. He scoured databases in an attempt to ascertain information about the site itself and sought to clarify whether the help of police or paramedics was needed. Somewhere in this moment, whether at the point he turned to his computer or began to ask questions to extract the fires’ exact locations, preparedness slipped almost unawares into actual response, where action is taken to attend to the fire emergency in its real-time unfolding. Not wishing to concentrate on this world of response, it is necessary to step back from this temporal breach, rewind to the moments leading up to it and consider the way in which the control room spatialises and materialises the interval of preparedness and induces a continual embodied state of awareness in those that need to be prepared.

To do so, it is important to reconsider the effects and purposes of those technologies that operators have at their disposal and which constitute the control room’s surroundings. Filling the control room with the screens described, operators are not simply ensuring that they have a wide range of informational sources at their command. Although certainly relevant for larger emergencies, much of the information that sources possess would certainly not be used to inform response to fire emergencies. A household fire would not make national news. Neither would it have ramifications for the stock market. The screens and the flurry of information that continually flows across their surface could be seen to act as a continual stimulant instead, continually peppering the awareness, alertness of the operators. The screens serve to maintain a continual connection between operators, often sitting dormant for hours on end, and the ever-present potentiality that an emergency might spark into life. Their affect resonates with the observations contained in Jonathan Crary’s book 24/7 (2013). For Crary a variety of technologies and their development point to the emergence of a new human subject entirely. It is a subject who, through their ever-more intimate rapport with technologies, are steadily but surely losing their ability to rest and sleep. Perhaps this continual sense of restlessness finds one of its incubators in the control rooms thus described.

Having the screens continually running acts as a kind of reinforcement too of the ontological premises upon which preparedness rests. Above, it was documented how preparedness creates a perception of the emergency as an event that will inevitably re-occur. Placing themselves amidst these sources of information, operators tap into and access a world that is equally beyond their control but which might help to inform response to emergencies whenever they arise and from wherever they emerge. The vast sources of information projected through the screens enable life in the control room to be shaped and informed by the wider contingent, inexorable world out of which emergencies arise. At the same time, access to the vast range of informational flows contained within the technologies present means that operators, and thus response more broadly, underpinned by the information they generate, possess a level of flexibility in moving from preparedness to response in an instant. The operator was able to invest himself in a world of data flows and informational conduits immediately upon hearing about the fire with no sense of delay.

As an affective state that is conjured across and through the technological materialities constitutive of this the control room as a space, intervals can be defined beyond their existence as temporary and fleeting, as eruptions between serialised meta-stable conditions of normal life. In the control room, intervals are part and parcel of this normal life. They are routine and enwrapped within routines that are continually kept alive through human interaction with the technologies around them. As a generalised condition, intervals here resonate too with J.D. Dewsbury’s work on habit (2014). For Dewsbury, habit would not simply refer to repeated activities over and again. Instead, habit creates ‘bodily dispositions for action’ (2014, 44) which can be mobilised instantaneously. The interval in the control room can be induced because the operator has stimulated a sense of ever-ready alertness and awareness, making them capable of quick movement, switching from dormancy to a heightened sense of necessity as they rapidly mobilise resources. Furthermore, intervals also reflect relations between bodies and material surroundings in a similar way to habits. For Dewsbury ‘Habit pushes us to look at how the molecular agencies and forces that the material cues of the milieus in which we live come to shape us’ (2014, 43). Intervals are quickly mobilised and taken up out of the interstices and entanglements cultivated between operators and the myriad technologies which surround them in daily life.

For all it reveals about preparedness as an interval, the control room is not the only place where preparedness is enacted. It is also present and made possible in spaces that could possibly be considered as more detached from emergencies, where emergencies appear less imminent but are nonetheless related to as future inevitabilities. It is found, for instance, in the moments of interface which orchestrate risk analysis involving FSEC software already discussed in Chap. 3. Understood as an event to take place in a future beyond immediacy, Chap. 3 demonstrated how the task of analysts here is to draw on their own capacity for imagination to envision what resources will be needed to ensure the service’s rapid mobilisation when emergencies do come to pass. Rather than appearing as a generalised condition between every emergency, the interval created here is one that operates through the manipulation and spatial arrangement of resources before the event. Intervals are thus created here well in advance of event itself but nevertheless fit into a broader repertoire of manoeuvres by which the FRS ready themselves for the next fire.

The intervals that enact preparedness are, of course, oriented towards the future emergency. However, the enactment of intervals reflects their entanglement within a much more complex temporal fix. A discrete set of temporal relations are found to develop in the intervals discussed here. In the control room, intervals are ingratiated as normalised aspects of life by its co-option into the sense of alertness that prevails continuously. In FSEC, intervals are imagined with a different sense of temporal punctuation in mind. Rather than being evident where resources are taken up when an emergency is deemed imminent, intervals are planned and plotted amidst the broader normalised flows that have developed gradually to collective constitute circulation in space. Possessing different senses of the temporality of the emergency they will operate within, intervals are consolidated furthermore, in and by the relations between human and digital software. Intervals are thus also materially constructed in both cases. As much on the computer screen where FSEC plays out as amidst the numerous screens in the control room, intervals are made possible by the assembly and configuration of different data flows, opening up moments of decision making whether in advance of an emergency or in the earliest moments of its onset, engendering the transfer from preparedness to response.

Despite developing in rapport with technologies grounded in the processing of different types of language, both intervals too are premised on the enrolment of more-than-representational forces. Whereas in the control room a bodily sense of alertness prevails, analysts interfacing with FSEC draw on their capacity for imagination in analysis that is otherwise constrained to the logics of probability inscribed in the algorithm the software uses. That these more-than-representational forces are enveloped in dynamic processes of redeployment that feature in the FRS might not necessarily come as a surprise. Much literature has arisen to describe the state of affairs in which fear and anxiety areinduced and harnessed as security measures, particularly in the domain of counter-terrorism. Signs in stations, adverts on televisions, free to download government sponsored podcasts, catastrophe films and 24/7 news have set new tones of hyper-vigilance in everyday life in cities where emergencies always exist as imminent at worst and potential at best. But their very ubiquity perhaps reveals the uniqueness of the case in point. Embedded in aspects of daily life, anxiety is now something that proliferates across general publics and makes those publics anew. Elaborated here instead is how similar states are mobilised in those actually governing.

6.2 Protection and the Elemental Materiality of Security

As a governmental logic , protection in some ways bears, performs and rests upon a similar temporal configuration as that evident where preparedness is examined. Such is the case insofar as protection too encounters emergencies as events that are inevitable. Protection confronts the emergency at the juncture where strategies to stop it altogether have failed in their bid to take hold of the situation. Scratch underneath the surface, however, and differences between protection and preparedness do rise to the fore. Whereas preparedness is anticipatory in that it ensures alertness and rapid mobilisation, protection anticipates through attempting to safeguard and mitigate the effects that an emergency might have. Unlike preparedness, then, protection does not establish intervals and momentary gaps in the contingent unravelling of events. Rather, it allows the emergency to occur with whatever force it possesses and seeks to implement measures to defend against its consequences.

In some ways the efficacy of protection derives from the respect that it affords to the multiple material forces both enwrapped in and mutually co-producing the event itself. The envelopment of material forces within protective security measures is initially evident if we inquire into the steps necessarily taken to protect the world from emergencies. Rather than working on an affective, sensorial register as is evident with preparedness, protection secures by working through material things otherwise conceptualised. Protection is described frequently as a means by which to instil security into the built environment. Literature has flourished detailing about how protective security is present in a diverse range of spaces, from street barricades to elaborate flood defence systems. In relation to critical infrastructure protection, Claudia Aradau (2010) has argued that, rather than passive, such materials play a key agential role that is central to securitisation because they are embedded in iterative interactions with human decision makers, wider security discourse and other types of active non-human objects in negotiating different security practices. Coaffee et al. (2009) might be said to pursue this line of argument in relation to counter-terrorism by showing how security measures built in to cities are shaped in a way that is cognisant of the different effects that such measures have according to their relative visibility amongst the public.

What has yet to receive sustained attention is in some ways the other side of the equation. That is, how protective security is instantiated in a way reflective of, and in relation to, the various elemental forces that the emergency event itself unleashes and is constituted by.Footnote 4 Taken by its pre-Socratic Emplocodean incarnation, elemental is taken here to refer to how air, fire, water and earth are enveloped in the operation of the security apparatus. In this light, one might explore how the actual fire in fire emergencies shapes the protective measures used to govern. Or how water in floods, air in hurricanes or the ground in earthquakes are interpolated into protective mechanisms of security. Extending Aradau’s conceptualisation, the elemental is another agential entity enveloped in processes of security and securitisation. Focusing on what he sees as the force of the elemental, Pete Adey (2015) has discussed the role that air plays in shaping how particular events come to be understood and the significance that we invest into them. For Adey, the formative effect elements can have is affixed on the affinities that whatever element forges with the wider set of bodies, feelings, objects and subjects that both inhabit and help to construct the wider space of the event. What Adey refers to as its force suggests that other attributes might be afforded to elemental objects in their contribution to events. Rather than possessing many inherent properties or indebted to a specific ‘nature’ the elemental enacts different capacities or roles and performances. As literature consistently has argued, capacities are realised in and through the relations that elements and other material objects make. Capacities only ever exist in potential to be actualised (Anderson 2014, De Landa 2006; Feigenbaum 2014; Peters 2010; Pile 2010; Whatmore 2006). Conceived by their capacity, the elemental opens up new angles for investigation regarding protection. Along with seeing protection as the mobilisation of security into the built environment, it means that protection can be explored as a form of security rendered operable by the orchestration of encounters between materials of the built environment and the elemental forces unleashed in the emergency itself. In the next section, I engage with a variety of examples to elucidate further how such a relation between the built environment and elemental forces prefigures the enactment of protection.

6.3 Orchestrating Relations Through the Regulatory Reform Order (2005)

In 2004, whilst at more local levels FRS across the country were adapting their practices and indeed broader culture to the transformations set down in the Fire and Rescue Services Act, central government was busy establishing new legislation that would bring further change to the FRS’ operation. By 2005, what is called The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order had been established (2005). This legislation was developed specifically to change the way businesses were protected from fire emergencies. In many ways, the legislation mattered less to the FRS than it did to businesses themselves. What the Order emphasised was that businesses should take a leading role in protecting their buildings from fires. For the FRS, all that would need to be done was to implement a new rota of routine inspections of business premises that, in relation to protection at least, would be increasingly responsible for self-governance.

Part of the governmental logic of protection, these routine inspections serve to verify that companies have taken steps to mitigate the effects of fire emergencies. At regular intervals, fire safety inspectors will visit a premise. They will establish whether evacuation procedures have been planned. At the same time, they will ensure that different material devices for fire safety have been installed. Flame retardant sprays should cover flammable surfaces. Running like a network invested in the innards of most buildings, inspections probe the systemic functioning of ventilation shafts and pipes. Frequently, inspections will check upon both the existence of chemicals in building and make judgements concerning the safety of their storage.

The inspections that now take place as a matter of routine in the FRS reveal how protection takes as its object the built environment. Protection is installed and instilled into the everyday spaces we occupy. These inspections certainly gauge how well protection is enveloped into the built environment here. But the measures themselves can be explored further to understand in more depth how protection is enacted as a logic that operates through the elements unleashed in emergencies. Protection in a way resonates deeply with what others have said about the capacities of the elemental because fire inspections seek to gauge the effectiveness of measures that seek to forge specific relations to the element of fire. As shown in Chap. 2, fire has been understood by its capacity to spread over surface for hundreds of years. Designed with a sense of this elemental capacity for circulation, some of the devices described above come to life by actively trying to form an obstacle to the spread of fire. This mode of relation between elements and protective materials is evident when it comes to fire retardant spray for instance. When confronted with a fire, the spray exists to ward off its proliferation across an object’s surface. In this mode of protection, the life, agency and capacity of the elements are actively denied. Whereas flame retardant spray attends to the actual flames produced in fires, other modes of protection are found to operate on other aspects of fire’s elemental constituents. The verification of ventilation shafts reveals other modes of protection. With ventilation shafts, the materials instilled in the built environment do not bring about an obstacle to fire’s capacity to spread. Instead, they attend to the smoke produced by fire and seek to alter and adjust it. Ventilation shafts enable this manoeuvre by forging two types of relations to fire smoke and thus harnessing its capacity to optimise security. On the one hand, these devices are premised on the capacity to absorb and accommodate fire smoke. They subsume the smoke released, allowing it to proliferate but in a way that is incorporated into the functioning of the aspect of the built environment protected. In the same moment, ventilation shafts act to redistribute the smoke produced by fire.

Inspections, owing to the array of objects they hold up to scrutiny, can lead to insight into the set of material-elemental relations which underpin protection as a specific governmental logic. In this way, protection reveals in extended ways the forces that are enrolled into fire governance where the FRS take on governmental logics that have a life across the broader security apparatus. But inspections also allow for a reappraisal of the concept of detournement that the chapter started with. As noted, the Regulatory Reform Order places much emphasis specifically on private businesses taking the lead in governing fire through protection. A different dynamic might be said to be present in the form of detournement protection enacts than was the case with preparedness or prevention. Detournement has appeared heretofore as a kind of transfer, in which technologies and software are appropriated and then applied to a new set of concerns. The trace of power and influence that private software companies possess grow as the reach of their product expands ever further, contributing to the making up of new subjects governed by their mere potential to be involved in emergencies and introducing new affective and sensorial states for responders themselves. But with the Regulatory Reform Order, what is evident is less a transfer of practices and material things from one place to another. Rather the authority to govern grows out from the centre to include new agencies in its execution. Instead of agents acquiring almost secondary power in the form of a trace owing to the application of their product, private businesses are bestowed with the authority and responsibility to govern directly. It is they who install devices across their premises. It is they who must develop evacuation plans. The FRS for their part merely gauge their compliance with taking on such a responsibility. Such an extension and expansion of responsibility resonate with the broader resilience motif that has been adopted across the West if not globally. In burgeoning literature considering resilience, this shifting of responsibility across public and private domains is said to be part and parcel of the active nestling of governance into a broader neo-liberal political economy, where the promotion of a shrinking state leads to an emphasis on publics taking on new obligations for self-governance, regardless of differences in resources (Chandler 2014; Evans and Reid 2014; Grove 2014; Zebrowski 2015).

Perhaps this expansion of responsibility are in some ways but a new iteration of a broader diffusion of power in societies that is in part premised on the need to secure. Regarding the case of The Regulatory Reform Order and its quotidian implementation and verification, it is necessary to stress that resilience and the broader diffusion of power that we find in such accounts do not, however, always play out perfectly. Agencies afforded new authority appear frequently as less than willing to take up the mantle of responsibility that has been bestowed upon them. Over the last decade, numerous cases have arisen showing the breach and circumvention of the precedents of the Regulatory Reform Order. These transgressions have come in different shapes and sizes, with a miscellany of consequences for their protagonists. Large-scale examples include the case of Fairfield General Hospital in Bury, UK in which a routine inspection in November 2016 found fire doors remaining open through the day, and combustible items being stored in routes designated for evacuation should a fire take place.Footnote 5 On a smaller, but more severe, scale, a landlord in Leicester in the UK was sentenced to eight months in prison in October 2014 for avoiding fire protection regulations after a substantial fire the previous year.Footnote 6 Beyond the pale of the potential emergency, the most recent and harrowing example of fires coming to fatal fruition because of inadequate fire safety at the time of writing is the case of the Grenfell Tower fire in Ladbroke Grove, London. Seventy-one people died when the 24-storey public housing facility caught fire in the morning of 14 June 2017. It is well documented that the fire itself spread so disastrously due to the instalment of flammable cladding on the outside of the Tower. Due to the imposition and continuance of austerity policies since the election of Conservative-led government in 2010, Kensington and Chelsea borough council were forced to invest in less safe cladding from the private building contractor Rydon.

Despite much literature concentrating on the neo-liberal conceit at the heart of resilience, or the diffusion of power that characterises security apparatuses more generally, the example of fire protection provides a more everyday case of the implementation of the rescaling and delegation of responsibility for security. The case itself reveals that the diffusion of power heralded in accounts of resilience has further implications to it in practice. Rather than solely inquiring after the whereabouts of power and how its dispersed coordinates map onto broader economic trajectories, fire protection leads to an enquiry into whether or not power is actually exercised in efficacious ways when arranged in such a distributed fashion. What the case seems to reveal is that, as power diffuses, its efficacy can in fact sometimes lessen and abate rather than become more extensive.

6.4 Conclusion

The dynamics of appropriation and redeployment which underpin risk governance in the FRS are not only facilitated through the customisation of software and its reorientation towards new aims. Rather the chapter shows that, in coming to govern fire risk, modes of action formulated to attend to emergencies come to be ingratiated into new fields of application. Some literature has articulated these actions under the moniker of governmental logics. In line with the literature spanned about them, the chapter has shown how such logics are distinguished from one another and rendered coherent by the specificity of their temporal relation to the emergencies to which they are attendant. Whilst all oriented on different predicates towards the future, the chapter has sought to decode the temporality of governmental logics at new levels of granularity. In particular, it has demonstrated how the temporal relations to future emergencies upon which governmental logics are organised and elaborated are made and remade through the performances, decisions and encounters that accumulate to constitute daily life in fire governance. The intervals which preparedness comes to operate through, then, are not only created in relation to abstract renditions of future events to come but can rather be explored in terms of their existence as devices that are enveloped in normal life that can be mobilised rapidly. Beyond its life as a set of actions that secure against emergencies presumed to hold a degree of inevitability regarding their likelihood, protection, furthermore, is a governmental logic continually reinforced through the verification of its material manifestation when routine inspections are undertaken.

Extending investigation into the domain where risk is perceived as a lived relation, governmental logics can be unpacked in ways beyond their temporality too. Enveloped in daily life, the intervals that preparedness will enact can be mobilised so quickly because of the affective state of alertness that resonates across the human bodies, the multitude of projectors and the flows of data that compile to define the contours of the control room as a space. The supposed robustness that protective security applies to the effects of emergencies, alternately, is evident in steps taken to modulate the capacity of elemental forces unleashed in emergencies by shaping their relation to the wider built environment. To intervene at different moments in emergencies to come, governmental logics enrol and harness any array of materially heterogeneous forces in their application: from bodies and their perceptive capacities to the elemental forces upon which the force of the emergencies, at least in part, hinges.

From the perspective of governmental logics, detournement cannot be understood simply by dynamics of the reapplication that might be inferred if our exploration should start and stop with the risk profiling mechanisms focused on in Chap. 5. Instead, detournement involves practices of enrolment in which an array of different things are rendered useful for the purpose of security. Although the preparedness instantiated in and across the control room was engendered by the installation of various digital technologies, it also relied on the cultivation of alertness and a sense of continual stimulation in human operators. Additionally, tracing this enrolment through attempts to protect from fire risks, the chapter was also compelled to reappraise how lines of responsibility are redrawn in the security apparatus when new agents of governance rise to prominence. Towards the end of the section on fire protection, it was shown how a catalogue of potential, and in the case of Grenfell very real, events allow for the stakes involved with shifting responsibility to be examined in further detail. Whereas with MOSAIC software in Chap. 5 questions were directed at where influence lies and with whom, cases of fire protection and its failure force questions related to whether or not agents actually take on the responsibility that has been bestowed upon them.