andré m. carrington: Minority Reports in the Pre-emptive Moment

Special Effects: Minority Reports in the Pre-emptive Moment

andré m. carrington

Steven Spielberg can’t claim all the credit for the pre-emption-chic that accompanied the release of his sci-fi noir Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise, less than a year after 9/11. Unlike the genetically-engineered savants whose visions of crime are the premise for the movie, he couldn’t have seen it coming. When Philip K. Dick wrote the short story that inspired the film two decades earlier, in which he defines the precogs pejoratively as “monkeys,” he wasn’t banking on its function as an allegory to the war on terrorism, either. The real theme of both renditions is a paranoid perversion of ethics that has dangerous implications for law and order when it spins out of control. Venerated speculative fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin called Dick a prophet, “not because he plays foretelling games with Rand, or extrapolates the next technological gimmick, but because his moral vision is desperately clear, and because his art is adequate to express that vision.”[1] It would be a misnomer to call Spielberg’s Minority Report prophetic, then, because the Hollywood blockbusters that have been inspired by Dick’s paraliterary fables (including Total Recall, Paycheck, and Minority Report) achieve their uncanny popularity on precisely the grounds a sci-fi visionary never does.

Speculative fiction critic Donald Lawler writes of the utilities of the genre as more than an anecdotal frame of reference for technological advances, as Hugo Gernsback valorized the “sci” in hard sci-fi.[2] Instead, the speculative is a contemporaneous supplement not just to science, but also philosophy and social commentary. He suggests examples like Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (inspiration for the cult-hit Blade Runner) as evidence that “any literature or art form or medium of expression capable of affecting imaginative processes of modern humans is not a distraction; it is an attraction. It will teach the race where and even how to focus its powers creatively.”[3] A comparison of the two versions of “Minority Report” actually convinces me that Lawler’s point, while compelling, is a hard sell. Much more frequently, the deeper insights emergent from a speculative tale that so forcefully resonates with its historical moment, as the film Minority Report does for its moment of production and “The Minority Report” does at second glance, get lost in the spectacular shuffle of interpretation. Their informative and inspiring faculties fail, but still draw audiences, for the same reasons that the political and ethical lines of reasoning behind them flounder but draw controversy in real life. The lesson of a minority report is that pre-emption would be unquestionably unjust if the situations ostensibly pre-empted were not, according to a convincing alternative interpretation, going to happen. But how would authorities, readers, or filmgoers come around to that interpretation?

I am suggesting, in light of the thoughtful instruction of Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report,” that the predictive value of the sci-fi cautionary tale is subject to the same scrutiny as the premonition it portrays. In both cases, the devil is in the details; how authorities practice pre-emption bears just as much on the integrity of the process as do the technologies used to glean information about the future. Each step in the process of pre-emptive detection, pursuit, and detention has its inherent flaws. The way I read it, the minority report is no confounding moral riddle at all; it is an injunction to recognize that there is no deus ex machina coming to relieve detective work and law enforcement of their tendencies to abuse power.

Foretelling Games with Rand

Fitting that the national security strategies of the Cold War prefigured the creep of pre-emptive law enforcement. Some of the first analogies between criminal justice and foreign policy came from Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who had served in both arenas. A culture adequately suffused with the threat of punishment, Dulles knew from his prior career, could curtail the occurrence of punishable offenses.[4] For all its assurances, up to Mutually Assured Destruction, scholars and enforcers alike had reason to wail with anxiety at the mercy of deterrence. Even when propounded by the highest-paid think tanks, and even when the risks were relatively one-sided, deterrence still relied on the capacity of its target to act afraid, and still required that the power pursuing a policy of deterrence let its target go free—a sword of Damocles makes everyone nervous, just hanging there. John Allen Anderton, the protagonist of Philip K. Dick’s short story, put his society on the road to pre-emption with what he thought was a step beyond this problem.

“‘One murder in five years.’ Witwer’s confidence was returning. ‘Quite an impressive record…something to be proud of.’
Quietly Anderton said: ‘I am proud. Thirty years ago I worked out the theory—back in the days when the self-seekers were thinking in terms of quick raids on the stock market. I saw something legitimate ahead—something of tremendous social value.’
He tossed the packet of cards to Wally Page, his subordinate in charge of the monkey block. ‘See
which ones we want,’ he told him. ‘Use your own judgment.’”[5]

Hence, the technology behind pre-emption evolved, in the backdrop to Dick’s story, from a fixture for easy material gain to the highest use possible: the preservation of an orderly society.

Elevating the trope of pre-emption to this level allows Dick to pose unsettling questions. Has the installation of foretelling technology in the primary functions of the state really reserved it for altruistic purposes? The system can, and does, end up subverted against itself, but not because it’s fallen into the hands of one naughty misleader. “The Minority Report” is no whodunit, but there are candidates: the subordinate who uses his own judgment, this shady Witwer character of whom Anderton is endlessly suspicious, the former military and anti-military agents between whom Anderton finds himself a pawn, all necessarily implicated. None of these forces, acting alone can expose the flaws of the Precrime system any more than Anderton could run it by himself. Carl Freedman suggests that the conspiratorial fringe of Marxist and psychoanalytic theory is not too far off the mark when it recognizes ideological collusion among a broad range of parties aligned against one’s own best interests as the basis for so many of one’s real and imagined travails in life.[6]

That much is true in the short story, when Anderton finds out that his position in the circuit of information as head of Precrime makes him uniquely vulnerable. The conceit of his peril is that there is no minority report; one precog sees him manipulated into murdering an opponent of the civilian police system. The next precog takes her sibling’s prediction into account when she foresees that Anderton, if he saw the premonition that he would commit murder would, of course, not do it. Finally, the third predicts that, taking the second scenario into account, Anderton decided to commit the murder and hope for a lenient sentence, placing the value of the system to which he’d devoted his life over his own claim to innocence; Anderton-as-murderer wins two-to-one, and the appearance of a majority report prevails.[7] What approximated a preponderance of the evidence were just the limits of perception and the subjectivity of interpretation.

More importantly, Precrime represents the apotheosis of a paranoiac society. Like the normative tendency of deterrence that dissuades would-be criminals from their actions by persuading them to internalize a disinclination to risk punishment, a normative condition of paranoia is what makes pre-emption appear to make sense. Once officials come to believe their knowledg
e
of the future is reliable, it’s only the one who c
an see all the possibilities for opposition who can end-run the system against all enemies. The trick is that one has to see the entire future, including what happens after one sees the future, and after that, and the monkey block starts to get crowded with better, more comprehensive interpretations; you’re never allowed to stop reading. Freedman recalls Freud’s exploration of paranoia as an exhaustive preoccupation with the discerning of motives to examine the present. “Paranoia, we can conclude, is no mere aberration but is structurally crucial to the way that we, as ordinary subjects of bourgeois hegemony, represent ourselves to ourselves and embark on the Cartesian project of acquiring empiricist knowledge.”[8] The society perfected in pre-emption turns intelligence over to obsessives, intellectuals even. Kissinger tired of deterrence for similar reasons; he claimed the Cold War turned strategy into deterrence, and turned deterrence into ‘an esoteric intellectual exercise.’[9]

The Next Technological Gimmick

Paranoia and pre-emption aren’t purely dystopic, however. Freedman continues,

“If we are economically constituted as capitalists and workers who must buy and sell human labor that is commodified into labor-power, then we are psychically constituted as paranoid subjects who must seek to interpret the signification of the objects—commodities which define us and which, in a quasi-living manner, mystify the way that they and we are defined.”[10]

Part of that mystification takes place through the collapse of boundaries between verisimilitude and simulation; when science fiction becomes science fact, for instance. This transformation isn’t so seamless, however, that the difference between reality and fiction, the present and the possible future, no longer matters. As N. Katherine Hayles points out in response to Jean Baudrillard, simulation may be a productive force in contemporary culture, but “In reality, borders count.”[11]

The film adaptation of Minority Report offers as profound a metafictive comment to that effect as do Dick’s writings. When we see non-lethal weapons on-screen, we should be aware of the forces that are constructing a fiction around them in order to encourage investment in their development. In the film, the DC police are able to injure, incapacitate, and disrupt the lives of suspects and intrusive bystanders through the use of non-lethal weapons. Through the application of non-lethal force and the replacement of the death penalty with lifetime solitary imprisonment under forced mental incapacitation, the officers of Precrime circumvent their own pre-emptive definition of justice. If they were ever going to kill anyone, the precogs would see it coming, and what would become of Precrime then? According to props master Jerry Moss, those weapons portrayed in Minority Report derive from prototypes designed by researchers, including graduate students, at MIT.[12] The border between their research and our reality is the viability of their grant portfolio, enhanced by the inclusion of consulting work on a feature film.

Another feature that buttresses the integrity of the Precrime methodology in Minority Report is biometric identification. In a further projection of the conflation of juridical and commercial pursuits, the iris-scanning devices police employ to identify suspects and to compel everyone standing in the way of their successful arrest are also widely indispensable to advertising. Every time a character passes an advertisement, in public transit and inside retail stores, their identity is recorded and, usually, announced. There are ways to subvert this system, of course, most simply by having one’s eyes replaced. When Tom Cruise’s Anderton does so to evade pursuers and clear his name, he finds the previous owner of his eyes called out when he falls into The Gap to buy a disguise. The video greeter recalls his previous purchase, “Mr. Yakamoto, come for some more of those khakis?” and Cruise mutters the name again, disheartened because his black market transplant doesn’t match his race. Even the precogs couldn’t envision a future when white men would have Japanese surnames.

The General Accounting Office released guidelines on Biometrics and Border Security in 2002, and there is also a call for the implementation of biometric measures in the 9/11 Commission report. Both lead the way to the subversion of these identification technologies by insisting that any system to scrutinize, verify, and implicate the identities of suspicious parties should also accommodate “trusted travelers” whom it ought not inconvenience—because biometrics doesn’t defer suspicion to an objective standard, it only corroborates suspicions are already there.[13] The GAO Report, the 9/11 Report, and Minority Report illustrate how a present formulation of the state founded in racism and capitalism can’t produce a future without them.

When Slavoj Žižek referred to Germany’s dissent to the war in Iraq as “Gerhard Schroeder’s Minority Report” in a Frankfurt newspaper, he was intimating the suspect quality of any policy so ostentatious as to claim absolute assurance of its actions based on absolute knowledge of the future. He asks, “was his disagreement with the US plans to preventively attack Iraq not precisely a kind of real-life ‘minority report,’ signaling his disagreement with the way others saw the future?”[14] Pre-emption, in domestic law enforcement and foreign policy alike, is pure science fiction. As such, it remains fallible on the same grounds that any story, however dazzling, owes its utility to a certain conspiracy among its readers to realize its vision. As long as there are militaristic and commercial forces working to rationalize pre-emptive interventions, there will be those who see things differently. As detective Anderton discovers,

The existence of a majority logically implies
a corresponding minority.[15]

If we’re as astute or as paranoid about pre-emption as its proponents, we’ll realize what to do with the minority report before it’s too late.

andré m. carrington
PhD candidate, American Studies
Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University

[1] Ursula K. LeGuin, “Science Fiction as Prophesy,” The New Republic, 30 October 1976. 34.

[2] Donald Lawler, “Certain Assistances: The Utility of Science Fiction in Shaping the Future,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 13, no. 3-4 (1980). 3.

[3] Ibid. 9.

[4] Lawrence Freedman, Deterrence (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2004). 9.

[5] Philip K. Dick, “The Minority Report,” in The Philip K. Dick Reader. (New York: Citadel Press, 1987). 326.

[6] Carl Freedman, “Towards a Theory of Paranoia: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick,” in Philip K. Dick: Contemporary Critical Interpretations, ed. Samuel Umland (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995). 11.

[7] Dick, “The Minority Report.” 353.

[8] Neil Easterbrook, “Dianoia/Paranoia: Dick’s Double “Impostor”,” in Philip K. Dick: Contemporary Critical Interpretations, ed. Samuel Umland (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995). 10.

[9] Freedman, Deterrence. 12.

[10] Easterbrook, “Dianoia/Paranoia: Dick’s Double “Impostor”.” 10.

[11] N. Katherine Hayles, “In Response to Jean Baudrillard: The Borders of Madness,” Science-Fiction Studies 18, no. 3 (1991). 321.

[12] Laurent Bouzereau, “Deconstructing Minority Report: Precrime and Precogs,” in Minority Report (Dreamworks, 2002). DVD.

[13] General Accounting Office. “Border Security.” 2002.

[14] Slavoj Žižek, “Gerhard Schroeder’s Minority Report and Its Consequences,” in Frankfurter Rundschau (2003). http://egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-gerhard-schroeders-minority-report-and-its-consequences.html.

[15] Dick, “The Minority Report.” 336.

Works Cited

Bouzereau, Laurent. “Deconstructing Minority Report: Precrime and Precogs.” In Minority Report: Dreamworks, 2002. DVD.
Dick, Philip K. “The Minority Report.” In The Philip K. Dick Reader. New York: Citadel Press, 1987.