Preemptive Affectivity in Errol Morris’s The Unknown Known - Future Presentification and Affective Capture

This study proposes the concept of ‘preemptive affectivity’ based on Brian Massumi's notion of ‘preemptive power,’ and through this lens analyzes Donald Rumsfeld's political imagination and politics of uncertainty as portrayed in Errol Morris's The Unknown Known. The epistemological system that Rumsfeld constructed within the ‘War on Terror’ discourse following 9/11 employs uncertain future threats as tools to justify present political actions. Preemptive affectivity refers to the collective and individual disposition to affectively experience future threats that have not yet occurred in the present, capturing the affect upon which Massumi's ontopower operates. Rumsfeld's four epistemological categories (known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns) functioned as rhetorical devices that, under the pretext of preventing ‘failures of imagination,’ enabled political intervention through the capture and manipulation of affect. Morris's stylized interviews reveal how Rumsfeld sought to achieve political objectives by actualizing potential risks through the presentification of the future. The research findings show that Rumsfeld's political imagination justified the Iraq War by constructing non-existent objects such as the potential connection between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda, demonstrating the mechanism through which ‘preemptive affectivity’ transforms the fear of potential threats into present military intervention. Among Rumsfeld's epistemological categories, 'unknown known' paradoxically operated as a logic that justified unlimited preemptive intervention. Morris's interview method functions as a critical device that exposes Rumsfeld's logical fallacies and structures of affective manipulation.