Transcript Lecture Six - University of Bath

Lecture Six
Reflexive Modernity and the
Risk Society.
Key Issues
• Risk Society- Ulrich Beck
• Risk as the 'flipside' of increased opportunities
created by science and technology
• Risk and institutional decision making.
• Risk and subjectivity.
• Risk, otherness, and identity.
• Risk and pleasure
• Risk, psychotherapeutic the powerless self and
‘therapy culture’ (Frank Furedi 2003)
Background
• For Giddens late modernity based upon human
reflexivity.
• Individuals make choices and decisions in a
'rational' and secular manner.
• This can be contrasted with the individual in
traditional societies individuals who referred to
tradition, religion or custom as a means by which
to make decisions and plans.
• In Late modernity all of our social activity needs
to be revised in the light of new information
about ourselves, others and the world around
us.
Risk, Uncertainty and
Subjectivity
• Subjectivity increasingly permeated by increased notions of risk and
uncertainty.
• Subjectivity includes our most personal thoughts, feelings and
emotions and yet we experience it in social contexts (Woodward).
• Question of why we become attached to particular identities and not
others.
• Giddens view of a modern rational subjectivity is flawed.
• A bewildering array of information upon which we are supposed to
base our decision making.
• According to postmodernists no longer any universal norms/ values/
truths/ concepts/knowledge.
• Metanarratives which provided certainty have been undermined with
the coming of the Postmodern age
• Modernity replaced religious and supernatural explanations with
science
Postmodernity and Risk
• In postmodernity scientificism undermined.
• For Giddens due to increased social reflexivity in
high modernity all 'traditions', ideologies etc.. will
have to prove their validity and origins
• But post/ high/ late modernity characterised by a
radical scepticism and relativism that throws all
of our beleifs, values and attitudes into question.
• An age of radical uncertainty
• Links between uncertainty and subjective
experience of risk.
New kinds of Risk.
• Risk faced by (post)modern individuals- different to risks
faced by individuals in traditional/pre-modern societies.
• In traditional societies individuals confronted by risks
associated with Nature (flood, famine, crop failure). In
modern and postmodern societies individuals more likely
to be faced with risks created by society and its social
institutions.
• Modern individuals faced with 'manufactured
uncertainities' (Giddens)
• In this sense late modernity is a 'risk culture'.
• For Giddens globalisation an existential dilemma which
profoundly affects an individual's/social group's sense of
personal and social identity.
From Industrial Society to Risk
Society.
• Ulrich Beck – concepts of risk as old as human race
itself.
• At present greater control over the risks posed by nature.
• BUT new 'man-made' risks- nuclear power, bio-chemical
disaster, pollution, ozone depletion, global warming, the
depletion of finite resources etc
• Risk- the flipside of increased opportunities we have
created through science and technology.
• Opportunities for material, physical and social security science and technology have a dark side.
• Global risks a central concern for a broad cross section
of society, leaders of national governments, individual
citizens and communities.
Changing concepts of risk.
• Risk in modern industrial societies not
global in reach
• Less of a concern for politicians and the
public.
• Shift in our understanding of nature over
the last three hundred years.
Changing Concepts of nature
and the environment.
• In past nature seen as a separate realm from humanity and
society
• Something to be bound into our service
• A feminisation of the natural world (Baconian view)
• Many different constructs of nature -a concept; a utopia; a
recollection; a resource.
• For Beck nature can no longer be understood as a separate
realm to the rest of society.
• Environmental problems not just problems of nature -social
problems also.
• Modernity is no longer able to deal with the fruits of its
creation.
• We must enter a stage of reflexive modernity.
• Pressing need for us to confront these catastrophes of our
own making.
Confronting global Risk. 1
• Global risks qualitatively different to natural
disasters.
• Global risk rooted in ‘rational’ decision making
processes which accept these drawbacks as the
negative image of advantage and opportunity.
• Risk emanates from organizational, political and
institutional decision making.
• Notions of accountability, personal responsibility
and blame absent from the sphere of natural
disaster
• BUT industrial risk politically charged
Confronting global Risk.2
• People, firms, agencies and politicians
responsible for decision making which leads to
the production of risk.
• Environmental and human cost not only aspects
of industrial risk.
• Social consequences of risk make it a highly
political issue.
• New institutional formations and procedures
necessary for establishing ways of dealing with
these consequences.
Institutional harm reduction and
the calculus of risk.
• Awareness of risk leads to institutionalised methods of harm
reduction.
• Attempts to anticipate risks that might not even happen. '
• Invention of a calculus of risk that entails making ‘the
incalculable- calculable'.
• Collective involvement in calculation of risk even though risk
is generally an individual thing.
• insurance system illustrates this collective involvement
• Risk produces knowledge
• Risk forecasted, calculated, measured and quantified
• Calculus of risk applied to disparate phenomenon
• Paradox- ethics of provision for risk not accompanied by a
morality which judges whether man should be placed at risk
or not
Comparing Beck and Giddens
• Similarities between Beck and Giddens.
• For both risk as emerges from modernisation and
globablisation.
• For both risk qualitatively different in late modern societies
where risk has greater impact across space and time.
• Both interested in the political ramifications of risk.
• Both claim that expert discourses have been undermined by
concerns about risk.
• Both interested in the ways that that increased reflexivity
results as a response to risk and uncertainty in late modern
societies.
• BUT Beck claims that increased risk reflexivity is the outcome
of a greater number of risks and hazards being produced
• Giddens claims that risks are merely thought to be greater
because human subjectivity is now more sensitive to risk.
• Giddens is also more interested self-reflexivity- refelexivity
directed towards the body and the self.
• Beck more interested in our reflexive critiques of the social and
institutional.
Cultural Symbolic perspectives
on Risk 1
• Cultural/Symbolic perspective on Risk influenced
by functional structuralism and anthropology of
Mary Douglas (See Lupton 1999)
• From this perspective risk notions of risk a
cultural strategy for dealing with danger, cultural
pollution, contamination and otherness.
• Douglas interested in how/ why some objects or
practices come to be defined as Risky.
• Judgements about risky peoples/groups,
practices and objects help to structure symbolic
boundaries around groups and to maintain a
sense of order within group boundaries.
Cultural Symbolic perspectives
on Risk 2
• Culture a mnemonic system- helps people to structure
collective beliefs.
• Certain dangers or risks singled out for attention by a
society or social group.
• Taboos or avoidance rituals act to protect the group from
behaviours, objects or practices which might destabilise
them and threaten the symbolic boundaries of that
group.
• Risk intimately bound up with political concerns.
• Concepts of risk used to define boundaries of social
groups.
• Concepts of risk used to exclude and create out-groups
or ‘others’.
Risk and the Individual Body.
• In Purity and Danger Douglas outlines a model
that highlights the ways groups and individuals
attempt to preserve the integrity of individual and
social body.
• Individual body has symbolic boundaries which
need to be controlled.
• BUT individual body a metaphor for the body
politic.
• Individual bodies have an inside that can be
threatened by the outside- Social body or society
also.
Risk and the social body
• Social body has margins, boundaries and an
internal structure that need protecting
• Notions of individual and social bodies bodily
boundaries and openings a major preoccupation
of human societies.
• National body at risk from invading ‘others’Social body at risk from pollution and
contamination
• The fleshly body at risk from contamination by
impure food or bacteria.
• Bodily control intimately bound up with social
control.
Boundary maintenance and Risk.
• Relaxing the boundaries of individual and social body
dangerous.
• Subjects and objects ascribed ‘dirty’ and ‘clean’ status.
• Failure to police what comes in and out of social or
individual body mean a sense of disorder ensues.
• Body continually threatened.
• Risk linked to notions of dirty and impure objects,
practices, individuals.
• A moral economy of risk.
• Danger explained by using cultural frameworks that are
moral and political.
• Douglas’ model useful tool for explaining racism and
other social hatreds.
The Specificity of Risk.
• Mary Douglas draws to our attention the ways that risk is
constructed differently in different contexts.
• What is risky in one culture provides social stability and order in
another.
• Different cultural contexts characterised by different symbolic
frameworks.
• A less individualistic account of risk perception than we find in
Giddens and Beck.
• Notions of risk affect group identities -all manner of objects and
actions can be experienced subjectively as risky.
• Risk -largely influenced or determined by social factors such as
group membership.
• Power relations underlie social meanings that inform our notions of
risk.
• Risk from this perspective is relative to time, place and context it is
socially constructed.
• Individuals construct risk knowledges in the context of their everyday
lives.
Risk Otherness and Object
relations theory 1
• Psychoanalytic theory- Object relations tradition stresses
the importance of the ‘Other’ as necessary for the
development of the self.
• Early realisation by infant that his/her body is a separate
entity from the mother results in tensions.
• Otherness becomes associated with danger and
confounds the sense of peace and order the infant was
experiencing before this realisation.
• Tensions and conflicts from early stages of life has
persistent effects throughout adult life.
• The self is always defined against the Other – that which
is not us.
• Group identity always defined in relation to an out-group.
Risk Otherness and Object
relations theory 2
• Freud –‘The narcissism of minor differences’
• Minor- not major- differences lead to the bitterest
disputes.
• Minor differences Inflated into lethally competing fictional
identities.
• Other always represents a sense of danger or risk to the
individual.
• Anything/ anyone that cannot be readily ordered or
categorised leads to feeling of uncertainty and anxiety.
• Risk always involves uncertainty.
• Marginalised members of society often considered ‘risky’
• Ascribed a risk identity by the dominant group.
• Risk central to subjectivity and identity, both our own and
others.
Risk and pleasure
• Foucault -individuals in modern society have become
self-regulating and self-controlling.
• This can be contrasted to social control by coercive
external forces of the state.
• Lupton argues that some individuals today rebel against
such self-control and self-regulation.
• Voluntary courting of risks one way of doing this
• Certain forms of risk-taking considered a necessary part
of ‘self-actualisation’.
• Common belief that risk taking linked to personal growth.
• Risk taking a response to the ever intensifying control
and predictability of modern life.
‘New-Age’ Travellers, Ontological
insecurity and Risk Identity
(Wild 2005)
• New-Age Travellers choose a risk Identity to escape from the
coercive, static, binding predictability of sedentary life (Wild 2005).
• Risk for this group intimately bound up with pleasure.
• Adopting a risk identity for this group - self empowering
• Risk identity and other status actively created on an ongoing basis.
• Travellers are the authors of their own otherness in many ways.
• Becoming other in relation to 'mainstream' society gives them a
feeling of belonging.
• Adopting a risk identity one solution to the ontological crisis in late
modernity that Giddens proposed.
• A secularised, globalised, fragmented, risk society produces
ontological insecurity and Travellers have found an answer to that
ontological insecurity in their risk identity.
• Risk identity a shared identity, fluid enough to allow self
determination but coherent enough to provide a sense of belonging
and community.
Risk Consciousness in
Contemporary society.
• Frank Furedi (2003) focuses on different manifestations of
contemporary risk consciousness.
• Furedi (1995)- study on the international contraceptive pill panic.
• Varied response to this panic in different societies.
• Furedi questions why some cultures have a more developed
consciousness of risk than others.
• Fear an ever-expanding part of life in the West in the 21st century.
• Fear of disease, abuse, stranger danger, environmental devastation
and terrorist onslaught.
• Urged to take greater precautions and seek more protection.
• Compared to past, or developing world, people in contemporary
societies have much less familiarity with pain, suffering, disease and
death.
• We actually enjoy an unprecedented level of personal safety.
• Greatest danger -the tendency to fear our achievements
• Panic about GM food, genetic research, dangers of mobile phones.
• Obsession with theoretical risks distracts us from dealing with the
‘old-fashioned’ dangers that have always threatened our lives.
Therapy Culture, Risk and the Medicalisation of
Everyday Experience.
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Furedi ‘perceptions risk have little to do empirical evidence’.
Risk perception shaped by cultural assumptions about human
vulnerability.
Explores cultural influences that have encouraged society to become
risk-averse and vulnerable.
Individuals increasingly represented as vulnerable.
Our mental health /emotions under siege.
Behavior and experience increasingly medicalised
Leads to notions of mans 'diminished subjectivity'.
We live in a ‘Therapy culture’. Psychoanalytic discourse leads to
notions of an ‘assailable self’.
Self and subjectivity under threat from the internal and external
psychological attack.
Notion of 'therapy' no longer refers to unusual problems or exotic
states of mind.
Everyday experiences given a psychological label
Everyday experiences medicalised and posed as a direct threat to
one's emotional well-being.
Therapy a way in which society expects individuals to understand and
cope with life.
The Helpless Self in
Contemporary Society.
• The therapeutic approach instructs us to
acknowledge our problems rather than
transcend them.
• Therapeutic culture teaches us to be
victims and to know our place especially
before an 'expert' whether he be a
therapist, doctor, lawyer.
• This generate a culture of dependance,
notions of a helpless self and a self at risk.
Conclusion
1
• Risk a diverse set of social phenomena not just a narrow, technical
concept.
• Question of whether heightened awareness of risk is really a new
phenomonenon.
• Foucault’s ‘great fear’ preceding the great confinement- shaped
modern rational subjectivity.
• Cycles of millennial panic throughout history.
• Natural,/supernatural disasters /Armageddon/ end of days and
millennial panic.
• Beck and Giddens are right to point out that notions of Risk have
always existed but now they are manmade.
• However man has, historically, also been seen as responsible for
being the master of his own destruction. Risk posed by sinful
behaviour preceded notions of risk bound up with technological
advancement
Conclusion 2
• Cultural symbolic approaches highlighted the ways that
notions of risk are used to police and construct the
boundaries around the individual and social body.
• Others or outgroups created by reference to risky or
dangerous objects, practices or actions.
• Others excluded and defined as dangerous threatening
or polluting
• Representations of other, coupled with their expulsion or
exclusion serve to maintain a sense of order, stability
and cultural purity or integrity.
• Otherness experienced in unexpected ways.
• Risk identity can be ascribed or elected (Wild 2004)
• Risk, Subjectivity and Identity inextricably linked.