Joost van Loon

The Risk Society and Beyond: Critical Issues for Social Theory

Introduction - Barbara Adam and Joost van Loon Repositioning Risk: The Challenge for Social Theory PART ONE: RECASTING RISK CULTURE Risk or Angst Society? - Alan Scott Two Views of Risk, Consciousness and Community Risk Culture - Scott Lash Risk, Trust and Scepticism in the Age of New Genetics - Hilary Rose PART TWO: CHALLENGING BIG SCIENCE Nuclear Risks - Alan Irwin, Stuart Allan and Ian Welsh Three Problematics Genotechnology - Lindsay Prior, Peter Glasner and Ruth McNally Three Challenges to Risk Legitimation Health and Responsibility - Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim From Social Change to Technological Change and Vice Versa PART THREE: MEDIATING TECHNOLOGIES OF RISK Child Organ Stealing Stories - Claudia Castaneda Risk, Rumour and Reproductive Technologies Liturgies of Fear - Howard Caygill Biotechnology and Culture Virtual Risks in an Age of Cybernetic Reproduction - Joost van Loon PART FOUR: P(L)AYING FOR FUTURES Information, Instantaneity and Global Futures Trading - Deirdre Boden Discourses of Risk and Utopia - Ruth Levitas Risk Society Revisited - Ulrich Beck Theory, Politics and Research Programmes

Begging for It: "New Femininities," Social Agency, and Moral Discourse in Contemporary Teenage and Men's Magazines

This article discusses the ways in which young women and young men are addressed through popular magazines in relation to their sexual subjectivity. It discusses the ways in which gendered attitudes towards sexuality and power are structured, and the ways in which moral agency and sexual practices are represented in UK magazines. The article is drawn from a study of ‘teenage sexual morality’, which explored the ways in which teenagers talk about sexual health and issues such as teenage pregnancy.

The End of Antibiotics

This article provides an initiation to theorizing infection in terms of spatialization and temporalization. Infection could be understood as the passing of a particular type of information, that subsequently transforms the condition of the receiving party, as well as that of the information itself. At first sight, infection could thus be described as a relationship between p arties that is based on the passing, be it giving or exchange, of a particular sort of information. However, such a description is very general and unspecified; as it does not address the sorts of relationship, passing, and information that are involved in infections.

Social Spatialization and Everyday Life

This editorial introduction discusses the problematic “demonology” of spatial analyses that attempt to understand the logic of the social in terms of subject-based origins. Taking the poststructuralist notion of decentered subjectivity to task, it uses the metaphor of exorcism to approach everyday life as a haunted space. Instead of identifying the true demons behind the voices rendering an account of everyday life, it shifts methodological attention to the incommensurable multiplicity of traces through which we map and narrate a hermeneutics of becoming.

Remediating risk as matter-energy-information flows of avian influenza and BSE

Nearly all risks associated with infectious diseases have potential global implications and highlight Beck’s (2007, Weltrisikogesellschaft. auf der suche nach der verlorenen sicherheit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag) famous thesis that the risk society is always a world risk society. One central factor behind the immanently global nature of risk is the role of mediated communication. All risks are mediated in one form or another. It is for that reason logical that mediation – as a process of coming in between or extending particular associations – should play a major role in the development of theories of risk. It is from this starting point that I propose to retheorise risk in relation to practices of communication. I will reflect on two well-documented cases: Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE or ‘mad cow disease’) and avian influenza (H5N1) to develop an analysis of the role of media in engendering particular risk sensibilities. By invoking Bolter and Grusin’s (1999, Remediation: understanding ...Nearly all risks associated with infectious diseases have potential global implications and highlight Beck’s (2007, Weltrisikogesellschaft. auf der suche nach der verlorenen sicherheit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag) famous thesis that the risk society is always a world risk society. One central factor behind the immanently global nature of risk is the role of mediated communication. All risks are mediated in one form or another. It is for that reason logical that mediation – as a process of coming in between or extending particular associations – should play a major role in the development of theories of risk. It is from this starting point that I propose to retheorise risk in relation to practices of communication. I will reflect on two well-documented cases: Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE or ‘mad cow disease’) and avian influenza (H5N1) to develop an analysis of the role of media in engendering particular risk sensibilities. By invoking Bolter and Grusin’s (1999, Remediation: understanding new media. Cambridge MA: MIT Press) concept of remediation, I will show that risks are virtual and this means that they can be endlessly reconfigured in particular techno–semiotic networks that are geared towards calibrating three attributions: matter, energy and information. It is through these recalibrations that particular systems are able to invoke specific forms of risk communication that fit distinct institutional and/or personal interests.

Parasite Politics: On the Significance of Symbiosis and Assemblage in Theorizing Community Formations

What lies between the autonomy of the individual and what Nietzsche (1989, p. 242) referred to as ‘the mediocrity of the herd’? The community has often been suggested as a ‘third way’ that balances out both extreme political forms. Developed against liberal pluralism and state socialism, this third way promotes a ‘communitarianism’ of responsible citizens, who cooperate and interact in collective settings with their own forms of accountability and engagement that supplement those of the state (Etzioni, 1993). The community is seen as the breeding ground of ethics and situated morality. It is in terms of community that judgements become social and meaningful events (Rorty, 1992). It is in terms of the community that we can ethically engage politics by surrendering our individual needs and interests to those of the collective. The community allows the formation of traditions upon which we draw to interpret phenomena and events (Gadamer, 1990). The community grants us continuity with the past, a hermeneutic sensibility, a moral ground for judgement and a political form of engagement; but above all the community allows us to engage with the Other (Levinas, 1981).

Biometric Revisions of the `Body' in Airports and US Welfare Reform

Agamben defines the state of exception as a ‘threshold of indistinction’ that suspends law by differentiating what is included in the legal order from that which is excluded. The state of exception is, therefore, not a precise or identifiable kind of law (like the law of war), given that it suspends legal order and abolishes executive, legislative and judicial powers (2005: 6–7). Agamben’s (1998) notion of the state of exception combines Carl Schmitt’s (1985) idea of the sovereign and Michel Foucault’s (1977) treatise on biopower to argue that the sovereign makes decisions concerning life and death.

Organizational Spaces and Networks

rooms. However, in an age which is said to be marked by ’the demise of the office’ (Veldhoen and Piepers 1993), which coincides with a range of initiatives varying from flexible workspaces, teleworking and virtual organizations, ’organizational space’ is far less fixed by a single iconography. The articles writing about specific organizational spaces in this volume implicitly rely on notions of social spatialization that make the ’organizational’ aspect of space more prominently visible. That is to say, they no longer accept the premise that spaces are already organized in their architectural realization, but only through their inhabitation can we speak of ’organizational spaces’ (see Roderick 1999; see Space & Culttcre 3). Hence what is at stake is the spatial organization or ordering. Moreover, with the arrival of telematics, these orderings no longer pay reverence to the originary blueprint of molar spatiality (i.e. that of confined, self-enclosed spaces see DeleuzeThe term ‘organizational spaces’ immediately conjures up images of office-buildings and meeting rooms. However, in an age which is said to be marked by ‘the demise of the office’ (Veldhoen and Piepers 1993), which coincides with a range of initiatives varying from flexible workspaces, teleworking and virtual organizations, ‘organizational space’ is far less fixed by a single iconography. The articles writing about specific organizational spaces in this volume implicitly rely on notions of social spatialization that make the ‘organizational’ aspect of space more prominently visible. That is to say, they no longer accept the premise that spaces are already organized in their architectural realization, but only through their inhabitation can we speak of ‘organizational spaces’ (see Roderick 1999; see Space & Culture 3). Hence what is at stake is the spatial organization or ordering. Moreover, with the arrival of telematics, these orderings no longer pay reverence to the originary blueprint of molar spatiality (i.e. that of confined, self-enclosed spaces – see Deleuze 1992), but instead have embraced more open, network-type, forms of spatialization. One of the most salient forms of spatialization is the virtual organization, which through outsourcing and telematics, has enabled a form of ordering that takes place everywhere, whilst itself being virtually nowhere.

‘We’ll always stay with a live, until we have something better to go to … ’: The chronograms of 24-hour television news

Drawing on Latour’s (1987) concepts of the sociogram and the technogram, this paper develops the concept of what we term the chronogram, a third axis along which each network actor is mapped so as to analyse its specific temporal network position and stability. The paper uses an empirical example of the television ‘live’ broadcast within the genre of 24-hour rolling news which relies so heavily upon the ‘live’ event, to argue that such an occasion enables actors to construct various simultaneous and sometimes conflicting chronograms which are performed or enacted within network space alongside ‘Newtonian time frames’. The theoretical intervention being explored here is that such an event as the extended ‘live’ news coverage of a particular story – here the release of the BBC journalist Alan Johnston from having been held hostage in the Middle East – is best explored through the lens of the chronogram, to reveal how the mechanics of the production of the television ‘live’ constructs or enacts various fluid temporal zones that exist alongside one another within networked space and that many of these zones remain deliberately and crucially concealed from the television audience.

Engineering a Global City The Case of Cyberjaya

This research concerns the Malaysian Multimedia Super Corridor project. Part of the project is a construction of a future intelligent city named Cyberjaya. This is a utopian city. The dream encompasses constructing working and living spaces for information communication technology professionals and experts from all over the world. Based on an ethnographic approach, this article seeks to explore what happens when utopian ideas are implemented. That is, rather than testing whether or not the dream has become true, the authors investigate the “materiality” of dreamwork in the development of a “planned city.” They show that the utopian globalized information communication technology city is built on the principles of zoning, sterility, and security. These principles are at the core of engineering a global community of knowledge workers. The authors argue that the ordering of this particular version of utopia—discursively anchored in a specific hybridization of (hyper)modernity, Malaysian culture, and Islam—has resulted in a proliferation of “non-places” that inhibit binding associations and thus prevent the development of a sense of “belonging.”