ABSTRACT
It is, however, interesting to look at the subject of risk from a somewhat different perspective, specifically, the way that many individuals are using risk (and associated practices) as a means of achieving a semblance of control – or, more accurately (following Featherstone 1994), a ‘controlled sense of loss of control’ – in the face of the changes and upheavals associated with late modernity. One might say that, rather than eschewing risk, the late modern subject is embracing it. Let us pause to consider this point in more detail. As alluded to above, one of the strange paradoxes of contemporary society is how, at the same moment, an individual can feel both ontologically insecure and – as a result of the increasing drive within everyday life towards the ‘hyper-banalisation’ of society – over-controlled. In other words, not only is it becoming more difficult to exert control and navigate a life pathway via the ‘established’ (and crumbling) norms and codes of modernity, but, at the same time, the individual is confronted by a reactive and burgeoning ‘culture of control’ (Garland 2001), whether in the form of state-imposed criminal legislation and other modes of rationalisation or private, decentralised, forms of surveillance and other techniques. Given such circumstances, might it not be the case, as outlined above, that many individuals will wish to escape this conflicting situation by exerting a sense of personal control and self-actualisation – to feel alive in an over-controlled yet at the same time highly unstable world? Moreover, might reflexive risk-calculation (such a prominent feature of our times) be the very instrumental device that enables that escape?
