ABSTRACT
Considering a cluster of questions under the concept ‘the neurotic citizen’ and ‘governing through neurosis’ may imply that such problems may have been taken up on the literature concerning risk, which has become one of the most debated concepts in social and political thought. To differentiate the nature and necessity of the questions I wish to pose, it will be necessary to briefly address that literature. The thesis on ‘risk society’ joined other theses such as ‘market society’, ‘postindustrial society’, and ‘network society’ in describing the transformations in state societies. (Throughout this paper I use the term ‘state societies’ to designate Anglophone states, primarily English Canada, the United States, Australia, and England. However, the appropriateness of what I shall describe as ‘governing through neurosis’ may well be greater than this immediate scope.) The question that concerns me is what facts have been reordered for the declaration of a risk society and how these facts are mobilized to create the image of a society that is governed by risk. Whether it is Luhmann (1993), Beck and Ritter (1992), Douglas (1992),
Douglas and Wildavsky (1982), or Giddens (1990), for these theorists, state societies have become risk societies because subjects govern their conduct through risk and governments primarily constitute themselves as safeguarding their subjects from risks, and these risks transcend the boundaries of the state. For Beck (2000), the paradigmatic case of all this was the environment with the rise of environmental politics but it has now spread to other fields of government such as health, security and technology. In all these areas, the legitimacy of governments depends on their ability to manage risks on behalf of their citizens. While this literature is diverse, the shared assumption seems to be that however risks come into being, it is impossible to govern state societies without managing those risks. There are two features of these risks that differentiate them from risks that other societies had to confront. First, while we know that these risks carry significant, if not catastrophic, consequences, we are not certain about their realization. Second, these risks, also unlike other risks, are based upon ‘manufactured uncertainties’ because they are direct results of scientific and technological interventions into nature that disrupt its balance (Zizek, 1999: 335). These two features combine to
create a situation where more production of knowledge is called upon to manage the risks it has created. This ‘reflexive modernization’ or the ‘second enlightenment’ creates a situation where we have to make decisions and we are held responsible for those decisions that we were forced to make without adequate knowledge of the situation (Zizek, 1999: 338). What facts are produced and reordered for this interpretation? The fundamen-
tal fact seems that with the increasing complexity of environments in which we live, citizens in state societies are subject to varieties of risk ranging from environmental hazards to health and security dangers. Citizens demand that these risks be managed if not alleviated. We have experienced many risks in the last few years: failing safeguards for water management leading to the deaths of citizens, new epidemics such as AIDS and SARS, food chain contamination such as BSE and risks emanating from intensified global mobility and flows such as terrorism and other security threats such as ‘dangerous’ refugees. When we put all this together the picture that indeed emerges looks like a risk society where many collective and individual decisions are increasingly governed by the need to reduce these risks to societies. When we compare the current governmental and social discourse with governing mentalities of the 1960s and 1970s and remember such governmental projects as elimination of poverty and unemployment, it certainly makes one convinced that indeed priorities have radically changed and that we must be living in a society that is governed by its aversions to risk. But the risk society theories are problematic from the point of view that I wish
to develop in this paper for two reasons. First, there is hardly any analysis of how various dangers and threats become risks. While there is a concern about reflexivity and manufacturing of risks, just how reflexivity produces those risks and by what mechanisms and practices remain neglected areas. In other words, if one is curious about the social and political practices by which certain dangers and threats have been constituted as risks, risk society theories are rather inadequate about asking such questions. Instead, a society is portrayed in which various groups mobilize their concerns about risks that are already agreed upon and governments attempt to respond to them by enacting policies that are designed to manage or reduce these risks. That way risk management becomes the primary mode of agreement between citizens and governments. Second, it also appears that risks are determined in a level playing field where various groups make their cases and governments choose amongst them. But these problems are not intractable and perhaps theories of risk society already contains answers to them. In my view, the fundamental weakness remains the subject that mobilizes or lies at the centre of such a society. This is perhaps, as Zizek pointed out, the most important inadequacy of risk society theories, which underestimate the radical anxieties that the changes thus described both presuppose and produce in affecting the modern subject. As Zizek puts it, risk society theories ‘leave intact the subject’s fundamental mode of subjectivity: their subject remains the modern subject, able to reason and reflect freely, to decide on and select his/her set of norms, and so on’ (Zizek, 1999: 342).
