ABSTRACT
This chapter utilizes Jean Baudrillard’s provocation as a prompt to shift the focus from the logic of precautionary risk to its circulation value: to the conscious and unconscious experiences and daily forms of knowing and un-knowing that give meaning to and invigorate articulations of risk and ‘risk consciousness.’ It provides an alternative genealogy of the ‘dispositif’ of precautionary risk logic as applied to the ‘‘War on Terror’ – one that illuminates the politics of knowing and unknowing that enable and sustain contemporary configurations of risk, its subjects and the ‘War on Terror’ waged in its name. The chapter begins with the question of how it came to be that post-9/11, the seemingly most powerful and secure on the planet came to be identified as subjects of terror/trauma within the context of a global war. Critical governmentality approaches to risk or, post-9/11, to precautionary risk as a logic, rather than an ontology, are helpful here.
