Risk

Modernity, argues Deborah Lupton, was an effort to manage risk. Risk was originally connected with the science of probability and statistics, which developed “as a means of calculating the norm and identifying deviations from the norm” and thus as a means for getting the world under control (Deborah Lupton, Risk , 6-7). Modern theory and practices attempted to eliminate uncertainty and indeterminacy, aiming to produce a “grandiose technocratic rationalizing dream of absolute control of the accidental . . . a vast hygienist Utopia” (8, quoting R. Castel in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality ).

Originally, “risk” carried potential for good and bad consequences, but today, Lupton says, it has narrowed down to its negative connotations. “Risk” means “danger,” and her study is a social and cultural study of this sense of danger as it presents itself in late modernity.

In various spheres, there has been a shift from “paradigms of mono-causal determinism to those incorporating multiple causes and effects” with the result that “risks have become more globalized, less identifiable and more serious in their effects and therefore less easily manageable.” For individuals, this has meant an experience of “intensifying . . . uncertainty, complexity, ambivalence and disorder, a growing distrust of social institutions and traditional authorities and an increasing awareness of the threats inherent in everyday life” (18).

To unpack the contemporary conception and experience of risk, Lupton relies heavily on the work of Mary Douglas, not only her Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory and Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers (with Aaron Wildavsky), but Douglas’s earlier classic Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo . Risks, she says, are analogous to the anomalies and ambiguities of a purity system, the threatening “other” who is treated as an infection of the “body” of society. Citing Douglas and Wildavsky, Lupton says that the environmental movement achieves internal cohesiveness by positioning industry and government as an “Other,” an “enemy that is demonized and blamed for risk” (67). Thus, “imputations of risk . . . like those of impurity, may be used as a means of social coercion and maintaining the moral and social order, a way of dealing with ‘polluting people’ who are culturally positioned as on the margins of society” (67).

One of Lupton’s most interesting chapters (8) is an excursion into the pleasures of risk. “Edgework” like sky-diving and rock-climbing and fight-clubbing bolsters a sense of masculinity for desk-chained men, and represents an effort to escape the control and predictability of modernity. Sexual transgression and shock have the same effect, producing not anxiety and fear but the carnivalesque exhilaration of breaking through settled boundaries.