Reflections: Ulrich and the Shaykh

I attended two lectures this week, very different both in style and substance; both equally fascinating, even though one was from the old world and one from the new-and that is something that appeals to the ancient heart and the modern mind.

Ulrich Beck on living in a 'world risk' society and its implications (political, institutional, cultural).

The Socratic position: I know that I do not know, which is still to posit something, still to bring uncertainty back within the folds of reason (the Greek distrust of the irrational emerges again; against beauty , proportion, the kosmos and harmony, the infinite haunts the Greek imagination). How to control risk, how to avoid being subject to the whims of fate?

One can resign oneself to it (this is our share in all that happens, this is what the 'gods' apportion) or, going beyond this, we can recognise that it is our very fragility that is precious, that the good life is something that can be lost at the drop of a hat, a fatal wrong turning... Or one can try and eliminate possibilities, tragic possibilities, by narrowing one's horizons, winnowing out all that is trivial, absurd, or ambiguous from one's life. And one thinks of all sorts of political and cultural mechanisms that can be set into motion for this purpose. In a simple life less can go wrong. Another option is to neutralize chaos by incorporating it into the natural order of being that repeats itself at regular intervals: the myth of eternal return; but perhaps there is a third and more innovative way: instead of being subject to chance we should make our own history, since if it is the case that we can only truly know what we ourselves make (Vico), then we don't have to renounce all attempts at knowing. If we can normalize probabilities, predict risk, then the irruption of the unforseeable becomes less problematic, it becomes a "known unknown".

But modern risk is something quite different: we simply don't know what we don't know and therefore face 'unknown unknowns'; our political and social institutions cannot cope with the unanticpated risks that technology and science throw up. Unforseebale consequences escape us, slip across the border into the shadows; it is almost as if there's a failure of language, an inability to even imagine how we would be able to picture such a non-event and a permanent state of indecison about which words we could possibly use to describe such a phenomenon ex ante. The more we deny the very existence of such phantom-like events the more they come back to plague us, the more real they become.

A global risk society is swathed in ironies; billions of dollars are spent on security, on patrolling international borders when, out of the blue, there's an attack from 'within'. Rationality, and the categories of thought that it depends on: the past, experience, etc can no longer be used to explain or predict what might happen. The old logic simply breaks down. The uncanny finds a home.

Risk, as ambivalence, ambiguity, is the fundamental way of being in late modernity. Liquid modernity or the carnival generates an endless stream of images. Is that something that we should resign ourselves to, embrace, or is it a spur to political action? If the image is a fleeting one, one that refers only to our sensibilities or its own tangled web of signs, can there even be a political response? Without the sense of immortality and transcendence, might not cultural and political authority be meaningless?

Is risk and ambivalence a way of avoiding definition, identity, a refusal of system?Can there be any going back to the world of certainties-God, Reason, Society-or does a late civilisation, one defined by its historical consciousness and flux, find itself unable to return its repressed origins? There is no going back to 'cosmos' and, as Raymond Williams poignantly reminds us, the nostalgia for 'place' is fraught with difficulties...

But this clammering for home is deep rooted and does not disappear so quickly, nor is it displaced so readily: the search for a centre of gravity is merely reborn in other forms. The past is never dead; it isn't even really past.

The 'global' element of risk is that we now have to negotiate with the distant 'other'; exchange, communication, is now conducted with strangers whereas in previous generations our sense of self was constructed in strict opposition to the alien, the sheer 'otherness' of the other, as well as by our own shared continuities of memory, history, and our shared attributes (communities of religion, ethnicity, language-sameness, homogeneity- are the bedrock of modern citizenship and not abstract 'man'. There's a growing sense in europe that we're too diverse, that the stranger in our midst has not, can not, be assimilated..to live cheek-by-jowl with the stranger, the immigrant, the non-citizen par excellence, the very paragon of what might be called 'Man', has only moved what was exterior to the centre. It hasn't erased, but only problematised the relation between exterior and interior)

Modern risk is not a natural, but a manufactured risk, something that is produced, a totally random by-product of our actions in nature that set off a whole series of chain reactions and processes. One questions whether these risks are not 'luxury risks', manufactued-in the other sense of the word- a form of subjective impressions that are weaved together by the media and by the political establishment.

Artifice as a method of political control. Unable to bind citizens and communities to a vision of 'the good society', the power of nightmares and 'fear' come into their own; in a society that lacks the cohesion of religious or cultural identity, one that is jeopardized by irrational outbursts of the crowd, mass society, one increasingly devoid of authority and legitamacy, the question arises: might it not be better to soothe souls (the therapeutic state), order chaos, by introducing pain and pleasure, fantasies and fear , as the central motivations of human nature?A politics of the circus, the spectacular, shines in the ruins of all past attempts to found politics. One must give up on the attempt to 'found' politics at all: justice-as-fairness- doesn't seek deep roots, metaphysical or otherwise. This signals, perhaps, a return to the mysterious will of the sovereign and not to a rationally ordered vision. Pain and pleasure are, after all, it is argued, the only 'natural' things we have in common-not our intellect or reason, and most definitely not our spiritual natures-and if this is so, then a politics established on what eludes our consciousness, namely blood and soil, can never be far behind...

For the west are there really that many great risks compared to the vagaries of fortune that one can expect in Africa or Asia, say? Might it not be the case that the more pragmatic, mundane, monochrome, our world becomes the more we seek risk? Terrorist threats are overplayed, avian flu...but also our taste for gambling, for recklessness, daring feats and adventure; all these suggest that the whole of society aspires to the condition of musicality, the fleetingness of the moment that stands in no relation to the past or the future..pure temporality or sovereign becoming. Jazz and improvisation are the quintessential markers of our identity in the risk age.
To improvise is to be free. It is to be truly alive - unmechanical, unpredictable. The more regimented and rational our lives become, the more we exclude the miraculous , the wonderful, the transcendent, from the world, and the more we discover need to create our on myths of the unknown, our own mysteries and risks.

Risk is not the same thing as catastrophe; it is the anticipation of catastrophe, a permanent state of virtuality, of becoming. When a risk actually materialises it ceases to be a risk. Risks are kept alive in the nebulous world of possibility and cannot be dissociated from their symbolic forms.

But where does the risk society originate from? Without God or a divine order humans are thrown back on themselves and are responsible for their decisions and their outcomes. Risk presupposes the absence of the divine and is , therefore, closely connected to the process of secularization. How to explain disasters or evil in a world that is made solely by man? Risk is ultimately a sign of our freedom. But it is what Augustine would call a lonely freedom. Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. Man sets forth on the open seas of unpredictability but, like the Narrenschiff , is condemned never to arive.

But reactions and counter-movements set in. The science of risk begins with the need to calculate insurance premiums for merchants. What is more, the dream of security, of utopian islands in that sea, stays with us. The perfect, gem-like ideal world where all relations are arranged in sublime geometric precision is also a prison, a panopticon....

But if change and randomness are inevitable-the one thing we can be sure of is that we are not sure of anything- then how do political institutions function? The only model for action is precaution, pre-emption. Our knowledge is uncertain and we have no basis to form a probability of what might happen (Keynes, 1937). But, then, why and how should society concern itself with establishing political rules for what it does not, can not , know?

Not via risk calulation which is based on experience or science. Hume: that the sun has risen every day so far in human history is no guarantee that it will tomorrow; the links in causality are tenuous or, if they are not, our knowledge of them certainly is! Instead, the only way of coming to terms with this new type of risk is by relying on imagination, fiction, fear, and suspicion.

Another dimension of this risk is that individuals ust now cope with uncertainty in their own way since the scientists and the politicians fail to hold our trust: they do not necessarily have a better idea of the risks that we face, and they are not in a privileged position in terms of information regarding the lieklihood of any risk and so it is fair to say: your guess is as good as mine. Individuals have to form their own assessment of the risks and this undermines political authority. The tragic irony: the more we elevate experts to the status of sooth-sayers, the less we believe what they have to tell us. In a post-democratic society, can the state reproduce power and order? If it does so, by providing more securityat the expense of liberty, how does it differ from the totalitarian solution? In an uncertain world, political forms are constantly shifting. All is flux.

How was it possible to dethrone the doctrine of necessity, the bourgeois certainities of the old world?How do we get to the strange idea that nature is at root irreducibly stochastic and why do we still doubt that contingency, chance, is an adequate measure of our being (Freud)?

Laplace, 1795: given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it...an intelligence sufficiently vast..nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.

The mechanical self-despite its opening up the possibility of meaningless repetition- is something that man has looked to as a model of precision and predictability, a dazzling monument to our desire to carve out order from the unformed. Efficiency, speed, power, the release of dynamic energies. What the human hand creates is what the human heart desired...
Shechenko, 1913, The world has been transformed into a single, monstrous, fantastic, perpetually-moving machine, into a single non-animal.., We like some kind of ideally maunufactured mechanical man, have grown used to living, getting up, going to bed, eating and working by the clock-and the sense of rhythm and mechanical harmony, reflected in the whole of our life, cannot but help be reflected in our thinking and in our spiritual life.


Against such a style of thinking chance can only be the intersecting of causal lines that we are at present dimly aware of. But this troubles us. What of free will? Only by positing a radical dualism is the self saved from mechanism: the res extensa is subject to mechanical laws and that includes the body-as-machine, but: (bichart), It is impossible to forsee, predict or calculate anything with regard to their phenomena (organic life). The lawless heart comes to prominence as the bourgeois uncertainties are undermined, as the solid stage of modernity draws to a close.

The free self dreams of unlegislated truth and trawls the 19th century for the gothic, mystery,melancholy, fear, anything beyond the iron cage of certainties, 'satanic mills'. In it she finds traces of those voluptuous moments when space opens up before her presence and an unmediated experience manifests itself. The unqualified delirium of 'the new', the utterly random event that shatters illusions of permanence. In the next century this feeling will morph into the rebellion against the rigidities of the old world, against ordinariness and mediocrity. Spontaneity, vitalism, Dada, as a way of combatting false moralities, and the hierarchies of the static world sink with the belle epoque. From now on one must be an artist of the floating world. In Zurich-a good place for nothingness-manifestos are drawn up: one must destroy librarires, culture and memory; the way of freedom lies in knowing only what one knows by heart; jazz, childhood, innocence, african prmitivism, are the viable options for an age that finds itself at the end of history. For a late civilisation, a world-weary culture, the appeal of thanatos looms large. One must renounce desire (Buddhism, as Nietzsche predicted, would be in line with such sympathies).

The subject is teetering on the brink of absolute nihilism; and if this mechanization with or without purpose, this universal depletion of meaning, should come to fulfilment, then the future void may prove equal to all the death anxieties of late antiquity and all the medieval anxieties about hell.

"Happenings" and collages made by the laws of chance, hedonism or inwardness were the only way to escape a world that after the trenches was increasingly unreal in its material splendour, its deathly destruction. If the machine, technology, had been used to tear up the past, to generate ever dizzying vistas of fragmented reality then perhaps, it was argued, the only way forward was to yield to the realisation that there was only one sensation followed by another.

"Resist much, obey little," urged Walt Whitman, and American modernism took this to heart. Everything must start anew, from the unruly self.

But chance had made her way into our thinking many years ago and it was as if a number of hidden undecurrents suddenly came to the surface of our awareness before becoming a flood. With Descartes' second turning inwards we could never be sure if the real world was anything but the trick of a devious mind. The modern world originates in radical doubt and the return to subjectivity; under such conditions there could be no 'givens', no absolute that acts as a guarantor of the truth. The necessity of mechanical instruments to perceive reality only strengthened this mentalitie. The telescope, that Goethe- perhaps with some wisdom- rejected, was a sure sign of this. From now on we could never be sure if we would encounter anything but our own thoughts or the products of our own mind...the world of risk is a world of immanence.

At the level of ideas this is how chance makes its first appearance although it will soon become an idea that comes to dominate all other ways of seeing the world. From here it is only a short step to imagine that nature itself is a fundamentally random process, throwing up different forms that then, equally strangely, slip back into oblivion. Life is devoid of any teleological meaning, a process that is unending and unlimited-like capitalism itself- and always likely to meander or explode into unchartered territories.

Although the introduction of risk into the world is something that is often feared, might it not be something that is also keenly desired-and not just because it is an expression of our freedom? The introduction of life and labour into the political realm, the unnatural growth of the natural (arendt) is wished for because it gives man a project that can never be realised. Life, in its radical openness and incompleteness, its radical chanciness, is the only version of infinity that entices us. Our games of chance, 'play', are perhaps nothing more significant than the thoughts of bored chimps.

But only 'perhaps'. More than anything, risk is our desire for areas of life that we simply cannot know. It is as if western man, with his hypertrophied mind, is tired of the compulsion to know. But how can civilised man live without knowing...

(Citations from J. Jones, Wild Ones and Mike Davis, Flames of New York)