By Joost Van Loon
The query to whether we're now getting into a possibility society has turn into a key debate in modern social thought. possibility and Technological tradition offers a severe dialogue of the most theories of possibility from Ulrich Becks foundational paintings to that of his contemporaries comparable to Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash and assesses the level to which chance has impacted on smooth societies. during this dialogue van Loon demonstrates how new applied sciences are remodeling the nature of probability and examines the connection among technological tradition and society via substantive chapters on issues resembling waste, rising viruses, communique applied sciences and concrete issues. In so doing this cutting edge new ebook extends the controversy to surround theorists corresponding to Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard.
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Extra resources for Risk and Technological Culture: Towards a Sociology of Virulence (International Library of Sociology)
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However, it is also evident that law presides over and interferes with a range of other systems, including the very powerful and largely self-referential system of finance and economics. Teubner argues that systems such as law have the ability to reflexively incorporate the logic of other systems in order to increase its own self-referentiality. This process of conversion or translation is of extreme importance to the sustainability of any system; not only must it be able to differentiate itself from its own environment, but also it must incorporate other systems and their environments and either induce or scan in their logic of differentiation and self-referentiality.
In particular since the 1960s, there has been growing awareness that cancer and cardiovascular diseases, the main causes of death in affluent societies, are related to practices of consumption. Moreover, developments in medical technology, in particular the discovery of antibiotics, enabled people to reconceptualize ‘infectious disease’ as something they can partly control and even conquer (Van Loon, 1997a). Already since the Victorian household sanitation movements of the late nineteenth century there was a growing sense of the dangers of invisible creatures (‘germs’) as the cause of many diseases.
Moral obligations thus become restricted to those imposed by individuals themselves. This sense of individualization fits in with a liberal ideology of personal freedom and choice. This ideology, which emerged from a collusion between modernity and the enlightenment, has been culturally dominant since the nineteenth century, but one could argue has now nearly attained full hegemonic status as very little can be successfully presented as a viable alternative to it. This, however, is not the only way in which one could interpret individualization.