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Abstract: The dominance of the modern concept of risk and calculability is challenged by and has to be distinguished from "manufactured uncertainties." Typically today, conflict and controversy flare up around this particular type of new manufactured risk. Neither natural disasters - threats - coming from the outside and thus attributable to God or nature have this effect any longer. Nor do the specific calculable uncertainties - "risks" - which are determinable with actuarial precision interms of a probability calculus backed up by insurance and monetary compensation fall in this category. At the centre of attention today, by contrast, are "manufactured uncertainties." They are distinguished by the fact that they are dependent on human decisions, created by society itself, immanent to society and thus non-externalizable, collectively imposed and thus individually unavoidable.
Why are the concepts of manufactured uncertainty and "(world) risk society" so important in order to understand the social and political dynamics and transformations at the beginning of the 21st century? It is the accumulation of risks - ecological, terrorist, military, financial, biomedical and informational - that has an overwhelming presence in our world today. To the extent that risk is experienced as omnipresent, there are only three possible reactions: denial, apathy and transformation. The first is largely inscribed in modern culture, the second gives way to a nihilistic strain in postmodernism, the third marks the issue this paper raises: How does the anticipation of a multiplicity of manmade futures and its risky consequences affect and transform the perceptions, living conditions and institutions of modern societies? It is crucial to keep sight of the irrevocable openness of the future and the specifically modern demand for rationalization. My assumption is that the demand for rationalization increases uncertainty. For the uncertainty produced by industrial society does not result ineluctably in chaos or in catastrophe. Rather, incalculable uncertainty can also be a source of creativity, the reason for permitting the unexpected and experimenting with the new. Against the grain of the current wide-spread feeling of doom I would like to ask: Is there hidden in the "culture of catastrophe" also an enlightenment function of global risks and what form does it take?
My argument (summarizing my theory) will be developed here in two steps:1
(1) Dangers,...