“If you discuss a problem without solving it, the effect will only be more uncertainty and more unrest … We spend too much time talking about the economic situation — it is like talking about the weather.”

Habermas this is not. But it does speak to Andy’s suggestion that humans with VSS are more akin to “things” than social beings. For Zalm, in fact, sociality (in the form of incessant discussion) is itself a vital risk.

you can see the whole article at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/45d6e49a-bbd0-11db-afe4-0000779e2340.html

And: How can we arrive at a critical account of some of the concerns around vss? For Foucault, genealogy was a form of critical intervention. It might be interesting to think about this in more detail.

Dale’s example is interesting. So while in the case of smallpox hospital staff is being vaccinated by means of a massive federal program for a largely hypothetical event, you have a rate of influenza vaccination among healthcare workers that remains far too low. Money and resources are going into fancy preparedness rather than old-fashioned prevention.

The point, then, is that there do indeed seem to be relatively new ways of constituting these groups, with new demands placed upon them. While first responders have, of course, existed prior to either preparedness or vital systems, they are now being thought of in different ways.

Equally as important, the specific mechanisms that enjoin these groups to do certain things (e.g., get vaccinated) are tenuous, and ironically, perhaps less effective than previous similar efforts. The irony is that the technology involved in this instance — vaccines — is essentially the same. Think only of the requirement of healthcare workers (and infants, and school attendees, and daycare providers, and first responders, and…) to get hepatitis B vaccine. Rates of vaccination are extremely high, generally speaking. Obviously, there’s a lot more that can be said, but I’ll just end with what I see as a need not only for terminological clarity, but empirical rigor as well: How are groups like first responders being constituted as, in fact, vital?

One of the immediate responses I have is that this is a very specific story about what “the social” is. It does not include a large number of things that were done to govern collective life in the name of society. And the story that he tells coming out of the 19th century is also a very particular one. A similar story about the transposition of moral categories onto “social characteristics” could be told 100 years earlier in Britain — indeed, that is the entire story of Polanyi’s “The Great Transformation.”

There are many things on this level, but I think that the broader point is that we may be sharpening how we pose the question “is vss about the social?” I think that Andy correctly points out here (and inthe earlier exchange) that vss does not involve the detailed knowledge about the regularities of collective life (although I am not convinced that these do not reappear at times in a different guise). And I think that it is also the case that vss does not seek to regulate the routine, recurrent, structured activities of individuals as social beings, at least not in the way that Rose thinks about them. So indeed: neither the knowledge-form nor the modality of intervention resemble those of “social modernity.”

But that said, it does not seem right to me to say that the field over which vss operates is not that of the social — or “society” in the sense it was “discovered’ in the late 18th and early 18th century. Systems are “vital” precisely because they are essential to the functioning of collective life — including political institutions and the economy, but also including things like hospitals, systems of supply, markets, upon which we all depend. It is the reality of all these interconnected elements of collective life that the French Physiocrats and the British liberals “discovered” as the new basis for human life. So clearly we have need for further terminological clarification.