Risk: A Paper by Holtzer and Millo
By: Carlo CaduffThis paper seems very interesting: “From Risks to Second Order Dangers”. I haven’t read the entire piece, only the page on Luhmann which articulates very succinctly why the key problem is “time”. Risk is envisioned as entailing a decision that makes a difference in the present. Such a decision construes its own future. Hence the idea of a seamless continuity of past, present, and future is analytically entirely inadequate because every decision introduces a break. And since there is a general tendency to discover everywhere decisions (even in what once was called ‘nature’), the future appears as changing faster than ever.
This conceptual approach suggests a move against the historical consciousness that has dominated much of the 19th and 20th century. It also makes clear why social constructivism as a late child of historicism is an inadequate mode of observation. Rather, the anthropology of the contemporary and, in particular, the peculiar temporality of its mode of observation seems to be the most adequate entry point for an exploration of risk after the dominance of actuarial risk assessment.