Risk means “exposure to the future”, but not through scarcity or deprivation - through unintended consequences. For Ulrich Beck, risk means, first and foremost, the result of interactions between technology and nature (which were formerly premised on a Baconian ideal of mastery). Risk is implicitly democratising – no matter how much you can afford to pay out, consciousness of technological, complex risks represents us all as ultimately subject to them. Society increasingly becomes organised around the monitoring and management of risks – individuals, but also individual institutions. It is no longer the case that technological rationality and norms of efficiency (the traditions of modernity, such as the application of science to solve problems) are assumed to be automatically the best way to go. Individualisation of responsibility occurs: the question is, how far should we trust the traditions of modernity, in individual cases?

Scientific analysis of risks – particularly where novel phenomena are being dealt with, such as the possibility of transmission of BSE to humans from cattle, and politicians have an interest in the message – often lends a misleading air of certainty to prognoses, particular where highly technical statistical methods are used, producing forecasts and prediction that carry an air of specious accuracy with them. (e.g. Smil 2005, pp. 167-78) As the geographer John Adams puts it, an over-reliance in risk analysis on the status quo of scientific knowledge like “the drunk looking for his keys, not in the dark where he dropped them, but under the lamp post where there was light by which to see” (Adams 2007, p. 10). So if we accept that there’s a tendency for the use of quantitative methods and scientific evidence in risk analysis to focus interest on what can be modelled, then the social predominance of technical risk analysis opens up another aspect of the risks society, and takes us back to Beck’s first thesis – second modernity implies a politics of risk. Just as modernity, understood as the project of the conquest of scarcity through technical and social progress, implies a politics of scarcity – who gets what – second modernity implies a politics of risk. Risks are unevenly distributed in society. How this is done is, Beck argues, down to an unequal distribution of power to define what aspects of general concern about risk are important.

Two problems with this. First of all, Beck seems to be suggesting that you can draw a line between first and second modernity on the basis of concerns with social justice that are about scarcity, and concerns which bring in issues of risk. But how we judge where this line is – are we in a risk society yet?- is not clear. What empirical features would a risk society manifest, beyond a transition from The integration of concerns about risk in various ways into everyday life may be an indicator of the passage – examples from (German) Playmobil toys (Heise 2008). But there is no clear distinction to be drawn. Vulnerability to risk relates directly to social justice – the poor, marginalised communities and so on tend to be more exposed to environmental risk. Inequality arguably remains a predictor of risk perception, for example – people who have risks imposed on them are perhaps more likely to be conscious of the complexities and arbitrariness of how risk is framed by technical discourses..

Beck’s tendency to use “risk” rather broadly obscures various conceptual distinctions which are perhaps quite important. What he appears to mean by “risk” in a broad sense implies consequences of actions, some of which we may be uncertain about to some degree, and some of which we might be entirely ignorant about. Put crudely, and in Donald Rumsfeld’s language, there are (as well as the known knowns of definite risks, which can be quantified as per the technical definition of risk, known unknowns (uncertainties) and unknown unknowns (ignorance). Further, uncertainty in general comes in two broad forms – subjective and objective. Not knowing what to do in the face of a future full of uncertain outcomes is a dimension which Beck does not address. His theory of individualisation, whereby individuals increasingly take upon themselves the responsibility for a risky future, does not

Peter Marris’ work contains a nuanced and perhaps overlooked approach to these issues. Marris died on 25th June 2007 at the age of 79.  He first came to prominence as one of the group of sociologists, headed by the late Michael Young (later Lord Young of Dartington) who formed the now legendary Institute of Community Studies in the East End of London. 

For Marris, a key element which shapes social practice is what expectations we have of the future, which is of course intrinsically uncertain. Located in a passing present, we experience the future as the horizon of action, and as such we see it as meaningful in relation to our present plans and projects. What we expect of the future shapes what we understand as our option for action in the present – different societies see it as something to be propitiated, insured against, planned for, predictable, random, waiting to be accepted, requiring our care and so on. Societies which manifest high degrees of religious belief demonstrate different attitudes than secular ones, bureaucratic institutions within secular societies differ from non-bureaucratic ones, and so on. What makes the difference between different expectations of the future, and different evaluations of the present is, for Marris, how concrete relationships are organised and interpreted. As members of societies and participants within institutions, we are first and foremost deeply embedded interrelated individuals, individuals whose self-understanding is shaped by the specific, concrete relationships we are emotionally, imaginatively and cognitively involved in. Stronger expectations with regard to the future – of how the consequences of our own and others’ actions will pan out – enable us to make more sense of our position in the present, and our capacity to effect the future and to take action that we find meaningful within some broader context.

For Marris, a framework of expectations is produced within social groups via attachment. It is in this way that he links social structures and shared practices to the emotional and cognitive experiences of an individual embedded in a set of evolving, concrete relationships. Expectations about the world are based on experiences of attachment relationships. By linking the personal and public in this way, Marris links sociological analysis to the kind of developmental psychologies worked out by such psychoanalytically-oriented psychologists as Heinz, Kohut, Daniel Stern, and Donald Winnicott who view the drama of infant development as being tied to how children model experiences of transition. Against a set of robust, largely predictable relationships – with the parental one being the source of expectations through which others are managed – individuals learn to model and manage change in their own lives, framing transitions as making sense in relation to a wider framework of meanings which they work on actively.

Part of the developmental process, as outlined by Marris in The Politics of Uncertainty, is that attachments develop to other objects. These can include attachments to features of place (developed through everyday routines), cultural objects, public institutions (whether a sports team, a political grouping or the NHS), and finally ideals. This wide range of attachments interconnect (people and place, institutions and ideals and so on), to cement expectations about what the future should look like. The relationships one has with these different objects of attachment, through time, act as coordinates that shape the sense one has of the meaningfulness of ones life. They create webs of trust (in people, in institutions, in the commodiousness or conduciveness of place, in the durability of ideals) against which the scale of uncertainty is diminished.

But Marris’ understanding of relationships represents them as inherently dialectical, as comprising two opposed meanings: as well as creating trust, reliability and durability against the horizon of an intrinsically uncertain future, they also make us vulnerable to unexpected change. Because the coordinates upon which frameworks of meaning are drawn are individual valued objects of these various kinds, attachment is always singular. Valued objects are the kind of things which have their own life stories – places, people, institutions, ideals - and as such, they have pasts and, importantly, futures in which things can go well or badly for them. What happens to these singular valued others can have an enormous impact on us. Ideals can fall out of fashion, be suppressed, or can die out with the decline of institutions. Our loved ones can grow sick and die, places can be transformed beyond all recognition through development or pollution incidents, and so on. The experience of losing such valued objects is, for Marris, an important factor in human well-being. The human subject, for him, is not homo economicus, for whom values are preferences that produce subjective well-being, with indifference between values being possible on the basis of their utility value (if one gets x amount of utility from consuming ice cream and the same amount of utility from consuming broccoli, then there is no essential difference between them). Marris’ subject is one formed by and forming a plurality of individual, sui generis relationships. One cannot exchange a sui generis good for another without undergoing processes of loss and grieving.

Uncertainty is, therefore, always on the horizon – and this kind of uncertainty is of both the subjective and objective varieties. The experience of uncertainty in the present, for Marris, can have serious consequences, unless it is caught within meanings that give it significance. Drawing on our attachments and the frameworks of meaning they make possible, the future can appear relatively predictable. But if (i) these attachments are broken or impaired, then the trusted meanings we use to understand what is coming can collapse. Alternatively, (ii) if dimensions of uncertainty arise which cannot be encompassed within our familiar meanings, then we also run into trouble. For example, a risky future (the prospect of unemployment, of illness, of environmental harm) need not harm us, if we trust ideals, people, institutions – other sources of meaning. Resilience in the face of uncertainty therefore depends very much on networks of attachment, for Marris. But sometimes we cannot make sense of what the future might hold – say, in situations which imply very complex downstream uncertainties, or obvious ignorance, like the regional impacts of climate change or the management of nuclear waste, then familiar meanings may not seem like reliable guides to action. Similarly, if we lose attachments to loved ones (through war or disease epidemics), to our jobs or workplaces (through unemployment), to our local environments (through unwanted development or pollution), then subjective uncertainty in the form of no longer having trustworthy frameworks of meaning as guides can erupt. Of course, both kinds of uncertainty can come together, with one triggering the other. So when radical uncertainty strikes, we can lose the sense of “how to go on” – this is what uncertainty, in its most intense form, means for Marris. A collapse of meaningfulness triggered by the failure of the interpretive tools we use to manage our passage from the past and present into the future.

What about politics? As Marris points out, we do not simply absorb meanings, we also make them. We attempt to reduce uncertainty through the interpretation and creation of meanings. We employ strategies, both individually and in groups or institutions, for managing uncertainty when it arises. This is where politics enters, because the use of different strategies reflects and shapes power relations. These typically fall into three kinds. Will say a bit about each of these before comparing Beck and Marris, and giving an example of how Marris’ work has been applied.

Strategies of autonomy are ones which attempt to deal with uncertainty by reducing or minimising attachment. They emphasise flexibility above commitment, and aim to maximise freedom of action in the present. For an institutional example, Marris describes the results of General Motors’ decision to close a Detroit manufacturing plant, which resulted in attempts by the city to construct a more attractive environment for investment by, inter alia, razing a working-class suburb, without success. The plant closed. Uncertainty here erupts within multiple, closely woven relationships: between people and a physical environment radically altered by municipal diktat, between people within families and between families themselves, between employees and employers, and between citizens and their municipal representatives. The company, from a position of economic power, chose to cut off its relationship with municipality and workers so as to protect its investments elsewhere. The municipallity used its power to increase its flexibility as an attractive place to invest, and in doing so broke bonds of trust, and destroyed attachments to place. Both, operating from a position of relative power, saw the uncertain future as one which had to be managed through successful competition (with other companies, sites for investment). But in pursuing this strategy, they seek greater certainty by ensuring that others experience greater uncertainty – both objective and subjective. The loss of jobs, trust in local government and place imposes great stress on those who have less flexibility, those whose sense of meaning is very much embedded in non-exchangeable relationships. The problem is that some institutions and sets of rules which operate across institutions privilege strategies of autonomy – private healthcare, a liberalised market in energy provision, labour market flexibility and so on. The goal of strategies of autonomy is to control uncertainty by managing the rules under which social life is lived.

Another way of dealing with uncertainty is to seek to extend and shore up commitments. This aims to preserve commitments, extending to the wider social level the kinds of efforts we engage in in personal life – expressions of care for others, upkeep of local places, participation in institutions, defending ideals. Social life is, in general for Marris, based on unconscious strategies of reciprocity which define individual and group identities, and thereby establish solidarity. Reciprocity in this sense can therefore be exclusionary – it can shift uncertainty elsewhere by excluding others from networks of support and frameworks of meaning. But Marris argues that it can also be cosmopolitan, as it implies a recognition that, as societies become more complex and (apparently) fragmented, they are actually becoming more interconnected. Reciprocity, as a conscious strategy, underlies initiatives such as socialised healthcare and other forms of risk pooling – it underpins the idea of resilience. One could see Marris’s argument here as a recapitulation of well-worn theses about modernity – that it involves the erosion of traditional ties and so on. But Marris sees reciprocity as expressed in political movements which are entirely modern. Attachment is not some kind of pre-modern paradigm, like Tonnies Gemeinschaft. It represents a basic dimension of human social existence with which all social action has to reckon.

When those affected by uncertainty do not have the power to competitively manage their exposure by shifting it elsewhere, and their networks of attachment and meaning are compromised, then withdrawal often becomes their only option in reaction to the grief which accompanies loss of meaning. As an interpretive strategy, this is, if you like, a negative image of autonomy: it seeks to keep the individual or institution “safe” from vulnerability by denying that this vulnerability is in fact real. This can arise through some kind of sublimation of meaning as occurs in religious beliefs that depict suffering as illusory. Or in retreat to drugs or alcohol, or in retreat to ideals which serve as a last bulwark against uncertainty What these defences have as their common denominator is their self-defeating tendency: they tend to accommodate people to uncertainty in ways which simultaneously undermining their hopes and bring about denial and even withdrawal from social networks.

Humans cannot do without attachment. Strategies of autonomy - including withdrawal - seek to minimise attachment, and control the outcomes of action. But in modern, industrialised societies, the long term increasingly becomes an object of concern. As with climate change and resource use issues, the longer-term impacts of our actions force themselves on us more and more as matters of concern. The problem with strategies of autonomy is that they tend to be premised on the assumption that the relationships can be controlled “from above”, as it were, in order to eliminate or at least reduce uncertainty as much as possible. But there are two problems here: first, the tools which autonomy relies on tend to be ones which only have a short reach. Control strategies feed off predictability, and so tools which promise predictability have great appeal. Basing risk analysis on scientific knowledge, or reliance on demand forecasting to predict future energy use are good examples of the use of such tools. The problem with these tools is that they are reliable only in the short-term, but it is the longer term that is increasingly the object of concern. To extend to the long term requires all kinds of dubious assumptions (such as future discounting in economics, or the use of very simplified models in forecasting the failure rates of e.g. nuclear waste facilities). Orienting oneself to an uncertain future as to a controllable – or at least manageable – object is therefore very problematic. We are back with Adams’ drunk searching for his keys in the light given by the streetlamp. The second issues concerns the complex and singular nature of the relationships on which people and institutions rely in order to make sense of their world. To seek to control uncertainty requires in large part redefining the nature of these relationships – one has to take a particular perspective upon them, in which their primary importance no longer derives from their sui generis nature. They are depicted as comparable according to some quantitative measure, and therefore as potentially exchangeable: one neighbourhood is much like another, one job like another, and so on. But we would resist saying the same thing about a lover, a friend, a landscape or an ideal, because of the meaning-conferring role relationships with these objects have in peoples’ lives. Marris’ implication is that the significance of objects of attachment – including institutions, roles, localities – is inseparable from this kind of meaning-conferring role. Defining them in the distanced terms required by the forms of knowledge on which strategies of control typically rely tries to do precisely this, however.

Overall, Marris’ perspective is unique because of the connection he draws between how we make sense of uncertainty and how we make sense of relationships with objects of attachment. He views strategies of interpretation, like reciprocity and competition, as tendencies within modernity as such, which can become radically antagonistic in some circumstances. This general trend for antagonism is perhaps, for Marris, definitive of modernity – early and late - as such. Like Weber’s distinction between instrumental and substantive rationality, the difference between reciprocity and competition is one between contrasting ways of making sense of the world and action within it. A quick example of one field in which this work has resonance.

One might say that many environmental conflicts are over definitions of the future – about the best way to understand and prepare for determinate risks and more or less indeterminate uncertainties. Risk, in the technical sense on which public and private institutions often rely, becomes - as Beck and Marris both argue – a technology for defining the future as calculable and controllable, or at least manageable. The use of EIAs and other forms of damage assessment to judge the benefits and costs of e.g. planning policies or decisions But these definitions of the future have real effects in the present – not only in determining how resources are allocated and used, but in enhancing or impairing the abilities of individuals, groups and institutions to deal with uncertainty. There’s been a lot of debate among political philosophers, particularly those concerned with planning, about whether the imposition of risks should be considered a compensable harm. But some social psychologists have argued that the reduction of the ability to deal with uncertainty, through the erosion of community cohesion that takes place through the transformation of place, erosion of internal relationships of trust, and through damage external relationships with local government and official agencies, is a cause of one form of social harm, and with it, of environmental conflict. The loss of objects of attachment which mark relationships with place and signify expectations of social solidarity – and how these losses are typically misunderstood and mismanaged by official agencies – is at the heart of the work of social psychologists like Kai Erickson and Michael Edelstein. Here, there is clear resonance with Marris’ work – the impact of uncertainty is understood as a harm in its own right. This has also informed my own work on the impacts of the South Wales Gas Pipeline, a short precis of which was published recently in Planet (www.planetmagazine.org) – and can be downloaded at http://www.scribd.com/doc/22226727/Living-with-Uncertainty.

Peter Marris: the Politics of Uncertainty Chris Groves

Beck and the Risk Society Reflexive modernisation: “modernisation of the principles of industrial society” (Beck 1992)

Risk and Science

Problems: 1) the “Risk Society” “Are we there yet?” Integration of risk concerns into everyday life But risk concerns get integrated into persistent “first modernity” concerns…

Problems: 2) Risk and Uncertainty

Peter Marris, 1928 – 2007

Relationships and futurity

Attachment and Expectations

Spreading attachments

Reliability and Vulnerability

“How do we go on?” Impact of objective uncertainty (the indeterminacy of the future) Impact of subjective uncertainty (the breaking of attachments)

Managing uncertainty

Autonomy

Reciprocity

Withdrawal

The costs of autonomy

Beck and Marris compared

The Significance of Marris – Environmental Conflicts over Risk