Riskiness of Modernity and Strategies of (Re)Production of Crisis: a Theoretical Research Perspective

Abstract

The article is devoted to the theoretical and methodological study of the crisis phenomenon. Based on the developments of U. Beck and N. Luhmann, the authors examine the process of how rationality, trying to get rid of external dangers and control an increasing number of elements of the environment, produces more and more risks. It is analyzed how the logic of "rationalization", "managerialization", "calculativeness", "dynamism" becomes an integral and recognized attribute of modern society and at the same time leads to the emergence of new risks. Attention is also paid to how risks are transformed into a commodity with a visible and stable audience of constant consumption. In this light, the authors aim to build a research scheme for further analysis of the strategies of social agents in the conditions of riskogenicity and chrysogenicity of modernity. For this purpose, they turn to the analysis of the societies of the Modern Other as producers and objects of specific risks. Authors analyze separately the constitutive nature of risks, that is, as chosenness, producedness and implementedness by the system, where reveals the "double paradox of unreliability". Special emphasis is placed on how the industrialization of risk production forms a new arrangement of political forces in society and how it transforms the nature of symbolic struggle at the macro level and subjectivity at the micro level. It is demonstrated that the logic of "permanent choice" and "doom to flexibility" leads to the permanence of diversity, uncertainty, instability, and fragility of the objects of choice and to their involvement in the agent's identity. The formation of the fundamental paradox of the "actor doomed to act without the guarantee of his own subjectivity" is separately investigated. The authors justify another paradox, that the crisis is constituted in the reality of everyday life only when there is also a crisis pattern among the patterns of perception and action. The authors pay attention to "layers of strength", "typed crises", "backup ways", ways of preserving "pieces" of "torn social fabric", the phenomenon of "crisis things", as well as, in particular, to the processuality of the fabrication of continuity of communication, interaction, practice, habits, discourses. Particular attention is paid to the phenomenon of integration of the "crisis" into the order of the social institution and the key parameters of this process are highlighted, noting that the social institution "expands" itself due to the integration into its order of elements from the surrounding environment.