Dominique Bourg, Pierre-Benoit Joly and Alain Kauffmann (eds.), Du risque à la menace. Penser la catastrophe, Puf, 2013
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17215
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Dominique Bourg, Pierre-Benoit Joly and Alain Kauffmann (eds.), From risk to threat. Thinking about the catastrophe, Puf, 2013
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Book Reviews
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Silvia Bruzzone
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Dominique Bourg, Pierre-Benoit Joly and Alain Kauffmann (eds.), From risk to threat. Thinking about the catastrophe, Puf, 2013
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96                                                             Tecnoscienza – 5 (2)

                                     ***


     Dominique Bourg, Pierre-Benoit Joly, Alain Kauffmann
     (eds.)
Du risque à la menace. Penser la catastrophe [From risk to threat. Thinking
about the catastrophe]
Paris: Puf, 2013, pp. 252

Silvia Bruzzone Tours University

    The book edited by Dominique Bourg, Pierre-Benoit Joly and Alain
Kaufmann is a collection of articles presented at the Colloque of Cerisy,
which took place in September 2011. After 35 years from the publication
of Beck’s Risiko Gesellschaft, the conference questions the appropriate-
ness of the expression “risk society” to explain contemporary dynamics.
The book is divided in four parts.
    In the first one, historians contest Beck’s main thesis of the existence
of a break between the present and the past. According to them many
characteristics, which have been attributed to the risk society, were al-
ready present at the beginning of the XIX century. In particular, they
question the supposed virtues linked to the risk society. In the past, the
acknowledgement of the dangerousness and of the potential damages in
the development of techno-sciences has not led to a limitation of their
expansion. This has rather brought to the development of measures of
accompaniment. So, while according to Beck, the risk society would be
more reflexive and conscious of the side effects of its production, the au-
thors in the book claim that this avowal goes in the sense of a risk ac-
ceptance rather than risk criticism.
    In the second, part, different contributions, mostly from philosophers,
elaborate on the concepts to think about the actual society. The necessity
to overcome the notion of risk and its connected idea of control and ca-
pacity of evaluation leads them to propose a substitution of it with the
term “threat”. Here we find the reason for the title of the book. The “so-
ciety of threat” would better convey the idea that we live in a society
made of potential damages which are out of our capacity of evaluation,
prediction and control. In Beck’s work, science plays a central role. Dif-
ferent contributions give account of the limits connected to the notion of
risk and provide some elements to frame a new epistemological paradigm.
The need of controlling incertitude has been increasingly left to mathe-
matical models and cost and benefit analysis. As side effect, the excessive
“mathematization” of society has led to the eviction of sense and to all
interpretative work. Attention is then addressed to post-normal science
(Funtowitz and Ravetz, 1990) which is based on a pluralism of perspec-
tives, on a critical distance towards models and on a new attention to in-
Book Review                                                                97
terpretation. This brings to a reconfiguration of knowledge itself, where-
by its ultimate goal would not be prediction but “care”. Moreover, the
notion of risk does not seem being adapted to cover so called “transcen-
dental damages”. The term risk entails in fact an individualist and mone-
tary dimension. Thus damages connected, for instance, to the degradation
of the biosphere could not be acknowledged under the category of risk.
The proposal is to take the incertitude for serious and to adopt a cogni-
tive approach, which recognizes the limits of human action. This should
be based on a “logic of clues” (in French “logique indiciaire” that is based
on “indices”, clues), which is close to judicial enquiry or to police investi-
gations. The logic “of clues” is linked to a situated type of knowledge and
to a way of proceeding by analogy. This would allow overcoming the idea
of the principle of precaution as cost and benefit analysis. The assump-
tion of the incertitude by the principle of precaution entails a change in
the way of thinking, which does not aspire to tell what is “true” but just
what is “right”. Moreover, with the development of the techno-scientific
society, new legal questions arise. If new subjects (non-humans, animals,
etc) long for rights, this goes beyond the traditional class framework,
which has structured society and law. Lastly, the language of catastro-
phism – natural and social - seems well adapting to acknowledge the con-
textual framework.
    The third part gives account of how social sciences have mobilized
and have appropriated the concept of risk. Through a sort of mea culpa,
French researchers admit of not having taken many risks in analyzing the
“risk society”. They have remained in much legitimated areas of research
– such as controversies on risk, public debates, etc. - and have not adven-
tured themselves in more uneasy domains: for example the analysis of the
risk where it is produced or of risk perception. In the same line, few
works have engaged in theorizing risk in connections with the new trans-
formations of the State action. A parallel is then made between technical
democracy proposed by STS, on one side, and the sub-politics proposed
by Beck, on the other. If both approaches are interested in the new forms
of democracy and to the development of participatory processes beyond
the institutional ones, some differences in scales and temporalities are of-
fered. Most importantly, while for STS, the affirmation of fora of hy-
drides is a result on its own, Beck rather tends to lay emphasis on the
apories of power in the new circuits of sub-politics. The space dimension
represents a category, which is embedded in the notion of risk. By taking
into account some of the last Beck’s works and the global spreading of
some health diseases, authors propose a new grammar of spatiality of risk
which overcomes the traditional cartography. The proposition is a “navi-
gation” form of cartography permitting the connection of the different
locations where the risk manifests itself. After space, time. If the sociology
of risk is connected to predicable and calculable time, the pragmatic tra-
dition lays emphasis on other notions of time which are meaningful in the
acknowledgment of risk. The activity of prediction is not based just on
98                                                            Tecnoscienza – 5 (2)

models but on different argumentations that people mobilize in their ex-
perience of time.
    In the fourth part, studies give account of the fact that the technologi-
cal risk has not replaced the social risk. In the analysis of the trajectory of
tuberculosis, the phenomenon of resistance to antibiotics is not qualified
as “iatrogene” by health institutions but it is connected to a misuse of the
technology by users and to problematic social contexts. In another exam-
ple, which compares two experiences of epidemiological crisis in XVIII
century and at our time, the human conditions seem to be at the base of
the epidemics, beyond any rational technical tool of risk management.
Finally, climate change represents the greatest challenge to the notion of
risk and to the research in social science. Its exceptional character con-
sists in its planetary dimension, it irreversibility and its close link to gov-
ernance questions.
    Even though some of the argumentations mobilized in this text are
not completely new and despite a certain difficulty in finding a file rouge
among all the texts, the readers of Tecnoscienza may appreciate the poly-
semy of contributions stemming from different disciplinary approaches.
Beyond all criticisms and attempt to overcome the notion of risk society,
the expression introduced by Beck still represents one of the grand récit
of our time and this book provides a further confirmation of it. At the
same time, this contribution speaks for the difficulty of finding a new co-
herent grand récit, under the banner of “threat”, “catastrophe” or some-
thing else.


                                     ***


     Peter Keating and Alberto Cambrosio
Cancer on Trial. Oncology as a New Style of Practice
Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2012, pp.
456

Stefano Crabu University of Padova

    What do prizes donated by General Motors, oncomice, molecules, pa-
tients, the acronym VAMP, statisticians and oncology have in common?
Apparently very little. They are, however, some of the elements and ob-
jects that, throughout a complex and articulated convergence process,
laid the foundations for the birth of the composite and diverse biomedical
transnational movement for cancer research and treatment.
    The history of this particular and heterogeneous convergence is the
subject of the latest book by Alberto Cambrosio and Peter Keating, two
of the most eclectic and prolific authors who have worked at the inter-
