Sociologist Ulrich Beck offers the paradigm of the 'world risk society,' whose emergence the Advisory System confirms, to describe the current advanced stage of modernity. All of these ways of conceiving the present have gained currency in literary studies, yet at least one model has largely remained outside its purview. The descriptors that these historical breaks generated- post-Enlightenment, postcolonial, globalization era-join the glossary of concepts that constellate around aesthetic and cultural understandings of the contemporary as a break from or an intensification of the forms of modernism: postmodern, simulated, ironic.
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This infamous date became one in a series of events that inspired new descriptions of the contemporary, prior occasions beingWorldWar II and the Holocaust, the spate of independence movements and anticolonial wars beginning in the late 1940s, and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the subsequent end to the cold war. With this sense of a new era came the need, felt in both the social sciences and the humanities, for another description of the contemporary situation, in its political and historical as well as symbolic and cultural dimensions.
This agency and program were symptoms of the sense that the strikes heralded a new era in America and the West generally. It hardly requires mention that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, catalyzed the second Bush administration to create both the DHS and its advisory system. While federal emergency communication initiatives had been in place for over fifty years, the Homeland Security Advisory System was the first to communicate a perceived threat rather than an actually occurring military offensive or other catastrophic event. The implementation of this alert system made clear that the nation at large was now, if not at greater risk, more aware of the risks it faced. Each easy-to-decode color-from red (severe) to green (low)-communicates a threat status that impels government entities as well as the public to modify their preparedness for an emergency. The system was designed to disseminate emergency information smoothly from the DHS to residents and governmental agencies by translating the national threat into one of five colors. On March 12, 2002, the newly created United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) inaugurated its Homeland Security Advisory System. Fifth, coming across the passage almost by accident, and not previously being aware of its existence, reminded me that internet searches can occasionally be serendipitous. Although Beck formulates his ideas on strangeness in more sophisticated terms elsewhere in his work (as discussed later in the chapter) there is an urgency and economy of words here which makes the force of the ideas contained all the more powerful. But I cannot deny the impact of this short section on my thinking at a crucial stage of writing this book. The more I read the passage the more I am confirmed in this view.ĭigging Deeper With The Dfx Pdf File more.
Fourth, as usual when reading Beck’s work I was both excited by the possibilities it opened up and aware that despite the beguiling formulation it might quite possibly be wrong. It seemed to me, for a brief moment anyway, that I was the intended reader of this passage, which seemed to simultaneously confirm my views on the relationship between globalization and strangeness, subtly challenge them, and direct my thinking in new and productive directions. Third, it was good to know that a writer with whose work (on cosmopolitanism, particularly) I was already familiar was ‘speaking’ to me in a language I could so clearly understand. Second, I was excited by the fact that another social theorist was offering an alternative (and critical) perspective on the figure of the stranger, too often treated uncritically in the literature.
The globalization of strangeness may not yet be a recurring theme in the social sciences, but at least there is evidence of it emerging in the literature. 1 First, it encouraged my belief that others may see strangeness in the same way that I do, which up to that point was looking extremely unlikely. Coming across the passage quoted below - in which Beck gives outline form to his idea of the globalization of strangeness - was important for the development of this book in several ways. Abstract I start this chapter with a personal reflection.Phase two: the social, political, economic and individual risks increasingly tend to. Editor of the books Edition Second Modernity. The transition from industrial society to risk society. Is Three Cups of Tea Writer Greg Mortenson a Fraud? As there are so few heroes in that troubled part of the world.