Abstract
The purpose of this article is to respond to Ulrich Beck’s (2014) two crucial concepts –metamorphosis and emancipatory catastrophism – by examining the articulation between transportation disasters and financial crises. The article explains why metamorphosis is an ongoing and open process that is unpredictable, unintentional, and inclusive. It also illustrates how dialogical communities of risk, as one of the possible emancipatory side effects of global risk, may weaken due to social organisms and inequality in risk definition.
Keywords
Introduction
After Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine, various media outlets reported on related global economic responses, with topics ranging from very specific worries about the share price of Malaysia Airlines to global concerns over stock market declines and the instability of some currencies. Some journalists or bloggers used specific concepts to define the economic responses to the loss of flight MH17, such as a black swan event (e.g., Rae, 2014) or an increase in risk aversion (e.g., Twaronite, 2014), whose language and emphasis were different from those who framed the disaster from the perspectives of humanity, politics, or international relations.
In order to understand these connections between a transportation disaster and several market crashes, I respond to Ulrich Beck’s (2014) development of two key concepts, namely, metamorphosis (Verwandlung) and emancipatory catastrophism. He introduced these concepts at The Seoul Conference 2014 – Climate Change and Risk Society: New Trends of Megacity Transformation in Seoul, Korea, in July 2014. I raise two issues regarding these concepts by using transportation disasters, financial crises, and their interconnections as examples.
Metamorphosis is an ongoing process that is unpredictable rather than predictable and unintentional rather than intentional; it embraces different social categories and thus changes social order in an inclusive rather than exclusive way.
The emancipatory side effects of global risk include the dialogical communities of risk. Social organisms and inequalities in risk definition may weaken this side effect.
The unpredictable, unintentional, and inclusive process of metamorphosis (Verwandlung)
Beck (2014) defines the notion of metamorphosis as ‘a mode of changing the mode of change’ which ‘challenges the way of being in the world, thinking about the world, and imagining and doing politics’. In order to understand this term, I generalize three of its characteristics.
Unpredictability
Metamorphosis may be better understood by a return to Kafka’s novel The Metamorphosis (2007 [1915]). The main character of the story, Gregor Samsa, suddenly morphs into a giant bug one day. What happens to Gregor does not equal an evolutionary process with some presumed rules or a revolutionary movement with some particular aims. It is beyond scientific prediction. I believe this is the very symbol of the unpredictability of metamorphosis.
People may argue that Gregor Samsa’s state is unpredictable just because there was no similar case before his metamorphosis. But many of the threats we face today, such as transportation disasters and financial crises, have a long history that long predates the modern era. The issue is that history cannot guarantee people’s prediction of what the future future (Beck, 2010) holds, or in other words, what will happen in the future. The shocking moments of people facing these catastrophes still arise. The Titanic tragedy and the Wall Street Crash of 1929 were definitely not the first cases of a transportation disaster or a financial crisis, respectively, but they still shocked people at that time, as the sinking of the MV Sewol and the European debt crisis shocked people more recently. The gap between the present future (Beck, 2010), which indicates people’s anticipation of the future, and the future future is not possible to fill in absolutely, even with the promises of modernity. Moreover, sometimes uncertainties have been created or enlarged because of modern industries and technologies (e.g., Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1999).
Unlike Marxist-based social conflict theory that focuses on the conflicts between social classes (Marx, 1971 [1859]), the theory of metamorphosis may regard the conflict between the realization of the unpredictability of future threats and humans’ desire for survival and better living as the driving force of social changes. The very moments during which people determined the ‘duty to render assistance’ in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (United Nations, 1982) or signed swap arrangements – for example, the Chiang Mai Initiative signed by Asian countries after the 1997 Asian financial crisis – may not be the moments in which people suffered an ongoing catastrophe. Instead, they might be the moments in which people were anticipating future disasters, with the realization caused by past experiences that the current system was not able to deal with them.
Unintentionality
Metamorphosis is an unintentional process in the sense that the consequences of global risk are side effects instead of the achievements of intentional actions and callings. Obviously, intentional social movements with particular political objectives – such as the anti-racism, pro-environmental, and feminist movements – continue to exist in the current era. However, unintentionality refers to the phenomena in which the articulation among risk and different social-political responses, due to the unpredictability of risk, occurs in an unprepared way, instead of being predicted and determined by pre-existing theories. Sometimes, it is still in the form of formal movements, for example, the outburst of Occupy Wall Street that responded to the economic and financial crisis (Hardt and Negri, 2011). But the time point of the protest and its multiple consequences that produced the articulation between the financial crisis and social inequalities, political reforms, race problems, and environmental issues were quite surprising and even beyond the thinking of the protesters themselves. And in many other cases, the consequences were more unapparent and taken for granted; for instance, people’s linking of the downing of flight MH17 to finance was not caused by social movements. Whether the disaster did influence the market is not the key issue. The crucial point is that people naturally take some transportation disasters into their understanding of financial uncertainties without being persuaded by a formal movement.
In short, the unintentionality of metamorphosis provides a new way to understand our world, an alternative to the evolutionary view of social dynamics. Due to the unpredictability of the future future in terms of global risk, the changing mode of the world has become more unfixed, unprepared, and flexible. The victims or marginalized groups may not be bound to fixed social categories. Thus, the metamorphosis of social orders might take place in an unintentional way, which could sometimes surprise the sociologists.
Inclusiveness
The inclusiveness of metamorphosis refers to the phenomenon that global risk creates new landscapes that go beyond the notions of nation, culture, and ethnicity or binaries such as us/others, East/West, bourgeois/working class, and women/men. For example, between 17 July and 19 July, within only three days after the MH17 tragedy, more than 8000 microblogs – on China’s most popular online platform, a microblog site called Sina Weibo (Sina Weibo, 2014) – addressed the link between Malaysia Airlines and the stock market. In this case, some strong social categories such as nation, culture, class, and race did not quite matter. A new landscape, or a so-called cosmopolitan community of global risk (Beck, 2011), was built up at that moment among financial investors all around the world, including China, due to the connections between a transportation disaster and the anticipation of its consequences on the financial markets.
But this does not mean that the notion of ‘nation’ has been ‘conquered’ in this case in an exclusive way. Chinese investors’ attention still focused on how the MH17 disaster would influence China’s market, directly or indirectly. In this sense, the idea of ‘China’ is embraced rather than torn down in the face of global risk, which echoed with the inclusiveness of metamorphosis. The interdependency, or the imagination of interdependency among the entities over the world, facilitates this inclusiveness.
Dialogical communities of risk
The emancipatory side effects of global risk include social catharsis (Beck, 2014), which visualizes the invisible, connects the unconnected and centralizes the marginalized. One of the primary imperatives of social catharsis is that the different imagined communities of risk start to communicate with each other. Nowadays, social organs are extremely specialized to maintain the overall social organism (Durkheim, 1984 [1893]). As a result, sometimes boundaries are constructed between different risk communities, and possibly facilitate organizational irresponsibility (Beck, 2014), which means the sufferers are not involved in the decision-making process with relation to risk. For instance, although possibly being victims, financial investors could hardly be conceptualized as members of the community of transportation disasters, let alone being the decision makers in this field due to the specialization between the transportation and financial sectors.
However, in some instances, different risk communities are entangled, which facilitates the unintentional metamorphosis with emancipatory potentials. In the specific case of the interconnection between transportation disasters and financial crises, financial investors unintentionally use capital flows to push different actors to improve the security of transportation systems either coercively or voluntarily. For instance, the increase in risk aversion created by the mediated connection between transportation disasters and financial crises has forced investors to withdraw investment from the particular companies, cities, and even nations. In the case of flight MH17, even the Malaysian government was forced to step in to stabilize and reorganize Malaysia Airlines, not just to improve the reputation of safety of the company, but also to increase the investor confidence in the nation. Meanwhile, facilitated by the expenditure that individuals, industries, cities, and nations spend on avoiding transportation disasters, the industries providing the technologies and services to improve safety systems have become a desirable business proposition. In this context, the investors are encouraged to voluntarily invest more money in the relevant companies, which in the end helps to improve the overall safety in transportation systems.
Ostensibly, the separation between the financial and transportation sectors is still there. However, dialogical communities of risk have challenged the organizational irresponsibility caused by social organisms by visualizing the sufferers outside of the community and possibly positioning them as the decision makers. On the basis of mediated dialogues (which could be discourse, capital or other forms of interconnection) between two communities of risk, financial investors are included in the transportation risk community as being both the victims and the unintentional (sometimes even invisible) decision makers who control the relevant capital flow.
Besides social organisms, one obstacle to the dialogical communities of risk is the formula of ‘schweigen entgiftet’ (Beck, 2009: 8), which means the expressions of risk are silenced. About one week after the MH17 flight disaster, a Taiwan TransAsia Airways plane (GE222) crashed, killing 48 people. The extent to which global media covered the latter disaster was much less than for the former incident, and not many articles linked the GE222 disaster to uncertainties in the financial sector. The reasons for the different portrayals of these two disasters might vary, but I see this difference as the very factor highlighting that ‘risk definition, essentially, is a power game’ (Beck, 2006: 333). Some sufferings are constructed in a visible and global way, while others are marginalized, silenced, and distant. This inherent inequality in the definition of risk may silence the potential dialogue between different communities at risk, and thus threaten the emergence of social catharsis.
Footnotes
Funding
This work was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) project: ‘Methodological cosmopolitanism – In the laboratory of climate change’ (grant number ERC-2012-AdG – 323719_Cosmo-Climate).