Ordinary Doom: Literary Studies in the Waste Land of the Present

Determining the probabilities of accidental intrusion into the site was daunting enough; they amply confirm Ulrich Beck's account of the present as a "world risk society" driven increasingly by a dynamic of nonknowledge, where the ever more avid calculation of probabilities is beset b...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:New literary history 2010-03, Vol.41 (2), p.329-349
Main Author: McGurl, Mark
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Benford, Gregory
Drug effects
Literary history
Literary postmodernism
Literary studies
Marxist sociology
Modernist art
Novels
Political economy
Politics
Reflexivity
Schutz, Alfred (1899-1959)
Science
Social reflexivity
Social theories
Society
Sociology
Studies
Temporality
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Summary:Determining the probabilities of accidental intrusion into the site was daunting enough; they amply confirm Ulrich Beck's account of the present as a "world risk society" driven increasingly by a dynamic of nonknowledge, where the ever more avid calculation of probabilities is beset by the continual multiplication, in that very process, of positive uncertainties.2 More broadly, whereas science was once thought of as a way of reducing ignorance, it now generates an uncontrollable array of unknowable technological side effects cascading into and back from the future. Living in the knowledge of this nonknowledge, inhabitants of the risk society can also be said, according to Beck, to be living in a time of "reflexive modernity," when the consequences of modernization have become a source of widespread worry.3 Long gone is the time when political economy could be conceived only in terms of the distribution (or maldistribution) of goods; conceived, that is, as founded on the opposition between goods and their lack.
ISSN:0028-6087
1080-661X
1080-661X
DOI:10.1353/nlh.2010.0002