Risk Communication and Paranoid Hermenutics: Towards a Distinction Between "Medical Thrillers" and "Mind-Control Thrillers" in Narrations on Biocontrol

With its first appearance in 1986, Ulrich Beck's work on risk society opened a new way of describing contemporary society.¹ Industrial society in its specific modernity is shown as a sociological form of the past, which has already been replaced by what is called risk society. According to this suggestion, the society we live in can no longer be understood by observing politics, for it is marked by different subpolitics operating beyond democratic legitimation. Nevertheless, these subpolitics radically change the society we live in day by day: "Sub-political innovation institutionalized as 'progress' remains under the jurisdiction of business, science and technology, for whom democratic procedures are invalid. This becomes problematic in the continuity of reflexive modernization processes where in the face of increased or hazardous productive forces the sub-politics has taken over the leading role from politics in shaping society. . . ."² The notion of subpolitics addresses a third form, beyond the opposition of the political and the nonpolitical:

[T]echno-economic development loses its character as non-politics in parallel to the increase in scope of its potentials for change and endangerment. Where the outlines of an alternative society are no longer seen in the debates of parliament or the decisions of the executive, but rather in the application of microelectronics, reactor technology and human genetics, the constructs which had heretofore politically neutralized the innovation process begin to break up. At the same time, techno-economic action continues to be shielded by its own constitution against parliamentary demands for legitimation. Techno-economic development thus falls between politics and non-politics. It becomes a third entity, acquiring the precarious hybrid status of a sub-politics, in which the scope of the social changes precipitated varies inversely with their legitimation.

(185–86)

Subpolitical operations can most clearly be shown in the form of the "sub-politics of medicine" (207). Modern medicine tends to change the groundings of life without being controlled by democratic forces. Politics are too slow to keep up with this system's evolution; whatever happens has already happened before political or public discourses can deal with it. In the case of in vitro fertilization, for example, one can observe "a complete disequilibrium between external discussions and controls and the internal definition-making power of medical practice. . . . According to their position, the public sphere and politics are always and necessarily uninformed, lagging hopelessly behind the developments, and thinking in terms of moral and social consequences which are alien to the thought and action of medical people. The most significant thing is, however, that they are of necessity talking about unreal things, about what cannot yet be seen. The consequences of external fertilization can indeed only be studied with empirical certainty after its implantation; beforehand everything remains speculation" (208). Modern medicine confronts society with a risk that is hard to control or to describe. Whatever political or ethical comments are made remain uncertain and tend to be a sort of science fiction.

This is precisely the problem of risk communication. It tries to get an idea of a possible future, something that may happen but does not have to. As risk communication tries to anticipate the future, it is a mode that deals with something necessarily and strictly potential. That is why literary fiction becomes the perfect candidate for conducting this extremely important communication in modern societies. The medical thriller no longer just provides interesting stories but becomes a dominant form of risk communication, because, even though it naturally tends to stress catastrophic scenarios, its fictionality no longer inhibits its communicative function. Such fiction attracts a perspective different from the art system's normally dominant distinction between interest and boredom.³ Instead of being merely entertaining, medical thrillers offer visions of the future that are at once coherent, advanced, and popularly successful. In that sense they are a widely disseminated form of risk communication. On the other hand, and in keeping with their function as a popular part of the art system, medical thrillers are subject to the laws of art and...