Risk and subjectivity: Experiencing terror

Abstract

In this article, the everyday life suffering of the author after being exposed to the 7/7 terrorist suicide attack at a distance of about one metre is explored in terms of the professional mediation of his injuries via post traumatic stress disorder counselling and the international media. These ‘risk technologies’ operate with their own orders of discourse and risk rationalities, while encouraging subjective interaction with the ‘victim,’ thus, in different ways, extending the top-down authority of ‘objective’ truth-makers in relation to suffering in everyday life discussed recently in the risk literature. However, by detailed discussion of the top-down (‘objective’) and below-up (‘subjective’) negotiations between these two orders of risk rationality (health, media) and ‘victims,’ the author suggests there may be too much of a dichotomy in recent formulations between ‘lived experience’ subjective understandings and the language of science and technical expertise on risk. Rather, the article indicates a discursive co-construction of institutional and subjective agencies, rather than in binary top-to-bottom opposition.

Keywords:

• terrorism survival
• health
• media
• risk technologies
• social suffering
• subjectivity