“It’s inevitable that one or other of the mutations will [pass easily between humans] and H5 looks the favourite candidate. Some are saying H5 has been around for 10 years and never will but I don’t believe that.” (Professor John Oxford, cited in BBC news Magazine’s “Is Bird Flu Still a Threat?“)
As with anticipation, there is something peculiar about risks. They do not ‘happen’ but always stand in reserve. Yet risks are not simply future events; they have a presence and the presence is expressed in the language of probability. The presence of a risk shows up discursively and can be supported by a range of devices, most notably statistics, simulation models and anecdotes. Risks are made present through these devices and ‘become real’ as they mobilize concern, call for action, and thus turn into objects to be managed (Van Loon, 2002).
Risks also undergo trials of strength (Latour, 1988). Simulations and experiments are often favoured trials of strength to test ‘what happens if’ a risk is encouraged to become an actuality (and ceases to be a risk). However, life itself is also a trial of strength and the case of Avian Influenza H5N1 is just one example of what happens to a risk if it seems to be ‘failing’ its trial of strength. When that happened, new formats of mediation were deployed to translate this failure into a new virtuality, one that could be deployed to re-affirm the adequacy of the initial anticipation.
- Joost
Virtu: taste for works of art.
Virtue: power, influence, efficacy, conformity to moral principles … high merit of accomplishment, valour (from vir, man)
Virtual: what is in essence or effect(The Oxford Concise Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford: Clarendon Press.)
It is not a difficult to see a link between virtual and virtuosity, especially when considering anticipation. Great football players, for example, are able to anticipate what is going to happen next before their opponents do. This gives them the advantage of both moving themselves into the best position, as well as giving them a head start in thinking about the next move. It is even easier to see that great chess players are masters of anticipation. They anticipate what the chessboard will look like many moves ahead of the one they are in at the moment of anticipation. Likewise management also relies on a lot of anticipation. One needs to ‘see ahead’ in order to ‘manage’ the contingencies of complex being. And this needs to be translated into making the right moves ‘ahead of time’ so that all is in place when the event comes into being.
In football, anticipation is a skill or better: a combination of skills, a particular kind of virtuosity. The skills of anticipation in football are a combination of physical, tactile comportment and perception c.q. ‘insight’. These can be trained, no question about that, but they do come to some players more naturally than to others to an extent that most insiders in the football industry would define it as a ‘talent’, as something that is more implicit and instinctive. One could redefine this as an economic issue: it is more costly to train someone without talent to achieve the same level as someone with talent.
(Continued)
National Recessions and Regional Depression
Last year, we asked about the geography of what we called “The Depression of 2009”. This year, in February, The Economist provided a brief article pointing out the differences in regional economies in the US – Montana still growing at over 4% versus Michigan’s economy, contracting at over 7%. Now in March the New York Times provides a map by county of the rate of change in the official unemployment rate compared to March 2008, noting, “Job losses have been most severe in the areas that experienced a big boom in housing, those that depend on manufacturing and those that already had the highest unemployment rates.”
Referring to “The Great Recession of 2008” it notes that layoffs affect men more than women construction workers, hotel workers, retail workers and others without a four-year degree, homeowners and investors more than renters or those on Social Security and Latinos more than other ethnic groups. It is no satisfaction to see that Depression terminology entering the discourse of the media:
If the Great Recession, as some have called it, has a capital city, it is El Centro, Calif., due east of San Diego, in the desert of California’s Inland Valley. El Centro has the highest unemployment rate in the nation, a depression like 22.6 percent. …hit by the brutal combination of a drought, a housing bust and a falling peso, which cuts into the buying power of Mexicans who cross the border to shop.
Locatable Assets and Non-Geography
There is a more fundamental geography of the economy. This is a geophysics of property and specifiable, locatable assets. On this material basis avatars and representations for these objects can be constructed and through this, trust can be maintained at a distance. As a system of signs grounded in valued locations and valued assets, the economy is not those assets per se but the signs of those assets.
(Continued)
