Risk and new technologies of rule

Abstract

dissenting views edited by Renato Veras (2010) is a collection of essays intended to critically address the way public smoking restrictions can be understood as embodying new technologies of rule in post-modern societies. The question raised is whether public ideologies that ban certain types of public behaviour, such as smoking, can be justified on behalf of collective public interests or can, rather, be defined as surveillance mechanisms that restrict individual freedom. At the heart of the publication is the concept of risk, and how such concept is employed by both experts and policy-makers in the definition of public health discourses that, in turn, reify public smoking as a deviant practice that should be banned from the social realm. In the provocative first essay "Misplaced targets: in defence of smokers", Castro Santos questions the neutrality of the supposedly scientific knowledge that, based on its epistemic authority, blames smokers for growing levels of cancer registered in modern societies. The author makes an appeal to sociology in order to resist such hegemonic epistemic discourse and upholds that new spaces of inclusive and not exclusive social interactions should be created. In another contribution to the collection, Veras strengthens such an appeal by stressing the contingency and constructed nature of risk perception. The author writes, "questioning is always a good exercise, particularly in respect of incomplete findings, or partial scientific evidence repeated again and again in order to transform them in "unconditional truth… sometimes low level risks are overestimated, while others much higher are underestimated" (p.45). As Geoffrey Kabat states, Castro Santos takes a position that is rarely articulated in intellectual arenas and that argues that the epidemiology and public health 'apparatus' have promoted an authoritarian and dogmatic discourse concerning tobacco use turning smokers into elements that or conform to normalised patterns of social behaviour or should be excluded from the social realm (p.29). In his own article, Kabat argues that there is an extremist strain in the anti-smoking movement that is based on biased scientific knowledge. The contingency of such knowledge is often forgotten in the "crusade to demonize smoking" to therefore turn "weak scientific findings" into "dogmas" difficult to deconstruct. However,