It is therefore accompanied by
a horror of the prospect of an equal and opposite reversal, a cessation of evolutionary
progress and regression towards devolutionary regress. As Grant explores in his essay,
the cyclical time of pre-modern consciousness and rituals has been replaced by the
metaphor of the open road on which we speed ever faster towards a utopian end. The
crash insists on a failure of modernity’s totalitarian ambitions, bringing us to an abrupt
standstill.
These contradictory relations have become the focus of academic, as well as
commercial, investigations of ‘the risk society’ (Beck 1992). Technoscience, Beck argues,
which was once supposed to complete the project of rationalisation begun by the
Enlightenment and banish terror, instead has provoked a new age of trans-spatial and
trans-temporal hazards, as systems spread over the entire surface of the earth.
Technological disasters are supposedly of a different scale of causes and consequences
than hitherto. The singular, containable risks of the Wall Street Crash, WW1, and the
sinking of the Titanic are less risky than a Chernobyl melt down. Yet what law
necessitates that all risks concern the forward march of technology, rather than, as
Greenslade’s essay testifies with regard to the nineteenth century realist novel, the
devolution of species? And in what sense is the actuality of the First World War
measurable against the risk of the millennium bug that never happened? If the latter,
not only no longer a potential risk but an not an actual one, counts nonetheless as an
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