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Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Tables and Figures -- Preface -- 1 THE BHOPAL TRAGEDY -- Levels of Explanation -- Limiting the Detection of Hazards by Processes of Definition -- Uncertainty and Counterfinality -- Global Economic Pressures in the Production of Pesticides -- Conclusion -- Notes -- 2 BHOPAL AND THE CRITICAL THEORY OF HAZARDS -- Hazards and Disasters -- Two Hypotheses -- The Possibility of Detection -- Redefining Hazards and Mitigations -- Hazard-Mitigation Transformations and Detection -- The Logic of Hazards Mitigation as an Explanation for Increasing Hazardousness and Vulnerability -- Conclusion -- Notes -- 3 FACTORS AFFECTING THE DETECTION OF HAZARDS -- Safety and Culture -- An Expanded Model of the Hazards Process -- Unintended Effects of Mitigation -- Global Economy, Hazards, and the Poor -- Conclusion -- Notes -- 4 CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS -- No More Bhopals? -- Hazardousness and Vulnerability in Bhopal -- The Safety Record of the Chemical Industry -- Criteria for Enhancing Detection and Reducing Hazardousness and Vulnerability -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Appendix -- Bibliography -- Index.

Although the focus of their work was rarely explicitly sociological, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari developed concepts that have important and often profound implications for social theory and practice. Two of these, sense and segmentarity, provide us with entirely new ways to view sociological problems of meaning and structure. Deleuze conceives sense independently of both agency and signification. That is, sense is neither the manifestation of a communicating subject nor a structure of language—it is noncorporeal, impersonal, and prelinguistic, in his words, a "pure effect or event." With Guattari, Deleuze notes that it is not a question of how subjects produce social structures, but how a "machinics of desire" produces subjects. In Deleuze and Guattari, desire is not defined as a want or a lack, but as a machinery of forces, flows, and breaks of energy. The functional stratification we witness in social life is only the molar effect of a more primary segmentation of desire that occurs at the molecular level, at the level of bodies. In Deleuze and Guattari, bodies are not just human bodies, but "anorganic" composites or mixtures, organic form itself being a mode of the body's subjectification. The problem of the subject, and thus of the constitution of society, is first a problem of how the sense of bodies is produced through the assembly of desiring-machines. The subject, we could say, is the actualization of desire on the incorporeal surface of bodies.

This article addresses a number of policy concerns that have arisen in the aftermath of the chemical accident that occurred in Bhopal, India on December 2, 1984. In view of magnitude of that tragedy and its implications for the export of hazardous technologies to the Third World, evaluations of the chemical industry based upon simple extrapolations from past industry performance are inadequate. Future policies undertaken to regulate the industry must explicitly account for the long-term global uncertainties, irreversibilities, catastrophic potentials, and dependencies created by the development of chemical technologies.

This article relates some examples of current research on the mitigation of environmental hazards to recent sociological work in the theory of action. My intentions are to isolate common themes in an otherwise heterogeneous literature, to encourage debate on mitigation issues, and to enhance the legitimacy of this research program by bringing it to the center of contemporary theoretical concerns in the discipline. Much of the current debate in the field of mitigation still harbors implicit ties to sociological functionalism. These ties are made explicit and critiqued. It is argued that functional conceptions of mitigation present an unbalanced picture of mitigation as a reaction to potential extremes in the environment to the neglect of mitigation's active role in altering hazard potentials.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Deleuze and New Technology -- CONTROL -- Chapter 1 Deleuze and Machines: A Politics of Technology? -- Chapter 2 Of Rhizomes, Smooth Space, War Machines and New Media -- Chapter 3 Deleuze's Objectile: From Discipline to Modulation -- Chapter 4 How to Surf: Technologies at Work in the Societies of Control -- Chapter 5 Chemical-Control™®: From the Cane to the Pill -- Chapter 6 Politics in the Age of Control -- BECOMING -- Chapter 7 Smash the Strata! A Programme for Techno-Political ®evolution -- Chapter 8 Deleuze and the Internet -- Chapter 9 Swarming: Number versus Animal? -- Chapter 10 The Body Without Organs and Internet Gaming Addiction -- Chapter 11 Deleuze's Concept in the Information- Control Continuum -- Chapter 12 Illusionary Perception and Cinema: Experimental Thoughts on Film Theory and Neuroscience -- Chapter 13 Surface Folds: The Archival Events of New Medialised Art -- Afterword -- Notes on Contributors -- Index

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