Vulnerability and vulnerabilisation in the pandemic
This analysis of vulnerability with respect to the ongoing pandemic will be split into two major themes. Firstly, vulnerability as a conceptual site of pity, abjection, punishment, and ultimately dehumanisation which delineates the deserving (of help, of life) from the undeserving. Secondly, the unattainable drive for invulnerability—the desire to be ‘normal’ and the opposite of this abject Other—serves within itself as a process of vulnerabilisation (read: precaritisation) which is necessary to stabilise the production of vulnerability (i.e. tomorrow’s vulnerable individuals must be recruited from today’s non-vulnerable pool if a vulnerable subclass is to be socially reproduced for continued exploitation). The first is a generator of inequality, driven by disableism; the second is a generator of disability, driven by ableism; both engines have accelerated with neoliberalism and austerity, but are escalating especially in this unmitigated era of the pandemic(ene) we now find ourselves in.
The plan at this point is to walk through a lot of theory on vulnerability—mostly from the fields of critical disability theory / disability justice and a lot of it either pre-dating or ignoring the current pandemic. The aim is first to define what vulnerability is, and how its conception is used to produce and justify the oppression of an Other subgroup labelled as vulnerable: pitying them, avoiding them, abjectifying them, framing them as ungrievable, sometimes even portraying them as a threat; all of which permits their dehumanisation and ultimately allows their extermination to be made an explicit goal—through social segregation, destitution, denial of healthcare, eugenics, euthanasia. There is a huge and obvious link here to the dehumanisation necessary to fuel the imperial machines of war and genocide which we should spend time considering through this lens. We may touch briefly on biopower and necropolitics in order to explain logic and mechanisms underlying this final process—that the domestic policies of ‘make live / let die’ (e.g. such as those co-opted by the ‘welfare state’ after WWII) can sharpen into a more openly bloodthirsty ‘let live / make die’ to deal with times of biopolitical crisis, such as the current pandemic.
Next, we’ll look at how the State were quick to reframe vulnerability at the onset of the pandemic, from an initial definition of a broad spectrum of ‘at-risk’ populations that must be protected due to their greater susceptibility to the virus—a wide range of disabilities, impairments, people with chronic illnesses and acute sickness (e.g. cancer), the elderly, even children (a class of mostly non-disabled people yet a subclass also vulnerabilised and oppressed in many respects)—to a much narrower definition of those who are remain susceptible (or at least refuse to disavow their susceptibility) to the virus. This process was facilitated greatly by the reframing of vulnerability as threat: a threat first to healthcare, then to the economy, then to freedom (of the non-vulnerable).
We’ll then examine how the creation of the vulnerable Other simultaneously brings into being its opposite, the invulnerable—that which is not weak, abject, undeserving, unhuman: ‘the clean and proper body’. This desire to be free from the corporeal weakness of the vulnerable human body and achieve perfect mastery over the body is unattainable (or at least only fleetingly attainable—and only for some people). Yet during times of mass disablement (e.g. a pandemic, austerity, climate change), fear within the dominant non-vulnerable class of becoming Othered can drive more docility and obedience and less solidarity with the vulnerable subclass—the fate of abjection and violence and death that awaits the vulnerable becomes more explicit and the costs of demotion to their subordinate subgroup is laid bare. The ‘return to normal’ of the working class in the ersastz ‘post-pandemic’ is explained away with many reasons by the people themselves, but from the viewpoint of the ruling class it was ‘consent’ given to a rewriting of the ‘social contract’ (to use a liberal phantasm)—a rewrite that permits more suffering and worse health for us all.
Finally, we look to ways in which the labelling of vulnerability and the force of vulnerabilisation may be resisted, with the most pressing application of reducing the destruction being inflicting by the current pandemic. Little time will be spent here agonising over the ways we might persuade the invulnerable to suddenly show solidarity with the vulnerable—it’s far too late for that in year five of this pandemic (and somewhere between year three-to-four of the ‘post-pandemic’) and anyways is something which may not even be possible owing to the many reasons of systemic and individualistic (dis)ableism discussed herein. Instead we’ll look focus on what the vulnerabilised population can do to better protect themselves and force their inclusion and grievability and humanisation and, ultimately, life.
A final note: instead of sitting on this increasingly massive blog post for months on end and never actually releasing anything, I’ve decided to serialise it in an attempt to finally motivate myself into producing stuff regularly—optimistically, a new piece of 1000-1500 words or so every few weeks. Then hopefully once I’ve finished all the individual pieces on this site I’ll pull it into a single cohesive piece and try and publish it somewhere.