Where has vulnerability gone?

Introduction

In shades of pink and red, paper and painted hearts sit in the windows of cars, cafés and homes. Across Canada, ‘the hearts in the window movement’—as it has been called in social media—is to acknowledge healthcare workers during the outbreak of Covid-19. In the US, the hearts are blue—#blueHeartsForHeroes—to recognise health care ‘heroes’, and in the UK, rainbows on tshirts, painted in windows, and by the contemporary British artist Damien Hirst, are a symbol of gratitude to healthcare workers and the NHS, Britain’s National Health Service. Cutting across borders, hotel and casino chains in Europe and North America have been lit in large hearts, and the Google doodle which is reserved for major sporting events (e.g. Olympics) released a doodle where the G sends a heart to the E, while on Reddit, you can use your coins (reddit currency) for the ‘healthcare hero award’.

During a time of social distancing, rainbows and hearts have become a cultural symbol to express gratitude to strangers for their ‘courage’ and ‘sacrifice’ (common words being used), and to acknowledge the ‘heroism’ and the risk health care workers are taking during this pandemic. The risk they take is a risk of death, as a result of work-related exposure to the coronavirus. Indeed, across the globe, health care workers are vulnerable to Covid-19—they are contracting it, and dying. As of the last week of May 2020, 21 social workers in England and Wales have died of Covid-19 and statistics show ‘a substantial and widening gap’ in death rates between social care staff and the general working population (Samuel, 2020).

In this article, I examine the juncture and relationship between vulnerability and heroism. In order to conceptualise the moment we are in, I begin by discussing the work of Georgio Agamben and then I turn to Judith Butler’s writing on vulnerability asking, where has vulnerability gone?

States of exception

You cannot be a hero without being a coward.

George Bernard Shaw, 1916

A hero cannot be conceived of, without vulnerability being recognised. It is vulnerability that positions people as heroes. In effect, essential workers are not heroes because they risk themselves, they are heroes because they are vulnerable, and still risk themselves. In the claim to essential workers as heroes, vulnerability has already been recognised. And it is this very vulnerability that gives meaningfulness to rainbows and hearts as symbols of thanks and gratitude to essential workers. In effect, the rainbows and hearts are a gesture to their vulnerability to dying of Covid-19. This gesture is situated in a context that is born of a political moment that Giorgio Agamben, an Italian philosopher, describes as a ‘state of exception’ (2004).

The ‘state of exception’ is when ordinary rules and laws are indefinitely suspended by the Government or Sovereign, without being abrogated. In a state of exception, every person is subject to the law (including people who are lawmakers or law enforcement officials), and civil liberties are controlled in the name of the supposed public good. In a democratic state, a state of exception takes the form of emergency orders or ‘a state of emergency’. As I write this, from the Canadian province of Ontario, we are entering our fourth month in a state of emergency due to the outbreak of the coronavirus.

Across the world, in response to Covid-19 and orchestrated by the organisational powers of government, human movement has become the target of states of exception. There are variations amongst countries that range from no outdoor movement permitted between 10 and 7, to no outdoor movement at all, to all non-essential travel being banned. In some places, documentary evidence is required to leave one’s home, to see a doctor, or to move across provincial or state borders where there has never been surveillance before. In other places, movement is being controlled digitally by tracking wristbands that those in quarantine must wear, or by the use of official immunity passports or risk-free certificates. In other places, movement is being regulated by sex. For example, in some South American countries, females can move outside their homes on certain days, and males on opposite days. And in many places, our movement has been regulated by the practice of shaming. This pandemic has driven a variety of states of exception to protect literal life, or what Agamben calls, zoē or bare life (1998, 2004).

Agamben (2004) describes that states of exception coincided with World War One and the sovereign’s desire to produce and enforce borders (of people, migration, or/and land), in order to protect national security—in essence, to protect people from an enemy. The adoption of states of exception was defined by this enemy and the threat they posed, outside or inside national borders (e.g. internment camps). In the outbreak of Covid-19, the states of exception are being triggered by a health emergency, with movement being restricted as a protective measure to bare life. Personal protective equipment, like masks, gloves, shields and hand sanitiser, are now matters of national security. While the moment we are in, is not the moment that Agamben is writing of, the discursive effect has been similar, and the cultural production of life, akin. As Einboden (2020) describes in a recent journal editorial,

the hero discourse is rife among political leadership across nations, replete with analogies of war and military metaphor. Popular news media and even medical leadership are producing and cementing an ideology that constitutes health care workers as the heroes in a war between COVID-19 and humankind (2).

The sociality of embodied life

‘We came to work for you. Please stay home for us.’

During this pandemic, there have been various versions of ‘stay home for us.’ We have heard a host of mutations on television, social media and through advertising campaigns. This phrase is a gesture to the state of exception: physical movement curtailed for some, necessary for other. While this phrase is educational in that it explains that Covid-19 can spread in proximity to others, it is also a reminder to us that our health, our life, is interconnected to the health and life of others. For me, in everyday life, in our state of emergency, this interdependency has been heightened. Each time I put on a mask to take groceries to a loved elderly relative, my awareness of our interdependence is plain. I feel the weight of my worry for their health in our brief and perfunctory (even perhaps, inhumane for its lack of touch) interaction. I can never leave quickly enough, a wake of bleach in my haste; and, I hold my breath for 14 days, the incubation period of the coronavirus. It is in these acts of putting on a mask, and carrying my worry, that I recognise and acknowledge our interdependence. But in the outbreak of Covid-19, our interdependence has not just been about family, but about strangers—the strangers to whom the hearts and rainbows are directed. As Butler writes, the precariousness of our life rests on the idea that, ‘there are others out there on whom my life depends, people I do not know and may never know’ (2004: xii). In this regard, the hearts and rainbows are not only an expression of gratitude and an acknowledgement of the individual work of strangers, but a recognition of our interdependence, what Butler calls, ‘the fundamental sociality of embodied life’. We are, living in a world of beings who are, by definition, physically dependent on one another, physically vulnerable to one another (2004: 27).

In this understanding, the hearts and rainbows are also a recognition of the vulnerability of those that host them. Einboden broadens this relational understanding writing,

our society and its leaders have chosen SuperNurse as the favourite toy of the day. She serves as a temporary distraction for fears and anxieties that have become more acute within the context of COVID-19's powerful lesson: our health is deeply connected to that of others, animals and the earth (2020: 4).

The reconstitution and unrecognisability of vulnerability

Butler argues that the very recognition of vulnerability changes its meaning and its structure (2004). As a result, she argues that there is always the possibility that vulnerability will not be recognised and that it will be constituted as the ‘unrecognizable’. The risk of unrecognisability is the risk of humanness—‘one cannot will away [vulnerability] without ceasing to be human’ (Butler, 2004: xiv). In mutating and twisting the very meaning and structure of vulnerability to present front line healthcare workers as heroes, vulnerability is recognised not for its presence, but for its absence—the ability to privilege heroism, in the face of vulnerability. In this understanding, vulnerability is reconstituted by its very absence, but in the terms of its own constitution and condition. This is a strange but significant discursive turn.

Unlike Einboden (2020), I would argue that the hero is not a distraction for fears and anxieties during this pandemic, rather the hero is a constitution and a recognition of vulnerability, and the embedded interdependence we have to one another (of which perhaps fear and anxiety arise as a result). Vulnerability is recognised and then becomes, as Butler writes, ‘somewhat unrecognisable’ when it is reconstituted as a hero. This discursive turn is important to note, because the vulnerability of health care workers has not always been recognised. For example, pre-Covid-19, the vulnerability of health and social care workers was not recognised in relation to the violence they experience in their daily work. Despite the attempts of their labour unions to politicise safety, their vulnerability is not seen as a systemic issue, but an individual responsibility. The reconstitution of vulnerability as a hero, only serves to reiterate this individualistic, neo-liberal framing of labour and danger. While vulnerability is seemingly accepted as part of the job, health care workers are heroic only as a result of the outbreak of Covid-19 and the state of exception, and not because of the work they do.

In the cultural representation of the hero, individuality is reiterated and the fundamental sociality of embodied life is at risk of being unrecognised because the very feature of a hero is that they are solo, they are independent. In addition, the turn to a hero turns vulnerability into a hierarchy. On the one hand, we are all vulnerable, but on the other hand, health and social care workers are vulnerable, and heroic in their vulnerability. This understanding is situated in the cultural effect of states of exception and a modernist way of thinking that mutates bifurcations, such as deserving/undeserving. And so, there is a material value to a hero as deserving. For example, the Ontario government has implemented a wage supplement to hospital workers during this Covid-19 outbreak. And, there is a cultural effect such that a healthcare worker who dies is a publically grieved tragedy, but those who have been unable to access care as a result of states of exception (for example, those who live with addictions), are collateral to this war—or what the media has recently called, ‘excess deaths’. These differential effects of a pandemic have been noted in the action calls to social workers during the outbreak of Covid-19. These calls underline the importance of advocacy and activism (Meade, 2020; Truell, 2020) and for advocating for ‘the powerless’ at micro and macro levels (Amadasun, 2020; Walter-McCabe, 2020). We know that in the outbreak of Covid-19, there has been a differential risk to certain people, especially those marginalised before the outbreak, for example those who are racialised, precariously housed or perilously employed. And so, these calls are important and must be accompanied by an understanding of how social workers hold differential structures in place by contributing to the unrecognisability of vulnerability. We must not only see our interdependence to one another, but we must also explore ways to understand and practice beyond the frames of life being offered in public discourses; frames of life that are defined by the exclusion of being human.

Conclusion

…our lives are profoundly implicated in the lives of others (Butler, 2004: 7).

Rainbows and hearts are intelligible representations and narratives that easily express gratitude to those marked as heroes during the outbreak of Covid-19. After all, who would not feel affectionate about a heart? A rainbow? However, in an analysis of vulnerability and heroism, we can see that the rainbows and hearts contribute to hierarchical understandings of life, work, health, risk, as well as the inequitable distribution of care and resources. In this article, I have suggested that vulnerability is reconstituted as a hero, and in this move, vulnerability becomes unrecognisable to us. I also suggest that we must make vulnerability present in our representations and discourses so we can ensure we are all equally human, and so that we can more widely see the possibilities for social work practice during this time. To do so, there can be no heroes.