JULY 2007
Warped and Twisted
http://bleeding4you.tripod.com/id17.html
Harsh words
& violent blows
Hidden secrets nobody knows
Eyes are open, hands are fisted
Deep inside I'm warped & twisted
So many tricks & so many lies
Too many whens & too many whys
Nobody's special, nobody's gifted
I'm just me, warped & twisted
Sleeping awake & choking on a dream
Listening loudly to a silent scream
Call my mind, the number's unlisted
Lost in someone so warped & twisted
On my knees, alive but dead
Look at the invisible blood I've bled
I'm not gone, my mind has drifted
Don't expect much, I'm warped & twisted
Burnt out, wasted, empty, & hollow
Today's just yesterday's tomorrow
The sun died out, the ashes sifted
I'm still here, warped & twisted
The only thing we
have to fear is the culture of fear
How human thought and
action are being stifled by a regime of uncertainty.
Frank Furedi
Wednesday 4 April 2007
Fear plays a key role in twenty-first century
consciousness. Increasingly, we seem to engage with
various issues through a narrative of fear. You could see
this trend emerging and taking hold in the last century,
which was frequently described as an Age of Anxiety
(1). But in recent decades, it has become more and better
defined, as specific fears that have been cultivated.
The rise of catchphrases such as the politics of fear,
fear of crime and fear of the future' is testimony to the
cultural significance of fear today. Many of us seem to
make sense of our experiences through the narrative of
fear. Fear is not simply associated with high-profile
catastrophic threats such as terrorist attacks, global
warming, AIDS or a potential flu pandemic;but rather, as
many academics have pointed out, there are also the
'quiet fears' of everyday life. According to Phil
Hubbard, in his 2003 essay 'Fear and loathing at the
multiplex: everyday anxiety in the post-industrial city',
ambient fear saturates the social spaces of everyday life
(2) Brian Massumi echoes this view with his concept of
'low-grade fear'
(3) In recent years, questions about fear and anxiety
have been raised in relation to a wide variety of issues:
the ascendancy of risk consciousness
(4) fear of the urban environment
(5) fear of crime
(6) fear of the Other
(7) the amplification of fear through the media
(8) fear as a distinct discourse
(9) the impact of fear\par on law
(10) the relationship between fear and politics
(11), fear as a culture
(12) and the question of whether fear constitutes a
distinctive cultural form
(13).\par Fear is often examined in relation to specific
issues; it is rarely considered as a sociological problem
in its own right . As Elemer Hankiss argues, the role of
fear is much neglected in the social sciences. He says
that fear has received serious attention in philosophy,
theology and psychiatry, less in anthropology and social
psychology, and least of all in sociology
(14). This under-theorisation of fear can be seen in the
ever-expanding literature on risk. Though sometimes used
as a synonym for risk, fear is treated as an afterthought
in today's risk literature; the focus tends to remain on
risk theory rather than on an interrogation of fear
itself. Indeed, in sociological debate fear seems to have
become the invisible companion to debates about risk. And
yet, it is widely acknowledged by risk theorists that
fear and risk are closely related. As Deborah Lupton
notes in her 1999 book ' Risk' has come to stand
as one of the focal points of feelings of fear, anxiety
and uncertainty
(15). Stanley Cohen makes a similar point in Folk
Devils and Moral Panics , published in 2002, where
he argues that 'reflections on risk are now absorbed into
a wider culture of insecurity, victimization and fear'
(16). A study of New Labour's economic policies argues
that they are couched in the '1language of change, fear
and risk'
(17).\par The terms 'fear' and 'risk' have been used
pretty much interchangeably in many studies of risk in
recent years. Yet where the sociology of risk has become
an important and ever-growing field of\ inquiry, the
theorisation of fear remains underdeveloped and immature.
Norbert Elias has made perhaps the most significant
contribution to the sociological study of fear. In his
1982 book The Civilising Process Vol 2: State
Formation and Civilization , Elias argued that fear
is one of the most important mechanisms through which
'the structures of society are transmitted to individual
psychological functions'. He argued that the 'civilized
character' is partly constructed by people's
internalisation of fears. This is a striking and
important insight into the history of fear and society
(18). Unfortunately, Elias' insights have not been
developed in relation to the contemporary experience of
fear. Indeed, today writers and thinkers tend to use the
term 'fear' as a taken-for-granted concept that needs
little explanation or elaboration. The aim of this essay
is to examine the various elements of fear in the here
and now. It will explore how fear works, and isolate the
key elements of today's culture of fear. According to
David Garland, in his 2001 book The Culture of
Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society,
when it comes to fear of crime 'our fears and
resentments, and also our commonsense narratives and
understandings, become settled cultural facts that are
sustained and reproduced by cultural scripts'. The idea
of 'cultural scripts' can help to reveal much about
emotions such as fear. A cultural script communicates
rules about feelings, and also ideas about what those
feelings mean. Individuals interpret and internalise
these rules according to their circumstances and
temperament, while always remaining very much influenced
by the rules. As Elias notes, 'the strength, kind and
structures of the fears and anxieties that smoulder or
flare in the individual never depend solely on his own
nature'. Rather they are 'always determined, finally by
the history and the actual structure of his relations to
other people'
(19). So the impact of fear is determined by the
situation people find themselves in, but it is also, to
some extent, the product of social construction
(20). Fear is determined by the self, and the interaction
of the self with others; it is also shaped by a cultural
script that instructs people on how to respond to threats
to their security. So getting to grips with fear in
contemporary society will require an assessment of the
influence of culture. Instead of treating fear as a
self-evident emotion, a taken-for-granted concept, we
should explore the meaning attached to fear and the rules
and customs that govern the way in which fear is
experienced and expressed. Sociologists need to ask
questions such as 'what may be the meaning of emotional
events?' when they are examining fear today
(21) As the sociologist David Altheide has argued,'fear
does not just happen; it is socially constructed and then
manipulated by those who seek to benefit'
......................................................
(26). While this description of socially constructed fear
tends to inflate the role of self-interest , the extent
to which fear entrepreneurs exploit fear in order to gain
some direct benefit ' its emphasis on the role of human
agency in the making of fear is nonetheless a useful
counterpoint to the idea that fear is something natural
or purely psychological. So, the meaning and experience
of fear are continually shaped by cultural and historical
factors. The historical fear of famine is very different,
for example, to today's 'powerful fear' of being fat
(27). The meaning that societies once attached to fear of
God or the fear of Hell is not quite the same as today's
fear of pollution or of cancer. And fear does not always
have negative qualities..The sixteenth-century English
philosopher Thomas Hobbes regarded fear as being
essential for the realisation of the individual and of a
civilised society
(28). For Hobbes, and others, fear could be seen as a
fairly reasonable response to new events and big changes.
In the individual, too, fear has not always been viewed
as a negative emotion. As David Parkin argued in his 1986
essay 'Toward an apprehension of fear', as late as the
nineteenth century the sentiment of fear was linked to
'respect', 'reverence', 'veneration'. \'Fearing the
Lord', for example, was culturally celebrated and valued.
In contrast, the act of fearing God today sits far more
uneasily with the prevailing cultural outlook. Matters
are complicated further by the fact that the words and
phrases used to describe fear are culturally and
historically specific. Today, we talk about fear as
something unspecific, diffuse, and intimately tied to the
therapeutic view of the individual. In her important
study of the cultural history of fear, published in 2005,
Joanna Bourke points to the importance of the recent
'conversion of fear into anxiety through the therapeutic
revolution'
(29). Anxieties about being 'at risk' or feeling
'stressed' or 'traumatised' or 'vulnerable' show very
clearly that today's individualised therapeutic
vocabulary influences our sensibility of fear.
Contemporary fear culture: In an important contribution
to the debate about how culture impacts on the
population, Ann Swidler argued that 'people vary greatly
in how much culture they apply to their lives'
(30). But in the very act of using culture, people 'learn
how to be, or become, particular kinds of persons'.
Swidler argues that this 'self-forming' continually calls
upon the symbolic resources of the wider culture.
'Through experience with symbols, people learn desires,
moods, habits of thought and feeling that no one could
invent on her own', she observes. And these habits of
thought and feeling influence the way that individuals
make sense of their experiences, and also how they
perceive of threats and how they respond to threats. As
Norbert Elias stated, the strength and form of 'shame,
fear of war and fear of God, guilt, fear of punishment or
of loss of social prestige, man's fear of himself, of
being overcome by his own affective impulses' depend upon
'the structure of his society and his fate within it'.
Threats are mediated through the cultural outlook. And
today, the role of culture is arguably more significant
than it was in previous times. According to Stefanie
Grupp, in her paper on the 'Political implications of a
discourse of fear', individual fears are cultivated
through the media and are less and less the outcome of
direct experience. 'Fear is decreasingly experienced
first-hand and increasingly experienced on a discursive
and abstract level', concludes Grupp. She also
suggestively notes that 'there has been a general shift
from a fearsome life towards a life with fearsome media
(31) This point is echoed by Altheide, who claims that
'popular culture has been the key element in promoting
the discourse of fear'
(32). Even Osama bin Laden seems to have grasped this
trend. In an interview in October 2001, when asked 'why
is the Western media establishment so antihumane', bin
Laden replied: '[Because] it implants fear and
helplessness in the psyche of the people of Europe and
the United States.' The legal theorist Christopher
Guzelian argues that this indirect aspect of fear is the
most distinctive feature of contemporary fear culture. He
believes that 'most fears in America's electronic age'
are the results of 'risk information (whether correct or
false) that is communicated to society'. He concludes
that it is 'risk communication, not personal experience,
[that] causes most fear these days'
(33) However, the influence of fear today cannot be
explained as a direct outcome of the power of the media.
The very real dynamic of individuation means that fear is
experienced in a fragmented and atomised form. That is
why fear is rarely experienced as a form of collective
insecurity, as it often was in earlier times. This shift
from collective fears to individuated fear is captured
well by Nan Elin, who argued in the 1999 book Postmodern
Urbanism that the fear we sense today is no longer
the fear of 'dangerous classes'; rather, fear has 'come
home' and become privatised
(34). The sensibility of fear is internalised in an
isolated fashion, for example as a fear of crime or as a
rather banal 'ambient fear' (as Hubbard describes it)
towards life in general. Hubbard notes that this is a
kind of fear that 'requires us to vigilantly monitor
every banal minutia of our lives', since 'even mundane
acts are now viewed as inherently risky and dangerous'
(35) Low-grade fears and risks seem to be flourishing and
capturing people's imaginations. The real significance of
this development, however, of this move towards a more
individuated form of fear, is the highly personalised,
even customised way in which fear is experienced now. As
Zygmunt Bauman argues, postmodernity has privatised the
fears of modernity. 'With fears privatized...there is no
hope left that human reason, and its earthly agents, will
make the race a guided tour, certain to end up in a
secure and agreeable shelter', Bauman writes
(36) John Keane has drawn attention to another aspect of
the privatisation of fear ' namely, today's growing
tendency to transform private fears into public ones'.
The privatisation of fear encourages an inward
orientation towards the self. According to one
interesting study, when members of the public are
interviewed about the personal risks they face they tend
to represent 'crisis, fears and anxieties' as
self-produced and individual problems, the products of
'personal biography'
(37)Fear as a problem in its own right. A recurring
question in public debates on contemporary risk
consciousness is whether society is more fearful today
than it was in the past. Some believe that today's
'magnitude and nature of fear' is different to the past,
since 'it seems that fear is everywhere'
(38). Studies on the fear of crime argue that there has
been a growth of fear in everyday life. For Elin: 'The
fear factor has certainly grown, as indicated by the
growth in locked car and house doors and security
systems, the popularity of gated or secure communities
for all age and income groups, and the increasing
surveillance of public space' not to mention the unending
reports of dangers emitted by the mass media.
(39) However, an increase in the quantity of fear is
difficult to measure, since the very meaning of fear is
itself continually changing. That is why, as Andrew Tudor
argues, 'simply to document the considerable range of
fears given currency in our cultures is not enough'
(40). We must remember, says Tudor, that 'late modern
conceptions of fear are distinctive in their fundamental
character when compared with other periods and
societies'. The starting point to gaining an insight into
the socio-cultural nature of contemporary fear is to
emphasise the quality and meaning of fear, rather than
its quantity. Fear is often said to be the defining
cultural mood in contemporary society. Yet the
institutionalisation of fear through the issuing of
health warnings, through risk management, through media
stories and so on, should not be interpreted as proof
that the quantity of fears has increased. Maybe it has;
maybe it has not. Nor can we conclude on the basis of
existing evidence that people feel fear more intensely
than did earlier generations. The prominent role of fear
today merely indicates that it serves as a framework
through which we interpret a variety of experiences. The
prominence of fear in contemporary culture also suggests
that fear works as a problem in its own right. In recent
years, particularly as a result of risk theory, fear has
become objectified. Alan Hunt has noted that 'risk
discourse transposes anxieties into an objectivist
problematic'
(41). As a result, fear is increasingly perceived as an
autonomous problem. Consequently, 'fear becomes a
discourse', which 'expands beyond a specific referent and
is used instead as a more general orientation'
(42) A distinguishing feature of contemporary fear is
that it appears to have an independent existence. In this
respect, it resembles the way in which social anxiety was
discussed and understood in the 1940s and 50s
(43). But whereas anxiety was viewed as a diffuse
intangible condition, fear today seems to exist in an
objectified form as a clearly identifiable social
problem. Fear in itself, rather than the thing that we
have become fearful in response to, is a distinct problem
of our times. Classically, societies associated fear with
a clearly formulated threat: the fear of death, the fear
of a specific enemy, the fear of hunger. The threat was
defined as the object of fear; the problem was not the
feeling of fear, but the things that were feared: death,
illness, hunger. Today, many see the very act of fearing
as a threat in itself. Consider the debate about the fear
of crime. Nowadays fear of crime is seen as a serious
problem that is to some extent distinct from real acts of
crime. As Garland observes: 'Fear of crime has come to be
regarded as a problem in and of itself, quite distinct
from actual crime and victimization, and distinctive
policies have been developed that aim to reduce fear
levels, rather than reduce crime.'
(44). Indeed, it seems that the fear of crime is 'now
recognised as a more widespread problem than crime
itself'
(45) It is far from clear what has been measured when
statistics point to an increase or decrease of the fear
of crime. As Chris Hale has suggested, it seems that
often what is measured is not so much the fear of crime
as 'some other attribute, which might be better
characterised as 'insecurity with modern living',
'quality of life','perception of disorder' or 'urban
unease'
(46) However, this process of trying to quantify a
cultural mood means that the fear of crime becomes
objectified, and thus can acquire a force of its own. Its
objectification may turn it into a 'fact of life', and
this can help to legitimate, if not even encourage the
fear response. Often today, public anxiety and concerns
are discussed as material factors that can have a
decisive impact on people's health and wellbeing. Many in
contemporary medical culture claim that stress and fear
are likely to increase the risk of heart disease, cancer
and chronic lung disease
(47). In Britain, the conclusion of an inquiry into the
alleged health effects of using a mobile phone is now
regarded as a model for how to respond to contemporary
health fears, particularly those related to environmental
health. The Independent Expert Group on Mobile Phones
(IEGMP), set up 'to keep ahead of public anxiety',
concluded that there was no known health threat posed by
mobile telephony yet it argued that the anxieties stirred
up simply by the presence of mobilephone masts need to be
taken seriously, since public fear in itself could lead
to ill-health
(48) There is always a potential for people's health
anxieties to turn into a major problem. Phil Strong, the
medical sociologist, has written about an 'epidemic of
suspicion' that can cause serious public health problems
(49). However, it is only fairly recently that fear has
also been discussed as an autonomous cause of illness.
When we witness the autonomisation of fear, then the
question becomes not simply what is causing fear, but
what are the potential negative consequences of fear?
This can lead to strategies that focus on managing
feelings of fear, in order to offset their damaging
impact, rather than focusing on the source of the
problem. If people fear that their health is at risk,
than this fear is often seen as actually posing a risk to
their health
(50). The legal systems in the US and the UK have
internalised this view of fear; courts are now moving
towards compensating people for their feelings of fear,
even when there is an absence of a perceptible physical
threat. As Guzelian has noted, in the past 'fright' that
is, a reaction to an actual event was compensated,
whereas now the fear that something negative might happen
is also seen as grounds for making a compensation claim
(51) The autonomisation of fear is linked to the view of
risk as an independent variable. Risk communication today
is informed by the idea that 'fear itself is a risk and
must be part of riskmanagement policymaking'
(52). The transformation of fear into a risk runs
alongside the transformation of risk into a negative
experience. Terms like a 'good risk' or a 'risk worth
taking' are noteable by their absence in contemporary
debate. Risk is not even represented as being neutral
today; instead risk is almost always associated with
negative outcomes which people are expected to fear.
Through risk management, fear is institutionalised and
the fear response is further encouraged and culturally
affirmed. The free-floating and raw character of fear .
The volatility of fear today is captured well by Parkin.
He says there has been a shift from a concept of fear
that 'encompassed' respect' to what he calls 'raw fear'.
He describes the former as an 'institutionally controlled
fear', while 'raw fear' has more of a free-floating and
unpredictable character
(53). Bourke claims that this move towards more 'nebulous
anxiety states' is due to the decline of tangible threats
to corporeal existence that were brought about by war,
for example, in earlier eras
(54). However, as I noted previously, it is likely to be
the privatisation of fear that makes it so arbitrary and
fluid today. In contemporary societies, fear is
unpredictable and free-floating. It is volatile, often
because it is unstable and not focused on any specific
threat. So today, fear can migrate freely from one
problem to the next without any causal or logical
connection. When in June 2002 the Southern Baptist leader
Reverend Jerry Vines declared that Mohammed was a
'demon-possessed paedophile', and that Allah leads
Muslims to terrorism, he was simply taking advantage of
the free-floating fear narrative. Strikingly, he latched
on to two big fears in contemporary culture: paedophilia
and terrorism
(55). This arbitrary association of paedophilia and
terrorism has the effect of amplifying the fear of both.
In the same way, constant claims that this or that
hurricane, flood or other natural disaster is a symptom
of global warming impacts on people's perceptions and
fears of such events. Fear today has a free-floating
dynamic. It can attach itself to a wide variety of events
and phenomena. Consider the fear of terrorism. Since
9/11, this fear has continually expanded to cover almost
all aspects of modern life. 'Corporations must re-examine
their definition of risk and take seriously the
possibility of scenarios that only science fiction
writers could have imagined possible one year ago',
argues a leading economist
(56). In the five years since 9/11, what were previously
seen as fairly normal hazards have been turned into
exceptional threats by their association with the action
of terrorists. So we no longer worry about the apparently
everyday hazard posed by a nuclear power station; we also
fear that it may be used as a weapon of mass destruction
against us by terrorists. The fact that more and more
areas of life are seen as targets for terrorists
'buildings, power stations, the economy and so on ' has
little to do with the increased capabilities of
terrorists; rather it reflects the growth in competitive
claims-making around fear and terror.Today's
free-floating fear is sustained by a culture that is
anxious about change and uncertainty, and which
continually anticipates the worst possible outcome. This
'culture of fear', as I and others have called it, tends
to see human experience and endeavour as a potential risk
to our safety. Consequently, every conceivable experience
has been transformed into a risk to be managed. Garland
writes of the 'rise of risk\' that is, the explosion in
the growth of risk discourse and risk literature. He
notes that little connects this literature together,
other than the use of the word'1risk'
(57) The very fact that risk is used to link together a
variety of otherwise unconnected experiences highlights
today's mood of uncertainty. Fear, like risk, has become
a taken-for-granted concept, even a cultural affectation
for expressing confusion and doubt. For the French social
theorist Francois Ewald, the ascendancy of the fearful
and precautionary culture is underwritten by a 'crisis of
causality', by a feeling of uncertainty towards the
relationship between action and effect. Ewald suggests
that the institutionalisation of precaution 'invites one
to consider the worst hypothesis (defined as the 'serious
and irreversible' consequence) in any business decision'.
The tendency to engage with uncertainty through the prism
of fear, and therefore to anticipate the worst possible
outcome, can be understood as a crisis of causality. Kurt
Riezler, in his early attempt to develop a psychology of
fear, similarly drew attention to the influence of ideas
about causality on the way that people respond to
threats. They have been taken for granted ' and now they
are threatened' is how Riezler describes a situation
where 'causes' are hopelessly entangled.
(58) The question of causation is inextricably bound up
with the way that communities try to make sense of acts
of misfortune. Questions such as 'was it God?' or 'was it
nature?' or 'was it an act of human error?' have
important implications for how we understand acts of
misfortune, and how we deal with them. Confusion about
causation encourages speculation, rumours, mistrust. And
as a result, events often appear to be incomprehensible
and beyond human control.
The new identity of vulnerability.Whom and what we fear,
and how we express and act upon our fearing, is in some
quite\par important sense, as Durkheim long ago realized,
constitutive of who we are.
(59) Today, the autonomisation of fear has important
implications for identity, for how we see and understand
ourselves. The idea that we are the subject of threats '
threats which have an independent existence ' has given
rise to the concept of generally being ' at risk. The
emergence of this 'at risk' category ruptures the
traditional relationship between individual action and
the probability of a hazard
(60). To be 'at risk' is no longer just about the
probability of some hazard impacting on you; it is also
about who you are as a person.'At riskness' has become a
fixed attribute of the individual, like the size of your
feet or hands. Public officials frequently categorise
whole groups of people as being at risk. The perception
of being at risk encourages the emergence of what we
might call a fearful subjectivity. According to Ulrich
Beck: 'The movement set in motion by the risk society'is
expressed in the statement 'I am afraid!' Therefore, says
Beck, the 'commonality of anxiety takes the place of the
commonality of need'. In the process, fear has become
something which shapes\par and makes our identities. To
be 'at risk' clearly assigns to the individual a passive
and dependent role. Increasingly, someone defined as
being at risk is seen to exist in a permanent condition
of vulnerability, and this informs the way that we make
sense of the threats we face. As a metaphor,
vulnerability expresses the idea that communities lack
the emotional and psychological resources necessary to
deal with change, to make choices, or to deal with
adversity.'Vulnerability' is now seen as the natural
state for most people. As a label it is used to describe
entire groups in society. Officials and community groups
now frequently use the recentlyconstructed concept of
'vulnerable groups'. The term 'vulnerable group' does not
simply refer to groups of psychologically distraught
people or to those minorities who are economically
insecure. Instead, we are all seen as being vulnerable in
one way or another. Children, most strikingly, are
automatically assumed to be vulnerable. A study into the
emergence of the concept of 'vulnerable children' found
that, in most published literature, the concept is
treated as'a relatively selfevident concomitant of
childhood which requires little formal exposition':
'Children are considered vulnerable as individuals by
definition, through both their physical and other
perceived immaturities.' Moreover, this state of
vulnerability is presented as an intrinsic attribute. It
is 'considered to be an ' essential 'property of
individuals, as something which is intrinsic to
children's identities and personhoods, and which is
recognisable through their beliefs and actions, or
indeed\par through just their appearance'
(61) And it isn't just children who are defined as a
vulnerable en masse. So are women, the elderly, ethnic
minorities, disabled people, the poor. Indeed, if all the
groups designated as vulnerable byr experts and
policymakers were added together, they would probably
constitute nearly 100 per cent of the population! The
sense of vulnerability is so deeply ingrained today that
it is easy to overlook the fact that, relatively
speaking, it is a recently-invented concept. The term
'vulnerable group' first started to be used in the 1980s.
One study notes that the tendency to frame children's
problems through the metaphor of vulnerability first
emerged in the 80s, but really took off in the 90s
(62). The authors of the study searched a major
bibliographical database, BIDS, and found that over 800
refereed papers between 1986 and 1998 focused on the
relationship between vulnerability and children. The
authors noted that 'while in the first four years of this
period there were under 10 references each year to
vulnerability and children, an exponential increase to
well over 150 papers a year occurred from 1990 onwards'.
They believe that this figure underestimates the tendency
to discuss children's lives in terms of vulnerability,
since it does not take into account the substantial
non-academic literature on the subject. A survey of the
LexisNexis database of newspapers confirms the findings
of that academic study. It shows that 'vulnerable group'
is a relatively recent concept. An analysis of articles
in the New York Times suggests the term began to
be used in the 1980s. Between 1973 and 1979 there were no
references to vulnerable groups in New York Times
. A similar pattern is evident in the UK. Before the
mid-1980s, use of the term 'vulnerable group' was rare.
It began to be widely used from 1985 to 1987. More
significantly, it appears that in the late 1980s the word
'vulnerable' started being used to describe people's
intrinsic identities. Vulnerability was no longer seen as
something that springs\par from specific circumstances,
for example poverty; rather it was considered to be an
inherent condition of an individual. This shift is best
captured by the newly emerging term'the vulnerable'. The
move from the idea that people are 'vulnerable to various
problems to the use of the noun 'The Vulnerable' captures
the sense of powerlessness and fragility that underpins
the rising use of the v-word today. Vulnerability is a
state of mind, an identity, rather than a description of
your relationship to a specific threat. The emergence of
vulnerability as an identity is linked with the
objectification of fear discussed above, which first
started occurring in the 1980s. A heightened
consciousness of threats and risks is 'experienced as an
ordeal of unexpected vulnerability', argues Ewald. His
claim that the expression 'to be vulnerable' is a newly
constructed 'sacred term' is an important insight into
contemporary fear identity. From this point onwards, fear
ceases to be just an emotion; it is also an important
part of the construction of identity. This was captured
well in a report from the International Labour Union,
which warned about 'fear in the workplace'. Guy Standing,
one of the authors of the report, argued that 'unless
[fear in the workplace] is reversed, the vulnerable will
become more vulnerable'
(63). Here we can see that even the supporters of trade
unions selfconsciously describe their members as
'vulnerable'. Through ideas about vulnerability, a sense
of fear starts to be seen as a normal state of being. The
flipside of this deflation of the status of human
subjectivity is the inflation of the threat that external
forces pose to the individual self. In public debate
today, the alleged vulnerability and impotence of the
individual stands in sharp contrast to the formidable
powers attributed to the everyday challenges we face.
Through the constant amplification of the risks facing
humanity 'pollution, global warming, catastrophic flu
epidemics, weapons of mass destruction, and various
health scares ' even the limited exercise of individual
choice appears to be restricted by today's' harsh regime
of uncertainty. The identity of vulnerability is the
flipside of the autonomisation of fear.
Conclusion: A proper sociological understanding of fear
requires further research into the way in which this
emotion is mediated through today's cultural outlook. We
must address not simply the emotion of fear and the
threats to which it is a response, but also the crisis of
causality that shapes the fearful subject. As indicated
previously, twenty-first century fear culture is
increasingly being normalised as a force in its own
right. In such circumstances, fear is a means through
which people respond to and make sense of the world. This
stands in sharp contrast to the approach taken by US
President Franklin D Roosevelt in his inaugural address
in 1933, when he stated that the 'only thing we have to
fear is fear itself'. Roosevelt was trying to assure the
public that it is both possible and necessary to minimise
the impact of fear. His was a positive vision of a future
where fear would be put in its place by a society that
believed in itself. Today, politicians are far more
likely to advise the public to fear everything, including
fear itself.
Frank Furedi is author of Politics of Fear: Beyond Left
and Right, published by Continuum . This essay is based
on a talk delivered at the NY Salon debate, 'Living in a
state of fear' at the New School on 20 March 2007.
Notes and references have been seperated (above)into
seperate paragraphs for easier reading.:
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