Социални афекти, безпокойство и уязвимост
Social affects, Anxiety and Vulnerability

Towards a Socioanalysis of the Befalling

Author(s): Stoyka Penkova
Subject(s): Social Sciences, Sociology, Social differentiation
Published by: Пловдивски университет »Паисий Хилендарски«
Keywords: insecurity; vulnerability; risk; mobility; boundaries; social identity; inheritance
Summary/Abstract: We live in a time of concern about the changes and uncertainties that ‘befall’ us as human beings. We are witnessing an „explosion” of discourses of risk which are utilized in order to link together different and impossible to otherwise relate experiences, the most significant of which is the feeling of insecurity. But to be „at risk” means to have a passive role, not being ‘enactive’, but „dependent”. This creates a constant sense of vulnerability, for the deprivation of resources required to „do” a change, for “making” choices, for “acting”. The emergence of vulnerability as a form of identity involves the questioning of ontological grounds of the daily existence of the vulnerable person (group, community, forms of sociality); and hence – would suggest the researching of new forms of personal insecurity, which are reflected in a variety of everyday psychopathologies. And since the vulnerability is a state of the body, a state of mind, an („fractal”) identity, we are faced with the need to study namely this strange (and schizophrenic) duality of living in the „long 21st century” – both being at risk and being vulnerable, which cannot but require new research approaches and methodologies. Moreover, when the form of „our” present as a specific cultural „assemblage” comes not from the past (i.e. from tradition), nor from the present („our” here-and-now), but from the future that befalls us, there are three main and interrelated analytical aspects on which we must focus as researchers in our attempt to describe the ambivalence of the late-modern man: 1) mobility; 2) boundaries; 3) social identity and inheritance.

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