It’s T-minus 96 hours and counting… I’m filled to the brim with nervous energy. I’ve not slept through the night in days.
At about 3am last night, I lie awake reflecting on the idea of danger. It seems that I can’t tell anyone where I’m headed without immediately receiving a stern lecture about how dangerous South Africa is, how I need to be hyper-vigilant at all times about my safety. I’ve been told to hire a bodyguard, to never venture into downtown Johannesburg alone, not to walk on the street alone, and never to worry or feel “guilty” about being utterly and completely paranoid at all times. To my knowledge, every single on of these lectures was delivered by someone who has either never been to South Africa, or who went and left without incident.
I would be a liar if I said I won’t carry some trepidation with me onto the plane. And, of course, I will be vigilant about my personal safety. But I think this kind of obsessive focus on the possibility of danger and harm is timely and interesting. Social scientists are rapidly developing a literature on what they term “risk society,” this idea that we have become a culture obsessed with calculating risk. German theorist Ulrich Beck coined this term to differentiate the specific types of risks associated with late modernity. It goes something like this: human beings have always been vulnerable to natural disasters. Now we’re also vulnerable to risks and dangers associated with modernization, man-made risks. And part of the process of modernization has been to calculate the best and most efficient ways to respond to those risks. (These calculations are, in many ways, produced and mediated by the media.)
So, how is this relevant? Well, in the post-9/11 U.S., I think we’re acutely aware of our profound vulnerability, particularly to the acts of unknown others. It is a specific type of fear of other people we carry with us. Judith Butler wrote poignantly in her book Precarious Life about the ways America chooses to transform that fear into aggression and violence, rather than simply to mourn the fact of our fragility and work towards peaceful coexistence. I’ve been reading and thinking about these ideas- and about violence in general- lately. I think it’s all really interesting, when we fear violence, when we enact it, what violence can represent (the outward expression of political resistance, repression, desperation).
I’m not sure what any of this actually means in the practice of my life. But I did have a moment about a month ago, driving in our car down Flatbush Avenue, when I realized that we’re all profoundly vulnerable, every moment of every day. And I made a conscious choice to attempt to leave that fear in the back of my mind, not to give it airtime or attention. And so, while I won’t be adorning myself in gold leaf and walking half-naked through the streets of downtown Joburg alone after midnight, I also won’t spend the next six weeks of my life stewing in guilty paranoia about my personal safety. I’m reminded of the following Eleanor Roosevelt quote read by a remarkable woman named Joanne, with whom I sat on a “diversity” panel at GSAS new grad student orientation yesterday: “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ Do the thing you think you cannot do.” Perhaps this will be my mantra in the coming weeks…
