Anthropology Now

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Disability and Dismantling: Four Reflections in a

Time of COVID-19

Rijul Kochhar

To cite this article: Rijul Kochhar (2020) Disability and Dismantling: Four Reflections in a Time of
COVID-19, Anthropology Now, 12:1, 73-75, DOI: 10.1080/19428200.2020.1761213

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features
Disability and Dismantling:
Four Reflections in a Time
of COVID-19
Rijul Kochhar
F our thought formations coalesce in my
mind as I witness the unfolding CO-
VID-19 pandemic. My personal experience
of living with a disability and my professional
concerns with thinking about questions of
bioinsecurity and vulnerability via antibiotic
resistant “superbugs” inform these peregrina-
tions:
First, how does the disabled body deal
with the novel coronavirus? No amount of
sanitizing one’s hands can ignore the fact
that those hands are lived on — they touch
wheels, they feel the world’s physical struc-
tures and, yes, they pick up things as they
wheel along. There is now a torrent of infor-
mation about how to deal with this novel
virus, from social distancing to self-isolation
to praying for a future vaccine. But most of
this discourse is able-bodied — it concerns
bodies capable of these “essential measures”
in the first place. There is little engagement
with how other bodies should deal with this
issue. For people with disabilities, the idea of
infection and foreign agents spilling over into
ones’ bodies is an everyday spectre. It must
alert us to the luxuries of “security measures”
now being advised everywhere, including
staying at home. What of those who do not
have a home, or cannot stay? This is not an
Rijul Kochhar Disability and Dismantling  73
Anthropology Now, 12:73–75, 2020  •  Copyright © 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1942-8200 print / 1949-2901 online  • https://doi.org/10.1080/19428200.2020.1761213
idle question anymore, but an existential one.
The disabled body can only hope to illustrate
that the idea of an autonomous individual
body was always a deeply injurious fiction.
People are all interconnected, both by the
microbial and interpersonal vulnerabilities
that always haunt us and by the social and
collective care infrastructures that could min-
ister to heal broken bodies. The question of
disability in a time of COVID-19 reveals the
poverty and cruelty of an individualistic, as
opposed to a social, reformulation of health,
vulnerability and, now, being.
Living my entire adult life with microbial
dangers alerts me to a second order of con-
cerns: the silence around structural changes. I
address two. The appalling collapse of health-
care systems suffering decades of dismantling
now reveals itself as the fundamental logic
motoring the current public and epidemiolog-
ical panic. If many countries around the globe
had not spent years of the 20th and now 21st
centuries on the wrong priorities — deregulat-
ing markets, vanishing public infrastructures
of health, care, sanitation and real medical
innovations — and if many countries had not
championed a weird collective fascination
with “engineering” the future with ephemeral
clouds, artificial intelligences and other forms
of social disruptions, perhaps society would
have been better prepared for a pandemic
or, certainly, less panicked. But government
leaders frittered those moments away like so
much detritus from the past. If individualized
forms of care were once championed and
are, today, dying, many countries will witness
the birth pangs of a forcedly emergent system
of (health) care that must now work for all if it
works for one.
 Then there is the connected paradox of
our military infrastructures in the face of this
singular pathogen. Taken together, military
arsenals in many places — India, China, the
Middle East, Europe, the United States —
constitute a stronger collective military pres-
ence on the planet than at any other time in
human history, crafted after much “sacrifice”
of social care and infrastructures, with a gen-
erous dollop of fear, nativism and the spectre
of a floating “enemy” abroad in many cultural
life worlds. Yet today, as the nuclear bombs,
supersonic cruise missiles and hypersonic jets
remain idling, silent, comedically impotent as
they confront the unfolding logic of the coro-
navirus, citizens must not stop asking: Of
what actual use are these weapons? This must
be the question that informs the world’s (pos-
sible) future, as the former colonial powers
suddenly battle for what has been their taken-
for-granted place on this earth. With the very
tools of biosecurity infrastructures that have
been marshalled to secure a “homeland,”
residents of many countries must now rethink
the meaning of home.
Today, as the globe confronts a truly plan-
etary crisis, everyone might remind them-
selves of a third cheery proposition: Today is
only a window into the future emergencies
to come. Looming are the crushing tides and
fiery winds of climate change; other, more
seriously debilitating pandemics spilling
over from pathogens and nonhumans that
have escaped reservoirs once held in the
great forests of our planet but subsequently
destroyed for profit; the increasing concen-
tration in our cities and our prisons that now
serve as helpless hothouses of bodies forc-
ibly packed together for the virtues of unim-
peded capitalist production. Endangerment
74  anthropology
is collective, even if it is asymmetric on this
planet.
My problem isn’t mine alone. It is every-
one’s. My potential COVID-19 infection is an
existential danger to each person’s immuno-
compromised self. Time, bodies and places
are now connected in a manner heretofore
unprecedented. This necessary revelation on
COVID-19’s account underscores a universal
element to this crisis that demands residents
of the United States and elsewhere think of
problems not despite divisions but in spite of
them, as problems for a planetary collective
that is both here and to come. Against those
emergencies at many of our doorsteps, the
hidden hand of the market and the pleasur-
able splendors of unbounded consumption
will not hold.
Yet, the biophysical emergencies to come
must prepare everyone for the emergencies
in our cultures that are already sprouting,
to which my mind wanders now in a fourth
direction. Quick fixes are phenomenally inef-
fective, as astute observers have now seen.
There are closed borders, social isolation
and other stopgap individualized responses,
the hollowing out of civil liberties1 under the
pretext of a pandemic, nations increasingly
under lockdown, individuals crippled by
doubt as to whether they or their surround-
ings remain infected by the virus. Witness the
general disablement of human life in the face
of the sheer inability of local governments to
confront an unfolding pandemic that respects
no national borders. Populations are herded
at home, fearful, panicked, quarantined.
This is the fantasy-come-true of a cer-
tain, already ascendant, reactionary politi-
cal formation. Yet, as COVID-19 spreads,
that political formation’s future ascendancy
Volume 12  •  Number 1  •  April 2020
is detrimental to planetary and local health
and (well) being in a manner that is reveal-
ing itself every moment with fine ferocity. In
the virus’s wake, these brokenhearted mea-
sures, in bad faith, serve as a patchwork quilt
of nonresponses.
Instead, structural changes need to be put
in place with care and dedication across the
globe. If people everywhere pause and think
about how to attain a conception of history
that interrogates the status quo, there might
be some hope remaining. Thinking pre-
sciently in a time that ours will increasingly
resemble while confronting the virulence
of fascism, Walter Benjamin, a philosopher
whose thinking is nearly as itinerant as the
virus, wrote:
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us
that the “state of exception” in which we
live is not the exception but the rule. We
must attain to a conception of history that
accords with this insight. Then we will
clearly see that it is our task to bring about a
real state of exception, and this will improve
our position in the struggle against fascism.
One reason fascism has a chance is that, in
the name of progress, its opponents treat it
as a historical norm. The current amaze-
ment that the things we are experiencing
are “still” possible in the twentieth century
is not philosophical. This amazement is not
the beginning of cognition–unless it is the
cognition that the view of history which
gives rise to it is untenable.
Rijul Kochhar Disability and Dismantling  75
The danger is not that everyone will fall
sick. At the rate COVID-19 is spreading, it will
engulf all humanity even if, for most, the symp-
toms are mild. COVID-19 is, indeed, the great
leveler. Those who will see the bright noon on
the other side of this virus’s vengeance must
never stop asking: What have been the prev-
alent conceptions of a broken and untenable
society, and what are the measures of care that
will replace them to ensure that, next time,
people endure as human beings? The real dan-
ger will occur if the global population is not
able to analyze the historical reasons behind
the multiple everyday emergencies of the pres-
ent. Only grasping that history in its entirety
will create a real state of emergency that might
immunize global populations against future
threats. The viruses to come will allow even
less time for the human species to mount an
immune response.
Note
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/na-
tional-security/justice-department-coronavirus-
laws/2020/03/23/6b860018-6d01-11ea-b148-
e4ce3fbd85b5_story.html
Rijul Kochhar is a doctoral candidate in history;
anthropology; and science, technology, and soci-
ety at MIT. His research deals with antibiotic resis-
tance, bacteriophage therapy and bioinsecurity in
the 21st century.