“Total Institutions” as Litmus Test of Civilisation

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated and magnified the vulnerability of convicts, psychiatric patients, elderly and disabled people in need of care, and children in institutional care or custody. Taking the move from the media coverage of “Total Institutions” during the pandemic, this paper explores the ways in which Goffman’s concept was mobilised in the public discourse to raise awareness of the extreme predicament of these vulnerable groups, as well as of the whole locked-down society. Whereas the metaphoric expansion of this terminus technicus to cover the whole community under lockdown threatens to dilute its specific meaning and overshadow the special vulnerability of inmates, we argue that the feeling of shared experience of “totalisation” bears a transformative potential. The possibility of taking stock of the multilayeredness (cognitive, rational, emotional) of the shared experience may enable collective cognizance of the structural roots of special vulnerability, thriving in the extant total institutions.