Ghost in the Wire

My thoughts regarding progressive politics and the reception of/preparation for Katrina. At some point, I'll need to make explicit what I see as the theoretical bridge between what I think under the rubric "progressive" and my work on mediation and theory, but for now, I'll just give into the anger and dismay I have regarding Katrina and its aftermath.

One cannot turn on the tele these days without seeing Katrina coverage visually characterized by "State of Emergency" graphics and theme music. These flashy graphic deals are, these days, pretty banal components in cable news, so they shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. But the "State of Emergency" does surprise me, not because Katrina wasn't so horrific a disaster, but because, as far as I knew from watching our media outlets and our politicians, I'm fairly sure we have been in a state of emergency for the last four years.

How else to explain the color coded terror alerts? The constant acknowledgment that terrorists will hit us when, not if, and the constant anxiety of waiting for the other boot to fall? The constant reports of bombings and insurgencies and conflict in Iraq? The constant threat of nuclear proliferation in Korea, Iran, and elsewhere?

Surely Agamben's arguments regarding the state of exception are crucial here, and many have already commented on them. But I'm also reminded of Jean Baudrillard's discussion of the alibi: the trick by which something steps forward as exceptional, as a way of standing out and differentiating itself from the norm, and in effect displacing the more general knowledge that there is, in fact, nothing remotely exceptional about it.

Fifteen years ago, George H. W. Bush spoke to us repeatedly of a "thousand points of light," a metaphor he used in reference to the many volunteers who supposedly were lifing or would lift America up in its time and space of need. It was a quintessentially conservative move, a classic shifting of responsibility for the public welfare away from the public and towards the private sphere. To define the social welfare via a fundamentally privative impulse is to rewrite the map by which we negotiate our collective reality, and it remained the mission of good conservatives everywhere to enact this vision in discourse and in practice.

Tonight, the son of Herbert Walker spoke to us (also repeatedly) of the "armies of compassion," a new and more militant term for a phenomenon not unlike the luminescent volunteers envisioned by his father. But the armies of compassion do not end with the volunteer, for as George Bush made clear the real work will require a more literal "army". This time, sadly, it is a quintessentially fascist move, one what we might call social militarization. To rewrite or reimage the social (and all that it implies for thinking both the public and the private) as a domain that requires for its constitution the intervention, oversight, and coordination of the military is to circumscribe the social within a purely juridical order.

Here are the two most disturbing paragraphs from tonight's speech:

I also want to know all the facts about the government response to Hurricane Katrina. The storm involved a massive flood, a major supply and security operation, and an evacuation order affecting more than a million people. It was not a normal hurricane -- and the normal disaster relief system was not equal to it. Many of the men and women of the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the United States military, the National Guard, Homeland Security, and state and local governments performed skillfully under the worst conditions. Yet the system, at every level of government, was not well-coordinated, and was overwhelmed in the first few days. It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces -- the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment's notice.

Four years after the frightening experience of September the 11th, Americans have every right to expect a more effective response in a time of emergency. When the federal government fails to meet such an obligation, I, as President, am responsible for the problem, and for the solution. So I've ordered every Cabinet Secretary to participate in a comprehensive review of the government response to the hurricane. This government will learn the lessons of Hurricane Katrina. We're going to review every action and make necessary changes, so that we are better prepared for any challenge of nature, or act of evil men, that could threaten our people.

The central rhetorical fiction that provides this justification for what is, without doubt, a state of exception, is so obvious that it's almost not worth noting. Almost. Whatever the extraordinairy force behind Katrina (were we to give this mystic force a name, we might call it global warming), there are no compelling reasons to believe that our normal responses wouldn't have been equal to it. The simple fact is that our responses were not normal; they were buffoonish, haphazard, uncoordinated. Our response was, in other words, incompetent - thanks mostly to a rampant amount of cronyism (a cronyism that, thanks to Bush's synecdochal claim of responsibility, will likely be ignored). The failure of the state when confronted by Katrina and its aftermath is in this instance a failure of the agent(s) of the state, not the agency of the state.

And yet, here that failure of the state, a failure born of spoils and patronage, is reversed and the failure magically transforms into the warrant for a surge in militant, governmental authority. It is clear, we are told, that there is only one branch of government capable of providing order, one branch that possesses the juridical force and logistical acumen to do the job of the state. In effect, Bush tells us that we have but one hope, and it is that hope that we must plan for, and so we must allot greater authority and greater control to the most powerful military on the planet.

This is just a question, one that I hope someone smarter and more learned than me can answer: what is it about the 19th and 20th centuries that made philosophers (Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Levinas, etc.) during those periods so interested in mood (irony, fear, anxiety, shame, pleasure, etc.) as the lens by which to understand ourselves and the world around us? Is it something that can be explained by some sort of historical, philosophical progression, or am I wrong in thinking that this seems to be, primarily, a relatively recent philosophical approach?

It seems that more recently we have thinkers with a broader appreciation of the dynamics of mood (Zizek on the one hand, Deleuze on the other - at least as exemplars), but that these appreciations aren't fixated on particular moods as means by which to understand subjectivity or the social. So if it was a particular historical moment, tied to particular conditions of emergence, where did those conditions go? Or are they still around and I'm missing the evidence? Thoughts, anyone?

A significant portion of my academic efforts are focused on making a case for and with a concept called "originary technicity," functionally, a way of thinking technics that imagines them as constitutive of rather than constituted by the human. So things I've written (on Heidegger, even on Lacan and the Matrix) have been in service to this project. I take this terminology for granted, but in actuality, I shouldn't, because it's not a common semantic choice, nor even a very common conception of technics. I was reminded of this by a recent reviewer, who thought my use of the term "technics" confusing and far too ambiguous.

Foreign policy and The Prospect have teamed up to determine (kind of) the top five public intellectuals. After creating a list of their top 100 living, public intellectuals, they are asking for your votes in order to determine the top five. Now the list won't please everyone. How Robert Putnam can be on there and not Haruki Murakami quite simply beggars the imagination and induces no small amount of sadness on my part. And the presence of Christopher Hitchens is downright embarrassing. But still, let's get your vote on, for at least the top 5, and we'll do our own little mini-poll. For the purposes of the mini-poll, let's not do write-ins, though again, if we were doing write-ins, Murakami would be one of my votes. Alas, poor Yorick, and all that.

Here are my choices for the top five public intellectuals (in no particular order):

1. Jared Diamond
2. Václav Havel
3. Lawrence Lessig
4. Jean Baudrillard (I couldn't resist)
5. Jaron Lanier Fareed Zakaria

Alright, so there's all the obvious biases here - people whose work or life with which I'm familiar, a heavy emphasis on the important of media. It's too late to change the major list, but I do think that for novelists, along with Murakami, I'd also very much like to see David Markson and Jonathan Lethem; in the arena of physics, I miss Stephen Hawking (where is he?); for philosophy and political thought, I'd very much like to see Giorgio Agamben, Ernesto Laclau, and Jean-Luc Nancy added; and finally, in political practice and media, I certainly wouldn't have objected to Joe Trippi, Douglas Rushkoff, or Karl Rove.

So let's see yours, shall we?