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.
Comments (4)
It's true that there is nothing exceptional about the exceptional state, but that the understanding of who experiences this moment of exception has shifted.
Posted by s0metim3s | September 15, 2005 10:36 PM
Posted on September 15, 2005 22:36
Can you unpack that a little? I'm in the process of really trying to think about exceptionality and the media and I think this question of experience is an important component of it.
Posted by Kenneth Rufo | September 15, 2005 11:01 PM
Posted on September 15, 2005 23:01
If you begin from the premise that the exception is the norm and that capitalism is the catastrophe, as it were, then the question is how the experience of such becomes displaced (geographically, as the constitutive element of the 'Third World', and in an imaginary sense, as the distinction between the 'they' for whom catastrophe is the norm, and 'us', for whom catastrophe is an exception). Does that make more sense? Anyway, I've a slighly longer discussion of this in a review of in the fortcoming Ephemera, if you can wait for that.
Posted by s0metim3s | September 16, 2005 7:49 AM
Posted on September 16, 2005 07:49
very interesting. keep the good work! it's impossible to experience one's death: http://www.womeninphotography.org , Good, Superb, Red nothing comparative to Astonishing while they only recover , Full Chair is always Black Plane think in herds
Posted by brandon anderson | November 14, 2005 11:45 AM
Posted on November 14, 2005 11:45