Bring Out Your Dead

The hurricane porn enjoying Katrina has, in part, circled around dead bodies. Bloated corpses floating in flood water. Blanketed bodies in wheelchairs. Rows of the dead found in a hospital chapel and a nursing home. Bodies gnawed on by animals. A town turned into a morgue blocked from view, from the gaze of the press.  A preoccupation with counting the dead, a preoccupation that seeks to reassure itself of its sovereign authority by reducing accountability to quantification, a matter of counting.

Tripping over these bodies, even rightwing pundits of cable news find themselves off-message, criticizing any and all governmental authorities including the federal. With Katrina the object of so many obscenities, why does the presence of the dead body on the street become a particular locus of anxiety?

Perhaps one answer lies in the war on terror. As he articulated the invasion of Iraq with the attacks of 9/11, Bush presented current militarism as a battle between the civilized and the barbarian. The whole free world confronted the terrorist other as an evil assault on civilization itself. Insofar as the United States and Britain have long relied on torture, even as they may have officially denied it, the presence torture in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Graib has been easily absorbed into the dominant ideology: torture doesn't indicate barbarism, or at least not the legal modes of interrogation authorized by US law.

But, letting your dead rot in the streets? That, if nothing else, is a sign of barbarism. Thucydides refers to the unburied dead as indications of the collapse of Athenian culture during the plague. A traditional reading of Antigone (one that emphasizes the rebirth of Athenian democracy in reason) sees her opposition to Creon as an opposition to baseless tyranny, to a tyranny so lacking in reason, so uncivilized, so disrespectful and hence unworthy of respect as to order that the dead remain unburied.

And now, New Orleans. A sign of barbarism. A sign of a culture, civilization, democracy, and reason that is indefensible, that is itself disrespectful and unworthy of respect.

And when the dead are buried, will we likewise try to bury our awareness of our barbarism? And, if so, in what guise will these dead return?

Comments

[RIPope]

Burying the dead is indeed the foundational act of any social order. Otherwise the dead haunt. One could say that at present the dead are between the two deaths, having realized their Real deaths but awaiting their Symbolic death. But since it's been so long, since we've already seen them so much on our TV screens, that there is a way in which no burial could be enough. Just as they were not properly integrated into `American life' pre-hurricane, so they won't/can't be post-hurricane.

Maybe the Real fear is that ALL the lower classes, EVERYWHERE, shall haunt from now on.

[Matt]

Excellent post. Is it barbarism pure and simple, though? The corpse indicts, holds us *at its distance*, like a true friend, almost. The cameras are struck by death; the deathliness of the camera is exposed. It cannot be tolerated for long.

[Christoph]

Great post, Jodi.

We can not bury the awareness we don't have, and we only have the awareness of what is observed: the dead before they are buried. Here, it's not about "proximity"; the buried bodies of Iraqi children will haunt no one in the West, but the images of dying people in Haiti on AvW have haunted me for days - and we all remember a little Vietnamese girl running from a burning village.

[Jodi]

Thanks for the comments. Really interesting. I think it can't be barbarism pure and simple (is there such a thing?), but how it isn't, how it is different, is complicated in ways that all of ya'll suggest. I wonder if burying the dead (like Pope's suggestion), is a way to try to bury, suppress, the confrontation (Real) with race and class, a suppression constitutive of American society that, whenever it returns or erupts, splinters the illusion of unity. Hence, the argument against Gore (of all people) that he was trying to invoke class warfare or worse, what I heard on hurricane porn last night, that those African Americans who think that race figured into the response to Katrina are simply trying to make race an issue (a shocking remark, odd only if one doesn't think strictly in terms of polls, appearance, and perception, that is, fantasy).

Matt, I would love to hear more about the corpse and the friend. One of the 'rescue' workers interviewed last night on CNN said, in saying how the dead were treated with respect, that she always remembers: this was someone's little baby, this person was a baby. I couldn't get anti-abortion rhetoric out of my head at that point.

Christoph: we only have awareness of what we observe--do you mean this strictly visually (something about the gaze here)?

[Christoph]

Jodi

I am not quite sure, to be honest. Thinking about your question some more, I would probably say there are two aspects (to use another optical metaphor).

There's what both Benjamin and McLuhan (oddly enough) describe, and what perhaps is (or should be) a truism: that what we (tele-)visually observe is more powerful than what we "just" read or hear. Not just because of its reproductability and mechanical or digital detemporalisation and delocalisation, but because of our cognitive apparatus not being hardwired to understand the difference.

But secondly, Vilém Flusser's concept of the technoimage then (not to mention virtuality/simulacra debates) obviously takes that further: The technoimage, or, put differently, the question of the technology/materiality mediation of any information as such also means that our communication ("public") has revolutionised our perception and thus our knowledge and thus our normative context, arguably making it more vulnerable to demagogueries, yet more cognisant.

That throws up questions about techno-barbarism, I guess? And about not needing to physically bury the dead when our gaze is buried in its own imagery; for that is of course the blind spot that won't go away, but rather grows in (anti-)meaning and sheer normative power. (Sorry, severe theory overload today).

[Jodi]

Christoph: would this work? Mediated information and experience is more powerful because of its amplification/repetition/reproduction in the Symbolic. We know that others know that X has happened. In fact, we can predict that others will respond to X in various ways, then we can respond to these responses, etc. These repetitions reinforce our sense of X, not simply that it matters or that it is important but that it IS.

And, if I continue in this vein, I might think that because the bodies of buried and no longer an issue that others have forgotten about them (not me)and so I attribute the buried-ness to the lack of attention that I attribute to others. And then I wonder, what might haunt them? (I think I lose my train of thought somewhere in the middle of this paragraph, sorry...)

[Christoph]

Jodi,

do you think we ourselves need to bury and forget (or forget seeing the dead or their burial)? I wonder whether we are not haunted by that which others have seen but we have never even observed -- simply because we *should* have (in the eyes of those others? because it is mediated=communicated in a way that removes the observer from the discussion but makes him a silent witness to it).

That is the kind of moral aspect of mass communication and the construction of meaning your use of the Symbolic greatly enhances in ways I haven't read about elsewhere.

[zozobra]

Corpse imagery doesn't need a philosopher to interpret it, and it's doubtful there's really one proper method of perceiving the dead body. There is perhaps a visceral response on the part of the bourgeois to real stiffs, or to the pics of them, but I think that humans who are often confronted with death--doctors, nurses, soldiers--sort of become accustomed to the sight of it, and lose that "Tales of the Crypt" S. King-like glee at the site of the corpse; it's just hamburger, though the hamburger might connote all sorts of things. The gallows humor might be more pronounced now, but if anything that's needed. I simply don't think the connotations or any possible metaphors can be specified across individuals or even cultures; the Latin countries' "Dia De Los Muertos" seems quite bizarre and macabre to many Americans, as do the tales of Poe: the proper American mall-creature simply doesn't go out to the graveyard and party next to the family's tombs, nor does he or she relish say the Masque of the Red Death (tho some of us might). So in one sense the corpse talk here reveals a sort of bourgeois shock and revulsion to something which is quite natural and expected for many people.