New Orleans: Survivor Stories

As the corporate media gleefully gears up for its next human interest story, to lead our nation in cheap demagoguery and onslaughts of insincere tears, perhaps one could do worse than to read instead some of the personal stories emerging from the event that was "Katrina," stories that refuse to be contained by mere soundbites. City Pages (courtesy of archive: s0metim3s) does just that:

Adele Bertucci, 53, hospitality worker, native of Cuba and 35-year resident of New Orleans The worst experience for me was being alone for maybe four days in the airport. That's something I'll never forget. There were bodies. There were people bleeding. There were people lying in their own waste. One after another. If you take Gone with the Wind and the Nazi War and the Vietnam war, and visualize that in one place, that's how I would describe the airport. When you watch it on TV, it's like watching a Walt Disney versus an R-rated movie. You only see what they want you to see. You can't smell it.

Comments

[Alain]

Matt, Alphonse has some more personal stories from the same web site here:

http://alphonsevanworden.blogspot.com/2005/09/there-is-no-jackson-avenue.html

[Matt]

Yes, I read that one too; they're all worth reading. You may even use the link above.

Possible topic for discussion (pompous teacher hat firmly in place): What if anything does the media festival over 'Katrina'/'Rita' teach us about repetition compulsion or simulation? Why is the corporate media so quick to see in Rita the *same thing* as Katrina (and what happened to lmnopq)? Are we not trying to master, gain control over trauma and over the event, by repeating it to ourselves, and above all on television? How ironic that this time, even if the devastation is equal or worse, the effect of the media circus will be to normalize and naturalize away whatever shocks to its system it had previously endured or betrayed. Which is why personal stories, the details of which cannot be naturalized away, are so important, now more than ever. And yet there is an element of desire and pleasure–jouissance if you wish–in the context-obliterating collective fantasies for 'the worst' or at the least the complete erasure and destruction of the archive. That's probably taking things a bit far, but there does seem to be an apocalyptic horizon at stake, or at least a somewhat banal fantasy of one that the media doesn't hesitate to make use of (in a superficial manner, without sincerely questioning itself, or its own material conditions of existence). Is there not something of Girard's 'mimetic desire' and Baudrillard's 'simulacrum' in this pseudo-self-questioning, an attempt even to make of oneself the sacrificial victim–at once sacred and profaned–however narcissistic and stuck? What happens to the dangers of simulation when it occurs "live," simultaneous (is it really?) with the event?

For instance, with regard to this story about JetBlue:

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=1150212

My brother writes to me in an email:

"Talk about surreal -- think about that! Like watching your own assasination on TV -- what would Derrida say about that?"

Like the smug little brother I am, I responded:

"He would say it was an uncanny convergence of the hyperreal and real, a sort of terror even, though hardly new, whereby the event is as if co-opted in real time by the dominant media discourse, etc. Unlike some, he would refrain from making it into more than it was. I'm not sure it's accurate to compare it to an assasination, really, though that may be part of the ritual-spectacle-effect on self-consciousness ("yes, we are all individuals"), etc."

Anybody have a better response?
Just my two cents.

[Matt]

Conversely, imagine if the MSM showed to complacent Americans images such as these?

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2005/09/sadr-to-zarqawi-out.html

Would it not expose their fundamental role as pornographers, intolerably so?

[Alain]

Matt

I am in general agreement with the compulsion to repeat and its simultaneous simulation. There is an obscenity to the spectacle that numbs us to the suffering and draws us in. The personal stories are essential to break the cycle, but I wonder if the media did choose to focus on these personal accounts would it make a difference? Of course it would be preferrable to what we have now but would it really have an impact on the coordinates of our situation?

[Matt]

Just to be clear, I don't think the compulsion to repeat is easily understood, or purely on the part of "the media." Although it's hard to imagine a responsible, truly investigative media, Alain, I'd like to think it could, it really could.

[Jodi]

Interesting discussion. I want to register an anxiety around the personal stories, though: do we think that somehow they provide authenticity, access to the Real? Zizek at least would reject this view, and I think he's right. The stories are of course produced, filtered, narrativized, etc. Why would we--here at LS!!--privilege this kind of first person testimony? It can't simply be that the personal 'breaks the cycle'--the stories are already part of, within the cycle. So, how are they functioning? What do they do? What should we do with them?

[Alain]

Jodi

Of course you are right - the stories are already mediated, filtered, "Theory Ladden." But the stark brutality of what has happened, as well as the humanity of those speaking, does reveal something different from the usual trash media theatre. While we should be cautious of essentializing the "immediacy" of the first person accounts, I think it is fair to say they have a certain efficacy, or power, that is hard to qualify. Just as Cindy Sheehan has provided a human face for the anti-war movement, the victims of post-Katrina cleansing provide a much needed face for the innocent victims of the current Junta.

[Alain]

Matt, to follow up on your point about our victimization, I heard some "liberal" radio guy talking about Katrina, and Rita, in terms of war - the storms are surging and attacking us, in a "full frontal assault," and Bush and Company have left the homeland vulnerable to this "war with nature." It was truly a bizarre image - the radio host blaming the war in Iraq as the reason we are unable to win the war with the Hurricains. While one can certainly see the depletion of resources as a result of the war in Iraq, it seems strange to take that metaphor and attach it to what is going on here at home. I think you are right Matt that there is an "apocalyptic horizon at stake" - and the uncertainty of this moment is pushing the limits of our current discourse. Language seems unable to express what is happening and so we fall back to these tired phrases, applying notions that do not really fit.

[Matt]

It strikes me that sure they are mediated and narrativized, these stories, to some degree performing in front of a certain audience; the rawness of their rage is a direct result, even, of performing for a big Other they know won't, because it can't–hear them.

But at the same time, the devil is in the details, and perhaps taken together they represent a kind of original collective testimony. With one story, or two, any details are marginalized and quickly forgotten. But with story after story after story, each one its own, and with its own set of details, I think they might resist being subsumed into any ultimately benign "human interest" angle. Imagine if for three hours CNN did nothing but relay these stories. They would still be framed, inevitably, packaged, etc. But the stories themselves would repeatedly spill outside of the frame, inclining toward a silence that refuses to be packaged, and in so doing perhaps suggest something larger, infinitely more menacing, particularly for all those insta-moralists who talk so tritely about "responsibility" and "survival" and "rescue."

I am thinking also of the sort of testimony suggested, at least, by sites such as this:

http://www.10eastern.com/foundphotos/

previously written beautifully about here:

http://this-space.blogspot.com/2004/12/kitsch-and-silence-on-photographs.html

As for Iraq, there are certainly some comparisons to be made. Whether they are victims of criminal negligence or rather ambiguous rules of engagement (or is that "video game" target practice):

http://pasaudela.blogspot.com/2004/09/aw-dude.html

–imagine if the relatives of these people were each allowed half an hour on prime time television to have their stories told. No interruptions, just their stories.

[s0metim3s]

No more or less 'authentic' or mediated than blogging, surely. Why would the genre of the 'personal story' be any more anxiety-producing than blogging, even those blogs which beg off overt diarising, since there's always an assumption of presence at work?

In any case, the difference between the register of 'personal testimony' and that of '(meta-)analysis' can often be a question of economics, of the time to write and the means of production, among other things. Writing and speaking isn't the sole prerogative of the cognitive worker, and I think maybe that studiously avoiding the form of the 'personal testimony' would amount to only reading the writings of the cognitariat.

[Matt]

I'm glad to take some heat for this. I certainly don't mean to privelege or unduly glory the genre of "confession" and anecdote itself. And the question of economics and time is well-taken. Also, if CNN were to scroll the text of personal stories for several hours slowly down the screen, hardly anyone would watch. But it would still have been there. Think of the Vietnam memorial, or even the Holocaust museum. I don't mean to sound sentimental. But it seems to me that it's precisely the lack of such acts of collective memorialization (without politicization, however naive that may sound)–that prevent the work of mourning after these doubly-inscribed media 'events' from even effectively beginning.

If not through the attention to details, how might this work be possible?

marginally OT: Cornel West