altariel | Katrina, the aftermath, and the sociologist (Reply)

I wasn't going to post about Katrina and its aftermath, but a sociologist has presented himself as a target for my repressed ire. I don't mind taking my impotence and frustration out on sociologists. Frank Furedi's piece on the BBC website attempts a deconstruction of a "master narrative" of the events which primarily seeks to point blame, and he suggests such an account is counter-productive. Furedi argues that in "today's secular times" (?), we no longer primarily use descriptions such as "act of God" or "act of Nature" to explain natural disasters (although I have certainly read a couple of pernicious accounts on these lines over the past week).

I think any comprehensive reading of events includes "Fucking Great Hurricane" as one of the primary causes. But I don't think that's a sufficient explanation - scratch a bit and you will usually find some good old social causes behind "acts of God" or "acts of nature". I am trying to be careful in this post to distinguish hurricane and aftermath. Because a hurricane can rip up a city by its roots, but it seems to take laissez-faire, chronically structural poverty, availability of guns, and the negligence of people in positions of responsibility to turn a convention centre into Dante's fucking Inferno. Social factors. We make our own hells. If the apparatus of modern, technologically-advanced society - a defining feature of which is the capacity to organize on a large scale - is not used primarily for the protection and care of the people who constitute society, and to alleviate misery and distress whenever it can, we may as well go back to banging the rocks together guys. And I'm yet to see evidence that this apparatus was used in this way.

Furedi concludes: "Today, the meaning of a catastrophe, like the one unleashed by Hurricane Katrina, is fiercely contested. There is no one moral story that we are all prepared to accept. That means we are in danger of facing a double disaster. One that is about physical destruction and loss of life, and the other which is the legacy of bitterness, confusion and suspicion. Instead of a powerful story that we can learn from there is a risk that we will become disoriented by an obsession to blame."

That last sentence contains a couple of interesting narrative moves. Firstly, it begins transforming the process of investigating responsibility in this terrible series of events into "an obsession to blame". Secondly, upon this, a false binary is constructed according to which, it seems, we may either blame or learn. Since Furedi is interested in the sociology of dissident knowledge, I'll use an online source to counter him:

hederahelix's recent post gives us the tools to recognize and deconstruct such a false binary, and refuse it as the conclusion of a narrative. I am perfectly capable of both learning and judging, sometimes all at the same time, and I think many other people are too.

I've read variations on the theme of "hey, let's not point the finger" around the net and this one has persuaded least. Damn right people are looking for someone to blame. Not God, not Nature... it's almost like people want to hold those responsible for the chaos that came with Katrina accountable. Told that way, it's almost like progress.