Politics and Time by Shapiro Michael J.;

Author:Shapiro, Michael J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2016-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

Conclusion: Katrina's Will-Have-Been

Spike Lee's Levees and David Simon's Treme testify to what much of the mediascape treated all too briefly and sketchily. They reveal that among the major effects of the Katrina event was the death, dislocation, trauma, and precariousness visited on black lives. Clyde Woods captures that aspect of the event succinctly: “The disaster surrounding Hurricane Katrina revealed the impaired contemporary social vision of every segment of society. Despite mountains of communication and surveillance devices, America was still shocked by the revelation of impoverishment, racism, brutality, corruption, and official neglect in a place it thought it knew intimately.”78

Woods's use of the past tense for America's shock raises some pressing questions, which reference the endurance of the Katrina event. Does that shock continue to be registered with “America's” mediascape and is it still present in the affective temporalities (the ongoing effects of trauma, dislocation, and suffering)? With respect to the first question, Katrina can be construed as a media subject under the rubric “black lives matter.” The racism, brutality and official neglect to which Woods refers in his reflections on the Katrina event are once again foregrounded in popular media in response to the shooting of unarmed African Americans by police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, Madison, Wisconsin, Charleston, South Carolina, and Baltimore, Maryland (and the strangulation of an African American by a police officer in Staten Island, New York), especially after grand juries failed to indict the officers involved in the Ferguson and Staten Island cases. Significantly, one internet outlet reported that the protesters of the shooting of the unarmed teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson referred to the event as “Obama's Katrina.” (“This is Obama's Katrina, and he ain't doing s**t!” − an answer to the question about Katrina's continuing affective resonances.79) Consolidating the four episodes of police violence against African Americans (the list grows as I write), the media's frequent referencing of Katrina effectively renders Katrina as what Karl Mannheim famously called a “paradigmatic experience,” the kind of experience that continues to serve as a “measuring rod for human conduct.”80

In terms of the temporality that the recent Katrina references evoke, Walter Benjamin provides us with a model (described in chapter 1). Displacing the linear narrative of history (the continuum from past to present) with episodes of shock, he refers to moments when the past, which “carries a temporal index…flashes up at a moment of danger.”81 In terms of the ethico-political questions that the evocation of Katrina raise, Judith Butler provides us with insights that also challenge a linear reading of the event's violence. She puts into question how we define an injurable or precarious life, how as a result we grieve for some rather than others, and how our perceptions are, ultimately, unknowing (predicated on norms that tend to be accepted unreflectively). As she puts it, “The epistemological capacity to apprehend a life is partially dependent on that life being produced by norms that qualify it as a life, or, indeed, as part of life.”82 Moreover, “apprehension” is not mere perception for Butler: “The precarity of life imposes an obligation on us.

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