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Home , Children of Men, Rescue 911, The Natural Disasters, Ulrich Beck

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Date: August 12, 2009

I, Kirk Boyle , hereby submit this original work as part of the requirements for the degree of:

Doctor of Philosophy in English and Comparative Literature

It is entitled: The Catastrophic Real: Late Capitalism and Other Naturalized Disasters

Kirk Boyle Student Signature:

This work and its defense approved by:

Committee Chair: Beth Ash Stanley Corkin Jana Braziel

Approval of the electronic document:

I have reviewed the Thesis/Dissertation in its final electronic format and certify that it is an accurate copy of the document reviewed and approved by the committee.

Committee Chair signature: Beth Ash & Stanley Corkin

The Catastrophic Real: Late Capitalism and Other Naturalized Disasters

Kirk Boyle, B.A., M.A.

A dissertation submitted in conformity with the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, College of Arts and Sciences, at the University of Cincinnati

12 August 2009

Committee Co-Chairs: Dr. Beth Ash & Dr. Stanley Corkin

ABSTRACT

The 2005 landfall of Hurricane Katrina entrenched natural disaster studies within the disciplinary territory of the social sciences. For scholars of this specialized field of knowledge, examining the geological and hydrometerological aspects of the largest natural disaster in the history of the United States made little sense without also asserting its historical origins and societal impact. One goal of this dissertation is to secure the human concerns of natural disaster studies further by aligning them with a singular historical social science, a Marxist paradigm that reframes contemporary natural disasters as misfortunes inherent to the neoliberal form of late capitalism. Although Marxism provides the most expansive view of the unnatural forces of natural disasters, this approach itself must be philosophically generous and rigorous, not politically expedient, hence I clarify the ontological status of natural disasters by enlisting reinforcements from the humanities—existential philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

The second goal of this dissertation is to redress a deficiency in the social scientific approach to the cultural representation of natural disasters, which is undeveloped and still largely beholden to positivist methodologies. Drawing on the jointly Marxist and psychoanalytic approach developed by dialectical thinkers like Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, I show how literary and cultural imaginations of catastrophes shape their real formation within the capitalist world-economy. A comparative analysis of the recent Hollywood disaster films Children of Men (2006) and I Am Legend (2007) demonstrates the divergent response of progressives and conservatives to what Naomi Klein dubs “disaster capitalism.” While some works of mass culture disguise and expose the role of the political economy in exacerbating the disastrous effects of so-called natural disasters, others naturalize economic crises. Close readings of The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) and Knowing (2009) unearth both ideological and utopian projections of the current “global financial crisis.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My gratitude extends to several sources. The Charles Phelps Taft Research Center and the University Research Council granted fellowships that helped me see this project through to completion. Dr. Jonathan Kamholtz scraped together funding to keep me around a fifth year, and Dr. Russel Durst offered me a generous professional and financial opportunity as his research assistant. The English Department staff—Geri Hinkle-Wesseling, Devore Nixon, and Jessica Vieson—was priceless, and so was the much tasked Langsam Library staff.

I have been fortunate to work with three first-rate professors during the drafting of this manuscript. Beth Ash and Stanley Corkin not only instructed me on every word herein, they played a central role in each stage of my graduate training. Their reputation as challenging, rigorous, and intellectually stimulating professors precedes them. I consider Jana Braziel a role model and friend. I do not think I will meet another scholar as tireless as she. Thanks also to professors Jonathan Alexander, Tom LeClair, Norma Jenckes, Leland Person, and Jay Twomey for their guidance along this crazy trip known as graduate school.

Dr. Julia LeSage at Jump Cut proved to be an impeccable editor of what became chapter two, and I thank her for including my work in the 51st issue of the journal. Dr. Michael Lindell and his colleagues at the International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters contributed a valuable insider’s take on the social scientific observations in chapter one. Dr. David Laibman and the editors of Science & Society also provided extensive feedback on this chapter, which I intend to revise and resubmit to their publication.

The love and support of Ed, Linda, Kelly, and Katie Boyle carried me through the “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” moments of writing, like always. Fellow travelers Daniel Mrozowski, Matthew Feltman, Jeremy Withers, and Byron Bailey supplied much needed camaraderie. As for the rest of my friends from graduate school and elsewhere, I toast you heartily.

Amber Leab deserves special mention. She is the most wonderful live-in editor I could ask for, of my work and my life. For all she has given me, I dedicate this work to her.

All errors, omissions, and misinterpretations in the present draft are singularly mine.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: The Need for a Cultural Studies of Natural Disaster 5

Chapter One: Natural Disasters as Late Capitalist Disasters: Realigning Natural Disaster Studies 14

Chapter Two: Children of Men and I Am Legend: The Disaster-Capitalism Complex Hits Hollywood 64

Chapter Three: Ontological Difference and the Catastrophic Real: A Lacanian Intervention into Natural Disaster Studies 99

Chapter Four: Late Capitalist Disasters as Natural Disasters: Metaphoric Projections of the “Global Financial Crisis” 158

Bibliography 218

Introduction: The Need for a Cultural Studies of Natural Disaster

It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations...for us time consists in an eternal present and, much farther away, an inevitable catastrophe… -Frederic Jameson

…to say that class structure is becoming representable means that we have now gone beyond mere abstract understanding and entered that whole area of personal fantasy, collective storytelling, narrative figurability—which is the domain of culture and no longer that of abstract sociology or economic analysis. -Frederic Jameson

In geology’s formative years at the beginning of the 18th century, the naturalist Georges

Cuvier proposed a radical theory that life on earth had suffered a series of “revolutions,” cataclysmic events that resulted in mass extinctions. What came to be popularly known as the theory of catastrophism gained acceptance through its unique mix of religious and geoscientific interpretation of empirical evidence, a synthesis that enabled the Book of Genesis’ story of the

Great Flood to co-exist with an exponentially increasing fossil record. While Protestant endorsements of catastrophism posited the intervention of a deity’s agency in natural history, Sir

Charles Lyell, among others, rejected the belief in God’s hand puncturing the fabric of reality to tear it asunder and start anew, and proposed in its stead one of the pillars of Darwin’s theory of evolution—gradualism, the belief that geologic change occurs slowly over long periods of time.

The only way to logically conceive of such dramatic alterations to landscapes and species was to imagine millennia’s worth of accumulated alterations.

By most scientific accounts, Cuvier’s earlier theory of catastrophism, minus its theological trappings, has proven to have more legs than was once thought. The theory of

“punctual equilibrium,” developed by evolutionary biologists like Stephen Jay Gould, represents a kind of Aufhebung, a dialectical overcoming, of Cuvier’s and Lyell’s positions. It is now generally accepted that long periods of ordinary time—to borrow a term from the Catholic

Church—are occasionally interrupted by the rarest of events: giant meteor strike, sudden climate change, super volcano eruption, etc. These global catastrophes redirect the course of world history irrevocably.

The contingency inherent in the theory of punctuated equilibrium, the idea that at any moment a random and unpredictable event can change the structure of reality dramatically, is a defining characteristic of modernity, of what it means to live in the post-teleological, “all that is solid melts into air” world. In particular, catastrophism has experienced a resurgence in the last few decades of this modern age, during the period commonly referred to as post-modernity. At least three major theories have risen to popularity during this time as part of the catastrophism renaissance.

In philosophy, postmodern theory promotes an “incredulity towards meta-narratives” like the gradualist beliefs in the progress of history and the advancement of scientific knowledge. In rejecting universals and foundations, postmodern theory opts for a relativistic worldview. No wonder that one of its foremost advocates, Jean-François Lyotard, cites the sublime “pure event” of the sun’s death in 4.5 billion years to affirm the postmodern condition of permanent transitoriness, of “matter taken as an arrangement of energy created, destroyed and recreated over and over again, endlessly” (Lyotard 1991: 9). Even if the disaster to end all disasters has yet to occur, the consequences of its fallout have already reverberated through philosophical circles, where grand systems of thought have (supposedly) lost their truth claims. For Lyotard, the inevitable solar explosion “can be seen in a certain way as coming before the fact to render these ploys posthumous—make them futile” (Lyotard 1991: 9). Postmodern theory sees in catastrophism a confirmation that philosophy and related “ploys” have come to an end.

Sociological theories of the “risk society” take a slightly less nihilistic, but no less overarching, view of life under postmodernity. Instead of “postmodern,” Ulrich Beck seizes upon “risk” as the zeitgeist-defining term of the later stage of modernity. “Where most postmodern theorists are critical of grand narratives, general theory and humanity,” Beck admits,

“I remain committed to all of these, but in a new sense…my notion of ‘second reflexive modernity’ implies that we do not have enough reason (Vernunft) in a new postmodern meaning to live and act in a Global Age (Albrow) of manufactured uncertainties” (Beck 1999: 152). The risk society thesis argues that scientific, technological, and economic instruments that enabled modern development have now manufactured risks distinct from the natural hazards that threatened pre-industrial and industrial societies of bygone epochs. In the new risk society, uncertainties created by artificial chemicals, nuclear power, global warming, environmental despoliation, and genetic manipulations outstrip the capabilities of governing institutions to ensure public safety. Beck defines the new epoch as “a phase of development of modern society in which the social, political, ecological and individual risks created by the momentum of innovation increasingly elude the control and protective institutions of industrial society” (Beck

1994: 27). Risk society theory updates catastrophism to include socially created worst-case scenarios, those low probability-high consequence events specific to the modernization process.

Finally, in the realm of the natural sciences, complex systems theory strives to ground catastrophism in physics. Through elegant computer models and simulations, non-equilibrium statistical physics studies the self-organized criticality of complex networks of all kinds, from atoms to cities to ecosystems. The working hypothesis is that systems such as the earth’s crust, forests, the stock market, even ideas themselves, may be naturally organized so that the tumultuous events that occasionally punctuate their normal functioning—earthquakes, fires,

crashes, paradigm shifts, etc.—follow power law distribution patterns. Put in lay terms, over time all complex systems reach critical states where upheavals or catastrophes become inevitable. As

Mark Buchanan writes in Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen:

The peculiar and exceptionally unstable organization of the critical state does indeed

seem to be ubiquitous in our world…It appears that, at many levels, our world is at all

times tuned to be on the edge of sudden, radical change, and that [earthquakes, disastrous

episodes of financial collapse, revolutions or catastrophic wars] and other upheavals may

all be strictly unavoidable and unforeseeable, even just moments before they strike.

Consequently, our human longing for explanation may be terribly misplaced, and

doomed always to go unsatisfied. (Buchanan 2002: 21, 62)

Complexity science argues that these ubiquitous upheavals are stochastic; they follow patterns that can be analyzed but not predicted because they depend on complex historical chains of causality, including feedback loops (in this way, “historical physics” tries to reconcile contingency with causality). Complex systems theory imports scientific explanations into domains that risk theory considers manufactured, examining how punctuated equilibrium affects natural and social systems alike.

These takes on catastrophism—one each from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences—captures a sense that we are living through a period of history where catastrophe is imminent. Each captures a sense that, as Frederic Jameson observes in the epigraph above, “for us time consists in an eternal present and, much farther away, an inevitable catastrophe.” Why this eternal present, and why this inevitable catastrophe? To paraphrase Jameson, it is easier for these theories to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism, not due to some weakness in their imagination, but more precisely

because they fail to consider the role of late capitalism, the defining feature of post-modernity, in the creation of catastrophic conditions (capitalistic critical states, if you will). For each of these theories obfuscates or downright ignores the concrete socioeconomic roots of catastrophes and, as a result, naturalizes their occurrence. Whether the result of absolute transitoriness, critical states, or the unintended consequences of techno-scientific inventions, catastrophes are not only bound to happen, they are beyond our control to curtail. All disasters have in a sense become natural disasters.1

The present project can be framed as a rebuttal to these theories. The lack of a proper dialectical analysis of the relationship between the abstract logic of global capitalism and the concrete socio-historical events of catastrophes undermines the way postmodern, risk, and critical systems theories understand the catastrophic world of late modernity. In the following pages, I argue for the necessity of adopting a dialectical view of capitalism’s relationship to contemporary disasters, and cast a critical eye on the ideological implications of social scientific and cultural representations of catastrophes. Specifically, I look at how representations of natural disasters efface the role played by the political economy, and conversely, how theory and culture naturalize economic crises. With the emergence of a truly global economy, disasters—natural, economic, and otherwise—can no longer be viewed as punctuating the equilibrium of everyday life in any natural way. They must be understood as symptoms of the machinations of capitalism.

1 “The more today’s social theory proclaims the end of Nature and/or Tradition and the rise of the ‘risk society,’ the more the implicit reference to ‘nature’ pervades our daily discourse….Although Francis Fukuyama’s thesis on the ‘end of history’ quickly fell into disrepute, we still silently presume that the liberal-democratic capitalist global order is somehow the finally found ‘natural’ social regime; we still implicitly conceive conflicts in Third World countries as a subspecies of natural catastrophes, as outbursts of quasi-natural violent passions, or as conflicts based on fanatical identification with one’s ethnic roots (and what is ‘the ethnic’ here if not again a codeword for nature?)….the key point is that this all- pervasive renaturalization is strictly correlative to the global reflexivization of our daily lives” (Žižek 2006a: 301). I would add that we still conceive natural disasters as natural disasters. 9

My project joins a nascent branch of disaster studies devoted to the investigation of how our theoretical, literary, and cultural imaginations of catastrophes shape their real formation within the capitalist world-economy, and I contend that the discipline of English has much to offer in developing this important area of research. Bodies of knowledge banished by other disciplines have found, once they took root in the field of English, a second life that is oftentimes more intellectually fruitful than their first. Once transplanted from economics and psychology,

Marxism and psychoanalysis yielded inventive approaches to the hermeneutic understanding of a variety of cultural products, from novels to television programs. Because real socio-historical phenomena like disasters and class structure have now “entered that whole area of personal fantasy, collective storytelling, narrative figurability,” to quip from the second epigraph, understanding them requires more than abstract sociological or economic analysis. A primary goal of this project is to elaborate how a jointly Marxist and psychoanalytic approach developed by dialectical thinkers like Jameson and Slavoj Žižek can redress a deficiency in social scientific studies of the cultural representation of natural disasters, which are few in number and still largely beholden to positivist methodologies.2

The project’s title, “The Catastrophic Real: Late Capitalism and Other Naturalized

Disasters,” reflects my interest in pioneering this methodological approach for its application to the cultural domain of natural and economic disasters. The first part of the title derives from one of the central concepts of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan: the Real. Lacan’s concept of the Real designates those traumatic encounters or events which resist symbolization absolutely.

Located at the point where symbolization fails, the Real “can be constructed only backwards,

2 I forayed into Žižek’s particular hybrid form of psychoanalytic Marxism in “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Slavoj Žižek’s Psychoanalytic Marxism.” International Journal of Žižek Studies. 2.1 Feb. 2008. http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/70/163

from its structural effects. All its effectivity lies in the distortions it produces in the symbolic universe of the subject” (Žižek 1989: 169). The 2005 landfall of Hurricane Katrina provides a pertinent example of the catastrophic Real. In the wake of Katrina’s traumatic impact, the attempts by news media to objectively report the plight of the hurricane’s victims were quickly distorted by the antagonism that has divided U.S. society throughout its history—the racialized class struggle. The structural effects of Hurricane Katrina could be constructed only backwards from the “Real” of this antagonism. Images of primarily impoverished, black Americans occupied the nation’s symbolic universe, and how we responded to these representations told us just as much about our own location with regard to this struggle as it did the victims’. In the end, this social antagonism proved to be just as catastrophic as the hurricane itself.

Hurricane Katrina entrenched natural disaster studies within the disciplinary territory of the social sciences. For scholars of this specialized field of knowledge, examining the geological and hydrometerological aspects of the largest natural disaster in the history of the United States made little sense without also asserting its historical origins and societal impact. The post-colon half of the title, “late capitalism and other naturalized disasters,” reflects a second goal of this project, which is to secure the human concerns of natural disaster studies further by aligning them with the Marxist paradigm of a singular historical social science. This singular historical social science reframes contemporary natural disasters as misfortunes inherent to the neoliberal form of what Marxists like Jameson refer to as the postmodern, or late stage of capitalism. In addition to defining the historical scope of my project, this part of the title emphasizes that economic crises are subject to the same naturalization process as so-called natural ones.

Chapter one, “Natural Disasters as Late Capitalist Disasters: Realigning Natural Disaster

Studies,” provides a critical examination of the current field of natural disaster studies (NDS),

and makes a case for why the field should be realigned with the aforementioned singular historical social science. Over the past three decades, institutions like the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder have developed NDS as a discipline which combines the scientific understanding of extreme geophysical events like hurricanes and earthquakes with social scientific perspectives on their hazardous effects. Scholars publishing in journals like the

International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters consistently undermine the assumption that these effects are strictly “natural.” The raging fires that burned San Francisco to the ground after the 1906 earthquake or the levees that broke in New Orleans after Hurricane

Katrina subsided make apparent that humans are culpable for disasters wreaked by naturally occurring phenomenon in the environment. I argue that in our late modern or postmodern world, we cannot simply blame humans for failing to assess the risks and mitigating the damages of natural disasters; they are much too abstract a suspect. Rather, the capitalist world-economy must be inculpated for creating the conditions in which natural hazards become unnatural disasters.

Chapter two, “Children of Men and I Am Legend: The Disaster-Capitalism Complex Hits

Hollywood,” applies the Marxist cultural studies approach developed in the first chapter to popular film. Although the plots of the recent Hollywood disaster films Children of Men (2006) and I Am Legend (2007) center on catastrophes that may or may not be natural, a comparative analysis of the two films details conservatives’ and progressives’ divergent interpretations of what Naomi Klein dubs “disaster capitalism.” I argue that these formally similar post- apocalyptic films respond in diametrically opposed ways to the neoconservative movement’s mix of imperial foreign policy with religious and market fundamentalism.

In a way, chapter three, “Ontological Difference and the Catastrophic Real: A Lacanian

Intervention into Natural Disaster Studies,” backtracks from chapter one in its attempt to

establish a philosophical “Grundrisse” for the singular historical social science developed in the opening chapter. Although a Marxist paradigm provides the most expansive view of the unnatural forces of natural disasters, this approach itself must be philosophically generous and rigorous, not politically expedient; hence, this chapter clarifies the ontological status of natural disasters by enlisting reinforcements from the humanities—existential philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In this third chapter, I argue that natural disasters present a solid case in defense of ontological difference. I conclude by showing how the Lacanian “ontology” of the Real,

Symbolic, and Imaginary can help clarify what we mean when we talk about “natural” disasters.

While some works of mass culture disguise and expose the role of the political economy in exacerbating the disastrous effects of so-called natural disasters, others naturalize economic crises. Chapter four, “Late Capitalist Disasters as Natural Disasters: Metaphoric Projections of the ‘Global Financial Crisis’” extends chapter two’s examination of culture’s ideological use of natural disaster to the realm of economic disaster. In this final chapter, I subject Alan

Greenspan’s testimony on the 2008 “global financial crisis” in front of the House Committee of

Government Oversight and Reform to critical analysis. Then, drawing from an equally critical genealogy of disaster film criticism, I provide close readings of The Day the Earth Stood Still

(2008) and Knowing (2009) to unearth both ideological and utopian projections of the current crisis of capitalism.

In our postmodern times so often our heightened perception of catastrophes obscures the routine operations of a vast machine constantly at work churning out disasters. The following pages argue for the necessity of studying the culture of catastrophe to delineate the contours of the “Real” of our age, the catastrophic world-system of capitalism.

Natural Disasters as Late Capitalist Disasters: Realigning Natural Disaster Studies

There is no such thing as a natural disaster, and the supposed naturalness of the market is the last place to look for a solution to this disastrous havoc. -Neil Smith (on Hurricane Katrina)

Natural Disaster Studies as World-Systems Analysis, or…

Over thirty years ago, Immanuel Wallerstein felt compelled to develop a new method to study the history of the modern world: “world-systems analysis.” World-systems analysis involves a historically systemic and materialist approach to social reality that breaks with the spatiotemporal limitations of the analytic frameworks provided by state-centric and unilinear modernization theories.3 By contrast, Wallerstein pursues his analyses within a systemic framework that is “long enough in time and large enough in space to contain governing ‘logics’ which ‘determine’ the largest part of sequential reality…” (Wallerstein 2001: 244).

While acknowledging that there exists multiple temporalities, a plurality of social times, and a dialectic of durations, Wallerstein follows in the footsteps of Fernand Braudel and adopts the perspective of the longue durée. “I think we have to make our analyses within the framework of what I call historical systems,” Wallerstein writes, “units of large-scale, long-term reality and social change that have some set of processes that we can analyze and that are held together because they comprise a significant and continuing division of labor” (Wallerstein 2004a: 139).

Painting in admittedly broad strokes, Wallerstein claims that there have existed three large-scale, long-term historical eras on our planet: a pre- 8-10,000 BC world composed of “scattered

3 Sociologist Neil Brenner challenges Wallerstein’s supposed overcoming of state-centric models of analysis. Despite Wallerstein’s useful corrective of “excessively presentist interpretations” of globalization, Brenner believes that “Wallerstein’s theoretical framework replicates on a global scale the methodological territorialism of the very state-centric epistemologies he has otherwise criticized so effectively” (Brenner 1999: 56). See Brenner 56-59. 14

minisystems,” an 8-10,000 BC to circa 1500 AD period of “co-existing historical systems (of the three main varieties: world-empires, world-economies, minisystems),” and the post-1500 AD capitalist world-economy (Wallerstein 1993: 295). Wallerstein’s central interest lies with the rise of the latter, the modern world-system of the capitalist world-economy, an era that he distinguishes from its predecessors for the sustained structural priority it gives to the ceaseless accumulation of capital.

In large part, I agree with the assumptions that inform Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis: the belief that “everything that is historic is systemic, and everything that is systemic is historic”; the focus on the macro-unit of analysis of world-systems that takes into account that these “systemic frameworks have beginnings and ends and are therefore not to be conceived of as ‘eternal’ phenomena”; the primary role of the division of labor that delineates these systems; and the affirmation of the qualitative difference of the capitalist world-economy that distinguished it from previous world-systems beginning some time in the sixteenth century

(Wallerstein 2001: 229, 244). I find these premises not only logically sound, but a marked improvement on historical modes of thought that are structurally deficient and sociological theories that lack historicity. Yet what interests me most in Wallerstein’s work are his criticisms of the modern structures of knowledge that accompany his analyses of world-systems. Indicative of the importance that epistemological self-reflexivity plays in Wallerstein’s work—what Fredric

Jameson in the context of literary analysis calls “metacommentary”4—is the bipartite division of his 1999 collection of essays, The End of the World as We Know It: Social Science for the

4 Jameson writes, “The starting point for any genuinely profitable discussion of interpretation therefore must be not the nature of interpretation, but the need for it in the first place. What initially needs explanation is, in other words, not how we go about interpreting a text properly, but rather why we should even have to do so. All thinking about interpretation must sink itself in the strangeness, the unnaturalness, of the hermeneutic situation; or to put it another way, every individual interpretation must include an interpretation of its own existence, must show its own credentials and justify itself” (Jameson 1988a: 5, my italics). 15

Twenty-first Century. Wallerstein titles the first part of this collection, “The World of

Capitalism,” and he collects the second part under the heading, “The World of Knowledge.”

Wallerstein investigates how we know what we know about the historical world as much as he desires to understand this world itself. His work, which is at once historical and philosophical, often reads as equally critical of the modern structures of knowledge as it is of the modern world-system of capitalism.5

Indeed, the inadequacies in the social scientific structures of knowledge that we inherited from the nineteenth century served as the impetus for Wallerstein to found world-systems analysis. He writes, “world-systems analysis is not a theory about the world, or about a part of it.

It is a protest against the ways in which social scientific activity was structured for all of us at its inception in the middle of the nineteenth century” (Wallerstein 2004a: 107). This “protest” reaches far beyond the perceived shortcomings of the disciplines of history and sociology. The need for a new analytic model grew out of Wallerstein’s suspicion of a generalized epistemological fragmentation that began with the rise of modernity in the sixteenth century, blossomed in the latter half of the nineteenth, and fully manifested itself in the split between what C.P. Snow in 1959 termed the “two cultures”: the sciences and the humanities.

Wallerstein laments the splintering of the social sciences especially. Instead of bridging the divide between the nomothetic sciences and the idiographic humanities as its name promises, the social sciences have since moved centrifugally to either side of this ever widening gap.

Against this trend and its concomitant division of mental labor, Wallerstein believes that we should “unthink” social science, and he advocates a centripetal movement in the structures of knowledge aimed at a reunified epistemology. (He champions complexity studies in the sciences

5 Wallerstein’s highly accessible introduction to world-systems analysis, World Systems Analysis: An Introduction (2004), also displays the equal weight he places on criticizing the international political economy and its structures of knowledge. 16

and cultural studies in the humanities for trailblazing to the epistemological middle). Wallerstein insists, “the epistemology that we must use is inevitably an Aufhebung of the nomothetic/idiographic antinomy” (Wallerstein 2004a: 118). “What we need,” he informs us, “is a fundamental reorganization of knowledge activity in the historical social sciences on a global scale” (Wallerstein 2001: 265). In short, Wallerstein calls for a singular historical social science.6

The various installments of Wallerstein’s manifesto for a monolithic practice of historical social science—in works like Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century

Paradigms and The Uncertainties of Knowledge—not only indict the social sciences for failing to fulfill their self-reflexive obligation to account for their own epistemological blind spots, they attack the contemporary university’s encouragement of multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinarity.

Instead of heralding research that combines the strategies of two or more disciplines as a step toward epistemological reunification, Wallerstein views this academic trend as a further reification of disciplinary borders. He prefers the notion of “unidisciplinarity,” a term that “refers to the belief that in the social sciences at least, there exists today no sufficient intellectual reason to distinguish the separate disciplines at all, and that instead all work should be considered part of a single discipline, sometimes called the historical social sciences” (Wallerstein 2004b: 98).

Wallerstein is careful to rationalize unidisciplinarity based on the lack of “intellectual” reasons to distinguish separate disciplines. Scholars face obvious physical, fiscal, and mental limitations in their individual confrontations with the history of world-systems. These limitations notwithstanding, Wallerstein holds what I view as a strong position: he argues for the total imbrication of the analytic boxes of the disciplines in contrast to the weaker belief in their

6 The following statement is representative of his epistemological position: “…the task is singular. There is neither historian nor social scientist, but only a historical social scientist who analyzes the general laws of particular systems and the particular sequences through which these systems have gone” (Wallerstein 2001: 244). 17

tentative overlapping in multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary programs and projects. Given the chance to restructure the university system of knowledge, Wallerstein would surely take it.7

This lengthy excursus on the unidisciplinarity of world-systems analysis allows me to draw a parallel with the nascent field of natural disaster studies (NDS). I claim that the major assumptions that inform the academic study of natural disasters now mirror those of

Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis. Contemporary NDS shares three primary methodological assumptions with world-systems analysis. Both of these fields insist on the necessity:

• to adopt a large-scale, long-term historical framework of analysis to contextualize

their respective objects of study;

• to overcome the nomothetic/idiographic antinomy that is propagated by hyper-

disciplinarity, the persistent divide between the “two cultures” of the sciences and

humanities, and the academic “wars” taking place within each of these “cultures”

(the so-called science and culture “wars”);

• to avoid the lure of multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinarity, which results in the

reification instead of the Aufhebung of disciplinary borders.

An exemplary case of the overlap between the epistemological concerns of world- systems analysis and NDS can be found in the work of David Alexander, primarily his 2000 book Confronting Catastrophe: New Perspectives on Natural Disasters. Like Wallerstein,

7 The Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economics, Historical Systems, and Civilizations, which Wallerstein cofounded, provides us with an idea of how the practical problems of unidisciplinarity might be addressed. In addition to the normal functions of an academic center (publications, conferences, workshops, etc.), the FBC organizes research working groups comprised of a variety of scholars from different disciplines and geographic regions to conduct particular analyses of “large-scale social change over long periods of historical time.” What separates these research working groups from current interdisciplinary programs is the center’s emphasis on collective research based on unitary problems. FBC studies require multiple years to complete because the collective tackles identified problems as a whole instead of following the “traditional” collaborative approach where each scholar submits an individual contribution on a multidisciplinary topic or theme. The FBC’s website can be accessed at: http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/. 18

Alexander believes that “disciplinary barriers have impeded progress towards a better understanding of emergencies and how to manage them” (Alexander 2000: 30). Alexander calls for a “non-disciplinary approach” in the study of natural catastrophes to counter the adverse trends of “overspecialization and territoriality among academic disciplines” (Alexander 2000:

4).8 He also contrasts non-disciplinarity with interdisciplinarity, which he views as a further impediment to the study of the “holistic phenomena” of disasters. “Disasters must be viewed as holistic problems, which, rather than being interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary, are independent of academic disciplines,” Alexander writes; “the nature of the problem to be solved should determine the methods applied to it” (Alexander 2000: 36, v). Beginning with the methodological apparatus of a discipline or even multiple disciplines puts the proverbial cart in front of the horse. Myopic disciplinarity creates false dilemmas and “incomplete theories” by foreclosing the macro-perspective that is required to theorize the holistic problem of natural disasters.

Although non-disciplinarity seems to oppose unidisciplinarity just as zero does one in binary code, this variance is strictly semantic. Alexander and Wallerstein hold the same essential position: disciplinary thinking should be overcome in order to theorize about large-scale, long- term problems (natural disasters for Alexander, the world-economy of capitalism for

Wallerstein). Whether they perceive their intellectual pursuits as a rejection or a unification of the disciplines is of secondary importance to their common approach to the objects of their analyses. Consider, for instance, the following argument made by Alexander: “The only way to find out the truth is to view the societal impact of disasters in terms of two fundamental

8 Kenneth Hewitt refers to the fragmented study of natural disasters that isolates particular problems at the expense of analyzing their “deep structure” as the “disaster archipelago.” Ilan Kelman explains the “disaster archipelago” as follows: “Partitioning disasters from other fields and partitioning specialties within disasters from other specialties within disasters creates a patchwork of isolated approaches rather than what we need: a coherent, comprehensive, and connected view” (Kelman 2007: unpaginated). 19

determinants: history and culture.…Events are transformed into history, history is absorbed into culture, and that provides the matrix for reactions to disaster” (Alexander 2000: 34). In order to understand the societal impact of catastrophic events, Alexander claims that our epistemological approach needs to be rooted in historical reality and cognizant of the mediating role of culture.

Translated into Wallerstein’s terminology, what we require is the construction of a historical social science of natural disasters.9

…A Historical Social Science of Natural Disasters

A brief survey of the eight decades-old history of the academic study of natural disasters reveals that the epistemological premises of world-systems analysis are not entirely new to this field. A short list of significant precedents and their contributions include: the human ecology movement of the thirties and forties, which sought to bridge the disciplinary gap between sociology and the hard sciences; the “father” of NDS, Gilbert F. White, a Quaker, geographer, and Chicago School graduate, who established the role of human agency in natural disasters

(best exemplified by his axiom: “Floods are ‘acts of God’ but flood losses are largely acts of man”); the Disaster Research School, founded in the sixties, which introduced theories of social organization and the social psychology of collective behavior into NDS; geographer Kenneth

Hewitt’s Weberian intervention in the 1983 collection, notably titled, Interpretations of Calamity from the Viewpoint of Human Ecology, which not only reiterated the human side of the disaster equation but reversed the direction of disaster etiology “so that human actions, rather than geophysical extremes, are considered to be the real culprits when the ground shakes, the volcano erupts, or the river overflows” (Alexander 2000: 32); and, in the vein of Hewitt’s collection, an

9 Alexander makes several “Wallersteinian” remarks. Not only does he believe in the need to “generate a body of theory that adequately unifies society with culture and history,” but he argues for a spatial model of disaster that directly corresponds with Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis: “in many instances [of disaster] a core-periphery model is once again appropriate at the macroscopic scale” (Alexander 2000: 35, 48). 20

unofficial and nebulous “critical school” comprised of researchers in the fields of geography, sociology, anthropology, and human ecology, that has produced a plethora of publications in the last twenty years further theorizing natural disasters as the pernicious and outright baleful “acts of men.”

Each of these developments in NDS exhibits a predilection for macro perspectives that were often not afforded by the established university disciplines of their times, or they represent self-critical turns in fields, most of which have straddled the disciplinary fence since their inception, e.g. anthropology. The above list also presents an evolution in thinking about the role that humans play in natural disasters, from the basic acknowledgment of our culpability to more nuanced positions that delineate the scope of human responsibility. Yet, it would be a grave mistake to view the history of NDS as a linear march of progress. The successive developments that comprise this young field are more properly viewed in a progressive-regressive narrative of uneven development.

I am not interested, however, in writing an intellectual history or in constructing an

“archaeology of knowledge” of NDS, Michel Foucault’s historico-philosophical “technique for revealing how a discipline has developed norms of validity and objectivity” (Gutting 1989: xi).

Nor do I wish to write an extended analysis of the history of NDS from a “sociology of knowledge” perspective. Others have carried out this informative work.10 I reference these select

10 In the opening chapter to Interpretations of Calamity, “The Idea of Calamity in a Technocratic Age,” Hewitt challenges “the ‘geophysicalist’ and technological reductionism of the dominant view” in natural hazards research (Hewitt 1983: 7). His critique of the “paradigm” (Kuhn) and “academic-research consensus” (Said) of the technocratic approach is based on theories of the social construction of knowledge. He writes, “my own argument amounts to saying that the ‘natural science-technological fix’ approach to hazards is itself, essentially, a sociocultural construct reflecting a distinct, institution- centered and ethnocentric view of man and nature” (Hewitt 1983: 8). Notably, one of Hewitt’s sources is Foucault, whom Hewitt cites in order to draw an analogy between the historical discourses of madness— which Foucault examined with his archeological method—and the “enclosure system” of the technocratic discourses of NDS—the object of Hewitt’s own “archaeological” analysis. 21

precedents to emphasize that the seeds of world-systems analysis have germinated in a specific section of the field of NDS for some time, and that they now have cross-pollinated to the point where the fruit of these two fields is, or at least should be largely indistinguishable. (Any claim that a unified historical social science of natural disasters has been fully realized is overstated, hence the conditional.)

Again, it should be stressed that I am not speaking for NDS en masse. Mark Pelling divides the variegated field into two major camps: the physicalist versus critical approach. The validity of this division is widely accepted, although it may go by different names depending on the interlocutor’s perspective. (From his human ecological stance, for example, Alexander refers to students of disaster as either “technocrats” or “humanists.”) In Pelling’s partitioning of the field, the physicalist orientation focuses on the geography of physical forces and the calculation of geological and hydrometerological risk. At its most radical, the physicalist orientation subscribes to an environmentally deterministic worldview. Hewitt declared this approach to be the dominant paradigm twenty-five years ago. To his chagrin, it remains so today.

On the other hand, the critical approach focuses on the production of disaster within a socio- and geopolitical context. In order to structurally analyze the human contribution to catastrophe, this approach investigates the cultural, political, and economic facets of disasters within the concentric circles of local, national, and global social organization. At its most radical, as I have previously mentioned, the critical school reverses the commonsensical perception of causality: humans, not extreme geophysical events, effect disaster. Quite literally for the critical approach, disasters are socially constructed. The movements in NDS that I cited above fall under the broad category of the critical approach. To my chagrin, not only does the work of the current,

unofficial, and nebulous “critical school” remain subordinate to the dominant physicalist paradigm, this work itself is widely uneven—a claim I will substantiate in the next section.

One need not be a deconstructive binary buster or have extensive experience in studying disasters to realize that the field is not so easily demarcated into two starkly opposing camps.

The truth is that we need both the critical and physicalist approaches to interpret calamity in a technocratic age. If natural disasters are more aptly named “humanitarian disasters with a natural trigger,” as Pelling rechristens them, then a physicalist approach is required to explain and help us prepare for the “natural triggers” of various disasters, and a critical approach is necessary to understand their human ramifications (Pelling 2001: 183). The question becomes: does a pragmatic synthesis in which these two approaches work in tandem adequately address these “humanitarian disasters with a natural trigger”?

A good gauge for testing the efficacy of a synthetic approach is Keith Smith’s

Environmental Hazards: Accessing Risk and Reducing Disaster, of which David Crichton writes,

“it is no exaggeration to say that it rapidly became the leading introductory textbook on the subject” after it was initially published in 1991 (Crichton 2006: 267).11 Smith is an environmental scientist who advocates a “balanced view of disaster” based on his division of the field of NDS into two camps that closely resemble Pelling’s physicalist versus critical paradigms. The “behaviouralist school” is a hazard-based approach that espouses technological and civil engineering methods to prevent natural disasters, which are viewed as disruptions of normal everyday life. Behaviouralists work from the perspective of more developed countries

(MDCs), and consequently emphasize the role of individual choice in natural disaster policy. The

“radical/structural school” is a disaster-based approach—disasters being the (actual) realization of (potential) hazards—that endorses the mitigation of natural disasters, which are viewed as part

11 The fifth edition was just published in March 2009 by Routledge. 23

of normal everyday life. This school argues for structural changes to society through political methods that redistribute wealth and power. Radical structuralists work from the perspective of less developed countries (LDCs), and as a result their disaster management policies emphasize the role of powerful institutional forces that constrain individual choice. (Smith points out that radical structuralists also take irrational behavior into account in their socioeconomic analyses, a factor I address in chapter three.)

In his ideal “balanced view of disaster,” Smith appropriates what he views as the best features of these two schools while discarding the rest. He criticizes behaviouralists for their reliance on technofixes, but defends them for providing a practical framework for hazard prevention. He praises radical structuralists for the “glocalized” (global + local) perspective they bring to the field, yet he states that they “can be criticised for rather stridently expressed views which, at worst, simply call for social revolution and attempt to deny the success of any devices—such as flood banks or forecasting and warning systems—in mitigating disaster”

(Smith 2001: 53). Essentially, Smith lops off the radical strain of each school—behaviouralism’s faith in progressive modernization, radical structuralism’s call for social revolution—so that he can move to the pragmatic middle of the political spectrum. As each option in this neat dichotomy is worse, some practical, “third way” compromise must be our only reasonable option, or so Smith explains:

From the standpoint of practical policy making, there is merit in achieving a compromise

between these two paradigms. Such a compromise has to be based on a recognition of

different causes and consequences of disaster between developed and developing

countries because there is little point in replacing a wholly environmental and

technocratic perspective with an equally polarised view based on political and economic

determinism. (Smith 2001: 53)

I argue that a “balanced,” synthetic compromise risks being as epistemologically and politically inadequate a solution to the problem of “humanitarian disasters with a natural trigger” as the dominant physicalist approach. Again, such an argument does not preclude the use of either the critical-radical structuralist or physicalist-behaviouralist paradigms. It is true that radical structuralists express the necessity of social revolution in changing natural disaster policy, but they need not take the extreme position of deep ecologists who reject the mitigating devices of modern civilization. Technology needs to be devised for detecting tsunamis (which it has) and policies need to be adopted for allocating this technology in an equitable manner (which it has not). Smith simply collapses the political distinction between fringe greens and orthodox reds in order to bolster the false dilemma between technocrats and revolutionaries that serves as the foundation for his call to compromise.

I reject a two-camp compromise like Smith’s because it erases the primary reason to argue for a division in the field of NDS in the first place: critical and physicalist camps approach disasters from different analytic starting points. Critical theorists, or in Smith’s parlance “radical structuralists,” do not argue that practical concerns like the calculation of hazard and risk mitigation costs is a meaningless activity. What theorists argue is that we should examine the precepts of the historical socioeconomic system that these calculations occur within before conducting our cost-benefit analyses. The dominant paradigm of the physicalist-behaviouralist approach to natural disasters puts science in action—to paraphrase Bruno Latour—within the confines of a social order without first questioning the underlying assumptions of this order (a

primary setback with “inductive-heavy” research in general).12 Disaster remains a “specifically intractable problem for scientific rationalism and technocracy,” according to Hewitt, because “it does not reflect upon the extent to which the institutions it serves—the societies that have made such technocratic authority possible—could be part of the problem” (Hewitt 1983: 14). By problematizing these institutions before assuming the validity of their epistemological claims or their political authority, critical theorists begin their analyses at a point prior to the entrenched

“scientific rationalism and technocracy” of the physicalist approach. Although behaviouralists may take a long view of disaster—say, by cataloguing hazards through return periods, e.g. “1-in-

100 year events”—their analyses ignore the political and economic forces always already at work within the capitalist world-system that create the conditions in which a 1-in-100 year hazard becomes an actual disaster (or, at least, a disaster of greater magnitude).

Basing a compromise between the behaviouralist and radical structuralist paradigms on recognizing the “different causes and consequences of disaster between developed and developing countries” is also epistemologically suspect. Different physical causes of disaster in developed as opposed to developing countries exist as do dissimilarities in the consequences of natural disasters based on a country’s degree of modernization, local cultural mores, topography, etc.; however, the causes and consequences of disaster largely derive from the political economic relationship between MDCs and LDCs, a “view” Smith disparages by calling it polarizing, thus

12 Alexander connects the schism between the physicalist and critical approaches to the divergent emphasis that each places on the role of inductive and deductive logic. The alternative to the heavily inductive methods of the physicalist approach—“so much more challenging and difficult—is to build a deductive model in which the links and processes in disaster are not passively observed, but are actively specified a priori.” Writes Alexander: In reality the process is not so simple, as deduction relies on a certain amount of induction in order to form its premises, and the process of identifying regularities by inductive reasoning often leads to unexpected insights of a more deductive nature, hence the Popper and Hempel loops that formalize ways of integrating the two tendencies. But the points of departure of induction and deduction are radically different, if not diametrically opposed. (Alexander 2000: 40) 26

foreclosing any dialectical understanding of how, for instance, the financial institutions and energy policies of MDCs affect LDCs resiliency to natural disasters.13 Even if particular causes and consequences empirically exist, treating the problem of natural disasters in “developed” countries as distinct from the problem of natural disasters in “developing” countries obfuscates the political economic interconnections of wealthy and poor countries within the same world- system. Symptomatic here is Smith’s use of the euphemistic designations “MDC” and “LDC.”

Although they replace their likewise problematic parent terms, “First world” and “Third world”—whose numeric rankings reify national and global inequalities—these acronyms indicate that some countries have simply not completed the modernization process yet, as if more developed countries had not modernized at the expense of the less developed. By calling for a compromise, the real polarizing forces of the modern world-economy of capitalism are erroneously displaced onto the radical structuralist paradigm.

We should therefore be highly skeptical of a synthetic overcoming of the divide that separates NDS into two camps because balanced views and calls for compromise fail to acknowledge that this supposedly epistemological division reflects a real political schism. As

Maureen Fordham incisively notes, “It is [the] fundamental challenge to the status quo that most particularly splits the research field” (Fordham 2003: 60). Because compromises do not fundamentally challenge the status quo, it is legitimate to ask if Smith dresses the wolf of behaviouralism in the sheep’s clothing of a synthetic approach. Smith’s creation of an antinomy

13 The term “resilience” is a prime example of the social scientific jargon that has developed to validate NDS as a legitimate academic discipline. Smith defines “resilience [as] a measure of the capacity to absorb and recover from the impact of a hazardous event” (Smith 2004: 14). Another example of the academic creation of a concept out of a word’s standard meaning is “vulnerability”: “the characteristics of a person or group and their situation that influence their capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impact of a natural hazard (an extreme natural event or process)” (Wisner et al. 2004: 11). My quibble with these pseudo-scientific concepts is that they conceal as much as they reveal about the political economics of disaster. 27

between two positions is characteristic of ahistorical social scientific methods (“A is incorrect, B is incorrect, but somewhere in between A and B lies the answer”), but especially baleful is the assumption of a policymaker’s perspective to escape the analytic cul-de-sac of this arrested dialectic. “For the policy-maker there is everything to be gained from compromise,” Smith writes. “Environmental hazards and disasters are two sides of the same coin” (Smith 2004: 7).

This statement not only informs us of Smith’s intended audience, it begs the question of what exactly a policymaker gains from compromise. Do they not obtain the ability to enact policies that do not disturb the status quo, and therefore remain in the physicalist paradigm of NDS?

Alexander rightfully reminds us that although from the physicalist perspective we possess advanced scientific knowledge of “the spatial distribution and temporal pattern of hazards,” it is easy to forget that decisions about natural disasters “are made on the basis of priorities and preoccupations that may have relatively little to do with objective analysis” (Alexander 2000:

36). Developing new tsunami detection and warning systems technology is a laudable feat, but the belatedness of this technology to reach people living along the costs of the Indian Ocean presents a significant social problem that is shamefully beyond the purview of the strictly physicalist camp and the priorities and preoccupations of those who cut this camp’s paychecks.

Ben Wisner et al. admit that “there is often a reluctance to deal with [social and economic] factors because it is politically expedient (i.e. less difficult for those in power) to address technical factors that deal with natural disasters” (Wisner et al. 2004: 7). Ascribing this reluctance to political expediency understates the case. The physicalist approach remains dominant in NDS not because it is epistemologically superior to or easier to work with than the rival radical structuralist paradigm; nor does it remain hegemonic due to the lack of “a moral imperative that can mobilize political will” to oppose it (although there is truth in this reason)

(Wisner 2003: 51). More to the point, it is in the interests of those in power to adopt what

Charles Mills called an “epistemology of ignorance” with regards to knowledge of natural disasters that subverts the ruling ideas of the current socioeconomic order. Those in power benefit politically and economically from limiting knowledge of natural disasters to technical instead of political factors. What would motivate a politician to support, or someone hired by a politician to conduct, research on natural disasters that threatens to challenge their privileged position in the status quo? Smith’s solution of a pragmatic synthesis to the contemporary problem of natural disasters should be met with skepticism precisely because of its appeal to policymakers and not to the people in general.

In order to avoid the naïve belief that some happy synthesis exists between the physicalist-behaviouralist and critical-radical structuralist camps—a likely pernicious lure mirrored in the academic pitch of multi-, inter-, transdisciplinarity—we must reframe the problem of natural disasters.14 Disasters are not unique events generated by natural phenomena, but, as Pelling writes, “momentary manifestations of ongoing environmental and social interaction, with class inequality being a key consideration” (Pelling 2001: 179). He adds,

“underlying states of human marginalization are conceived as the principal cause of disaster”

(Pelling 2001: 179).

Because natural disasters are neither strictly natural nor human-oriented but socionatural, and because they are historical phenomena, we require a dialectical understanding of them. The antinomy between the physicalist and critical stances should be overcome not by their synthesis,

14 Anthony Oliver-Smith and Susanna M. Hoffman discuss the importance of “framing” calamity. They write, “Who gets to declare disaster? on what terms? for whom? to what ends?—these are matters that provoke social discourse and often dissension…particularly pertinent in this modern age is not only how a disaster frame arises, but who dominates the construction of the frame and, consequently, takes command of persuasion” (Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 2006: 9). On the dominant paradigm in NDS, Ted Steinberg bluntly inquires, “Whose interests has this aseptic, natural understanding of calamity served?” (Steinberg 2006: xxi). 29

which implies an ahistorical and therefore untenable Archimedean vantage point, but by an historical social scientific approach. Pelling is absolutely correct to locate disasters in the ongoing interaction between the environment and society, but his framing of the social portion of the problem is not dialectical enough, so to speak; it fails to express the logical connection between its constituent parts. I would argue that “underlying states of human marginalization are conceived as the principle cause of disaster” precisely because of class inequality. Class struggle is not a key consideration, as Pelling puts it; it is the key consideration. Disasters make manifest the latent class struggle that overdetermines existent states of human marginalization. Slavoj

Žižek, a philosopher and psychoanalyst, explains the Marxist position on the special status of class struggle in relation to other social antagonisms:

The wager of Marxism is that there is one antagonism (“class struggle”) which

overdetermines all others and is, as such, the “concrete universal” of the entire field. The

term “overdetermines” is used here in its precise Althusserian sense: it does not mean that

class struggle is the ultimate referent and horizon of meaning of all other struggles; it

means that class struggle is the structuring principle which allows us to account for the

very “inconsistent” plurality of ways in which other antagonisms can be articulated into

“chains of equivalences.” (Žižek 2006a: 361)

Notice how Žižek defines class struggle negatively; it is that which accounts for the inconsistency in attempts to equate other social antagonisms. Gender and race, for example, can be linked to progressive struggles for emancipation, but as third wave feminists argue and David

R. Roediger’s work points out, these antagonistic struggles are often the site of reactionary politics: feminism “can function as an ideological tool used by the upper middle classes to assert their superiority over the ‘patriarchal and intolerant’ lower classes” (Žižek 2006a: 362); the

history of the American working-class movement is mired in racism and sexism, etc.15 Class struggle allows us to account for the inconsistency of political positions that are simultaneously progressive and regressive.

Although “class struggle does not represent the ultimate referent or horizon of meaning of all other struggles,” there exists only one way to consistently chain together the various social antagonisms exposed by a natural disaster, and that is to show how class struggle, as a universal structuring principle, “traverses,” “cuts across,” or “splits from within” the particular antagonisms of race, ethnicity, sex, age, health, etc.16 To draw from a pertinent example:

Hurricane Katrina clearly revealed how racial antagonism, because it is overdetermined by class struggle, persists in the U.S. despite the abolition of slavery nearly 150 years ago and the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.17 Although this legislation declared racism illegal— economically and socio-politically—racial antagonism, as we have known it throughout

American history, remains a reality as class struggle continues. (This is why a film like the 2006 academy-award winning Crash is purely ideological: it represents a “class-free” racial

15 For critiques of the inconsistency to equate sexual and class antagonisms, see materialist feminist works like Brenner, Johanna (2000) Women and the Politics of Class. New York: Monthly Review Press; and Hennessy, Rosemary (2000) Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism. New York: Routledge. For the definitive critique of the inconsistency to address racial and class antagonisms in an American context, see Roediger, David R. (1999) The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Revised Edition. New York: Verso. 16 In The Political Unconscious, Frederic Jameson conceives Marxism “as something like an ultimate semantic precondition for the intelligibility of literary and cultural texts…that ‘untranscendable horizon’ that subsumes such apparently antagonistic or incommensurable critical operations, assigning them an undoubted sectoral validity within itself, and thus at once canceling and preserving them” (Jameson 1981: 75, 10). The wording of Jameson’s conception may seem to contradict Žižek’s rejection of class struggle as an ultimate horizon of meaning. Despite appearances, Jameson’s and Žižek’s theoretical positions are quite similar, each having derived from the same Althusserian (or, more accurately, “post-Althusserian”) tradition of Marxist theory. For both, class struggle is a structuring principle or matrix that accounts for the multiplicity of conflicting political interpretations. I argue for the deep affinity between these two thinkers in chapter three. 17 The Social Science Research Council collected several articles that demonstrate the intertwined racial and class elements of Katrina in a research hub titled “Understanding Katrina: Perspectives from the Social Sciences: http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/. This hub also serves as a nice introduction to the disparate approaches in NDS. 31

antagonism. The film appears to address race and class, but since it fails to represent their dialectical relationship in terms of class struggle, it resorts to the ideological thesis that racism and classism are equivalent forms of antagonism—race and class, the film perniciously argues, are simply matters of “subjective” prejudice!).18

The Marxist understanding of class struggle allows us to see how the exemplary victim of the so-called natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina was ninety-one year-old Ethel Freeman, who—in the absence of disaster relief and medical aid—died some thirty hours after waiting for a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) bus to arrive at the New Orleans

Convention Center. Freeman’s corpse—which her son was forced to eventually abandon— remained seated in a wheelchair outside of the convention center for two days. Freeman, a poor, elderly, and disabled black woman, did not die because of any one of her particular “states of human marginalization.” A singular struggle overdetermined each of these marginalized states that when considered in toto turned Freeman into the wretched of the U.S. If, as Alexander argues, “catastrophe opens a window upon the inner workings of society,” then the only way for the various antagonisms Freeman represents to be viewed in a consistent chain of equivalence is through the “window” of class struggle (Alexander 2000: v). She is truly the symptomatic point of the double catastrophe of Katrina and capitalism.19

18 A criticism of Wallerstein’s “otherwise admirable work” by Žižek offers an enlightening example of dialectical thinking. Žižek identifies a suspended or arrested dialectic in Wallerstein’s claim that the October Revolution and subsequent Soviet regime proved to be nothing more than a species of the global capitalist system. “What is obfuscated in Wallerstein’s account,” Žižek writes, is “the properly dialectical tension between the Universal and the Particular” (Žižek 2002a: 334). In Wallerstein’s account, capitalism is a “neutral universal genus” that enframes all particularities, even adversarial ones. Although it is true that “Really Existing Socialism” became a species of capitalism, Žižek argues that the “Communist bloc” represented a competing universality, a serious challenge to capitalist hegemony which makes it irreducible to a capitalist taxonomy. “The only true species of capitalism is capitalism itself,” writes Žižek, “while other species, especially Socialism, were precisely failed attempts to break out of the capitalist frame—they are, as it were, species of capitalism by default” (Žižek 2002a: 334). 19 Freeman’s story comes from Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006). My reading of Freeman is not unrelated to Nancy Harstock’s feminist standpoint theory or its 32

If we generalize from this arguably American example of the momentary glimpse disaster provides of class struggle and expand our purview to the international stage of globalization, we discover the substantial connection of NDS to world-systems analysis. The fact that the former has come to share the methodological and epistemological assumptions of the latter is significant, and not merely coincidental. Their common formal/philosophical approach to historical reality derives from the substantial affinity between the problems that each investigates. Bluntly stated, the problem of natural disasters is the problem of the world- economy of capitalism. This does not mean that natural disasters represent the sole or primary issue of capitalism or that capitalism directly generates or causes natural disasters. Rather, the position being developed here maintains that within the third historical era that Wallerstein distinguishes, the post-1500 AD world-economy of capitalism, the problems posed by natural disasters are always already problems endemic to the existent and evolving capitalist system.

Natural hazards, calamities, and catastrophes are systemic crises. Any large-scale, long- term solution to them will be forced to confront the systemic problem of the capitalist system: class struggle and the inequities it propagates. Likewise, in order to make sense of the “disaster” of a natural disaster, its “origin”—as opposed to its natural “trigger”—will need to be traced to the machinations of the capitalist world-economy. Natural disasters cannot be studied adequately without reference to this world-system. As Wisner states, “a full understanding of such disasters is impossible without taking political economy into account” (Wisner 2003: 45). Any theoretical approach to catastrophe not grounded in world-systems analysis will inevitably be marred by myopia.

theoretical progeny, intersectionality. I simply stress the role of the antagonism of class struggle in determining the “matrix of domination” (Patricia Hill Collins) of natural disaster victims. 33

The Marxist Paradigm in Natural Disaster Studies

The less originality I claim for the historical social scientific approach to studying and interpreting natural disasters the better. Previously, I listed its precedents; now I note its direct antecedent. The unequivocal Marxist tenor of my argument should come as no surprise to those familiar with the field. An overtly Marxist approach to natural disasters formed in the mid- seventies, and it survives today under the discreet appellation: “the political economic paradigm in natural hazards research.”20 Although this epithet enables a degree of classificatory flexibility, it also obfuscates the crucial issues that inform a Marxist approach to natural disasters. In many respects, Marxism has become a theory that dare not speak its name.

Several reasons explain why even natural disaster researchers sympathetic to Marxism are quick to qualify their references to it or to couch their observations in different terms, including the ever equivocal label “neo-Marxism,” not to mention Smith’s own phrase

“radical/structuralist school.” (How exactly is the latter not synonymous with “Marxism”?)21 The horrors of “really existing socialism” continue to mar the Marxist legacy as does the prevalent perception of communism’s failure in a world twenty years removed from the Iron Curtain. In addition to the historical reasons for Marxism’s notorious reputation, Marxist theory remains confused with a vulgar version of itself that was complicated long ago (by none other than Marx himself). For example, Smith’s claim that a radical structuralist position exchanges one

20 In particular, the work of Claude Meillassoux and the Marxist French school of economic anthropologists on the Sahel drought and subsequent famine influenced several disaster scholars, notably Phil O’Keefe, Ken Westgate, and Ben Wisner, who wrote the watershed essay, “Taking the Naturalness Out of Natural Disasters.” See also chapters 5, 13, and 14 in Hewitt (1983). 21 Despite his centrist leanings, Smith does not misrepresent the leftist position on natural disasters. The radical structural paradigm, he writes: originates in the belief that disasters in the LDCs arise more from the workings of the global economy, from the spread of capitalism and the marginalization of poor people than from the effects of geophysical events…it is a radical interpretation of disaster which envisages solutions based on the redistribution of wealth and power in society to provide access to resources rather than on the application of science and technology to control nature. (Smith 2001: 50-51) 34

determinism, the physical/environmental, for another, the political/economic, stages a false dilemma that creates a Marxist straw man to be burned at the stake. Marxism is not a unilinear or univocal deterministic philosophy. As I pointed out with regards to the concept of class struggle,

Marxism is a theory of socioeconomic overdetermination: “the determination of one structure by another and of the elements of a subordinate structure by the dominant, and therefore determinant structure” (Althusser and Balibar 1997: 188). Instead of connecting the dots of globalization’s complex causality—a difficult task indeed—scholars like Smith hastily conclude that radical change is a pipedream and call for compromise in its stead. My sense is that they believe Marxism to be an anti-intellectual position, or they assume others believe this, which produces the same result. Still other researchers regard Marxism’s focus on totality as hubristic, a profound irony if one considers the false sense of modesty micro-critiques and scholarly obsessions with particularities so often exude. The effect of the intellectual marketplace and academic faddism on the waning of Marxism’s reception should not be underestimated either.

All reservations and misconceptions aside, the theoretical benefits of adopting an overtly

Marxist paradigm are manifold. A historical social science can serve as a corrective to the nebulous nature of the current critical school of NDS by offering conceptual clarifications.

Pelling’s “humanitarian disasters with a natural trigger” has the benefit of denaturalizing natural disasters, but conversely, it risks naturalizing the world-economy of capitalism. “Humanitarian disasters” connotes that they are charity cases to be addressed by a philanthropic logic internal to the capitalist system.22 Pelling’s revision itself should be revised: natural disasters are more

22 Harvey claims that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) “are not inherently democratic institutions. They tend to be elitist, unaccountable (except to their donors), and by definition distant from those they seek to protect or help, no matter how well-meaning or progressive they may be” (Harvey 2005: 177). Tina Wallace explores the vicious circle between NGOs and the forces of global capitalism in her provocatively titled article, “NGO Dilemmas: Trojan Horses for Global Neoliberalism?”, which can be accessed at: http://www.ngopractice.org/docs/NGODILEMMAS(LPandCLeditJune12).pdf. 35

accurately named capitalist disasters with a natural trigger but a socioeconomic origin (just as earthquakes have been dubbed “classquakes”).23

Marxist theory can also elucidate problematic premises that inform critical school thought. The “human” component of natural disasters, expounded across the board in anthropological, sociological, and human ecological circles, is one such assumption that invites a surfeit of often contradictory interpretations. For example, the anthropological approach to “the subject of human existence from a holistic and evolutionary point of view” is rightfully championed in the context of NDS (Hoffman 2006: 304). However, this conception of human existence can also lead to abstract generalizations, ambivalent political stances, and teleological scientific explanations. Much the same can be said about the recently popularized notion of

“political ecology.” In short, interpreting natural disasters from the perspective of a political ecology of humans is, more often than not, different than interpreting them from the perspective of the political economy of class struggle. It is a fine thing to be fellow travelers who hail from a diversity of disciplines and use cross-disciplinary concepts, but when it comes to problems as dire as disasters, a front unified by the basic premises of Marxist theory is best suited for future research of natural disasters and, most importantly, for their future victims.

In addition to refining the concepts and premises of the amorphous critical school, a singular historical social scientific approach enables us to articulate the problem of natural disasters within a world historical context. In the introduction to his edited collection American

Disasters, Steven Biel avers that “catastrophic disturbances of routine actually tell us a great deal about the ‘normal’ workings of culture, society, and politics” (Biel 2001: 5). Marxism offers an important amendment to Biel’s otherwise astute observation. As the previous example of

23 Classquake: “A description by Guatemalan survivors of the 4 February 1976 earthquake disaster of why political and social processes long before the earthquake are more to blame for the disaster and their post- earthquake misery than the earthquake itself” (Kelman 2007: unpaginated). 36

Hurricane Katrina alluded to, natural disasters tell us a great deal about the normal workings of the capitalist world-economy which, in turn, tell us a great deal about the normal workings of culture, society, and politics. If the political economy is not taken into account first, cultural and sociopolitical conventions will only partially be understood.

Beyond defamiliarizing the capitalist quotidian, natural disasters register systemic modifications to this world-system. As momentary manifestations of ongoing struggles, natural disasters serve the hermeneutic function of symptoms: when analyzed they can reveal irrevocable changes in the machinations of capital. Informed by Marxist theory, NDS can track historical transformations in the ever-evolving capitalist world-economy that are apposite to the problem of natural disasters. In other words, analyzing capitalism allows us to historicize—to interpret within a world historical context—natural disasters, and vice versa (natural disasters indicate historical revolutions in the capitalist world-economy).

Critical studies of the dialectic between disasters and previous periods of our current world-system have been conducted. Alessa Johns’ edited volume Dreadful Visitations:

Confronting Natural Catastrophe in the Age of Enlightenment, examines the European response to and the colonial perspective of natural disasters in the historical context of eighteenth century market, or mercantile, capitalism. In The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of

Modern America, Kevin Rozario reads the development of America’s “culture of calamity” against the backdrop of the nineteenth and early twentieth century stage of monopoly, or imperialist, capitalism. (I return to Rozario’s work in chapter three.)

To comprehend the current world historical context of natural disasters, we need to trace the qualitative shift in political economy since WWII. World-systemic developments in the latter half of the twentieth century warrant yet another adjectival qualification of capitalism.

“Multinational,” “consumer,” “postindustrial,” “digital,” “communicative,” and “finance” are just a few of the most popular candidates vying for the distinction. The advantage of these terms is also their drawback. While each highlights a significant facet of contemporary capitalism, all fail to express the economy in its entirety. Such nominations also tend to exaggerate the extent of contemporary capitalism’s “break, rupture, and mutation” from its prior instantiation—Lenin’s

“highest stage” of imperialist capitalism—as if the emergence of postindustrial or consumer society somehow marks the end of capitalist exploitation as we have known it (Jameson 1991: xix).

Nothing, in fact, could be further from the case than the declaration that we have now entered an “Information Age” of (what Bill Gates calls) “friction-free capital.”24 Jameson argues that we are currently living in a “purer stage of capitalism than any of the moments that preceded it….the purest form of capital yet to have emerged, a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas” (Jameson 1991: 3, 36). Jameson follows Ernest Mandel in referring to the contemporary stage of the capitalist world-economy as “late capitalism.” This purer “late” stage of capitalism realizes a market truly global in scope thanks to the prodigious economic expansion made possible by the rise of new forms of transnational business. In addition to the discovery of new commodity markets by multinational corporations, features of late capitalism include:

the new international division of labor, a vertiginous new dynamic in international

banking and the stock exchanges (including the enormous Second and Third World debt),

new forms of media interrelationship (very much including transportation systems such

as containerization), computers and automation, the flight of production to advanced

Third World areas, along with all the more familiar social consequences, including the

24 See Gates, Bill (1996) The Road Ahead. New York: Penguin. 38

crisis of traditional labor, the emergence of yuppies, and gentrification on a now-global

scale. (Jameson 1991: xix)

While designations like “multinational capitalism” or even “globalization” convey one or two of the above aspects, sublating these seemingly disparate phenomena under the historical marker

“late” captures a sense of their complicated interrelationships. “Late” simultaneously signifies the continuity of the capitalist dynamic since its inception (or, by its very notion), and the emergence of the most complete materialization of the capitalist world-economy to date. To put it in Hegelian terms, “late capitalism” represents an Aufhebung of capitalism’s earlier phases, at once overcoming the historical idiosyncrasies of its residual forms while preserving their essential mode of production. (By the very structure of dialectical thought, Wallerstein’s concept

“capitalist world-economy” indicates this split between the universality of the logic of capitalism and its “imperfect” particular/historical manifestations.)

As an indefinite adjective, “late” allows a degree of latitude in dating when the tectonic plates of capital shifted forever. We need not feign the precision of natural scientists and pinpoint the exact date and time of the late capitalist event horizon. There is no convenient event like a post-impressionist art show or the Pruitt-Igoe implosion to announce the advent of the third stage in capital’s evolution. The qualifier “late” boasts the distinct ability to be generally applicable to all things capitalist post-WWII (the Bretton Woods era), while specifically referring to those political economic forces that “somehow crystallized in the great shock of the crises of 1973 (the oil crisis, the end of the international gold standard, for all intents and purposes the end of the great wave of ‘wars of national liberation’ and the beginning of the end of traditional communism)…” (Jameson 1991: xx-xxi). “Late” refers to the moment when capital stepped foot across the Rubicon and the tides of change that were already at work to bring this moment to its

crisis. To paraphrase Virginia Woolf, on or about 1973 the character of the capitalist world- economy changed.

Carbon dating late capitalism is less important than apprehending the ramifications of its arrival. The central point to grasp is that the infrastructure of late capitalism and its concomitant superstructure—what Jameson defines as the cultural dominant of “postmodernism”—became the hegemonic norm, the determinate structure of the contemporary world-system.25 Since the early seventies, what Antonio Gramsci would call the “historical bloc” of postmodern late capitalism, having nestled, settled, and established connections everywhere, has remade the entire world in its own image (or, at least its practitioners have attempted to do so).26

To discern this image-become-reality and its relevance to natural disasters, NDS should enlist the aid of contemporary thinkers on the left who have updated Marx’s critique of political economy to elucidate the maneuvers specific to late capitalism (theorists who practice what

Jameson aptly calls Spätmarxismus—“late Marxism”). The work of critical geographer David

Harvey is especially germane to NDS because it deconstructs the blueprint for late capitalism: the political economic theory of neoliberalism. If the current problems posed by natural disasters are problems always already endemic to late capitalism, then neoliberalism is the current

25 In the following quote, Jameson emphasizes that the strength of “late” is not its specificity as much as its ability to mark a broad historical shift in the capitalist world-economy: What “late” generally conveys is…the sense that something has changed, that things are different, that we have gone through a transformation of the life world which is somehow decisive but incomparable with the older convulsions of modernization and industrialization, less perceptible and dramatic, somehow, but more permanent precisely because more thoroughgoing and all- pervasive. (Jameson 1991: xxi) 26 “Hegemony” and “historical bloc” are concepts that Gramsci explicated for Marxist theory. Hegemony refers to an economically dominant mode of production and its attendant ruling class, but for Gramsci it also signifies the dynamic class alliances that form in the sociopolitical sphere of this dominant mode of production. Of the second term, Gramsci writes, “structures and superstructures form a ‘historical bloc.’ That is to say the complex, contradictory and discordant ensemble of the superstructures is the reflection of the ensemble of the social relations of production” (Gramsci 2000: 192-193). We might say that a historical bloc is a particular instantiation of hegemony, e.g. the historical bloc of neoliberalism is one form of capitalist hegemony. 40

theoretical and political adversary of the singular historical social science of NDS. If present-day natural disasters are essentially late capitalist disasters, neoliberal policies are responsible for perpetuating, exacerbating, and failing to ameliorate their ravages. To revitalize the Marxist paradigm of natural disasters involves not only recovering Marxism as a corrective to the critical school of NDS, but reworking its theories to confront these policies. Harvey’s analysis of neoliberalism is a good place to start.

In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Harvey defines the current hegemonic theory in international political economy as follows:

Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that

proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual

entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by

strong property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and

preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices. (Harvey 2005: 2)

Neoliberalism envisions this institutional framework to be all-encompassing. “The market,”

Harvey writes, “is presumed to work as an appropriate guide—an ethic—for all human action”

(Harvey 2005: 165). By constructing an institutional framework based on privatization, commodification, and “the financialization of everything,” neoliberalism advances a political economic agenda of unfettered capitalism (Harvey 2005: 33). It seeks to return capital to a purer, more fundamental form. Put simply, neoliberalism is the ideology of late capitalism. From the perspective of the longue durée we live during the third of Wallerstein’s historical eras, but on a timeline more detailed, we go about our business in an age dominated by the neoliberal ideology and institutional framework of late capitalism.

What at first glance appears to be the triumph of neoliberalism may, upon closer examination, be its utter failure. This paradox can be explained by the distinction Harvey draws between neoliberal theory and what we might call “really existing neoliberalism.” As an ubiquitous market “ethic,” neoliberalism “holds that the social good will be maximized by maximizing the reach and frequency of market transactions, and it seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market” (Harvey 2005: 3). Neoliberal theory believes, in other words, that what is good for the market is good for the people. However, the proliferation of neoliberal practices around the globe has not resulted in the liberation of “individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills” or the maximization of the social good. On the former front, a business-friendly faction criticizes neoliberalism for debilitating competition. Increasing state interventions that expand oligopolistic, monopoly, and transnational power have betrayed the classical ideal of laissez-faire capitalism that neoliberalism sought to reclaim. Instead of distilled capitalism freed from statist impurities, neoliberalism creates “a tension between sustaining capitalism, on the one hand, and the restoration/reconstitution of ruling class power on the other”

(Harvey 2005:152). Except for an extreme minority of elites, “the actual pragmatics of neoliberalization” do arguably more to bridle than to unfurl the forces of the free market (Harvey

2005: 21).

The irony of this pro-capitalist criticism noted, Harvey proceeds to what he sees as the central contradiction between neoliberalism in theory and neoliberalism in practice: the restoration/reconstitution of ruling class power and wealth at the expense of the social good. “At the heart of the problem,” Harvey writes: “lies a burgeoning disparity between the declared aims of neoliberalism—the well-being of all—and its actual consequences—the restoration of class power…the evidence strongly suggests that the neoliberal turn is in some way and to some

degree associated with the restoration or reconstruction of the power of economic elites (Harvey

2005: 79, 19). Instead of generating wealth to promote the well-being of all, neoliberal capitalism redistributes riches at the expense of most in a process Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession.” Capitalists still “generate” wealth in the traditional manner of accumulating the built-in surplus value of wage labor, but really existing neoliberalists augment their “unearned income” by privatizing or discontinuing altogether social services once provided by the welfare state; privatizing and commodifying the commons and other forms of public property; indebting

LDCs—in a pattern that primarily follows a core-periphery or “North-South” lender-borrower

“agreement”—and individual consumers from MDCs through a financial credit system; cutting taxes on rich citizens and providing tax abatements for corporations; and by aiding and abetting infamously authoritarian governments that cooperate with the dictates of late capitalism. When these forms of theft prove insufficiently profitable, they may resort to older, more directly imperial means like military invasions. Through these pernicious practices, among many others, a minority of elites maintains the political and economic power it wields over the majority of today’s world population.

Concentrated wealth and power has ensconced the few with predictable consequences for the rest. Pelling notes that “the average number of natural disasters reported world-wide per annum has doubled every decade since the 1960s” (Pelling 2003: 3). Drawing from data compiled by the Red Cross, Peter Walker et al. report that the number of people affected by natural disasters has risen by 59% over the past two decades, with most of the deaths predictably occurring in LDCs (1,052 deaths per disaster compared to 23 in MDCs) (Walker et al. 2005:

249). In addition, the average cost of worldwide economic damages resulting from natural

disasters has doubled since 1975 from fifty to one hundred billion (2006 US) dollars annually.27

Perhaps global warming has escalated turbulent weather and/or bureaucrats have become more savvy bookkeepers, but it is undeniable that the exponential growth in natural disasters correlates with the rise of neoliberalism and the application of the neoliberal ethic to natural disaster management over the course of this time period. The statistical evidence suggests that the

“perverse” growth model of neoliberalism—in particular, its policies to accumulate wealth by dispossession and to externalize liabilities through a newfangled “personal responsibility system”—increases everyone’s vulnerability to natural disasters, not just the exploding global population of slum-dwellers.28 In a nutshell, the political economic forces of globalization have created a brave new world of geopolitical risk for all, not liberty and justice.

That the rise in occurrences and costs of natural disasters accompanies a rise in the dispossession of wealth for the majority of the world’s population—including the “middle classes” of MDCs—makes sense. When people are strapped for even life’s necessities, they will lack the resources to establish and maintain the basic safety net of environmental security. When the services of natural hazard prevention and disaster mitigation are commodified, only those wealthy enough to afford these services will have access to the freedoms they provide. When the collective burden of the state to provide the basic safety net of environmental security is

27 Statistics for natural disasters are difficult to compute. The United Nation’s International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UN/ISDR) presents disaster statistics that can be accessed at http://www.unisdr.org/disaster-statistics/introduction.htm. The increase in the frequency, magnitude, and cost of natural disasters is alarming; however, we gain some perspective on these numbers when we compare natural disaster fatalities with other disaster-related deaths. 434.1 million people died from disasters during the UN’s International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (1990-1999). While political violence accounted for 62.4% (270.7 million) of the victims and slow-onset disasters like famines and droughts caused another 16.1% (70 million), only 2.3% (10.7 million) of fatalities were related to rapid-onset disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes (Wisner et al. 2004: 4). 28 Wisner uses the term “perverse” to describe “growth that does not increase general welfare in the long run” (Wisner 2003: 48). For a detailed exploration of the mass phenomenon of slum-dwelling, see Mike Davis (2006) Planet of Slums. New York, Verso. 44

delegated to private corporations in no-bid cost-plus contracts, the potential to become a natural disaster victim increases for all of us, minus perhaps those residents of what journalist Robert

Frank calls “Richistan.”

Applied Marxism in NDS: Naomi Klein’s Analysis of “Disaster Capitalism”

Harvey mentions one form of accumulation by dispossession, the manipulation of crises, that particularly influences how “differences in power and material interest [shape] the spatial and social distribution of risk” (Wisner 2003: 44). That capitalism manipulates crises is not news. Driven by the constant need to revolutionize the mode of production—its instruments and relations alike—the capitalist world-economy has been characterized by the “uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation” throughout its five hundred year history (Marx and Engels 1998: 54). With the capitalist system, “all that is solid melts into air”; everything is either booming into or busting out of existence. Hence, the observation first made by economist Werner Sombart and popularized by Joseph Schumpeter that capitalism’s incessant self-reinventions produce a “perennial gale of creative destruction.”

“Perennial gale” suggests—as a natural disaster metaphor applied to the normal functioning of an economy constructed by humans—that the invisible hand of capital manipulates crises automatically, as if driven by a law of nature. Indeed, an inherent volatility to destroy in order to reinvent the mode of production is written into capitalism’s DNA. It is standard for crises to punctuate business cycles; capitalism could, in fact, not exist any other way. Consequently, the capitalist world-economy will never reach a stage in its development where it achieves a stable, harmonious, smoothly-operating social order. There is no proverbial eye of its perennial gales.29

29 The figurative use of natural disasters is not restricted to the Right. A pertinent and recent example from the Left can be found on the paperback cover of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, which 45

Nevertheless, capitalism’s stormy periods have been followed more or less by stretches where markets achieve some degree of stability. These perennial plateaus, to mix metaphors, have been the norm even during the late stage of capitalism (the post-Cold War prosperity of the

Nineties, for example). Journalist Naomi Klein points out that “for decades, the conventional wisdom was that generalized mayhem was a drain on the global economy. Individual shocks and crises could be harnessed as leverage to force open new markets, of course, but after the initial shock had done its work, relative peace and stability were required for sustained economic

contains an aerial shot of a hurricane taken from space. W.J.T. Mitchell questions the appropriateness of this image: Why should a book that insists on a resolutely political, economic, and social construction of world order, the “juridical” formation of state, corporate, and NGO agents that constitute what they call “Empire” with a capital E, have a meteorological event like a hurricane as the totalizing emblem of its message?...It is as if Hardt and Negri were led, almost unconsciously to the limiting breakdown of their world-picture, a turbulent form of order and disorder…. (Mitchell 57: 2007) The answer to Mitchell’s question, which he fails to provide, lies with Hardt and Negri’s repetition of (early) Marx’s mistaken belief in the teleology of dialectical history: the belief that capitalism will dig its own grave, that the inherent antagonisms in its mode of production ineluctably create the conditions for the communist revolution. “Empire is born and shows itself as crisis,” and it will inevitably implode under the weight of its internal contradictions as the multitude finally comes to rule itself in “absolute democracy” (Hardt and Negri 20: 2000). Since highly organized corporate capitalism is already a kind of “socialism within capitalism,” all the multitude awaits is for Empire’s crown to blow off its head. Hence, the image of the hurricane does not simply represent Empire’s violent world order—the mad dance of capitalism’s self-propelling spiral of productivity ruthlessly destroying any obstacle in its path—but the inexorability of what is left in its wake. For Hardt and Negri, the disorder of Hurricane Empire “naturally” births the new order of “absolute democracy.” That the Right and Left deploy similar natural disaster metaphors is not coincidental. On the contrary, their shared imagery betrays a common fantasy. Žižek writes: the critics of Communism were in a way right when they claimed that the Marxian Communism is an impossible fantasy—what they did not perceive is that the Marxian Communism, this notion of a society of pure unleashed productivity outside the frame of Capital, was a fantasy inherent to capitalism itself, the capitalist inherent transgression at its purest, a strictly ideological fantasy of maintaining the thrust to productivity generated by capitalism, while getting rid of the “obstacles” and antagonisms that were—as the sad experience of the “really existing capitalism” demonstrates—the only possible framework of the effective material existence of a society of permanent self-enhancing productivity. Hurricane Empire is only the latest perennial gale of creative destruction in the capitalist world-economy. To believe in a storm-free horizon is a fantasy, the utopian fantasy that is both the Right’s frictionless capitalism and the Left’s absolute democracy of the multitude. It is symptomatic of the contemporary Left’s disorientation that the only way it can imagine an end to the antagonism of class struggle is via reference to some large uncontrollable, even teleological, natural process. Indeed today, as Jameson, Žižek, and others have observed, it seems easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. 46

growth” (Klein 2007: 423). Yet, Klein’s recent work, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster

Capitalism, tracks changes in the dynamic of the capitalist world-system that suggest the wisdom of relative peace and stability is falling by the wayside. More accurately, it is being forcibly removed by its opposite: the shock doctrine of disaster capitalism.

In The Shock Doctrine, Klein seeks to make visible the hand that intentionally manipulates crises to maximize profits. At the same time, she disregards conspiracy theories. She does not believe, for example, that the U.S. government imploded the World Trade Center towers to encourage war profiteering exploits or that they blasted the levees to gentrify and

“Disneyfy” New Orleans. Rather, she uncovers something more abstract than direct manipulations of the market but no less dangerous and unsettling: an escalation in the rapidity and intensity of the creative destruction cycle of late capitalism.30

Klein’s central thesis is that manipulating crises has become the modus operandi of late capitalism, in both revolutionizing the mode of production and disseminating its neoliberal ideology. In late capitalism—perhaps it will prove more historically accurate to say “late-late capitalism”—the creative destruction that once reignited the flames of capital has exploded into an uncontrollable firestorm of crisis opportunism. Klein believes that the exception now become the norm merits a name of its own: “disaster capitalism,” which she defines as “orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities” (Klein 2007a: 6). On one hand, climatic and political storms allow states of exception to be declared under which neoliberal policies can be

30 Klein’s position is close to Žižek’s: there is no need to believe in conspiracy theories because the “invisible hand” of capitalism already is itself the grand conspiracy. Žižek writes, “there is no need for a secret ‘organization-within-an-organization’: the ‘conspiracy’ is already in the ‘visible’ organization as such, in the capitalist system, in the way the political space and state apparatuses work” (Žižek 2002a: 171). More recently, Žižek has defended a position that is closer to Klein’s, that manipulations of the market have become more overt: “in today’s global capitalism, we are all too often dealing with actual ‘conspiracies’” (Žižek 2006a: 375). 47

established. On the other hand, these same storms have themselves become a booming new commodity market, a disaster-capitalism complex that at once extends and supersedes the military-industrial complex President Eisenhower diagnosed in his 1961 farewell address.

Before delving into the disaster-capitalism complex, a brief explanation of the relationship between disaster capitalism and neoliberalization is in order. Klein’s study revolves around a statement made by Milton Friedman, an economist synonymous with the Chicago

School, itself synonymous with the teachings of economists in the late forties and fifties like

Friedrich Hayek. Contrary to Keynesianism, which argued for the state to actively regulate a mixed economy, Hayek, Friedman, and the Chicago School of economics professed the interdependence of classical liberalism and free-market capitalism. The quote that Klein centers on comes from Friedman’s manifesto, befittingly titled Capitalism and Freedom, where he writes, “only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on ideas that are lying around” (Friedman 1962: ix). This politically ambivalent statement comes into focus when we consider the ideas that Friedman intends to be lying around: the theory of neoliberalism, nothing short of a template for the

“capitalist Reformation: a return to uncontaminated capitalism” (Klein 2007a: 53).

Like Harvey, Klein views neoliberalism as a theory of political economic practices that seek to restore class power through deregulation, privatization, and cutbacks to social spending, a free-market trinity bent on redistributing wealth as much as generating it. However, she amends

Harvey’s explanation that a “culture of consent” helped entrench neoliberal ideology. Because neoliberal policies fail so miserably to bring about general prosperity, Klein claims that “the fundamentalist form of capitalism has always needed disasters to advance” (Klein 2007a: 9).

“Natural” and “manmade” disasters were harnessed to institute neoliberal ideas that the

masses—from Chilé to China to the post-Communist bloc countries—otherwise felt were best left lying around. In the primary conceit of her book, she draws an analogy between psychological and economic shock therapy. Instead of the psychic driving Ewen Cameron deployed to “depattern” minds which he could then reprogram, Friedman and his followers

“clean-slated” countries so they could write their armchair economic theories into reality.

Routine doses of climatic and political crises were prescribed to quell resistance to neoliberalization.31

Klein also takes Harvey’s analysis one step further by blaming the actual pragmatics of neoliberalization—the redistribution of wealth and restoration of class power—on corporatism,

“a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining force to wage all-out war on the third power sector—the workers—thereby drastically increasing the alliance’s share of the national wealth” (Klein 2007a: 86). She equates the history of the contemporary free market with the rise of corporatism. By raising the specter of corporatism, she implies that it took a vast collusion between Big Government and Big Business to implement neoliberal policies at labor’s expense. In the face of an ever-widening gap between “the dazzling rich and the disposable poor,” only an erasure of the boundaries between Big Government and

31 The forces of creative destruction need not be climatic or political. As Klein writes, “the kind of crisis Friedman had in mind was not military but economic” (Klein 2007a: 140). Her explanation details how the manipulation of economic crises circumvents the need to construct Harvey’s “culture of consent”: What [Friedman] understood was that in normal circumstances, economic decisions are made based on the push and pull of competing interests—workers want jobs and raises, owners want low taxes and relaxed regulation, and politicians have to strike a balance between these competing forces. However, if an economic crisis hits and is severe enough—a currency meltdown, a market crash, a major recession—it blows everything else out of the water, and leaders are liberated to do whatever is necessary (or said to be necessary) in the name of responding to a national emergency. Crises are, in a way, democracy-free zones—gaps in politics as usual when the need for consent and consensus do not seem to apply. (Klein 2007a: 140) Terrorist “shocks” work in very much the same way as Friedman’s economic crises. 49

Big Business could successfully transfer public wealth to private hands (Klein 2007a: 15). And only corporatism could create a disaster-capitalism complex capable of accelerating this transfer.

In general, disaster capitalism manipulates crises to spread neoliberalism, but the disaster-capitalism complex specifically manipulates crises to turn a profit. Far beyond the creative destruction of the past, today’s crisis opportunism entwines superprofits with megadisasters to the point where “all conflict- and disaster-related functions (waging war, securing borders, spying on citizens, rebuilding cities, treating traumatized soldiers) can be performed by corporations at a profit” (Klein 2007b: 50). Traditionally, such conflict- and disaster-related functions were performed by the state in the interest of national security and the welfare of its citizens. The interests of unadulterated capitalism see these core functions of the state differently. Corporatists view them as market opportunities to be privatized via the disaster- capitalism complex.

A causal connection exists between neoliberalism’s parasitic use of disaster and the creation of the disaster capitalism-complex. The neoliberal policies made possible by the political manipulation of crises creates a world that is less stable, peaceful, and safe—in short, a world perfect for the economic manipulation of crises which generate “huge profits for the high- tech-homeland-security sector, for heavy construction, for private health-care companies, for the oil and gas sectors—and, of course, for defense contractors,” i.e. all of the pieces of the disaster- capitalism complex (Klein 2007b: 56). It is not surprising that disaster capitalism, although it has accompanied neoliberalism for over three decades, burgeoned into a full-scale complex post-

9/11. An endless global War on Terror enabled the creation of “a full-fledged new economy in homeland security, privatized war and disaster reconstruction tasked with nothing less than building and running a privatized security state, both at home and abroad” (Klein 2007b: 299).

Under the auspice of fighting terrorism, the disaster-capitalism complex insidiously developed into a fully articulated state-within-a-state, a corporate shadow-state, that carries out the normal functions of a nation-state but at a heftier price.

While the disaster-capitalism complex is not unprecedented—the fear of the military- industrial complex was always that wars would be waged for strictly monetary reasons—its proliferation raises the obscene, Orwellian, but nonetheless real possibility of a self-reinforcing feedback loop of disaster creation and disaster reconstruction.32 Neoliberalism already provides a ready-made model for a vicious circle of self-replication:

The more the global economy followed [Friedman’s] prescriptions, with floating interest

rates, deregulated prices and export-oriented economies, the more crisis-prone the system

became, producing more and more of precisely the type of meltdowns he had identified

as the only circumstances under which governments would take more of his radical

advice. (Klein 2007a: 160)

What if, in our postmodern world where the “medium is the message” (McLuhan), the disaster- capitalism complex begins to deliberately organize? What if an increase in privatized wars and disaster responses create more and more opportunities for disparate functions now provided by separate companies to be incorporated into larger and larger corporations? Could the next stage in the evolution of the disaster-capitalism complex consist of a “morbid vertical integration” where “the destroyers and rebuilders are different divisions of the same corporations”? (Klein

2007a: 381).

The prospect of a corporatist dystopia, albeit speculative, has entered the cultural imaginary, a phenomenon that will serve as the topic of the next chapter. At the present time, one

32 It is well known that the penultimate draft of Eisenhower’s farewell address warned of a military- industrial-congressional complex. The government’s role in accelerating this complex’s growth justifies Klein’s use of the term “corporatism.” 51

thing is for sure—there is plenty of room for the disaster-capitalism complex to grow. Potential markets include disaster-proofing multinational corporations, contracting municipal functions like policing and firefighting to private security companies, and building suburban green zones wherever there is a demand for a “parallel privatized state, one equipped with well-paved highways and skyways, safe bridges, boutique charter schools, fast-lane airport terminals, and deluxe subways” (Klein 2007b: 54, 50). With the formation of Sandy Springs in a “wealthy

Republican suburb outside Atlanta,” the move to stand-alone “contract cities” that mirror their green zone military predecessors is already underway (Klein 2007b: 55).

If the flat world of frictionless capitalism was the dream of the nineties, today it has turned into the nightmare of a corporatist world of disaster capitalism. Neoliberal theorists like

Friedman began by arguing for the manipulation of crises to extend the domain of the free market. Instead of increasing human welfare, really existing neoliberalism advanced disaster capitalism, using the desperation and fear created by catastrophe to disseminate its own ideology of the market ethic. As disaster capitalism escalated its sundry forms of accumulation by dispossession and neoliberalism morphed into corporatism, a full-fledged disaster-capitalism complex emerged. The imminent threat of terrorism provided the perfect ruse for the disaster- capitalism complex as it upturned the long-standing belief that political stability is good for business by thriving “in conditions of low-intensity grinding conflict” (Klein 2007a: 441). When the “point is to create ‘security’ inside fortress states bolstered by endless low-level conflict outside their walls,” it was simply a matter of time before the disaster-capitalism complex made the leap from setting up shop in war-torn and disaster-struck countries to offering its services to the wealthy (Klein 2007a: 441). In 2007, the “private military company” Blackwater USA rebranded itself Blackwater Worldwide, and has since rebranded itself once again as Xe

Worldwide. Its name change indicates that its “protect the principal” directive in Baghdad will expand to an “entire new sector of country club disaster management” where “the same pay-to- be-saved logic [will] govern” (Klein 2007c: unpaginated).

As the disaster-capitalism complex extends its conflict- and disaster-related functions to daily civilian life, differences in power and material interest will become the sole factors that determine the spatial distribution of risk. Klein envisions the endgame of disaster capitalism as a world partitioned “between the included and the excluded, the protected and the damned” (Klein

2007b: 49). A “collective future of disaster apartheid” looms large on the horizon in which the super-rich reside in the gated green zones of hyperserviced states completely segregated from the ultra-poor surplus people who struggle to survive in the red zones of failed states (Klein 2007b:

54). Could this really be the outcome that incites neoliberal triumphalism?

What is to be Done?: Realigning Natural Disaster Studies

If a world where private aircraft swoop in to save global elites from impending disaster while the Ethel Freemans are left to die on the streets sounds horrifying, there is, Klein reminds us, “another principle that could guide our collective responses in a disaster-prone world: the simple conviction that every life is of equal value” (Klein 2007c: unpaginated). Klein’s reference to the Enlightenment principle of universal rights as a counter to the privatized disaster responses pushed by crony capitalism faces two immediate problems. The belief that “every life is of equal value” is contradicted by the right to unfettered private property. It does not, in fact, make any sense to compute the value of human life as we price the value of property, although the logical conclusion of neoliberalism’s market ethic is their equation (the human lives with more property are simply worth more in the world of corporatism). Every declaration of a universal human right, like Article 3 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to

life, liberty, and security of person,” butts up against a declaration that undermines its universality by “protecting the principal”: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” (“the pursuit of Happiness,” of course, being Franklin’s euphemistic revision of Jefferson’s original third unalienable right,

“Property”).

The second problem with Klein’s otherwise admirable call for a different principle to

“guide our collective responses in a disaster-prone world” is the ambiguity of “our collective.”

Certainly the Fourth (or Fifth) International is not the same collective as the corporatist powers of global capitalism, nor is either the same as the abstract collective that is the entire world’s population. As Klein’s analysis reveals, the current collectives responding to natural disasters are the same ones making the world more disaster-prone. To establish a universal right for hazard prevention and disaster mitigation that is as complete as humanly possible will require a change in the collective instituting this right. The energy expended to organize the disaster-capitalism complex could be diverted to form a collective who actually believes that every life is of equal value, that everyone has the right to security of person.

Perhaps Smith’s pragmatic synthesis between the physicalist and critical schools of NDS intends to move in the direction of universalism. By crossing party lines and appealing to the general policymaker, Smith’s solution appears to call for an effort that is more collective than those of the present. However, the political implications of a synthetic approach are as specious as its epistemological foundations that we deconstructed earlier. A pragmatic synthesis represents the marriage of social scientific knowledge to a politics of moderation that is inevitably more right of center than it is left. It asks us to accept a pragmatic blackmail in place

of substantial changes to natural disaster management policy. Gradualist and compromising

“Third Way” political movements represent the limits of a “capitalist welfare” approach to natural hazards and disasters. What Harvey calls the “embedded liberalism” within the capitalist world-economy may offer a degree of immediate relief to victims, but in the long-term such policies perpetuate the root causes of disaster by displacing criticism of the status quo. Liberal incremental natural disaster policies such as marginal reforms and modest calls for corporate responsibility form a type of politics that Marx and Engels classified as “conservative or bourgeois socialism,” and Gramsci referred to as the “passive revolution.” Such a “revolution without a revolution” will not significantly alter the dominant physicalist paradigm’s approach to managing natural disasters. Under the liberal incrementalism advocated by a pragmatic synthesis of NDS, to paraphrase Marx and Engels, the bourgeois is a bourgeois—for the benefit of natural disaster victims. For the people—and not the professional politician—there is everything to be gained from radical structural changes to the political economy.

Critical school NDS scholars have argued that radical structural changes to the political economy can be accomplished democratically, that the remedy to our disaster management woes is more democracy. Such a proposal comes on the heels of the anti-globalization movement’s stance that the capitalist world-economy is best confronted by the collective of the multitude and its agenda of radical, or absolute democracy (a movement whose theoretical basis can be found in the work of Hardt and Negri). For example, to interrupt the negative cycle of NDS being beholden to institutions that contribute to the catastrophic effects of extreme geophysical events instead of alleviating them, Pelling argues that “previously depoliticized areas of decision- making (corporate economic decisions, scientific research agendas, plans for the new application of technology) need to be opened-up to public scrutiny, which,” he adds, “requires new legal

institutions” (Pelling 2001: 186). Pelling’s prescription implies a democratization of private institutions, many of which have only been privatized or come under the influence of the private sector in the last thirty-five years with the rise of neoliberalism. If changes to disaster management policies are desired, the adverse trends of privatization need to be reversed by the people legislatively, politically, and by other means.

In the field of NDS, Pelling is not alone in prescribing a democratic repoliticization of areas of disaster decision-making that are dubiously depoliticized. Alexander agrees that

“democracy, and not any subversion of it, is at the heart of hazard mitigation. Imposed solutions are implicitly flawed” (Alexander 2000: 28, my italics). Alexander’s claim that imposed solutions are implicitly flawed represents the logic of the majority of today’s advocates of democratic solutions to capitalist conundrums. No solution except democracy, the current popular line of thinking goes, can fix the problem while maintaining individual autonomy and human rights. Imposed solutions can be wildly flawed—corrupt, unjust, and dangerous—but should we jump the gun so fast in declaring democracy the only viable option? Is democracy the default prescription for realizing comprehensive natural hazard prevention and disaster mitigation that we should accept ad ignorantiam?

What is striking about this pro-democratic logic is its affinity with the logic of neoliberalism. Neoliberals decry all statist solutions as communist and fascist, with all of the attending horrors of the Gulag and Holocaust implied (the fact that these different political orders are lumped together is itself telling). What the neoliberal logic entails is the fallacious placement of the burden of proof on the side of state systems. Since these systems are historical, they represent an incomplete set of examples, i.e. it is possible to imagine a future state system that does not repeat the evils of its predecessors. Just because states have failed, maimed, and

murdered their citizens in the past does not mean that neoliberalism, or for that matter radical democracy, is by default the only solution to the problem of natural disasters.

We have already touched on neoliberalism’s own impositions and horrors, and why decisions about natural disasters are better left to policymakers interested in people instead of profits. Calls for democracy however, beg the question that “The People” are interested in people instead of profits (or commodities as Lizabeth Cohen argues in The Consumer’s Republic). In reference to the “Big Money” versus “Big Government” debate, Ted Steinberg perspicaciously remarks, “the simple truth is that while government can be idealized just as blindly as the free market, it can be a powerful tool for achieving important collective goals in ways unimaginable for a corporate entity” (Steinberg 2006: 210). Likewise, government can be a powerful tool for achieving important collective goals in ways unimaginable for a democratic body politic. Anti- capitalist, anti-statist proponents of democracy idealize the “Big People.” They forget that although the state exists to serve the people, it is the state that makes the people in the first instance. As Harvey writes, “however much we might wish rights to be universal, it is the state that has to enforce them. If political power is not willing, then notions of rights remain empty.

Rights are, therefore, derivative of and conditional upon citizenship” (Harvey 2005: 180).

Without the state, individuals cannot be conceived as citizens with the right to be protected from natural disasters. If we desire to establish legislation that rights the wrongs of current natural disaster policy (among a host of other vital political economic issues), we need a state big enough to recognize and defend as citizens—with no exceptions—the wretched of the planet.

Confronting the problems of natural disasters calls for a true international collective, the very opposite of global capitalism. The contemporary notion of a democracy by the multitude overestimates its anti-capitalism. Those who place democracy at the heart of disaster policy

assume that it represents a serious threat to neoliberalism. For some leftists, democracy not only fails to challenge neoliberalism, it is in cahoots with this latest stage of capitalism. According to

Žižek, “what prevents the radical questioning of capitalism itself is precisely belief in the democratic form of the struggle against capitalism…this is the hard kernel of today’s global capitalist universe, its true Master-Signifier: democracy” (Žižek 2006a: 320). The leftist critique of democracy—whether it faults the concept of democracy, its ideological instantiations, or its de facto track record—can no longer be ignored by NDS scholars. It is often argued that science should serve the people instead of profits, but democratic rallying cries for political egalitarianism miss their target if they ignore the antagonism of class struggle.33 NDS can be of service to all people only if its scholars confront the contradiction between people and profits, and self-reflexively examine the ways in which their own field promotes the latter at the expense of the former. Facile calls for democracy appended like so many prescriptive periods to the conclusions of descriptive studies of disaster are unsatisfactory and perhaps, as Žižek suggests, part of the problem itself.

The fear that direct calls to action will unwittingly reinscribe the dictates of neoliberal capitalism explains why Žižek feels tempted to reverse Marx’s Thesis 11: “the first task today is precisely not to succumb to the temptation to act, to intervene directly and change things…but to question the hegemonic ideological co-ordinates” (Žižek 2002a: 170). Contemporary

33 Post-normal science, Ziauddin Sardar argues, consists of “a dialogue among all stakeholders in a problem, from scientists themselves to social scientists, journalists, activists and housewives, regardless of their formal qualifications or affiliations” (Sardar 2002: 226). I like the concept of post-normal science, but I am wary of Sardar’s faith in the “democratisation of science.” Bringing science “out of the laboratory and into public debate where all can take part in discussing its social, political and cultural ramifications,” sounds good in theory, but raises anew a problem addressed long ago by Plato. In book VI of The Republic, Plato compares the state to a ship, and he asks who is the better leader, the lone captain who is qualified to command because he is knowledgeable in the art of navigation or the unqualified crew who have the numbers but know nothing about navigation? The issue of stem-cell research provides a pertinent example of how the question of competency presents a real conundrum for the democratic claims of post-normal science (Sardar 2002: 226). 58

philosophers have only proposed changing the world in various ways; the point, Žižek argues, is to interpret it. This chapter has proceeded on the assumption that Marxism is not a youthful phase in the development of a serious scholar or public intellectual but, as Jameson maintains, a theory that “offers the only complete explanation of the things that are happening to us, and thus, the only sound guidelines for what in the present situation it is up to us to do” (Jameson 1975:

36).

It is up to NDS scholars working in the present situation of late-neoliberal-corporatist- disaster capitalism to interpret and question its hegemonic ideological coordinates. Although it may sound insufficient as a guideline for what to do about natural disasters, the first obligation of

NDS scholars is to defend Marxism’s explanation of the natural disasters that are happening to us. “The first lesson we must learn,” Harvey states with an audience of “crypto-communists” in mind, “is that if it looks like class struggle and acts like class war then we have to name it unashamedly for what it is” (Harvey 2005: 202). In a similar vein, when discussing the impact of the neoliberal ideology of growth, efficiency, and deregulation on natural disaster policy, Wisner writes, “this is where one has to begin to use the ‘C’ word. One has to ask how capitalism, as a manner of organizing power and material interest, has changed over the past hundred years or so” (Wisner 2003: 47). Effective action can only come after sufficient interpretations of the problem of natural disasters, and sufficient interpretations—let alone sound guidelines on what is to be done—require an unashamed defense of the explanatory power of the Marxist conceptual apparatus.

Of course, defending a Marxist paradigm in NDS is easier said than done. Fordham’s observation that the status quo most particularly splits the field of NDS strikes me as axiomatic.

What divides scholars in NDS is the same thing that divides citizens in the “real world”: the

antagonism of class struggle. One provisional—and relatively provincial—act that NDS scholars can do is to unify their own ranks. Granted, calls for unidisciplinarity, non-disciplinarity, or even supradisciplinarity in NDS are largely empty if divested of their larger legal, institutional, and political implications. The impulse behind reframing the problem of disaster must exceed the desire for an epistemological reunification of the physicalist and critical schools of NDS; it must be accompanied by a political restructuring of priorities and preoccupations. Yet if we, like

Klein, affirm a collective, fundamental challenge to the status quo and its “stay the course” disaster management policies, then it behooves us to integrate our knowledge in a singular historical social scientific approach to natural disasters. If the knowledge of NDS is fragmented and flawed, then it makes little sense to breach the barrier that separates epistemology from its implementation in “real world” policymaking. What Fordham refers to as the integration of academic/theoretical knowledge with practical disaster management requires us first to integrate the academic/theoretical knowledge side of the equation (Fordham 2003: 70-71).

Lest we be charged with committing a performative contradiction for proposing a theoretical alliance as a practico-political solution to natural disasters, it should be mentioned that Marxism is a “philosophy of praxis” (Gramsci) which perceives theory and practice as unified. For Althusser, “philosophy ‘represents’ the class struggle in the realm of theory, hence philosophy is neither a science, nor a pure theory (Theory), but a political practice of intervention in the realm of theory” (Althusser 1997: 321). We might consider reframing the problem of natural disasters and realigning our approach to their study a political practice of intervention in the realm of NDS, especially considering how the status quo divides the field in order to conquer its “real world” efficiency. However, to clarify the relationship between theory

and practice, Althusser’s rather crafty definition of philosophy should be viewed in light of the predecessor he denounced, Lukács. Žižek explains:

Lukács advocates the dialectical unity/mediation of theory and practice, in which even

the utmost contemplative stance is eminently “practical” (in the sense of being embedded

in the totality of social [re]production and thus expressing a certain “practical” stance of

how to survive within this totality), and, on the other hand, even the most “practical”

stance implies a certain “theoretical” framework; it materializes a set of implicit

ideological propositions. (Žižek 2006b: 113)

For NDS scholars like Smith, policymakers do not operate like theorists, but theorists should operate like pragmatic policymakers. Against the contradiction that theory and practice are irredeemably split except for in the pragmatic “balanced view of disaster”—a fetishistic split par excellence—we should argue the opposite of Smith: policymakers ought to operate more like theorists. The “practical” stances of policymakers are always already based on theoretical frameworks. Politicians currently operate as if the neoliberal-physicalist-technocratic- behaviouralist paradigm is natural, commonsensical, and indubitable, i.e. like it is not a theory in the first place. When a dominant paradigm is assumed to be “just the way things are,” only practical solutions within the confines of its ideological propositions are considered possible.

These severely limited possibilities are not really solutions at all; they are doomed to produce failures already inscribed within their theoretical framework. Ironically enough, if politicians want to solve practical problems, they need to be more theoretical, not less so.

Natural disaster policy need not be circumscribed by the epistemologically-flawed, politically-corrupt, and practically-bankrupt theory of neoliberalism. Yet, the policies that come to replace it will also materialize a theoretical framework. Any truly countercultural and

counterhegemonic approach to natural disasters therefore requires sound theory of its own. From a philosophy of praxis perspective, natural disaster policy cannot be fundamentally revamped without theoretical invention that is eminently practical and practical innovation that is theoretically informed. In addition to interpreting the late capitalist world-economy and defending the pertinence of Marxism, I propose the following theoretical realignment to NDS:

The first thing to notice about these two diagrams is that they are not parallel. Although each represents a school of thought in NDS, the smaller circles which symbolize more refined positions within these schools do not operate on the same level. For example, the historical social science of NDS is a more theoretical stance than the corresponding neoliberal/technocratic paradigm. Yet, as Lukács reminds us, even the most practical technofixes rely on some theoretical framework. The corporatist crisis manipulation of the disaster-capitalism complex is sustained by the neoliberal market ethic, for instance.

The blue diagram seems more practical than the red precisely because it is hegemonic. As the dominant paradigm, its theories are acted on; they have been actualized (perhaps not to plan, but that is another matter). Thus, the proposed realignment of the red diagram seeks to lay the theoretical groundwork for a hegemonic shift based on the presupposition that the contemporary

problem of late capitalist disasters inheres within the neoliberal form of the capitalist world- economy. For countercultural and counterhegemonic scholars and policymakers of NDS, the hegemony of the blue diagram is the problem of contemporary natural disasters, and the political efficacy of NDS will hinge on how effectively it opposes the dictates of neoliberalism which reify the theories of the physicalist/behaviouralist school. At the very least, this proposed realignment prioritizes the task of questioning the current hegemonic ideological coordinates of

NDS.34

If we no longer perceive natural disasters as “acts of God” or “acts of Nature” or even

“acts of Man” but “acts of Capital”; if we have truly left behind the metaphysics of causation and now agree that states of human marginalization are the principle cause of disaster; if we can come to fully embrace the paradox that humans are classed-beings even before they are human beings; then we should be willing to embrace the theoretical and political ramifications of adopting the Marxist/radical structuralist paradigm to realign NDS. The hope of a singular historical social science of NDS is for our best intellectual efforts to be matched by courageous political acts, and that a reformation in our epistemological order will be accompanied by a restructuring of the social one.

34 A different way to read the encircled circles of the diagrams is not that they symbolize more refined positions but more politically radical ones. The two diagrams could be laid out in a political continuum with the corporatist crisis manipulation on the far Right, the Marxist paradigm on the far Left, and the critical and physicalist schools taking up positions just left and right of center, respectively. Although tempting, one of the primary points of this chapter is that within a hegemonic constellation, the center is never in the center. The center is always to one side or the other. In other words, the reasonable solutions offered by a pragmatic synthesis or even the critical school are “caught up in the game.” Although they may appear to mitigate disaster or even prevent hazards, at the end of the day they end up reifying the dominant hegemony and its resultant states of marginalization. In short, the center—whether it be composed of physicalist or critical scholars—exacerbates the problem of late capitalist disasters with a natural trigger. At the end of the end of the day, class struggle mandates that a proposed realignment be either/or instead of and/both. 63

Children of Men and I Am Legend: The Disaster-Capitalism Complex Hits Hollywood 35

Our culture of calamity has critical implications for the emergence of the disaster- security state and the consolidation of corporate power in the age of globalization. -Kevin Rozario

In chapter one, I tackled the social scientific study of natural disasters from a Marxist perspective. I sought to historicize natural disasters within the context of neoliberalism, and used

Naomi Klein’s work to exemplify how natural disasters occurring within a neoliberal order are more properly understood as late capitalist disasters. In this chapter I adopt the same Marxist perspective, but apply it to cinematic representations of disasters that strike a world defined by the precepts of neoconservatism. Specifically, I contrast Alfonso Cuarón’s representation in

Children of Men of the role neoconservatism plays in creating late capitalist disasters with

Francis Lawrence’s representation in I Am Legend of the role that this political movement plays in alleviating them.

Like many of the critics who praised Cuarón’s Children of Men for being one of the best films of 2006, I found the film a topical post-apocalyptic treatise on a variety of contemporary political problems, from the “War on Terror” to environmental degradation. However, I did not fully grasp Children’s political significance until I viewed another dystopian science fiction film released the following year, Lawrence’s I Am Legend. The formal similarities of these two films accentuate a stark contrast in how each represents a world shaped by the Anglo-American neoconservative movement. Legend propagandizes for what Children condemns—the neoconservative combination of religious and market fundamentalism with aggressive foreign policy, a political economic agenda that Klein calls “disaster capitalism.”

35 This chapter was published as an article in Jump Cut 51, Spring 2009: http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/ChildrenMenLegend/index.html. 64

A comparative analysis of Children and Legend provides a glimpse into the political stakes of cultural representations of neoconservatism. To discern these stakes, I read Children through the lens of Legend’s ideological intentions—religious, economic, and geopolitical. The first section examines the metaphysics of each film. Characteristic of neoconservative ideology,

Legend offers the moral palliatives of Christianity to allay and even justify the dubious workings of disaster capitalism. Despite its religious allusions, Children presents a materialist worldview not ordained by the heavens. In the second and third sections, I contrast Legend’s utopian fantasy of late capitalism with Children’s dystopian vision. Although “green zone” and “red zone” refer to fortified and unsecured areas of Baghdad, these terms resonate with meanings that exceed military objectives in Iraq. Legend favorably depicts the winners of neoliberalization—those gated in the globe’s green zones—while Children identifies with those suffering in the red zones, the majority of the world’s population who are losing out in an age of unfettered capitalism. I conclude my comparative analysis by drawing on the work of Klein and Žižek, two prominent social theorists whose intellectual interests dovetail with Cuarón’s aesthetic concerns. I use their work to illustrate how Children and Legend represent political space in diametrically opposed ways.36

The Alpha and Omega Man

Children takes place in London in 2027, eighteen years after a pandemic of infertility renders humankind unable to produce offspring. In the face of impending extinction, Theo Faron

(Clive Owen), a white, middle-aged bureaucrat, helps Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), a black,

36 Klein explains on her website that she sent Cuarón a copy of her latest book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, because “I adore his films and felt that the future he created for Children was very close to the present I was seeing in disaster zones” (Klein 2007d: unpaginated). Žižek likewise sees in the future depicted by Children the present “ideological despair of late capitalism” (Žižek 2006c: unpaginated). Cuarón included both of them in the bonus features of the DVD of Children. He also created a short film to promote Klein’s book, which can be viewed at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/video/2007/sep/07/naomiklein. 65

inexplicably pregnant refugee, rendezvous with the Tomorrow, a vessel belonging to the Human

Project. Although Theo cannot be sure that the Human Project exists, he gives up his life to escort Kee and her newborn to this group of the world’s “brightest minds” and “wise men doctors” working on a cure in the Azores.

Set in New York in 2012, Legend takes place three years after 90% of the world’s population dies due to the lethal mutation of a genetically-engineered virus. The virus, which initially cured cancer, transforms another 9% of the population into “dark seekers,” vampiric zombies who then “killed and fed on” the 1% with immunity (about twelve million people). Only one middle-aged man has supposedly survived the double-catastrophe of plague and monster invasion, Robert Neville (Will Smith), an African American Lieutenant Colonel of the U.S. army and virologist, who spends his days at “Ground Zero” searching for a cure. When Neville produces a vaccine, he sacrifices himself so that two other recently discovered survivors, Anna

(Alice Braga) and a young boy named Ethan (Charlie Tahan), can escape with it to a survivor’s colony in Bethel, Vermont.

Both films are thus set in major Western cities in the near future with main characters who pay the ultimate price in hope of reversing the catastrophic effects of a pandemic that

(incidentally) struck in 2009. In a genre prone to religious allegory like end-of-times science fiction, these sacrifices carry Christ-like significance. Released on Christmas Day in the U.S.,

Children doubles as a nativity story with Theo playing Joseph to Kee’s Mary after she reveals her pregnancy to him in a barn. Kee’s baby Dylan, like Christ, provides hope of a redeemed future for mankind, while the resistance movement that spearheads Kee’s flight to the coast fittingly calls itself the “Fishes.” The stigmata wounds Theo suffers—his cut foot and gunshot wound in the side—signify that he also plays Christ. The extra-diegetic effect of John Tavener’s

accompaniment music, “Fragments of a Prayer,” bolsters a religious reading of Children by supplying a spiritual gravity to key moments throughout the film.

I problematize reading Children as a religious allegory at the end of this section. For now, I turn to Legend (also released during the Christmas season) to raise the political implications of its Christ figure.37 Legend’s final fifteen minutes quilt together the film’s scrambled Christian allusions (a New York permanently decorated for Christmas, Neville’s hanging on the third day of the film, a cross dangling from the rearview mirror of Anna’s SUV, etc.), and assure the film’s status as Christian allegory. In the penultimate scene when the dark seekers attack, Neville, Anna, and Ethan convert a walled-in space of his lab into a panic room.

Neville typically uses this enclosure to secure infected subjects he has captured for his vaccination tests. When the three of them enter, to their surprise they discover that his latest

“human trial” has succeeded. As the leader of the dark seekers unremittingly rams his body into the enclosure’s heavy glass doors, Neville tries to reason with him. He pleads:

Stop, stop, stop. Look, I can save you. I can save—I can help you. You are sick, and I can help you…I can fix this. I can save everybody…Let me save you! Let me save you!

Neville’s use of the word “save” instead of “heal” or “cure” represents a slip from medical to ecclesiastical discourse. “Everybody” literally refers to the victims infected with the Krippen

Virus (KV), but as a double entendre means mankind in general.38 If read metaphorically,

Neville’s plea implies that everyone, including the dark seekers, are Christian sinners in need of salvation.

37 This reading was not lost on Christians. See, for instance, Todd Hertz’s review: http://www.christianitytoday.com/movies/reviews/2007/iamlegend.html. 38 The virus is named after Dr. Alice Krippen (uncredited Emma Thompson), whose cure for cancer—a genetically re-engineered measles virus—mutates into the lethal strain that wreaks havoc on the planet. Krippen is the German word for “cribs” or “mangers,” and carries connotations of the Nativity Scene. In the allegorical structure of Legend, the Krippen Virus quite literally sets the scene for Christ’s second coming. 67

I find the shift in addressee from “you” to “everybody” all the more striking because of

Neville’s consistent treatment of the dark seekers as wholly other. For example, earlier in the film, Neville records a “behavioral note”:

An infected male exposed himself to sunlight today. Now it’s possible decreased brain function or growing scarcity of food is causing them to...ignore their basic survival instincts. Social de-evolution appears complete. Typical human behavior is now entirely absent.

If Neville believes that the infected are no longer human, that they are different from humans not by degree but by kind, to put it in evolutionary terms, then he would not use the all-inclusive

“everybody” to refer to his attackers. He would continue to use the objective pronoun “you,” which clearly differentiates the infected from the immune. The abrupt pronoun change announces a discursive shift in his rhetoric from science to religion.

Such nitpicky attention to linguistic detail might be insignificant in and of itself; however, the next scene indicates that Christ may very well return as a military scientist. As the

“irrational” leader of the dark seekers continues battering the doors, Neville draws a vial of blood from the cured subject, shuffles Anna and Ethan into a coal chute, and gives her the vial. He says, “Anna, I think this is why you’re here.” She asks, “What are you doing?” He responds,

“I’m listening.” In prior arguments between the two, Neville denies that there is a survivor’s colony (“There’s no survivor’s colony. There’s no safe zone.”), and he rejects that God is responsible for the outbreak of KV (“God didn’t do this, Anna. We did.”). The line “I’m listening” concedes to Anna that she has been right about the etiology of the plague and the existence of a colony. The key scene occurs right before the dark seekers attack:

Anna: Come with us, Neville…to the colony. Neville: There’s no colony, Anna. Everything just fell apart. There was no evacuation plan… Anna: You’re wrong. There is a colony. I know, okay? Neville: How do you know, Anna?

Anna: I just know. Neville: How? I said, how do you know? How could you know? Anna: God told me. He has a plan. Neville: God told you? Anna: Yes. Neville: The God? Anna: Yes…I know how this sounds… Neville: It sounds crazy. Anna: But something told me to turn on the radio. Something told me to come here. Neville: My voice on the radio told you to come here, Anna. Anna: You were trying to kill yourself last night, right? Neville: Anna— Anna: And I got here just in time to save your life. You think it’s just a coincidence? Neville: Stop…just stop. Anna: He must have sent me here for a reason. The world is quieter now. We just have to listen. If we listen, we can hear God’s plan. Neville: God’s plan? Anna: Yeah.

When Neville hands Anna the vaccinated blood in the coal chute and tells her “I’m listening,” he confirms that “the God” directed her to listen to his radio broadcast, remain at the seaport to save him, and take the cure to the survivor’s colony.39 In other words, he believes that he, too, has a role in God’s plan, a teleology that up to this point was revealed to Anna alone. When Neville

“listens,” he accepts that he must sacrifice himself for the future of humanity. Accordingly, he

39 Neville travels to the South Street Seaport at noon everyday and broadcasts the following message: My name is Robert Neville. I am a survivor living in New York City. I am broadcasting on all a.m. frequencies. I will be at the South Street Seaport everyday at midday, when the sun is highest in the sky. If you are out there...if anyone is out there...I can provide food, I can provide shelter, I can provide security. If there’s anybody out there...anybody...please. You are not alone. Neville’s equanimous broadcast, with its echoes of Psalm 18:2 and John 16:32, contrasts strikingly with Vincent Price’s existential loneliness in the first filmic adaptation of Richard Matheson’s book, The Last Man on Earth (1964): “This is Robert Morgan. If somebody can hear me, answer me. For God’s sake, ANSWER ME. This is KOKW calling. KOKW calling! Answer me!” While Morgan desperately desires “somebody,” Neville can console and care for “anybody.” If Neville is indeed Christ, as I believe he is in the world of Legend, when Anna listens to his radio broadcast, she literally hears the voice of God. When Neville denies that God told her to find him, he says, “My voice on the radio told you to come here, Anna.” At this point in the film, Neville is simply unaware of his divinity. Later when his sacrifice turns him into Christ, his final act retroactively acknowledges that it was he, the God, who broadcast his plan to Anna. Anna’s faith is so strengthened by the apocalyptic event of the plague—she can hear God better in the now quieter world—that she comes to H/him. 69

pulls the pin of a grenade and runs at the dark seekers, transforming himself from skeptical scientist to savior-cum-suicide bomber.40

The film uses butterfly imagery to “objectively” buttress Anna’s “crazy” belief that divine reason undergirds all events, however coincidental they may appear to the theologically tone-deaf. Neville only converts after witnessing cracks in the glass doors form the shape of a butterfly, an image that leads him to recall his deceased child Marley’s (Willow Smith) words,

“Look Daddy, a butterfly.” When he turns to Anna and Ethan, he spies a butterfly tattoo on her neck. This coincidental appearance of butterflies brings to mind a series of them throughout the film, especially the butterfly spray-painted on a tank from the opening sequence that reads “God

Still Loves Us.”41

The repeated image of the butterfly refers to the “butterfly effect” in chaos theory, a branch of physics devoted to studying the minutia of causal relations within nonlinear dynamical systems (“Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?”). Where films like Red (1994) and Run Lola Run (1998) appropriate chaos theory to tell stories about characters caught in intricate webs of causation, Legend deploys the “butterfly effect” to insist that the apparently random events surrounding Neville’s life are divinely determined.42 The film

40 The necessity of Neville’s sacrifice should not go unquestioned. Why does Neville not throw the grenade and duck into the chute with Anna and Ethan? Why does he have to become a suicide bomber in order to defeat the dark seekers? 41 http://godstilllovesus.orgis a viral marketing site created by Time Warner to promote Legend. The site contains a photography contest in which entrants submit pictures that display the “God Still Loves Us” logo in various settings. One grand prize winner receives a MacBook Pro 15”, which is significant because Apple’s products are predominantly placed in the film. The site also contains message boards on theological and philosophical issues and a newsfeed to stories on current events with specific emphasis on disasters. That religion is not immune to the viral logic of capitalism is nothing new, but the way in which Time Warner uses religious belief to peddle its cinematic product significantly contrasts with the absence of cross-marketing promotions in NBC Universal’s Children. No corresponding “The Human Project Lives” website exists. If one was created for commercial purposes, would it not contradict the meaning of the Human Project within the worldview of the film? 42 Perhaps the “butterfly effect” also accounts for Anna’s connection to Brazil. At the time of the outbreak, she was evacuated from São Paulo aboard a Red Cross ship. Could her “flight” have set in 70

incorporates a modern worldview based on contingency, but within a premodern teleology, much like a creationist museum diorama exhibits animatronic dinosaurs living side-by-side with Adam and Eve.43

By combining religion “with the latest findings of science,” Legend exhibits one of the defining characteristics of fundamentalism. “For fundamentalists,” Žižek points out, “religious statements and scientific statements belong to the same modality of positive knowledge” (Žižek

2006d: 117). Because fundamentalists regard their beliefs as knowledge, they can justify any act, however horrific, as divinely sanctioned. Moreover, the fundamentalist conflation of belief with positivistic knowledge imperils the status of belief (an ironic inversion of the traditional fear that science undermines religion). Without beliefs in Enlightenment principles like universal human rights, the benefits of knowledge—clean water, health services, modern technologies, disaster mitigation—evade members of so-called “less developed countries” whose rights we are no

motion the events of the film? A less speculative reading of Anna involves the film’s creators and its intended audience. The fantastic gaze of (predominantly white) Western Christians projects onto Anna, a devout Latino woman from Brazil, the status of “true believer,” or “subject supposed to believe.” As Žižek explains, “There are some beliefs, the most fundamental ones, which are from the very outset ‘decentered,’ beliefs of the Other….From the very outset, the speaking subject displaces his belief onto the big Other…from the very beginning, the subject refers to some decentered other to whom he imputes this belief” (Žižek 2002b: unpaginated). Žižek cites the role that children and “ordinary working people” play as stand-ins of the big Other for parents and Communist intellectuals, respectively. To this list I would add the Catholic Latino Other to whom white, Western Christians impute their spiritual belief. A white American Anna (played by someone like Jennifer Aniston) would be ridiculous precisely because she would not have fit within the fantasy frame of the film. 43 Further evidence that butterflies signify the divine providence of fundamentalist “knowledge” (and the incorporation of a premodern teleology within the modern world) can be found in Francis Lawrence’s most recent project, the television series Kings on NBC, which imagines the contemporary United States as a monarchial society called Gilboa. A butterfly on the kingdom’s orange flag symbolizes God’s supposed anointment of King Silas (Ian McShane). In Silas’ story, which he repeats verbatim, a swarm of Monarch butterflies landed on his head in the shape of a “living crown” to signal his divine right to rule. We do not know if this moment actually occurred or if it is a myth meant to keep the people enthralled to their leader, until we witness the butterflies crowning a young soldier named David Shepherd (Chris Egan). Their presence indicates the real existence of a metaphysical realm that guides the events of the world in a predetermined fashion—the exact same role that butterflies play in Legend. (No wonder Kings retells the Old Testament story of Kind David’s ascension.) That Lawrence uses butterflies in Kings as he did in Legend cannot be a coincidence.

longer able to recognize. Without belief in these rights, we act as if we know these people are not fully “human” (just like Neville dehumanizes his test subjects and, as we shall see, the British government treats refugees in Children).

A skeptic might contest that the butterflies are a figment of Neville’s imagination, not fundamentalist “proof” of divine providence. Anna may believe and Neville may convert, but they could also be delusional. The coda that follows Neville’s fade-to-white sacrificial explosion, however, undoubtedly confirms that a Christian teleology based on fundamentalist “knowledge” structures the world of Legend.

In the coda scene, Anna and Ethan drive through a picture perfect autumn landscape, replete with blue skies and colorful foliage, until they arrive in Bethel (“House of God”) where they discover the survivor’s colony. Because our previous knowledge of the colony’s existence comes solely from Anna’s divination, its actual existence means that we are witnessing a prophecy realized. Tellingly, the point of view passes from Neville to Anna in this scene, shifting from the subjectivity of a skeptic to the objectivity of a fundamentalist. Anna, the audience is asked to believe, is not a traumatized survivor suffering from supernatural delusions; God has truly spoken to her and sent Neville, as Christ, to die for her.

As if the brute reality of the colony’s existence were not confirmation enough, Anna’s narration drives home the point that contingency has no place in the world of Legend:

In 2009, a deadly virus burned through our civilization, pushing humankind to the edge of extinction. Dr. Robert Neville dedicated his life to the discovery of a cure, and the restoration of humanity. On September 9th, 2012 at approximately 8:49 p.m., he discovered that cure. And at 8:52 he gave his life to defend it. We are his legacy. This is his legend.

Anna’s closing remarks sound like a military eulogy (a point I address later), but they also act as gospel, retroactively codifying Neville’s life as Christological. Like Neo (Keanu Reeves) in The

Matrix (1999), Neville fulfills his role as chosen one to restore humanity to its prelapsarian state.

In true romantic fashion, the salvation of an individual doubles as the salvation of humanity.44

All survivors, infected and immune alike, become part of Neville’s story as he transfigures into the primordial father figure of “reborn” humankind. Anna, Ethan, and the rest of civilization owe him their existence; they are his legacy.

The debt implicit within the lines “We are his legacy. This is his legend” becomes clear in Anna’s last line, which serves as the film’s final word. After a cut to black, Anna stage whispers, “Light up the darkness.” With a total absence of referents on the screen, this line can only be interpreted as an injunction addressed to the audience. Not only are Anna, Ethan, and the rest of civilization within the film Neville’s legacy; we the moviegoers are, too. To pay our metaphysical debt to Neville, we must “light up the darkness.” In other words, Anna commands us to convert non-believing “dark seekers” to Christianity. Her disembodied voice delivers the inverse message of Sofía’s (Penélope Cruz) opening line in Alejandro Amenabár’s film Abre los ojos (1997). The theologically-laden “light up the darkness” inverts the Enlightenment imagery of “open your eyes.”

To each film’s credit, Legend and Children stage a discussion of the antagonism between the worldviews of antiquity and modernity. Children’s response to this discussion implies a significantly different ideological commitment than the fundamentalist one found in Legend.

Although infused with religious themes, Children defends the secular principles of the

44 Notably, Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” plays during the credits, giving a specific meaning to the lyrics: “…We’ve got to fulfill the book.” Neville also tells Anna about Marley’s “virologist idea” to “cure racism and hate…by injecting music and love into people’s lives.” Neville’s view of racism as a religious and moral problem contrasts with Children’s representation of its political and economic roots. 73

Enlightenment.45 Two scenes from the DVD chapter titled “Faith and Chance” show how

Children’s treatment of Christianity contrasts with Legend’s.

A line by Jasper (Michael Caine), Theo’s aging hippie friend and retired political cartoonist, precedes the first scene. Jasper proclaims, “Kee, your baby is the miracle the whole world’s been waiting for. Shanti, Shanti, Shanti.” Jasper likens Kee’s baby to Jesus, and the

Eastern religious peace offering works to denote a theological meaning to his proclamation. The next scene, in which Theo questions Kee about her pregnancy, juxtaposes this religious setup.

Theo: Who’s the father? Kee: Whiffet. I’m a virgin. Theo: …Sorry? Kee: Cha, be wicked, eh? Theo: Yeah, it would. Kee: Fuck knows. I don’t know most of the wankers’ names.

This scene ironizes a religious allegorical reading of the film, and it thwarts the temptation to draw parallels between Kee and Theo’s adventure and the nativity. More importantly, it depicts the film’s protagonist succumbing to this exact temptation. A slight beat follows Kee’s false declaration of virginity in which Theo considers her baby as immaculately conceived. After he says, “Sorry?,” Kee laughs and points at him to signal that he has fallen for her prank. Her child may be a miracle, but Dylan is certainly not the second coming.46

The jocular atmosphere of this scene conceals a serious point about the structure of

Theo’s belief and its relation to the film’s ontology. The trajectory of Theo’s character opposes that of Neville’s. Where Neville moves from disbelief to faith in a plan God has laid out for him,

45 As Christian allegories, Legend and Children star black religious figures. Because of class differences between Neville and Kee, only the latter treats race progressively. Legend uses Neville, an affluent African American from Manhattan, to make a religious and nationalistic appeal to Americans from all races to unite against a common enemy. Children uses Kee, a Third World refugee, to argue that the struggle for emancipation begins with the wretched of the earth. 46 The ideological move here would have been to make Kee, the black illegal immigrant, the “true believer,” just as Legend figures Anna. To repeat the thought experiment of f.7: Would Theo believe, even for an instant, in the immaculate conception of a white and well-off Kee? 74

Theo develops from gullible believer to existential hero, to someone who courageously acts without any metaphysical guarantees. Like Neville, Theo believes but he anchors his “faith” in this world and not the next. He takes responsibility for helping Kee reach a human project spearheaded by a group of scientists. Theo’s belief in his duty to Kee, her baby, and humanity is thus ultimately self-imposed.

Theo and Kee’s secular belief rejects the dualistic ontology proffered by Legend, in which acts in this world are ultimately dictated by another. Instead, Children supports a monistic ontology (“the world is all that is the case”).47 Although monistic, the film’s conception of being is not naturalistic—where humans, like everything else in the universe, are determined by cosmic forces beyond their control (the environment, the laws of physics, genetics, etc.)—but dialectical:

Theo et al. do not choose the context within which they must act, but their actions shape the trajectory of history.

The scene that follows Kee’s practical joke confirms the dialectical nature of the film’s ontology. While smoking pot, Jasper waxes philosophical on the “mythical cosmic battle between faith and chance” to Miriam (Pam Ferris), a former midwife and Kee’s caretaker.

Jasper: So, you’ve got faith over here, right, and chance over there. Miriam: Like yin and yang. Jasper: Sort of. Miriam: Or Shiva and Shakti. Jasper: Lennon and McCartney. Kee: Look, Julian and Theo. Jasper: Yeah, there you go. Julian and Theo met among a million protestors in a rally by chance. But they were there because of what they believed in in the first place, their faith. They wanted to change the world. And their faith kept them together. But by chance, Dylan was born…Their faith put in praxis… Miriam: Praxis? What happened?

47 One possible objection to the claim that Children rejects metaphysics involves the animals in the film. In the tradition of fairytales, the animals take a supernatural liking to Theo and seem to operate as helpers for the heroes to reach their destination. For example, dogs seem to intentionally increase the volume of their barking to cover the noise of Kee’s labor pangs. I argue that the film’s animal scenes, along with its nods to religious allegory, are ludic pastiches of archaic literary forms. 75

Jasper: Chance. He was their sweet little dream. He had little hands, little legs, little feet. Little lungs. And in 2008, along came the flu pandemic. And then, by chance, he was gone. Miriam: Oh, Jesus. Jasper: You see, Theo’s faith lost out to chance. So, why bother if life’s going to make its own choices? Miriam: Oh, boy. That’s terrible. But, you know, everything happens for a reason. Jasper: That I don’t know. But Theo and Julian would always bring Dylan. He loved it here.

This scene demonstrates a crucial difference in the belief systems of its two primary characters.

Miriam is New Ageist: she meditates, prays in a mix of creeds like an omnist, and believes in a universe guided by conflicting binary forces (like premodern cosmologies which pit a masculine against a feminine principle). As an aged hippie, Jasper and his supposed witnessing of a UFO— a story Miriam shows extreme interest in hearing—does not appear to offer much of an alternative. Yet, Jasper distances himself from Miriam’s fundamentalist “knowledge” by joking

(equating the profane couple Lennon and McCartney with the sacred couple Shiva and Shakti) and, more importantly, by responding to Miriam’s teleological belief that “everything happens for a reason” with skepticism. (That “everything happens for a reason” is the same teleological belief that structures the world of Legend.) Indeed, it would be a mistake to read Jasper’s discourse on faith and chance in the mythical, cosmic terms that he uses to introduce it. In the above scene, Jasper affirms a dialectical ontology that is at odds with Christian, New Ageist, and naturalistic worldviews.

Jasper supports a dialectical ontology by giving Dylan the paradoxical status of an object of both faith and chance. Theo and Julian’s child operates as a chance event and the outcome of

“their faith put into praxis.” Contingency rules his conception as Julian’s pregnancy is unplanned. Faith enters when Theo and Julian retroactively take responsibility for him, when they make him “their sweet little dream.” According to Jasper, faith involves taking

responsibility for contingent events, not affirming some divine plan.48 Likewise, Theo and Julian meeting among a throng of protestors is a chance event, but their reason for being at the rally and for becoming a couple is governed by something more than chance, by their belief that they can change the world. As Marx famously explained: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past” (Marx 2000:

329). Acting to change contingent circumstances forms the basis of a dialectical ontology, of which Children exemplifies and Legend lacks. While Theo struggles under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past, Neville saves the world under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from “the God.”

The fact that Legend is a Christian allegory does not make it inimical to a leftist understanding of catastrophe and the cultural representations it inspires. An apocalyptic film need not be an opiate for the masses. Read exclusively as a Christian allegory, Legend merely develops one strain of the scrambled allegorical code of its cinematic predecessor, The Omega

Man (1971). Where Charlton Heston performs Christ part-time in The Omega Man, Will Smith plays Christ from alpha to omega.

Legend should be of concern for leftists not because of its religiosity per se, but for its marriage of fundamentalist Christianity with neoconservatism.49 David Harvey argues that

48 Jasper seems to slip into mythical discourse when he states that Dylan’s birth was inevitable because “he loved it here.” Does Jasper not affirm that replayed in all possible universes, Dylan—right down to the random genetic recombinations that formed his singularity—would be born? Granted Jasper’s New Age flirtations, he does seem to contradict himself here. However, we could read “Dylan” in the sentence “Theo and Julian would always bring Dylan” as an open signifier, one not pinned to a specific individual per se, but one representative of a general idea, a signifier that stands for their belief in changing the world incarnate. 49 As reported by AP journalist Holly Ramer, Republican presidential nominee John McCain also fancies himself an omega man. Throughout his campaign’s ups and downs, “he’s shown the stamina of the last man on Earth. ‘I’ve been declared dead in this campaign on five or six occasions. I won’t refer to a recent 77

neoconservatives seek “social control through construction of a climate of consent around a coherent set of moral values,” “order as an answer to the chaos of individual interests,” and “an overweening morality as the necessary social glue to keep the body politic secure in the face of external and internal dangers” (Harvey 2005: 84, 82). Legend constructs a climate of consent around a coherent set of moral values (“Light up the darkness”), and the film’s fundamentalism assures its viewers that providence orders the world, including its external and internal dangers.

The Last Men on Earth

Neoconservatives concern themselves with consent, order, and morality to counteract the chaos created by neoliberalism, today’s political doctrine of unfettered capitalism. The confluence of Christianity and neoconservatism cannot be properly understood without reference to this political economic ideology. As David Harvey writes, neoconservatives “in no way depart from the neoliberal agenda of construction or restoration of a dominant class power” (Harvey

2005: 83). Because neoconservatism cannot be divorced from neoliberalism, we must address

Children’s and Legend’s divergent responses to late capitalism before exploring how the two films culturally construe our current political constellation. In this section, I argue that Children contests the neoliberal ideology that Legend upholds.

Ostensibly, Children and Legend say very little about contemporary capitalism. Since the catastrophes in each film are not economic in origin, a straightforward Marxist allegory is not possible. Christological allegories aside, we simply do not know who or what is ultimately

movie I saw, but I think I am legend,’ [McCain] told reporters, referring to the film in which Will Smith stars as the last man on Earth” (Ramer 2008: unpaginated). McCain’s reference to this particular piece of pop culture should not be treated as incidental, but as a calculated political move geared to rally Christians to support his neoconservative candidacy. 78

responsible for jump starting the end of the world. The characters in Children discuss possible theories about what caused the infertility but none are verified. The culprit of the mutated virus in Legend is also unclear. Even as Legend depicts the plague as a biblical flood redux, it suggests that humans are at fault for tampering with Nature/God’s creation. If humanity is culpable, did the government or the private sector fund the genetic modification of the measles virus? Each film withholds whether its disaster’s etiology is natural or artificial, corporate or national, collective or individual.

Yet, in this indirect treatment of the origin of a mega-disaster lies the key to each film’s

“political unconscious.” That is to say, the capitalist world-economy operates as the absent cause that structures these two science fiction films. The disaster scenario, whether it be mass infertility or a mutated virus, displaces or stands in for neoliberal late capitalism. As Fredric Jameson writes, “all the cataclysmic violence of the science-fiction narrative—the toppling buildings, the monsters rising out of Tokyo Bay, the state of siege or martial law—is but a pretext, which serves to divert the mind from its deepest operations and fantasies, and to motivate those fantasies themselves” (Jameson 1988a: 15). In a distorted manner, the cataclysmic violence of

Children and Legend expresses a fantasmatic response to living in the “real” historical world that produced these two films. The disaster scenario, to put it succinctly, harbors the films’ ideological commitments.

The imagined worlds of Children and Legend represent two very different fantasmatic/ideological responses to living in the “real world” of unfettered capitalism. Children criticizes the “sterile hedonism” of late capitalist consumers who live in a society ruled strictly by the pleasure principle. The film is not “about infertility as a biological problem,” Žižek writes:

The infertility Cuarón’s film is about was diagnosed long ago by Friedrich Nietzsche, when he perceived how Western civilization is moving in the direction of the Last Man, an apathetic creature with no great passion or commitment: unable to dream, tired of life, he takes no risks, seeking only comfort and security, an expression of tolerance with one another: “A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at the end for a pleasant death. They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health. ‘We have discovered happiness,’—say the Last Men, and they blink.” (Žižek 2006e: unpaginated)

The Bell’s whiskey that Theo drinks, the “Strawberry Cough” that Jasper smokes, and the masterpieces that Theo’s wealthy cousin Nigel (Danny Huston) collects represent the trivial daily pleasures of the Last Men. The government-issued Quietus suicide kit serves as the greater dose of poison “at the end for a pleasant death.” In such a world, cynicism replaces belief in large, consequential projects as Theo, “the rebel with a lost cause,” demonstrates:

Even if [the Human Project] discovered the cure for infertility, it doesn’t matter. Too late. The world went to shit. You know what? It was too late before the infertility thing happened, for fuck’s sake.

Universal infertility could be blamed for creating an environment conducive to cynicism because it functions as a deterministic force beyond anyone’s control. However, Theo exhibits a cynicism towards the world before “the infertility thing happened,” the world of late capitalism. When

Theo questions how Nigel manages to collect art when not even “one sad fuck” will be around to look at it in one hundred years, Nigel’s response epitomizes how cynicism functions as an ideology that buttresses capitalism: “I just don’t think about it.” Children depicts the Nigels of the world not as the victims of a natural disaster, but as the perpetrators of a manmade one.

Mise-en-scène plays a crucial role in depicting capitalism as the absent cause of

Children’s disaster-world. Cuarón explains his technique:

We used the cameras in the same principle as in Y Tu Mamá [También]...we decided social environment is as important as character, so you don't favor one over the other. That means going loose and wide. The camera doesn’t do close-ups. Rather than make tension between the character and the environment, you make the character blend in with the environment. (Busack 2007: unpaginated)

The blending of characters and environment is a highly ambivalent technique, politically speaking. Émile Zola and Theodore Dreiser experimented with treating people with the same import as objects in their fiction, but in an ideological way that naturalized late nineteenth- century capitalist reification. Cuarón uses this technique to ensure that the ultimate truth of his film will be social and not naturalistic or psychological. The meaning of Children cannot be reduced to the redemption of a self-medicated bureaucrat. Rather, Cuarón focuses a critical eye on “real world” social crises by foregrounding Children’s background. In its backdrops, the film achieves a kind of slow motion montage-effect: by yoking together images of seemingly disconnected crises over the course of 109 minutes (images of globalization, immigration, inequity, environmental degradation, permanent states of emergency, politics of fear, surveillance society, terrorism, and ghettoes), Cuarón argues for their dialectical relationship.

Crises that appear as disjointed liberal talking points turn into a web of related issues tied to a larger problem: capital.

Children’s systemic analysis would not be as effective if these social crises were treated forthrightly. In direct treatments of disaster—like the documentary “The Possibility of Hope,” a bonus feature from the DVD version of Children that “examines how society may be headed toward the ill-fated world represented in the film”—the presentation fails miserably (the message gets lost, the audience’s interest wanes, the argument triggers familiar ideological antagonists who dismiss it out of hand, etc.). This failure explains why, for Žižek, the art of the film lies in

“the paradox of anamorphosis: if you look at the thing too directly, the oppressive social dimension, you don’t see it. You can see it in an oblique way only if it remains in the background” (Žižek 2006c: unpaginated). Anamorphic images, like Children’s shots of the oppressive social dimension, appear distorted; only an unconventional view of them yields their

accurate form and meaning. Children compels us to look awry to perceive not just the characters’ implication in this oppressive social dimension but our own.

An example of Cuarón’s anamorphic technique occurs when Theo, Kee, and Miriam

“break into prison” so they can reach the coast to rendezvous with the Human Project. When they arrive at the city-sized internment camp of Bexhill on a UK Homeland Security bus, it stops at a checkpoint. Through the bus windows we see detained Arab men being tortured in poses reminiscent of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. If the camera left the bus at this point to focus on the infamous hooded prisoner from Abu Ghraib, the effect would be propagandistic. Instead,

Cuarón distances the oppressive “real world” social dimension by placing it in the background.

The abused foreigners glimpsed through the windows operate as historical context, as a history of the present where today’s divisions persist in a future dystopian England. Now, and in this imagined future, “more developed countries” neutralize the perceived and real threats of “less developed countries” in order to acquire and secure resources for their wealthy economies. As

Cuarón states, “we didn’t want to do a future that was about the future—but about the present”

(“Interview” 2006: unpaginated). Cuarón achieves a future of the present through the cumulative effect of foregrounded backgrounds like the reenactment of Abu Ghraib. Strategically placed homeland security signs, a recreated Hamas funeral demonstration, and paraphernalia against the

Iraq War and the Bush and Blair administrations create a mise-en-scène of the War on Terror.50

Over the course of the film, these images link together to provide a coherent narrative of globalization and its discontents.

Legend begins with panoramic and bird’s-eye-view shots to establish that New York City was abandoned in a hurry and has since fallen into disrepair. A music-less soundtrack of animal

50 Arlen Parsa discusses several of the political references of the film in her blog, The Daily Background, which can be accessed at: http://www.thedailybackground.com/2006/12/31/exclusive-political-references- in-new-film-children-of-men-examined-illustrated/. 82

calls suggests that whoever lives here no longer makes their home in a concrete jungle but a real one. A roaring red car streaks down an empty street interrupting the tranquility of the post- apocalyptic landscape. The potential for the scene to initiate a critical dialectic between environment and character quickly dissolves into a car commercial. Lawrence intersperses a series of close-ups of Neville and his German Shepherd co-star, Sam, with ones of the car, which we discover is not just any automobile but Ford’s Shelby Cobra Mustang GT500. Neville and

Sam (short for Samantha but also recalls “Uncle Sam”) use the red sports car to hunt deer. The film dedicates minutes of screen time to the car accelerating, making tire-squealing turns, spinning out gracefully, and stopping on a dime.51

Close-ups consume the scene of their unsuccessful hunt, precisely the shots which

Cuarón avoids so he can emphasize social environment. Like Children, Legend blends its characters into an environment, but this environment is not the “real” post-9/11 world but the pure fantasy space of neoliberal capitalism. Since Neville lives in a megalopolis full of commodities and bereft of people, he enjoys the fruits of capital without incurring debt. He lives in a world of pure surplus enjoyment. His duties to find a cure and broadcast to potential survivors aside, Neville spends his days partaking in the leisure activities of an outdoorsman—he hunts, fishes, golfs, and plays with his dog. In addition, he finds time to work out, watch old

51 Since, in many respects, cars represent the world of commodities at large, the contrast between Children’s depiction of automobiles and Legend’s is not incidental. The Fiats and Renaults of the former are not the concept cars on display in standard fare futuristic films like I, Robot (2004). They are old, boxy, covered in grime, and often fail to work properly, i.e. they are not a fantasy being sold to the audience. The only car that looks like it has just been driven off the showroom floor is a Bentley Arnage R that escorts Theo into the Ark of Arts to see Nigel. Close-ups of this car emphasize class differences between those in the inner and outer circles. 83

television shows, listen to Bob Marley on his iPod, “rent” videos, and rescue famous paintings

(just like Nigel). In nearly every respect, Neville’s life fits the bill of Nietzsche’s Last Men.52

In addition to indulging the fantasies of late capitalist consumers, Legend targets its audience with “anamorphic advertising.” Lawrence replaces Cuarón’s background commentary on forced migrations and terrorism—newspaper clips that read “Refugees Blamed for Increase in

Terror Attacks” and “Immigrants Protest Against Government New Racist Policies”—with identifiable store fronts, billboards, and products. The “hyper-commercialization” of Hollywood is not a new phenomenon. Product placements, tie-ins, merchandising, and cross-promotions have proliferated in the age of media conglomeration to the point where younger generations no longer experience them as baleful, let alone disruptive. That the Shelby Mustang is clearly the choice of the post-apocalyptic sportsman—along with the Ford Explorer and Escape Hybrid— will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with this latest version of the culture industry.

Nonetheless, Children makes Legend’s participation in these dubious marketing trends look egregious. Brandchannel.com lists thirty-two corporate brands that appear in Legend (on average, a new one every three minutes) while Children features “almost zero brands” (Sauer

2007: unpaginated).53 Beyond the quantity of ads lies an issue of quality. Where Children harnesses the political potentials of anamorphosis—especially in scenes where anamorphic advertisements of invented products ironize the consumerism of late capitalism—Legend exploits the same artful techniques to peddle products and promote corporate brand

52 Several critics point to the video rental store scene as one of the highlights of the film. For them, Neville’s interaction with mannequins recalls Tom Hanks’ performance as Noland in Cast Away (2000) when he paints a face on a volleyball and talks to it to stave off loneliness. From a cultural studies perspective, I am less interested in the existential dread of a lone survivor than I am in how Neville procures a modicum of normality by sustaining an everyday experience of consumer society. Instead of transferring the DVDs he desires en masse, he visits the store each day to exchange videos to maintain the illusion that he is only renting. 53 The titles of online articles that discuss Legend’s advertising encapsulate its hypercommercial subtext: “I Am Legendary Product Placement,” “I Am Legend; Ford is Legend,” “GT500 Stars in I Am Legend.” 84

recognition.54 Most disturbing of all, Lawrence uses anamorphosis to naturalize the corporate structure of neoliberal capitalism. Signs of multinational corporations litter the backgrounds of

Legend. A mega-disaster has destroyed the signs’ referents within the diegesis of the film, but their spectral presence sends the subliminal message to an early twenty-first century audience that corporate capitalism is all but indestructible. The first few minutes of Legend where

Neville’s Shelby zips past strategically placed advertisements for XM Satellite Radio, Staples, and Hyatt, assure us that the world is more likely to end before capitalism does.

One final indication that Legend cuts ties with reality in order to enact a consumerist fantasy stems from what Popular Mechanics calls the “junk science” of the film. Popular

Mechanics’ assistant editor Erin McCarthy consulted “experts in the fields of structural engineering, virology, and wildlife to determine what could happen—and what certainly won’t happen” regarding Legend’s portrait of the future (McCarthy 2007: 1). Pointing out the scientific inconsistencies of a film does not meet the criteria most moviegoers take to the theater, nor will it prove to be an ideological indicator in many cases. But as with Legend’s prevalent product placements, its “junk science” is symptomatic of a larger ideological problem. New York City would be in worse condition due to water and fire damage, and Neville would run into problems with powering his home that the film glosses over. Disbelief could be suspended if these vital infrastructural issues had not been ignored precisely because Neville exists in the fantasy space of a consumer and not a producer. In one representative scene, he harvests ears of corn in Central

Park. That the corn is ripe is no accident. Legend cannot represent how the things Neville consumes were produced because labor does not exist in the consumerist fantasyland of the Last

Men. Everything Neville needs or wants is simply there for the picking.

54 For examples of Children’s ironic “anamorphic advertising,” see the YouTube video, “Children of Men: Advertising From The Future” at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VnIrXmdYhY. 85

Legend creates a capitalist utopia by immersing its protagonist in a world that defies the laws of physics, a playground of consumer goods that hides the labor power of its construction and sustenance (and the problems that would inevitably plague its sole survivor). The film’s

“anamorphic advertising” weaves its consuming public into this fantasy world to naturalize neoliberalism as if to say, “the world as we know it will never end, and we will always feel fine.”

Where Legend celebrates the Last Men and their late capitalist utopia, Children critiques their narcissism, cynicism, and classism (as soon will become apparent), by depicting their world—our world—as dystopian. With the dreamworld of wealth comes the catastrophe of crimes against humanity in the guise of free markets, illegal immigration, homeland security, and the War on Terror—all of the specious policies which Cuarón catalogues in his backdrops, the very same policies that Naomi Klein argues bankroll the well-orchestrated “disaster-capitalism complex.”

I Am Conservative-Corporatist

In The Shock Doctrine, Klein claims that the neoliberal era ushered in a “capitalist

Reformation” that doubled as a counterrevolution to Keynesianism and Third World developmentalism (Klein 2007a: 53). Like Harvey, she views neoliberalism as a theory of political economic practices that seek to restore class power through deregulation, privatization, and cuts to social spending, a free-market trinity bent on redistributing wealth as much as generating it. Put into practice, neoliberalization morphs into corporatism, a vast collusion between Big Government and Big Business to transfer public wealth to private hands while an ever-widening chasm opens up between “the dazzling rich and the disposable poor” (Klein

2007a: 15). The recent $700 billion financial bailout of banks by the U.S. government provides a clear example of this collusion.

Klein charts how the rise of corporatism spawned a disaster-capitalism complex that at once extends and supersedes the military-industrial (-congressional) complex President

Eisenhower diagnosed in his 1961 farewell address. With the emergence of the disaster- capitalism complex, the latent “creative destruction” that fueled the engines of capital since its inception surges to the surface to become the recognized modus operandi of the economy.

Today, crisis opportunism entwines superprofits with megadisasters to the point where “all conflict- and disaster-related functions (waging war, securing borders, spying on citizens, rebuilding cities, treating traumatized soldiers) can be performed by corporations at a profit”

(Klein 2007b: 50). Although “disaster capitalism” has been part of neoliberal policy for over three decades, it did not develop into a full-scale complex until after 9/11 with the War on

Terror. As Klein writes, “although the state goal was fighting terrorism, the effect was the creation of the disaster capitalism complex—a full-fledged new economy in homeland security, privatized war and disaster reconstruction tasked with nothing less than building and running a privatized security state, both at home and abroad” (Klein 2007a: 299). Under the auspice of fighting terrorism, the disaster-capitalism complex insidiously developed into a fully articulated state-within-a-state, a corporate shadow-state, that carries out the normal functions of a nation- state but at a heftier price.

While the disaster-capitalism complex is not unprecedented—the fear was always that the military-industrial complex would wage wars for strictly monetary reasons—its emergence represents a new phase in globalization. Klein points out that “for decades, the conventional wisdom was that generalized mayhem was a drain on the global economy. Individual shocks and crises could be harnessed as leverage to force open new markets, of course, but after the initial shock had done its work, relative peace and stability were required for sustained economic

growth” (Klein 2007a: 423). The disaster-capitalism complex upturns this belief in political stability by thriving “in conditions of low-intensity grinding conflict” (Klein 2007a: 441).

Worldwide wars on terrorism provide the perfect ruse for the disaster-capitalism complex, where

“the point is to create ‘security’ inside fortress states bolstered by endless low-level conflict outside their walls” (Klein 2007a: 441). The next logical leap is to expand the market of the disaster-capitalism complex from war-torn and disaster-struck countries to everyday civilian life.

Instead of building green zones to protect military operations, residential green zones are being built to shelter those who can afford them.

Klein envisions the endgame of this burgeoning complex as “a collective future of disaster apartheid” where the super-rich reside in the gated green zones of hyperserviced states completely segregated from the ultra-poor surplus people who struggle to survive in the red zones of failed states (Klein 2007b: 54). In this future corporatist dystopia, the world will be partitioned into the armored suburbs of contract, or stand-alone, cities on one side of the fence and a post-apocalyptic no-man’s-land of FEMA-villes on the other.55

All of this is to say that Klein prophesizes the world Cuarón creates in Children. More accurately, Cuarón imagines Klein’s “collective future of disaster apartheid” by transposing the conflicts of recent history in places like Iraq, Palestine, Bosnia, Somalia, and Northern Ireland— his admitted references—to 2027 England. As Hurricane Katrina exposed a disaster apartheid already at work within the U.S., Children confirms that the future is now.

In one poignant scene, a Bentley chauffeurs Theo into the inner circle to see Nigel about obtaining transit papers. As “The Court of the Crimson King” plays, the car passes through

55 “Not so long ago, disasters were periods of social leveling, rare moments when atomized communities put divisions aside and pulled together. Today they are moments when we are hurled further apart, when we lurch into a radically segregated future where some of us will fall off the map and others ascend to a parallel privatized state, one equipped with well-paved highways and skyways, safe bridges, boutique charter schools, fast-lane airport terminals, and deluxe subways” (Klein 2007b: 50). 88

Admiralty Arch, which is guarded by a troop of soldiers, two gates, two tanks, and a sentry tower. Inside The Mall, Theo witnesses the absurdity of the Household Calvary Mounted

Regiment parading down the street, and the Band of the Scots Guard performing “The Spirit of

Pageantry” as the wealthy stroll through St. James’s Park with their pet zebras, poodles, and camels. After driving through another guarded checkpoint outside of the Ark of Art (Battersea

Power Station), the Bentley drops off Theo inside where he must walk through a metal detector.

Nigel lives tucked away in this fortress for the super-rich with Picasso’s Guernica decorating the wall, attendants who serve multiple-course meals, and wine, pills, and video games at hand. This is “England as a Green Zone, a comfort zone,” as Cuarón puts it. “[T]he characters feel they’re lucky to live there, but there’s a big percentage of outsiders waiting to get in” (Busack 2007: unpaginated). In Children the state rounds up these outsiders and deports them to cordoned off areas on the opposite side of the green zone’s walls and fences. The crowded, chaotic, and grimy streets of Bexhill provide the film’s red zones. Here “the other half lives” in slums comprised of makeshift dwellings and ramshackle buildings as roadside garbage and corpses burn alike. Here the Fishes stage the “Uprising,” an insurrection against the state, which reveals that red zones often double as rubble-filled war zones when tensions erupt.

Children artfully illustrates the dialectical disparities between green and red zones that

Klein theorizes, but only after Legend was released could the ideological stakes of filmic representations of the disaster-capitalism complex be grasped in their entirety. In the interests of detailing Legend’s allegiance to neoliberalism in the previous section, I ignored one important element of the film: the imminent threat posed by the dark seekers. These vampiric zombies represent the sole impediment to Neville’s consumerist freedom. When the sun sets, Neville must barricade himself in his Washington Square townhouse to prevent his becoming their next

meal. In the first lockdown scene, Neville fastens a crossbar security lock on his front door and shuts seven windows outfitted with retractable steel doors. The montage-quick succession of this lockdown repeats later in the film as rolling steel doors and shutters close on another five windows. In this latter scene, we also witness the elaborate defense system Neville has installed in case of an emergency. Powerful lights form a perimeter around his fortress home to deter the photophobic vampires. Parked cars rigged with remote-controlled explosives provide a last line of defense.56

Essentially, Legend and Children represent the two faces of the disaster-capitalism complex but from opposing perspectives. Children’s red zone population of “fugees” and illegal immigrants mutate into Legend’s feral dark seekers, and its green zone population of ministers

(Nigel) and bureaucrats (Theo) become Greenwich Village’s resident military scientist. These character transformations entail a shift in the audience’s point of identification. While the progression of Theo and Kee’s journey leads the audience to empathize with the plight of those barred from a privatized security state, the hell-bent dark seekers who threaten Neville elicit empathy for his imperiled one-man gated community. While Children invites us to identify with those who are critical of the disaster-capitalism complex, Legend solicits the opposite allegiance with those orchestrating it.

The conflicting character loyalties in Children and Legend can be explained by their opposing conceptions of political space. To understand the films’ diametrical conceptions of political space, I refer to Žižek’s often cited example from Claude Lévi-Strauss’ Structural

56 In one draft of the script available online, Mark Protosevich’s description of Neville’s “turn-of-the- century house” unwittingly demonstrates the “class warfare” aspect of gated green zones. Although the house looks normal from without, “normal it is not”: “Every window and door has been bricked and cemented shut....security cameras jut out at odd angles, pointing at every corner of the surrounding landscape.” In addition, two fences constructed of wood beams, telephone poles, metal sheets, iron staffs, sharp wooden spikes, and barbed and razor wire outline the perimeter. A crude, three foot deep moat adds a royal touch. The full description can be found at http://www.horrorlair.com/scripts/legend.txt. 90

Anthropology of the spatial arrangement of buildings in the village of the Winnebago tribe.

When asked to map their village, the Winnebago’s two sub-groups draw the ground-plan as a circle:

but for one sub-group, there is within this circle another circle of central houses, so that we have two concentric circles, while for the other sub-group, the circle is split into two by a clear dividing line. In other words, a member of the first sub-group (let us call it “conservative-corporatist”) perceives the ground-plan of the village as a ring of houses more or less symmetrically disposed around the central temple, whereas a member of the second (“revolutionary-antagonistic”) sub-group perceives his/her village as two distinct heaps of houses separated by an invisible frontier....The central point of Lévi-Strauss is that this example should in no way entice us into cultural relativism, according to which the perception of social space depends on the observer’s group-belonging: the very splitting into the two “relative” perceptions implies a hidden reference to a constant—not the objective, “actual” disposition of buildings but a traumatic kernel, a fundamental antagonism the inhabitants of the village were unable to symbolize, to account for, to “internalize,” to come to terms with, an imbalance in social relations that prevented the community from stabilizing itself into a harmonious whole. (Žižek 2007: unpaginated)

Žižek reads Lévi-Strauss’ story of the Winnebago tribe as an allegory of the difference between conservative and radical politics. Contrary to the typical social scientific understanding that locates Right and Left on two sides of a political spectrum, Žižek argues that the Right and Left view the political field in mutually exclusive ways. A Leftist and a Rightist “not only occupy different places within the political space,” writes Žižek, “each of them perceives differently the very disposition of the political space—a Leftist as the field that is inherently split by some fundamental antagonism, a Rightist as the organic unity of a Community disturbed only by foreign intruders” (Žižek 2007: unpaginated). Leftists recognize an inherent imbalance in social relations (the map of a circle divided by an “invisible frontier”), which eludes Rightists who symbolically efface this imbalance (the map of two concentric circles). (As President George W.

Bush said about his 2003 tax cut plan, “I understand the politics of economic stimulus. Some would like to turn this into class warfare. That’s not how I think.”)

Instead of acknowledging what Leftists call the “class struggle,” Rightists displace the fundamental antagonism inherent within society to an antagonism between homeland and foreign intruder. Instead of the “invisible frontier” of the class struggle, Rightists perceive a “visible frontier” that divides society from an extrinsic agent who threatens to compromise the integrity of the organic community—Jews for fascists, blacks for white supremacists, Communists for

U.S. cold warriors, “Welfare Queens” for Reaganites, terrorists and illegal immigrants for neoconservatives.

I contend that Legend and Children conceive of political space in an analogous way to the two sub-groups of the Winnebago tribe. Where the conservative-corporatist Legend imagines a harmonious society vulnerable to external enemies, the revolutionary-antagonistic Children depicts a society at odds with itself, one internally divided by an “invisible frontier.” In Legend,

Neville barricades himself within his townhouse. Encircling his green zone fortress is a

Manhattan-sized red zone of abandoned buildings, each potentially occupied by vicious monsters who jeopardize his otherwise unbridled consumerism. In Children, “only Britain soldiers on” by viciously excluding foreigners. Children’s red zoners are not blood-sucking vampires, but refugees who suffer from a serious imbalance in social relations. They are homo sacer, Giorgio

Agamben’s term for those whom the state refuses to recognize as political subjects. By detaining them in internment camps, the state strips them of their rights and reduces them to their biological existence (what Agamben calls “bare life”).

The different antagonisms each film envisions imply divergent solutions. In Children, salvation lies outside the green zones with those who do not enjoy capital returns and whose very exclusion makes possible the surplus enjoyment of the privileged. In Legend, when Neville gives his life to restore humanity, he becomes the source of salvation. These are two different species

of salvation. In one, the underclasses and those class traitors who conspire with them save humanity. In the other, a military man saves humanity with the aid of an ethnic woman’s faith.

Anna’s closing military-style eulogy praises Neville because “he gave his life to defend it,” “it” being an indefinite pronoun that refers to the cure but also brings to mind instances when the phrase applies to “country” or “nation.” Neville dies in the line of duty, a hero defending the homeland from infidels.

The ideological implications of Neville’s patriotism were not lost on one reviewer, Bob

Mondello from NPR’s All Things Considered. In his rather gracious review, “I Am Legend a

One-Man American Metaphor,” Mondello reads Lawrence’s film within the context of the fall

2007 season of “War-on-Terrorism, Rendition-for-Lambs-In-the-Valley-of-Elah movies”:

I mean, it’s still a sci-fi blockbuster, but take a look at that plot: Western medicine takes a virus (a bad thing) and manipulates it so that it can fight cancer (a worse thing). Sort of like Western military forces arming jihadists (which they regard as a bad thing) so that they’ll fight communists (which they regard as a worse thing). And then the built-up virus—the bad thing—mutates into something much worse than the cancer, and it turns on its creators. And this starts where? That’s right: In New York, which everyone in the movie keeps calling Ground Zero. And some poor schmoe who didn’t start the problem has to try to fix it. But even if he comes up with a cure, a way to make the nasty infected guys human again, they’re just going to keep coming [as Neville echoes, “They’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop.”], banging their heads against plate glass, destroying the civilized world and—here’s the kicker—either killing everyone they come into contact with or converting them into monsters just like themselves. And the only solution is to shoot them dead—or withdraw behind metal walls, into a fortress-like homeland. And that’s not working. (Mondello 2007: unpaginated)

While I concur with Mondello’s general political reading of the film, I find his characterization of Neville as a “poor schmoe” suspect. Neville is not poor in any sense of the term, nor does

Lawrence depict him as a schmoe. In one scene, Neville opens his refrigerator to provide the audience with an anamorphic gaze at a Time magazine cover graced by his picture. The caption reads, “Savior, Soldier, Scientist.” Although Neville has appended a question mark, the shot establishes his place in a neoconservative movement that mollifies the detrimental effects of its

disaster-capitalism complex by appealing to fundamentalist “knowledge.” In addition, the shot invites the audience to share in the mythos surrounding Neville’s (and Smith’s) public celebrity: surely a military man (and star Hollywood actor) who works in good faith can save us from the forces of evil.

I also question Mondello’s claim that according to the film, fortressing the homeland fails as a viable policy for combating “Islamo-fascist” dark seekers. Although the terrorists successfully invade Neville’s home, the walled-in fortress town that is the survivor’s colony seems impenetrable. When Anna and Ethan reach its steel gates, a scanner system confirms that they are not infected, i.e. illegal immigrants. The gates open to two armed soldiers guarding an idyllic Small Town, U.S.A. The bells of a traditional white-steepled Protestant church ring while the stars and bars wave in the wind. A bird’s-eye shot reveals that this privatized security state is a self-sustaining farm powered by wind turbines.

The linked images of soldiers, church, flag, defense walls, farm, and green technology provide a perfect dialectical image of the neoconservative utopian vision. In Bethel, apparent contradictions are reconciled: under God, one nation lives indivisible, with liberty and justice for green zone residents only; a fundamentalist moral order integrates the latest scientific discoveries of the eco revolution; and dark seekers the world over are miraculously cured by a Eucharistic vaccine (and, of course, by the liberal democracy and free market capitalism spreading across the globe).

The 2008 DVD release of Legend confirmed the existence of an alternate ending in which

Neville peacefully returns the uncured female test subject to the male leader of the dark seekers before safely escaping Manhattan with Anna and Ethan. In this ending, Neville apologizes for abducting the female test subject (and perhaps for attempting to “save” her), the butterfly

imagery is profaned (the male leader uses it to identify his partner), and Bethel remains an off- screen hope instead of a reality. This nonviolent ending utterly alters the politics of the theatrical release.57 Instead of a suicide bomber’s sacrifice based on fundamentalist “knowledge” that leaves no room for belief in the human rights of the dark seekers, the alternative ending proposes a diplomatic resolution to the antagonism between two equal families. Although this ending is also ideological, it does not support the neoconservative agenda of stimulating the disaster- capitalism complex through aggressive foreign policy acts like preemptive wars.

The disparity between Legend’s endings may tempt conspiracy theorists to speculate that an apparatchik in the Bush administration highjacked the film in post-production and instructed

Warner Brothers to produce a “why we fight” conclusion for theaters. Klein suggests a more banal but no less evil explanation when she raises the specter of a disaster-capitalism-culture industry complex:58

The homeland-security sector is also becoming increasingly integrated with media corporations, a development that has Orwellian implications….The creeping expansion of the disaster-capitalism complex into the media may prove to be a new kind of corporate synergy, one building on the vertical integration that became so popular in the Nineties. It certainly makes sound business sense. The more panicked our societies become, convinced that there are terrorists lurking in every mosque, the higher the news ratings soar, the more biometric IDs and liquid-explosive-detection devices the complex sells, and the more high-tech fences it builds. If the dream of the open, borderless “small planet” was the ticket to profits during the Clinton years, the nightmare of the menacing, fortressed Western continents, under siege from jihadists and illegal immigrants, plays the same role in the new millennium. (Klein 2007b: 58)

The culture industry, Klein warns, is evolving. Beyond selling us products or even consumerism itself, films like Legend now push corporatism, that unholy “mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations,” which the neoconservative moment appropriates

57 The alternate ending can be viewed at: http://www.firstshowing.net/2008/03/05/must-watch-i-am- legends-original-ending-this-is-amazing/. 58 Nick Turse uses the term “military-industrial-entertainment complex.” See Turse, Nick (2008) The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives. New York: Metropolitan Books. 95

Christianity to help sanctify (Klein 2007a: 86). Legend may fail to induce panic or nightmares because its CGI villains are unconvincing (a popular criticism). Nevertheless, it delivers verbatim the chilling neoconservative agenda of a neoliberal utopia of unfettered disaster capitalism justified by the fundamentalist “knowledge” of an apocalyptic Christian teleology.

Legend and Children herald a new phase in disaster films, one related to what Gill

Branston, in his reading of Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow (2004), calls “issue event blockbusters.”59 Instead of exploring the representability of a hot button political issue like climate change, however, Legend and Children operate as political allegories of the Anglo-

American neoconservative moment.60 If, as Ian Buchanan writes, “all texts are political allegories, symbolically working through and provisionally resolving a variety of social and cultural anxieties,” then these two films do so with the social and cultural anxieties provoked by the disaster-capitalism complex (Buchanan 2006: 61). It is no exaggeration to say that Legend and Children could not resolve these anxieties more differently.

Žižek applauds as a “solution” the floating boat at the end of Children, which he reads as a metaphor for cutting one’s roots. Reminiscent of all emancipatory struggles, the boat represents the utopian moment of separation from an oppressive social dimension. Children’s unmoored boat contrasts with Bethel, the literal shining city upon a hill in Legend. Children posits utopia as

59 See Branston, Gill (2007) “The Planet at the End of the World: ‘Event’ Cinema and the Representability of Climate Change.” New Review of Film and Television Studies. 5:2, 211-229. 60 Maurice Yacowar provided the first formalist taxonomy of the disaster genre. Yacowar’s study lists eight basic types of disaster films: natural attack, the ship of fools, the city fails, the monster, survival, war, historical, and the comic. Although Children and Legend borrow elements from some of these genres, neither film could be classifed as one of these types. However, as responses to the contemporary political constellation, they reflect one of the conventions Yacowar highlights: “Often the disasters have a contemporary significance” (Yacowar 2001: 231). For a more recent study of the disaster genre, see Keane 2001. 96

the desire for a radically different social order and the foray into the abyss to create it rather than a realized harmonious social order whose antagonistic sources have been eradicated.

Although the utopian moment is important, we should not forget to register the discipline, collective effort, and individual sacrifices that set the stage for this utopian moment. The foreground story of Children tells the story of a motley crew whose rejection of the unacceptable state of the present—its draconian immigration policies, xenophobic border controls, unwarranted military campaigns, inter- and intra-generational inequities, ecological deterioration, etc.—unites them to carry out the trying and sometimes dangerous work of bringing about an indeterminate, yet radically other future.

One scene in Children, in particular, represents the patient work of revolution. The scene titled “Reasonable Accommodations” on the DVD version takes us into a house of revolutionary-antagonists.61 A gypsy woman named Marichka (Oana Pellea)—a variation of

“Marina,” Russian for “sea”—leads Kee and Theo to a former bank whose residents now include an elderly Georgian couple. The couple feeds Theo and Kee and provides them a much needed respite in their apartment decorated with Byzantine icons of Christ and busts of Lenin. The elderly woman sings to Kee’s baby and presents her with a swan sculpted from an orange.

Sirdjan (Faruk Pruti), a middle-aged man from the Balkans, gifts Theo a much-needed pair of shoes, procures a boat for them to meet the Human Project, and later dies helping them get to

61 It bears mentioning here that Children’s foreground story carefully draws a line between terroristic resistance and “something else” (a recognition of the mutual problem of neoliberal capitalism, an acknowledgment of political stakes, the willingness to die for an indeterminate cause, leftist politics?—at the very least, Children argues for a purely formal gesture of united resistance, something in the vein of Jameson’s cautious call for “anti-anti-utopianism”). Children poses the question, can terrorism ever be an effective form of resistance, or does it always devolve into hysterical provocation where the terrorists get caught up in a zero-sum “war game” of mutual destruction with the state they oppose? The fine line is best represented by the difference between Julian, whose true allegiance as a “mirror” is to the clandestine Human Project, and the rest of the Fishes, whose prime motive—from its idealistic to ignorantly dangerous ranks—is the suicidal Uprising. 97

shore. Here, in the ironic setting of a former English bank now occupied by an aged couple from the former Soviet Union, the Russian Revolution sprouts to life like a weed through the cracks of capitalism’s foundation. This is an image of Jesus the Left can live with, a Christ worth imitating—one who perseveres in working for reasonable accommodations for all.

Ontological Difference and the Catastrophic Real: A Lacanian Intervention into Natural Disaster Studies

It is easy to account for the fact that poor people around the world dream about becoming Americans—so what do the well-to-do Americans, immobilized in their well- being, dream about? About a global catastrophe that would shatter their lives—why? This is what psychoanalysis is about: to explain why, in the midst of well-being, we are haunted by nightmarish visions of catastrophes. -Slavoj Žižek

Natural Disaster Studies and Psychoanalytic Marxism

The first chapter traced an epistemological shift in NDS from the natural to the social sciences. Although this relocation is all but complete, a reliance on empirical methods continues to impede the investigation of the social aspects of natural disasters. The object of study may have moved from the natural to the social world, but positivistic practices remain. Regardless of how qualitative, correlative, and tentative findings in social scientific studies may be, the end goal of methods borrowed from the natural sciences is to obtain objective truths about society.

Although no scholar working in NDS today would categorize their field as a natural science, the ghost of positivism haunts the subdiscipline, and indications that it will be busted once and for all are few and far between.

In the first chapter, I proposed Marxism as an alternative to positivism because it offered several benefits to scholars of natural disasters. I argued that adopting an explicitly Marxist approach to natural disasters specifies their socioeconomic origin and historicizes their occurrences within the context of the capitalist world-economy. It enables scholars to realign the nebulous critical school in NDS to counter the hegemony of the dominant physicalist approach and its political application via neoliberalism. Under the premise that natural disasters are late capitalist disasters, the Marxist paradigm of NDS represents a countercultural and hegemonic approach to the status quo treatment of disasters as technocratic or developmental problems.

I framed the shift to a Marxist paradigm as the formation of a singular historical social science of NDS, with the operative word being “historical.” Historical and scientific knowledge are typically viewed as contradictory, only capable of being reconciled via some metaphysical or teleological system. However, history and science are not antinomious provided that the precepts of positivism are discarded. A singular historical social science of NDS shares the epistemological status as what Wallerstein (following Braudel) calls “interscience,” Jameson conceives as a “unity-of-theory-and-practice,” and others refer to as dialectical thinking. Each of these names refers to a methodology distinct from science proper that does not fall into the twin traps of philosophical grand systems (the 19th century solution) and social scientific disciplinarity

(the 20th century solution).

A science that studies the moving target of historical societies living within an ever changing natural world is not a science in the typical sense of the term. Among other things, a historical social science refuses to collapse what is considered subjective into what is assumed to be objective. It affirms the existence of phenomena like ideology, which are “subjectively objective.” Indeed, natural disasters themselves are subjectively objective phenomena. In this chapter, I draw on Lacanian psychoanalysis to provide a philosophical understanding of the paradox of the “subjectively objective” as it pertains to NDS. Surely, the rich traditions of

Marxist thought have devoted countless pages to explain this paradox via concepts like

“commodity fetishism.” Despite this effort, the social scientific perception of Marxism rests on the contradictory belief that its theories are somehow too scientific and not scientific enough.

That Marxism itself is a positivistic science that over-privileges the role of economic class in shaping people’s vulnerability to natural disasters remains a prevalent belief. Even when it is

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granted that Marxism provides an expansive view of natural events-become-unnatural disasters,

Marxism is often charged with sacrificing intellectual rigor for the sake of political expediency.

To ensure the dialectical sufficiency of a Marxist paradigm shift in NDS, this chapter posits a further qualification to the first chapter’s proposed realignment of the field. By enlisting

Lacanian psychoanalysis, I hope to put to rest the latent positivism and social scientific disciplinarity in NDS and to curb any reservations about the philosophical merits of a singular historical social scientific understanding of natural disasters. Psychoanalysis—which Jameson claims is a “unity-of-theory-and-practice” akin to Marxism—resolves the social scientific dilemma of standing with one foot in subjective and objective waters. It does so by way of a dynamic ontology based on three registers of human experience: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. This tripartite structure supplies Marxism with a philosophical basis for interpreting natural disasters as subjectively objective phenomenon. My revised realignment proposal for the field of NDS appears in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1 Incorporation of psychoanalysis in proposed realignment of NDS.

This visualization, like its predecessor in the first chapter, represents NDS as a Russian matryoshka doll of sorts where precise theoretical approaches mirror more general ones that

“contain” them. This type of diagram has the distinct benefit of positioning psychoanalysis

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within the Marxist paradigm instead of locating it “outside,” which would indicate that the former serves as a mere supplementary theory meant to correct some irredeemable flaw with the latter (the classic move of Freudian-Marxist syntheses). Although positioning psychoanalysis as firmly rooted in the Marxist tradition runs counter to Freud’s conception of their relationship

(and the views of most contemporary psychoanalysts), there is a growing body of work by theorists like Jameson and Žižek that understands psychoanalysis as a vital part of Marxist theory and Leftist politics (what Yannis Stavrakakis calls the “Lacanian Left”).62 By offering a nuanced, dialectical ontology, psychoanalysis fine-tunes more conventional Marxist approaches to studying natural disasters, with the hope of ushering in a truly post-positivist episteme in NDS.

Like the dialectic itself, this chapter develops in three stages. The first looks at how the familiar debate (made infamous by the 1996 Sokal Affair) between postmodern theorists and traditional scientists played out within NDS. The second relies on existential philosophy to overcome the antinomy created when social constructivism is opposed to a positivistic form of realism. This recourse to existentialism may seem anachronistic, but I assure my readers it is fundamental on two accounts. For all its faults (solipsism, voluntarism, etc.), existential philosophy defended ontological difference, a necessary concept for understanding why anything considered natural, such as a disaster, is inescapably political. Where most antecedent theoretical movements on the Continent dismissed existentialism and ontological difference as remnants of the Enlightenment tradition’s hubristic humanism, Lacan took up the idea of ontological difference and refined it. Thus, I also draw on existentialism to introduce Lacan’s more complicated conception of ontological difference. The final stage of this chapter outlines how

62 For Freud’s discussion of Marxism and psychoanalysis, see Freud, Sigmund (1989) “The Question of a Weltanschauung.” The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York: W.W. Norton, 783-797. For a recent argument on the inconsistency between psychoanalysis and leftist politics, see Parker, Ian (2007) “Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Revolutionary Marxism.” Lacanian Ink. 29: 121-139. Also see, Parker 2004. 102

Lacan morphs this concept into the three experiential registers of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and

Real. A concluding example shows how the categories of a psychoanalytic ontology pave the way for a psychoanalytic Marxist approach to NDS that further clarifies what we mean when we talk about “natural” disasters.

The Deadlock Between Positivism and the “Social Construction” of Natural Disaster

Perhaps the most revealing symptom of the saturation of positivism and positivistic methodologies in NDS is the almost compulsory calls that litter scholars’ papers for more research to be carried out in this or that subfield of study (“This study attempted to rectify the neglect researchers have shown for the psychological effects of losing a family pet in a natural disaster; however, more research should be conducted on the difference between the psychological effects of a cat’s death versus a dog’s...”). Such addendums for further research operate on the positivist assumption that one day in the (far off) future we will finally have accumulated enough research for a full understanding of natural disasters. Of course, the day of

“absolute knowledge,” to borrow a Hegelianism, never arrives. Thus, these calls imply the continuation of disaster research ad infinitum, which effectively means that there is no end to the cultural capital a scholar can accrue from empirical researches of natural disasters. There will always be another branch on the NDS tree to climb.

My cynical (and slightly hyperbolic) account of the field does not intend to write off positivistic studies per se, but to raise a serious concern about their epistemological limitations.

Positivistic studies, albeit tedious, can overturn commonsensical beliefs about certain phenomena. For example, it is a well-known myth—since researchers acquired plenty of empirical evidence to prove it so—that disasters incite panic. Contrary to what we may assume or what disaster films have taught us, people act in surprisingly rational ways in their immediate

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responses to disasters.63 Instead of simply confirming our intuitions, empirical research can yield these kinds of defamiliarizing conclusions. But what cost do we pay for restricting the field of

NDS to the scientistic agenda of empirical research and positivist knowledge? What truths does this delimited research program foreclose from NDS?

From a practical vantage point, the never-ending task of conducting empirical research tends to postpone the decisive moment for action. If another study is always required for a more definitive assessment of a situation, we may find ourselves terrorized by Prufrockian ponderings on whether or not to act on our tentative findings and dare disturb the universe. Furthermore, the

“falsifiability” of any research on the dangers of global warming or a new medication, to take two pertinent examples, is precisely the rationale now adopted by moneyed interests who, it goes without saying, privilege profits over truth (scientific and philosophical). Representatives for the special-interests of Big Oil and Big Pharma hold financial incentives for perpetually questioning the validity of studies carried out by the scientists of regulatory bodies and oversight institutions

(such is the predicament we currently find ourselves in with the truth of the Popperian- poststructuralist position finally unveiled). The relative applicability of empirical research to confirm such-and-such hypothesis aside, an epistemological shift in NDS away from its utter reliance on positivism is a long time coming.

The imbedded positivism of NDS can be partially explained by its roots in the U.S. military’s interest in funding research that accorded with a “demand-capability model,” which

“viewed disasters as external agents that impinge upon a social system’s capacity to meet basic needs” (Webb and Eyre 2000: 11). The military-funded “classical disaster research approach” derived from a larger current in sociological thought in the mid-twentieth century: functionalism

63 See Quarantelli, E.L. (2002) “The Sociology of Panic.” International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Eds. Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes. Oxford: Elsevier Science Ltd., 11020- 11023. http://www.udel.edu/DRC/preliminary/pp283.pdf. 104

(Tierney, Lindell, and Perry 2001: 8-16). Functionalism treats society as an organic whole that can be studied using the same methods employed by natural scientists to understand the

“functioning” of natural phenomenon like ecosystems. It presumes an objective understanding of how social systems “naturally” function during ordinary and extraordinary times. When applied in the field of NDS (what was designated in chapter one as the “physicalist paradigm”), the entire phenomenon of disasters is naturalized. Although functionalism views natural disasters as disruptions to the organic integrity of society—as demands that threaten the capability of society to function normally—this approach fails to consider that disasters have a social origin. In an ironic coincidence of opposites, an organic conception of society produces a mechanistic understanding of how it functions when faced with external agents like natural disasters.64

A decade or so later, a slew of social scientific approaches to organizational and collective response behavior, social psychology, and symbolic interactionism (what, in chapter one was designated, following Smith, as the “behaviouralist school”) widened the scope of this mechanistic approach. Institutes like the Disaster Research School primarily concerned themselves “with describing and explaining how social units—such as households, organizations, and communities—prepared for, responded to, and recovered from disasters”

(Webb and Eyre 2000: 11). Although this research emphasized the social side of natural disasters—“behavioral improvisation, organizational flexibility and adaptation, and structural

64 Here we should recall the discussion of corporatism and disaster capitalism in chapter two. The fact that the military backed the functionalist conception of society as an organic unity is no coincidence. At the height of the Cold War there were other “external agents” besides natural disasters that motivated the military’s research, just as in the midst of today’s War on Terror the Department of Homeland Security, which was formed to deal with terrorism, houses FEMA. The scientific objectivity of functionalism thus conceals a conservative political vision of society as a corporate body consistently threatened by external enemies, whether they be natural disasters or communists with nuclear bombs. The rise of neoconservatism during the Bush administration signals a return to functionalism and a concomitant naturalization of world-historical events. No wonder that it serves as the epistemology of the disaster- capitalism complex and its defenders. 105

emergence during the emergency period”—its empirical methods treated human behavior in quantifiable social units (Webb and Eyre 2000: 11). Such methods remain rooted in a functionalist conception of an organic society despite the messier social scientific findings they deliver. Although conclusions may be correlative and conjectural, the goal of this research is to achieve the positivist knowledge of functionalism proper, even if such a goal is de facto impossible.

As chapter one construed the genealogy of NDS, approaches that considered the role of society in creating natural disasters have gained more and more traction on the physicalist- behaviouralist paradigm in the field. Scholars of what Kathleen Tierney et al. label the

“environmental hazards research perspective,” treat the “natural events system” as distinct from the “human use system.” This separation allows environmental hazards research to explore the joint functioning of natural and human systems in producing natural disasters. Although this perspective takes a step forward in discerning the scope of human complicity in historical contingency, the persistence of the same empirical methods betrays its progress. As Tierney et al. write, “whether as a matter of conscious choice or not, most disaster research reflects functionalist assumptions, in that researchers have sought to understand disaster events in terms of their social-systemic antecedents and consequences” (Tierney et al. 2000: 23). The environmental hazards research perspective differentiates the human from the natural, but continues to be embroiled with the functioning of human systems.

The inability to overcome functionalist assumptions takes center stage in a debate that occurred in the special issue of the International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters,

“What is a Disaster? Six Views of the Problem,” edited by E.L. Quarantelli (Vol. 13.3). In

Kenneth Hewitt’s response to the first five papers (which were presented at a conference he did

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not attend), he argues that although they deal with the social construction of disaster, each replicates the “regime of mechanism and control” (Hewitt 1995: 320).65 In their aping of the natural sciences, each paper excludes what Gary A. Kreps, in his response to Hewitt’s critique, summarizes as “an interpretive (as opposed to positivist) research paradigm that takes seriously the perspectives and actions of threatened populations more directly into account” (Kreps 1995:

350). To counter the “strictly Western, professional stance, concerned with general principles and abstractions, and with formal, essentially governmental organization,” Hewitt proposes that the “frontline of disaster response” garner the testimonies of actual (and often voiceless and/or invisible) victims of catastrophe (Hewitt 1995: 326).66

Although Hewitt correctly shifts the emphasis of NDS to “the social order, or human choice and action within it, rather than mere mechanical processes,” his solution remains as confounding to me as his interlocutors found it (Hewitt 1995: 320). Exemplary here is Tom

Horlick-Jones: “Grounding theory in empirical fact is one thing, the provision of a favored status for the ‘testimony’ of victims as a condition of authenticity is quite another” (Horlick-Jones

1995: 357).67 What if, however, grounding theory in empirical fact is the real obstacle to be overcome in NDS, regardless of whether these facts are collected by social scientists compiling data in ivory towers or by embedded researchers conducting fieldwork? Hewitt is right to flee the

65 “Most of the other authors use and take for granted a vocabulary of mechanism and control, and its underlying assumptions, if they struggle to improve its use” (Hewitt 1995: 321). 66 Hewitt’s concern with the roots of NDS in Western administered society is unmistakably in the vein of Adorno and Horkheimer’s “dialectic of Enlightenment,” although his attributed influence remains Foucault (which perhaps tells us more about Foucault’s kindred with the Frankfurt School than Hewitt himself). 67 Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006) represents a perfect example of Hewitt’s testimonial-based, qualitative empirical research methodology. Instead of presenting a deductive argument about the event, Lee and his team restrict themselves to the testimonials of nearly one hundred people from different backgrounds and professions who were implicated in Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. The documentary, like Hewitt’s testimony methodology at large, is thus limited to the experiential knowledge of the group interviewed. Lee attempts to overcome these limitations with 255 minutes of included footage. 107

positivist confines of his discipline, but his attempt to do so runs into familiar problems. Horlick-

Jones’ observation highlights the problem of replacing empirical with experiential knowledge and assessing the validity of oral testimony from the victims of calamity. My objection concerns

Hewitt’s replacement of one form of empiricism (data crunching, flow chart construction, etc.) with another (interviews, surveys, etc.). Although these methods seem as different as apples and oranges, both bear the fruits of positivist knowledge. The former may be more quantitative than the latter, as a scholar like Horlick-Jones might argue, but both rely on “external” observers to conduct research that validates or disproves hypotheses about the natural and/or social

“objective” world. Each approach involves researchers analyzing empirical data and developing generalizations based on it.

The problem does not lie with the self-reflexive assessment of the NDS field by scholars who are critical of its dogged functionalist assumptions (scholars who were referred to as the critical school in the first chapter). The problem lies with how these critics believe in fighting fire with fire, as if empirical knowledge did not, by its very definition, perpetuate functionalist assumptions. So-called “qualitative” social science researchers like the ones Hewitt acclaims, risk unwittingly consolidating the position of their physicalist-behaviouralist peers, who easily dismiss the empirical deficiencies of qualitative research while defending their own tried-and- true or new-and-improved quantitative methodologies. At the very least, the debate between

Hewitt and his interlocutors exposes the deadlock of empirical approaches to the social construction of disaster. As Tierney et al. correctly surmise, “patterns of disaster-related social and organizational behavior cannot be understood fully without considering the cultural assumptions in which they are rooted, the fragmented and shifting institutional framework within which they have evolved, and the social and economic context within which they are

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undertaken” (Tierney et al. 2001: 246). What I cannot fathom is how empirical research methodologies, however qualitative they may be, can be used in any definitive manner to study the socioeconomic and sociocultural spheres that are at once objective and subjective. Empirical studies of culture, whether they be quantitative or qualitative, must give way to dialectical approaches.68

In an attempt to be dialectical and escape the constraints of functionalism, social scientists have recently adopted the interpretative techniques of literary scholars. Scholars like

Gregory Bankoff analyze how discourses socially construct disasters in quite literal ways. In this social constructionist approach to disasters, “the properties of disasters—even such seemingly objective properties as severity or scope of impact—are not inherent in the phenomena themselves but rather are the product of social definition” (Tierney et al. 2001: 17). Bankoff specifically examines how Western discourses on natural disasters “form part of a wider historical discourse about imperialism, dominance and hegemony through which the West has been able to exert its ascendancy over most people and regions of the globe” (Bankoff 2003: 15).

By focusing on the language used by different interest groups and stakeholders to frame disasters, social constructionists problematize value-free scientific discourses on natural disasters. They emphasize that positivist “ways of defining and labeling hazards and disasters…are socially produced through organized claims-making activities,” or, as Noel

Castree writes, that “knowledge of, and action in/on, nature is unavoidably value-laden” (Tierney

68 If the following remarks on conceptualizing the field of disasters and popular culture by Stephen R. Couch are any indication, the prospects for dialectical methods in NDS are not promising: “In my view, there is not enough consensus or conceptual clarity to take a deductive approach in defining the popular culture of disaster. Better to allow definitions to emerge inductively, from studies taking place within the field, and then to enter into discussion as to the advantages and disadvantages of the definitions that emerge” (Couch 2000: 24). Statements like Couch’s reveal the pressing need for the dialectical inquiry of cultural studies to enter the realm of NDS. 109

et al. 2001: 17; Castree 2001: 18). In short, they argue for the impossibility of a strictly objective study of natural disasters.

Although the shift from positivist truth to the social construction of knowledge enacted by scholars like Bankoff seems to take a step in the direction of dialectics, it results in the same crisis of legitimization confronted by Hewitt when he privileges the discourse of victims over the

“regime of mechanism and control.” If all discourses are socially-constructed, then on what grounds can one be more valid than another? What makes a victim’s testimony more valid than an expert’s? What makes non-Western discourses on natural disasters more accurate than

Western ones? What criteria allows us to evaluate different discourses in the first place?

Furthermore, does not the shift from positivism to social constructionism deny the “reality” of disasters, their very real physical existence and consequences? Do we not ignore the actual event when we take recourse in arguments that focus on the linguistic construction of an event?

Critical theorists like Judith Butler label the philosophical stance that reduces reality to a matter of language games (however lethal the results of these games may be), “linguistic idealism.”69 On a continuum of epistemological positions on risk, Wisner et al. refer to the position of linguistic idealism as the “strong constructionist approach, “where nothing is a risk in itself but is a contingent product of historically, socially and politically created ‘ways of seeing’”

(Wisner et al. 2004: 19). (In “Socializing Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics,” Noel Castree calls “hyperconstructivist” the view of nature as social “all the way down.”) Wisner et al. define the opposite end of their risk continuum as the realist approach. At this end, risk is an “objective hazard that exists and can be measured independently of social and cultural processes” (Wisner et al. 2004: 18). As one familiar with social scientific discourses can easily guess, a middle-of-

69 The radical constructivist position “becomes that of linguistic monism, whereby everything is only and always language” (Butler 1993: 6). 110

the-road position exists, the “weak constructionist” approach, “where risk is an objective hazard but is always mediated through social and cultural processes” (Wisner et al. 2004: 19). Fig. 2 depicts Wisner et al.’s risk continuum.

Realist------Weak Constructionist------Strong Constructionist (objective) (objective/subjective) (subjective)

Fig. 2 The continuum of epistemological positions on risk as developed by Wisner et al.

As is the case with all continuum constructions, the antinomious ends represent straw men positions erected more for heuristic purposes than philosophical ones. Adopting the realist approach, for example, places one firmly within the realm of positivist truth. Here, classical economists and unrepentant vulgar Marxists can derive wildly different conclusions based on the same empirical data of “objective hazards measured independently of social and cultural processes.” Although a positivist Marxist may calculate how the “material security and prosperity for some was bought at the systemic production of greater risk exposure for others” and link “the political-economy roots of underdevelopment with determinants of exposure to natural disaster risk,” a price is paid for not taking into account non-empirical factors (Pelling

2003: 5). A member of the IMF or WTO may look at the same data and move to loan undeveloped countries money, a solution that ultimately increases the material security and prosperity of the already developed while systemically producing greater risk exposure for the undeveloped. Strictly empirical approaches that fail to account for the elusive subjective element in risk production—what dialectical Marxists call “class struggle”—buttress such vicious cycles.

On the other end of the risk continuum, adopting a hyperconstructivist position implies an absurd rejection of reality. To paraphrase Christopher Norris’ argument against Jean

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Baudrillard’s essays on the first Gulf War, natural disasters will take place, they are taking place, and they did take place. As Bankoff’s disclaimer to his own constructivist argument indicates, there is strictly speaking no such thing as a “strong constructionist” approach:

All this is not to deny that disasters occur, that their effects are very real, that they create

livelihood-destroying and, at times, life-threatening states that governments, agencies and

peoples everywhere should be concerned about and want to do something to alleviate.

But the attributes that differentiate these phenomena from the wider issues of poverty,

environmental degradation, demographic growth and inequitable socio-political

structures may also be cultural, part of an historical discourse that is embedded within a

distinctly Western construction of knowledge….” (Bankoff 2003: 17)

The phrase “may also be cultural” reveals that Bankoff is a realist who believes that discourses construct natural disasters, but in the weak sense of the term. Discourses produce real effects even if they lack an iota of realism and are ideological through and through. As Stephen Biel, from the vantage point of the media studies subfield of NDS, accurately summarizes, “disasters are not mere constructs, fictions, wholly self-referential media contrivances that ignore the reality of human pain in favor of the ‘reality’ of exciting programming. Neither, however, are they extricable from language and other forms of representation” (Biel 2001: 4).70

If two antinomious ends are unfeasible, intuition tells us that the answer must lie somewhere in the middle. Wisner et al., although broadly realist, also predictably rely on a weak constructionist position. Yet, upon second consideration, the “weak constructionist” solution is no solution at all, but a mere repetition of our initial problem with positivism and the functionalist paradigm. For inevitably, once one argues that natural disasters are real and that

70 From the vantage point of literary studies, the hyperconstructivist position is better known as poststructuralism or postmodernism, with the founding text being Jean-François Lyotard’s (1979) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: Minnesota. 112

they can be known empirically, one relegates discourse analysis to the confines of empiricism.

Cultural understandings of disaster are thereby judged as accurate or not based on some kind of empirical standard of truth. The only options for a weak constructionist scholar remain vulgar

Marxism (where empirical truth contradicts false ideology), behaviouralism (where positivist truths about society contradict errant human behaviors), victim testimonials (where fieldwork empiricism contradicts dissociated empiricism), or primitivism (where non-Western knowledge contradicts Western positivism).71 The trick of positivist appropriations of constructionist arguments involves a doubling of empiricism. Weak constructionism does not derive from empiricism’s limited knowledge of the role of social structures in constructing disasters.

Empirical methods are not used to study actual disasters while social constructionist methods are deployed to understand human responses to them. Rather, weak constructionism implies that

“real” disasters can be known empirically and so can the social discourses we have constructed to interpret them. Scholars use the same epistemological foundation to study the effects of organized claims-making activities about disasters that they use to study disasters themselves.

If the position of strong constructionism is untenable and the compromise position of weak constructionism remains positivist, the only logical option to break out of the empirical deadlock is to overcome the antinomy between realism and constructionism proper without accepting a synthetic position (recall that an analogous move was made in chapter one against

Smith’s call for a compromise between behaviouralism and radical structuralism). But if natural

71 The latter solution, of course, is not positivist but New Ageist. One can also imagine a complimentary solution to primitivism like that of deep ecologists who would contradict Western discourses by returning to the biodiversity of nature. In deep ecology positivism merges with New Ageism as the knowledge of the tribe is replaced by the “knowledge” of Nature, that other primitive Other. A more reasonable position might be that of political ecologists who contradict Western discourses with sustainable development. On a related note, risk theorists’ critiques of modernity and industrial society represent one other possible constructivist position (where a second more complete modernity contradicts an incomplete first one). See Tierney et al. 2001: 16-21 for a discussion of emerging theoretical perspectives in NDS. 113

disasters and the risks they entail are neither solely constructed nor independent of social and cultural processes, then what exactly is their ontological status? Economist Philip Mirowski offers a fruitful way to answer this question. Fig. 3 reprints a schematic that he developed to illustrate four broad metanarratives of “possible configurations of the Natural and the Social in

Western thought” (Mirowski 1994: 11). (I have included the names he associated with these positions as points of reference, not contention.)

1. The Natural and the Social are identical in a. every respect (extreme reductionism) b. laws (Churchland) c. epistemic methods (Glymour, Cartwright) d. metaphorical structure (Schumpeter) 2. The Natural and the Social are disjunct but individually lawlike due to a. epistemic status (Windelband, Rickert, Weber, Kuhn) b. ontological status rooted in psychology (Dilthey, Taylor) c. purposes (Habermas, Dreyfus) 3. The Natural is objectively stable, whereas the Social is patterned on it but is not stable, implying a. a sociology of collective knowledge (Durkheim, Mannheim) b. sociology as epistemology (Douglas, Bloor, Shapin) 4. The Natural and the Social are both unstable and hence jointly constructed as mutually supportive a. out of interests (Latour, Haraway, actant-network theory) b. out of practices (modern pragmatists, Hacking, Rouse) c. out of will (Nietzsche, Foucault) (Mirowski 1994: 11)

Fig. 3 Permutations of the Natural and the Social in Western Thought

It is tempting to read Wisner et al.’s risk continuum onto Mirowski’s schematic, with realism representing position one, strong constructionism filling position four (especially 4c), and weak constructionism taking positions two and three; however, I find the very premise of a risk continuum misleading because there exists a fundamental divide between position one and the others, which is highlighted by position two’s claim that “the Natural and the Social are disjunct.” As soon as the autonomy of the Social is acknowledged, then the entire game changes,

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so to speak. In declaring that the Natural and the Social are identical, position one essentially dismisses the existence of the Social. Although positions two through four differ to the degree that they grant an autonomous existence to the Social, these positions agree that the laws governing the Social cannot be reduced to those determining the shape of the Natural. Put differently, these latter three positions qualitatively differ from position one because they acknowledge one of the core concepts of philosophy: ontological difference.

In this section, I have declared my skepticism of the second and third position’s approach to the Social, arguing that their assumption of a stable Natural order allows positivistic methods to enter through the backdoor to guide studies of the Social that I claim follow a different logic altogether and therefore require their own dialectical methodology. Although one would not be off the mark in declaring chapter one a defense of position 4a, I have in the current section also problematized position four. Before returning to Mirowski’s schema to iron out this apparent contradiction with the aid of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the necessity of premising NDS on the basis of ontological difference must first be demonstrated. Ontological difference is a tricky concept, at once simple and difficult to understand, and it behooves us to clarify its meaning and establish its importance before reconfiguring the relationship between the Natural and the Social along psychoanalytic lines.

“The Missing Element is the Human Element”: The Necessity for Ontological Difference

Broadly speaking, ontological difference is the philosophical term for the difference between beings and Being, between entities that exist and the horizon of meaning of their existence, the fact that beings exist versus the what of their existence (in traditional metaphysics their “essence”). Martin Heidegger, the philosopher most famously associated with the concept, distinguishes science from philosophy via ontological difference. Science concerns itself only

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with beings and conducts what Heidegger calls ontic inquiry, which includes all manners of investigation that are divorced from the properly ontological question of Being. According to

Heidegger, in science “what should be examined are beings only, and besides that—nothing; beings alone, and further—nothing; solely beings, and beyond that—nothing” (Heidegger 1993:

95). By dealing with what is ontic only, scientists ignore or even repudiate ontological difference. The modern mode of scientific inquiry forecloses the question of Being and the domain of ontology which instigates philosophical inquiry.72

Having established that science deals with physics, and nothing besides, further, or beyond, Heidegger identifies philosophy with metaphysics since the “metaphysical question

[concerns] the Being of beings” (Heidegger 1993: 108).73 In traditional metaphysics (classical philosophy) the Being of beings has always implied a dualistic or double ontology. That is, philosophers have posited the world of ontic things while asserting that the essence of these entities lies elsewhere in a metaphysical sphere (in the Platonic realm of Forms, God, etc.). There is the sensible world of entities and then there is some kind of supra-sensible world where the essence of these entities resides. Against the metaphysical baggage of this tradition, Heidegger brings ontological difference back down to earth, so to speak. Instead of a “maximal” difference between the totality of beings and a metaphysical realm beyond them, Heidegger posits a

“minimal” difference between beings and nothing. For Heidegger, ontological difference names the difference between an entity and the void of its existence. Instead of the completeness of an

72 On the relationship between philosophy and ontological difference, Heidegger writes, “we call it the ontological difference—the differentiation between being and beings. Only by making this distinction— krinein in Greek—not between one being and another being but between being and beings do we first enter the field of philosophical research” (Heidegger 1927: unpaginated). 73 Heidegger’s succinct definition of metaphysics is unsurpassable: “Metaphysics is inquiry beyond or over beings, which aims to recover them as such and as a whole for our grasp” (Heidegger 1993: 106). 116

entity being found in its infinite essence, a being is finite, incomplete, and ready to slip back into the void of nothingness at any moment.74

Heidegger distinguishes the “nothing” that accompanies beings from the concepts of

“nullity” or “nonbeing” found in science and traditional metaphysics, respectively. The

“nothing” implies the prior existence of a specific entity that, although ontic, introduces ontological difference: Dasein (“being-there”). Without Dasein, there are only beings; there is no difference between beings and Being, which is to say, without Dasein no minimal difference can exist between a being and the void. “Nothing” is not possible without Dasein’s presupposed existence (hence Heidegger’s reference to man as the “lieutenant of the nothing”) (Heidegger

1993: 106). Without Dasein, only the senseless positivity of beings exists (which is precisely the object of scientific inquiry).

The implications of introducing Dasein into the ontological mix are manifold. First,

Dasein must be distinguished from other beings, or as Heidegger claims, “Dasein is a being that does not simply occur among other beings. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that in its Being this being is concerned about its very Being” (Heidegger 1993: 53). It follows that if

Dasein is different because it is concerned about its Being, then Dasein is essentially a philosophical being. Indeed, Heidegger writes that “metaphysics belongs to the ‘nature of man.’

It is neither a division of academic philosophy nor a field of arbitrary notions. Metaphysics is the basic occurrence of Dasein. It is Dasein itself” (Heidegger 1993: 109). Finally, if Dasein is philosophical/metaphysical, then the finitude of human beings grounds ontological difference.

If/when humans become extinct, ontological difference will disappear. Therefore, only Dasein,

74 As Žižek puts it, “the difference between beings and their Being is simultaneously a difference within beings themselves; that is to say, the difference between beings/entities and their Opening, their horizon of Meaning, always also cuts into the field of beings themselves, making it incomplete/finite” (Žižek 2006: 24). 117

the philosophical being, introduces the cut between beings and the ontological horizon of their meaning. For Heidegger, “Being is given only if the understanding of being, hence the Dasein, exists,” or, as he states elsewhere, “Being itself is essentially finite and reveals itself only in the transcendence of Dasein which is held out into the nothing” (Heidegger 1927: unpaginated;

Heidegger 1993: 108).

To make the rather dense philosophical concept of ontological difference clear, let’s refer to a piece of pop cultural detritus, an award-winning advertising campaign that attempts to reframe a certain chemical company with a dubious track record as a responsible corporate citizen and world leader in addressing the problems of sustainability, climate change, and Third

World development. In June 2006, the second largest chemical manufacturer in the world, the

American-based multinational corporation Dow chemical company, launched the “Human

Element” advertising campaign “built upon the concept that the missing element of the Periodic

Table is the Human Element—which when applied to chemistry, can help solve the world’s most pressing problems.”75 In the most famous television spot for Dow’s campaign, National

Geographic-style images and music accompany a narrator’s voice that speaks of the moment when we discover that “life is elemental.” The voice says:

…we look around and see the grandness of the scheme—sodium bonding with chlorine,

carbon bonding with oxygen, hydrogen bonding with oxygen. We see all things

connected, we see life unfold, and in the dazzling brilliance of this knowledge we may

overlook the element not listed on the chart. Its importance so obvious, its presence is

simply understood. The missing element is the human element, and when we add it to the

equation the chemistry changes. Every reaction is different. Potassium looks to bond with

75 See “Employee Communications Campaign of the Year 2008” at http://www.prweekus.com/Employee- Communications-Campaign-of-the-Year-2008/article/100574/. 118

potential, metals behave with hardened resolve, and hydrogen and oxygen form desire.

The human element is the element of change. It gives us our footing to stand fearlessly

and face the future. It is a way of seeing, it gives us a way of touching—issues,

ambitions, lives. The human element—nothing is more fundamental, nothing more

elemental.76

The advertisement concludes with a series of shots of people from across the globe accompanied by the graphic of a boxed “Hu” to signify the “human element” on the periodic table. Although the schmaltzy humanism of this advertisement brings to mind inspirational posters found in the workplace, I wish to use it to illustrate the philosophical notion of ontological difference.

Dow’s advertisement begins with the purely ontic world where Dasein is not only absent but non-existent, where all that exists are the elements and their bonding together to produce other elements (sodium with chlorine, carbon with oxygen, etc.). It is only with the introduction of Dasein, which the advertisement refers to as the “human element,” that the chemistry changes and the reactions become different. The human element introduces the concepts of time and fear, or to be more precisely Heideggerean, time and the fundamental mood of anxiety which Dasein experiences when the “nothing” is revealed (in the phenomenological approach developed in

Being and Time, Heidegger equates this “nothing” with death; Dasein experiences anxiety when it contemplates the prospect of its own death). Only with the appearance of Dasein can there be a future to fearlessly or angst-riddenly face. Without Dasein, elements merely and timelessly exist in their utter idiocy. The human element is “fundamental” precisely because it introduces an ontological horizon in which these ontic beings have a history, carry a meaning, and can possibly be nihilated.

76 Dow’s “Human Element” advertisement can be viewed at http://www.dow.com/hu/. 119

The advertisement also displays Heidegger’s Hegelian roots. It refers to the human element as the element of change, meaning that with the emergence of Dasein comes the purposeful negations which comprise human history and separate it from the blind positivity of natural evolution. For example, when combined with the human element, metals can be manipulated to form steel (in the pathetic fallacy committed by the commercial’s metaphorics,

“metals behave with hardened resolve”). The course of human history, by altering the makeup and reactions of otherwise natural beings, interrupts the course of natural history when elements bonded for no purpose and in no predetermined direction. In a deceptively complex footnote in his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Alexandre Kojève conceives of the ontic-ontological divide by distinguishing between the dialectical ontology of “Man and History” and the nondialectical ontology of “Nature.” He writes:

Hegel’s reasoning is certainly correct: if the real Totality implies Man, and if Man is

dialectical, the Totality itself is dialectical…The classic argument: everything that is, is in

one and the same manner, should not have obliged Hegel to apply one and the same

ontology (which, for him, is a dialectical ontology) to Man and Nature, for he himself

says (in the Phenomenology) that “the true being of man is his action.” Now, Action

(=Negativity) acts otherwise than Being (=Identity) is. And in any case there is an

essential difference between Nature on the one hand, which is revealed only by Man’s

Discourse—i.e., by another reality than that which it is itself—and Man on the other

hand, who himself reveals the reality which he is, as well as the (natural) reality which he

is not. Therefore it seems necessary to distinguish, within the dialectical ontology of

revealed Being or Spirit (dominated by Totality), a nondialectical ontology (of Greek and

traditional inspiration) of Nature (dominated by Identity), and a dialectical ontology (of

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Hegelian inspiration, but modified accordingly) of Man and History (dominated by

Negativity). (Kojève 1969: 213)

The entrance of Dasein, the human element, and ontological difference, divides ontic Nature, where every being simply is (as Kojève says “is in one and the same manner,” i.e. is identical with itself), from ontological History, where every being is given a meaning through human discourse and action (and where, as Kojève would say, it can be negated). The ontology of

Nature is nondialectical because although elements bond and react, they do so in the absence of an ontological horizon. Ontology only becomes dialectical and therefore historical when Man, the agent of ontological difference, appears. Only Dasein reveals a Being of beings through its discourse and actions. When Man is erased “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea,” the ontological horizon of Being, too, will vanish (Foucault 1994: 387).

Furthering our reading of the advertisement as a Heideggerean allegory is Dow’s claim that the dazzling brilliance of scientific knowledge may lead us to overlook the presence of the all important human element. Heidegger would surely concur that Dasein should not be overlooked lest Being be forgotten and ontological difference denied; however, he would disagree that Dasein is obvious or that its presence is simply understood, especially in our modern epoch. In a technocratic world dominated by instrumental reasoning, Dasein—and consequently ontological difference—is precisely what we fail to grasp. A world enframed by techné consistently reduces humans to their ontic existence (they are “reified,” in traditional

Marxist terminology). “We usually lose ourselves altogether among beings in a certain way,”

Heidegger writes. “The more we turn toward beings in our preoccupations the less we let beings as a whole slip away as such and the more we turn away from the nothing” (Heidegger 1993:

104). Considering Dow’s history of environmental and human rights violations (its production of

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Agent Orange, its connection with the Bhopal disaster, its manufacture of the pesticide DBCP which sterilized workers), the commercial seems to be apologizing for the company’s own devastating forgetfulness of Being.77 In devoting all its time and energy to developing science and technology (symbolized by the periodic table), Dow has disregarded the most fundamental element of all, the human element. Of course, Dow’s campaign is not Heideggerean, but a public relations ploy to improve the company’s image in order to appease and attract more conscientious investors. That solving the world’s most pressing problems and doing what is best for the human element, in all of its global diversity, cannot be reconciled with the unbridled accumulation of profits throws the sincerity of advertisement into question.

Before taking leave of the “Human Element” commercial to apply the concept of ontological difference to the study of natural disasters, I want to examine how Dow’s elegant demonstration of Heidegger’s philosophy of ontological difference falls apart. The ways in which the commercial fails to recognize ontological difference offer an enlightening lesson on ideologies that pervade discourses on phenomena, like natural disasters, that raise the problem of how we configure the relationship between the Natural and the Social.

The ideologies expressed in Dow’s commercial revolve around the mutually exclusive ways “elemental” functions. The narrator claims that the meaning of life is revealed for each of us when we learn that “life is elemental.” But in what way is life elemental? Is “elemental” to be taken literally as in “life is composed of basic chemical elements,” or figuratively as in “life is primary” or “life is the primary force”? The difference between the literal and figurative definitions of “elemental” leads to two contradictory but nonetheless ideological worldviews: scientism and metaphysics.

77 See “Dow Accountability Network” at http://www.thetruthaboutdow.org/. 122

In the literal reading of “elemental,” “life” is a biological concept with no inherent meaning or telos. All life up to and including human life is simply composed of basic chemical elements, a fact that the commercial represents by having the human element appear in the same form as the other elements of the periodic table. The “Hu” graphic suggests that there is no ontological difference between humans and other ontic beings (as the advertisement stresses, there is nothing more elemental than humans). That humans are comprised of the same elements as other life forms is a scientific fact; however, science falls into the ideological trap of scientism when it reduces humans to their ontic composition, thereby denying ontological difference.

Scientism explains ontological phenomena like politics, history, and human agency scientifically

(capitalism mirrors the “political economy of Nature,” free will is an illusion produced by the neural system, etc.). What scientism represses—that not all phenomena specific to humans can be explained scientifically—often returns in dangerous ideological guises like eugenics, social

Darwinism, sexism, and other naturalized political antagonisms.

Ecology serves as a dominant species of scientism in today’s world of global warming.

The ecological movement often frames ontological difference as the “original sin” against Earth,

Mother Nature, Gaia, etc. According to this ideology, environmental problems began when we saw ourselves as separate from Nature and not connected to it like everything else. The paradigm of “human exemptionalism” has led us to forget our place within the biosphere. We have forgotten that we, too, are made up of the same stuff and take part in the same natural systems as everything else. It follows that we should rediscover our natural position so that the ecological balance of Earth can be restored. In a literal reading of “elemental,” the advertisement intimates that although Dow is a chemical company whose very existence requires tinkering with Nature

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(often with deleterious effects), the company remains an environmental advocate dedicated to sustainability.78

This reference to ecology brings us to the other ideological trap expressed by Dow’s commercial, the ideology of replacing the ontological horizon of meaning with a metaphysical system (what Heidegger calls “ontotheology”). The close reader will notice that Dow’s advertisement never recognizes an autonomous ontic level of existence. From the very beginning of the ad, elements bond and beings are connected in a grand unfolding scheme. The arché and telos of “Life” bestows value upon otherwise meaningless entities and their mindless combinations. A figurative reading of “elemental” actually uncovers two metaphysical systems at work in what proves to be a very muddled advertisement. One relies on interpreting “life is elemental” as “life is primary/the primary force.” The other focuses on the primacy of human life: “the human element—nothing is more fundamental, nothing more elemental.”

The advertisement begins with the claim that each of us experiences a eureka moment when we discover that “life is elemental.” In the aforementioned literal reading we learn a basic lesson of biology, but as anyone who has taken Bio 101 or watched a nature documentary will be familiar with, the brute fact that life is elemental is often accompanied by an unscientific awe and wonder at its complexity and very existence (to paraphrase Heidegger, why life at all, and why not rather nothing?). In reading “life” as “primary,” we discover a concept of life in excess to the scientific fact of life. The remainder of life beyond its ontic denotation

“transfunctionalizes” it into the anchor of a metaphysical system where all things, including the

78 By denying ontological difference, scientism (what this chapter considers synonymous with positivism), deep ecology, and capitalism alike, reduce humans to their ontic existence and naturalize the role they play within closed (ahistorical) systems. All advertisements in a capitalist economy, by their very form, naturalize the market and reify our roles within it. In a humanistic Marxist reading, Dow lets slip that they do not privilege humans over the chemicals they produce. To the contrary, each is a commodity to be exchanged on the market. 124

human element, fulfill a telos (to put it in Žižek’s terminology, “life” becomes a sublime object of ideology).

Instead of finite humans providing life with an ontological meaning, the advertisement presents a metaphysical meaning of life (“Life” with a capital “L”). It argues that Life has an eternal essence where, for example, the evolution of life consummates the teleology of the universe. The key to the fine distinction between ontology and metaphysics lies with ecology’s hidden reference to the transcendental subject of romanticism. Fittingly, footage of an erupting volcano accompanies the discovery that “life is elemental” in Dow’s commercial. The “Human

Element” ad stages the romantic notion of the sublime, where witnessing the awesome power of the force of nature assures humans of their transcendental existence.79 In other words, for Life to buttress an entire metaphysical system of meaning, we must assume the existence of a transcendental subject beyond the historically-bounded existence of Dasein. This transcendental subject guarantees that Life is primary eternally, while Dasein may only believe it is primary finitely.

The ecological movement thus operates on two different levels that merge in a dialectical coincidence of opposites. On the one hand, ontological difference does not exist in ecology

79 In The Critique of Judgment, Kant argues for the transcendental status of humans by introducing the concept of the “dynamical sublime.” The dynamic sublime occurs when we discover our moral incommensurability while witnessing incommensurable environmental events like natural disasters (from a secure position of course). In section SS28, Kant writes: Bold, overhanging, and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunderclouds piled up the vault of heaven, borne along with flashes and peals, volcanoes in all their violence of destruction, hurricanes leaving desolation in their track, the boundless ocean rising with rebellious force, the high waterfall of some mighty river, and the like, make our power of resistance of trifling moment in comparison with their might. But, provided our own position is secure, their aspect is all the more attractive for its fearfulness; and we readily call these objects sublime, because they raise the forces of the soul above the height of vulgar commonplace, and discover within us a power of resistance of quite another kind, which gives us courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of nature. (Kant 2004: unpaginated) Žižek explains that “Kant interpreted our fascination by the outbursts of the power of nature as a negative proof of the superiority of spirit over nature: no matter how brutal the display of ferocious nature is, it cannot touch the moral law in ourselves” (Žižek 2008a: 96). 125

because it is a science, its inquiry is strictly ontic. Disinterested, it studies ecosystems, of which humans are simply a part. On the other hand, ontological difference does not exist in ecology because it is romantic-religious; its inquiry is based on the metaphysical presupposition that Life, like God in monotheistic religions, is the essence of existence, the metaphysical placeholder that ensures the divine plan of existence. Without Life and the harmonious order it instates (the fragile “web” of life), existence would be meaningless. It would simply entail the accidental formation of organisms out of the non-organic matter of the universe.

The figurative reading of “elemental” allows metaphysical meaning to slip through the backdoor of what is supposed to be an ontic vocation, the science of ecology. The metaphysical baggage of the term “life”—which we come across whenever its biological referent turns into a referent for everything, the totality of existence, the universe—ensures that ecology is always minimally prescriptive. Although a science, ecology harbors an agenda, buttressed by the metaphysical belief that Life is primary, to conserve and preserve the biosphere. Ecology as ontic inquiry easily translates into a religiously-intoned ecology. Either way, ontological difference goes unrecognized.80

The second metaphysical system implied by a figurative reading of Dow’s commercial centers on the discrepancy between the narrator’s declaration that life in general is elemental versus human life specifically being elemental. Both claims, of course, can be true in a literal reading, but when “elemental” is read figuratively to mean “primary,” they become mutually

80 Žižek connects the religiosity inherent within ecology with the ideology of the politics of fear. Ecology, as another instantiation of the politics of fear: has every chance of developing into the predominant form of ideology of global capitalism, a new opium for the masses replacing declining religion: it takes over the old religion’s fundamental function, that of having an unquestionable authority which can impose limits...although ecologists are all the time demanding that we radically change our way of life, underlying this demand is its opposite, a deep distrust of change, of development, of progress: every radical change can have the unintended consequence of triggering a catastrophe. (Žižek 2008b: 439-440) 126

exclusive claims. How can life be primary, a claim of biocentrism, when nothing is more primary than the human element, an anthropocentric claim?

These contradictory claims can only be reconciled by connecting the evolution of life with the metaphysical logic of the Great Chain of Being. The Great Chain of Being argues that humans are the destiny of the grand scheme of life, of its highest, most perfect realization. In the scheme of the Great Chain of Being, every element bonds in an evolutionary telos that culminates with the appearance of human life on the planet. Instead of the feeble creature Dasein

(Heidegger’s “shepherd of being”) who supplies beings with meaning, the Great Chain of Being assures that Man is the ultimate meaning of beings, the be-all and end-all of existence. This humanist reading of the commercial fits well with DOow’s corporate mission statement “to constantly improve what is essential to human progress by mastering science and technology.”

What Dow finds primary is not ontological difference, the theoretical discoveries of science, the life of the biosphere, or even the diversity of human life. What is essential for Dow is human progress. Since progressivism has historically fulfilled the role of a capitalist ideology—progress for some at the expense of the many—Dow’s humanism can be understood as a metaphysical cover for its business interests.

When put together, the multiple readings of Dow’s “Human Element” advertisement form a semiotic square (see Fig. 4). The white quarter represents scientism and derives from a literal reading of “elemental,” as used in bio-chemical descriptions of life. By contrast, the shaded areas represent metaphysical readings. The lightly shaded gray areas consist of the two metaphysical systems implied by the commercial: ecology and humanism. Both stem from reading “elemental” figuratively in the sense of “primary.” Ecology “transfunctionalizes” life in general into a guiding metaphysical principle (“Life”), whereas humanism does the same but

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with human life in particular. Scientism, humanism, and ecology share a common denial of ontological difference. Each turns ideological when it naturalizes and/or essentializes what is thoroughly social and historical—what Heidegger would call humanity’s being-in-the-world.

Fig. 4 Interpretations of Dow’s “Human Element” commercial mapped out in a Greimasian semiotic square.

The final region appears a shade darker to distinguish philosophy from the metaphysical systems of humanism and ecology. Philosophy is metaphysical in the Heideggerean sense of the term. It requires a conception of ontological difference to “get off the ground.” By concerning itself with the open question of Being, i.e. the ever changing ontological horizon of meaning for beings, philosophy opposes the closed ontologies of scientism and religion (in its sacred ecological and secular humanist guises).

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Philosophy, like science, is thoroughly materialist: it reads “element” in the ontic sense of the term to refer to beings divorced from their ontological meaning. Philosophy differentiates itself from science by accounting for how the “fundamental” human element (Dasein) introduces ontological difference into existence. By its very definition, science restricts itself to studying the brute facts of the earth and the universe. For philosophy, ontological difference creates a world of meaning that is “mapped” onto the ontic universe. As soon as ontological difference is established, the natural universe enters into a dialectical relationship with an ever-changing historical cosmos of meaning. The term “socionature,” which has been adopted by emergent interdisciplinary fields like political ecology, environmental sociology, and critical geography, captures this dialectical relationship succinctly.81

The Hysterical Subject of Natural Disasters: Psychoanalysis and Ontological Difference

The philosophical concept of ontological difference affirms the disjuncture between the

Natural and the Social without forcing NDS scholars to choose sides. We do not have to pledge allegiance to positivists who seek natural explanations for all phenomena or postmodernists who argue for the absolute social construction of reality. Natural disasters present a perfect case for the need to acknowledge ontological difference. It is no coincidence, therefore, that we discover these socionatural phenomena in the writings of Heidegger’s heirs, the intellectual movement of existentialism.

In the chapter of Being and Nothingness, “The Origin of Negation,” Jean-Paul Sartre addresses the ontological status of natural disasters. At first glance, Sartre’s reasoning follows

81 “Socionature” is primarily used to express the dual idea that social systems cannot be divorced from the natural systems that they depend on while natural systems, especially within the context of the modern world of mass industrialization, are not only socially constructed by our epistemological frames but physically reconstituted by human development. In many respects, “socionature” is the social scientific version of the philosophical concept of ontological difference. With the appearance of Dasein, ontic Nature becomes ontological socionature. 129

the dictates of common sense: in order for a naturally occurring phenomenon to be constituted as disastrous, a witness must be present who designates it so. Without the agency of a witness, a geological upheaval merely modifies “the distribution of masses of beings” (Sartre 1984: 39).

The example of the oxymoronic natural disaster allows Sartre to establish the ontic-ontological divide, the split between the raw, factual material of being and the structuring concepts upon which this ontic matter is perceived in a phenomenological sense. As a good existentialist, Sartre believes—contra empiricists, positivists, cognitivists, etc.—that the phenomenal is irreducible to the ontic level of being. As soon as there exists a phenomenal subject, there exists the possibility for the natural redistribution of matter to become a disastrous matter.

In Albert Camus’ novel The Plague, Bernard Rieux, a doctor turned chronicler, fulfills the role of phenomenal witness by recording the events surrounding a natural disaster. The novel, which is comprised of Rieux’s chronicle, memorializes the catastrophic effects of a plague that strikes the Algerian city of Oran. Rieux’s chronicle provides an ontological meaning for what is otherwise a simple modification of the distribution of masses of beings. Writing of himself in the third person, Rieux explains the plague in juridical terms: “summoned to give evidence regarding what was a sort of crime, he has exercised the restraint that behooves a conscientious witness”

(Camus 1948: 272). In bearing witness to the plague, Rieux provides a purportedly natural event with a social meaning. Under his watchful eyes, a natural plague becomes an unnatural crime.

Like Rieux, Sartre cannot help but provide ontic phenomena like natural disasters with a social meaning. In his description of the ontic-ontological divide qua natural disasters, he goes so far as to charge the ontological with an a priori value. Instead of a purely formal difference/gap between the ontic and the ontological, Sartre premises his version of ontological difference on the quality of “fragility,” “a certain probability of non-being for a given being under determined

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circumstances” (Sartre 1984: 39). When Sartre’s phenomenal subject introduces ontological difference, the contingency of ontic being transforms into the necessity of ontological fragility.

Although Camus most famously posits “absurdity” as the a priori value of the ontological, the character Tarrou in The Plague pictures the world as fragile when he becomes cognizant of ontological difference. Tarrou states, “what’s natural is the microbe. All the rest— health, integrity, purity (if you like)—is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter” (Camus 1948: 229). Tarrou distinguishes the ontic natural microbe from the unnatural ontological human will. The human will struggles to produce values out of brute existence and to sustain these fragile values—the “all the rest” of human history—from receding back into the void. From a phenomenological-existentialist perspective, the plague’s appearance reveals the fragility of our historical transformations of the natural world.

If it accomplished nothing else, the twentieth-century philosophical movement of existentialism rescued the concept of ontological difference for a late capitalist and techno- scientific world that sought to pitch it in the dustbin of history. At the same time, in what is perhaps the defining feature of existentialism, thinkers like Sartre and Camus posited an a priori value to ontological difference, to what is strictly-speaking an empty gap between the ontic and the ontological. It is as if contrary to the axiom that “existence precedes essence,” existence first required a minimally-defined ontological horizon of meaning. For Sartre and Camus, existence needs to be fragile or absurd; otherwise, it is meaningless.

Existentialists slip from purely declarative ontological statements into evaluative ones because they hold an inflated view of the agency of phenomenal subjectivity, which is not unlike the transcendental subject of romanticism found in, of all places, Dow’s advertisement. In order to define the ontological horizon of meaning for everything as fragile, Sartre’s witness must

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accept full responsibility for everything in this fragile world, up to and including the weather.

Sartre hyperbolically asserts, “it is necessary then to recognize that destruction is an essentially human thing and that it is man who destroys his cities through the agency of earthquakes or directly, who destroys his ships through the agency of cyclones or directly” (Sartre 1984: 40).

Sartre creates an either/or situation: either science has disenchanted the universe completely and no one is responsible for any aspect of it, or the world is fragile and each of us is responsible for every aspect of it. For the existential subject confronting catastrophe, fragility defines the ontological status of things like cities and ships regardless of whether these artificial entities are destroyed indirectly by wildfires during a lightning storm or directly by enemy fire during wartime. Either way, it is humans who lay waste to their fragile creation.

Despite Sartre’s insistence via the example of natural disasters on the non- or pre- judicative comprehension of the non-being or nothingness of beings like cities, ships, vases, etc., his conception of fragility commits a short circuit between ontologically designating certain phenomena as disastrous and holding humans ethically responsible for the real effects caused by these phenomena, regardless of whether or not we created them. Considering Sartre is a modern philosopher who arrives on the intellectual scene well after the scientific revolution, it is highly ironic that his specious argument is analogous to one spun by medieval clerics. In Strategies of

Sanity and Survival: Religious Reponses to Natural Disasters in the Middle Ages, Jassi Hanska emphasizes how the concept of “natural disaster” did not exist for premodern peoples, who regarded all tribulations, from plagues to wars, as “equal and caused by similar reasons” (Hanska

2002: 12). Although Hanska acknowledges the existence of proto-scientific explanations of natural disasters, he claims that medievalists predominantly equated the causa of sin with the deleterious effectus of natural disasters. The reasoning provided by this logic of causality allowed

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for sermons of the cessante causa cessat et effectus topos: since human sin is responsible for causing natural disasters, these tribulations will end when humans cease to sin (Hanska 2002:

131-132).82

In Sartre’s modern version of this medieval logic, humans are culpable for the effects of disasters by their very existence as witnesses to a fragile world. Sartre’s example of the ontologically precarious status of earthquakes and cyclones—intended to establish the nothingness that haunts being, the negation that “tears us away from [the] wall of positivity which encircles us”—ends up equating the phenomenal perception of disaster with our ethical responsibility for it (the modern conundrum of the imbedded reporter/photographic journalist/documentarian is related: when am I ethically compelled to cross the line between transcribing events and directly intervening in them?) (Sartre 1984: 43). Sartre uses the same formal logic as his medieval counterparts to ontologically ground the effects of natural disasters in human agency. The difference is one of content: religious leaders in the Middle Ages invoked the causa of human sin while Sartre opts for the causa of human perception (as if simply looking were a sin!).

The key to the connection between modern philosopher and medieval cleric is that both endow the subject with a transcendental status. The transcendental subject eliminates the mediatory role of what Lacanian psychoanalysts refer to as the symbolic order, “the social world of linguistic communication, intersubjective relations, knowledge of ideological conventions, and the acceptance of the law (also called the ‘big Other’)” (Felluga 2003: unpaginated).

Although the Sartre of Being and Nothingness and medieval metaphysicians correctly raise the

82 Camus represents this metaphysical logic in The Plague with the figure of Fr. Paneloux, who delivers a sermon of the cessante causa cessat et effectus type (Camus 1949: 84-91). After witnessing the horrific death of Othan’s young son, Paneloux preaches a credo quia absurdum est sermon, thus signifying a shift from a medieval form of belief to a modern one (Camus 1948: 198-211). 133

issue of culpability in the case of natural disasters, they cannot conceive of responsibility within the political realm of the symbolic order. They wind up with a transcendental subject, whether monadic sinner or witness, who converts natural disasters into moral affairs.83

Lacan avoids the morality traps presented by the transcendental subject by de- essentializing ontological difference. Lacan’s notion of the symbolic order reestablishes the purely formal gap between the ontic and the ontological (the gap that existentialists collapsed by introducing values like fragility and absurdity). The symbolic order introduces a distinctly psychoanalytic conception of ontological difference. Peter Dews explains that “Lacan defends a notion of the sheer ‘transcendence’ of the symbolic order in relation to all that is natural. In other words, he rejects the view that language, the symbolic order, can be rendered as emerging progressively from preceding levels of reality” (Dews 2005: 211). Contrary to evolutionist theories that aspire to scientifically describe the development of all things human, Lacan argues that the emergence of the symbolic universe of humans represents an irrevocable “cut” from the preceding levels of reality, the all that is natural. “As soon as the symbol arrives,” Lacan writes,

“there is a universe of symbols” (qtd. in Dews 2005: 211).

With the arrival of the symbolic universe, regardless of the Archimedean point adopted by disciplines like sociobiology, we can no longer describe the whole of reality through science

(which is the subject-less discourse par excellence). Evolutionary theory may provide us with an accurate account of the biological history of earth, but it harbors a teleological perspective when applied to culture. Lacan rejects its aspirations to explain the symbolic universe of humans in

83 Roland Barthes’ response to The Plague, “La Peste: annales d'une épidémie ou roman de la solitude,” claims that the novel propagates an “anti-historical morality” and a “politics of solitude.” The absence of history and a vision of collective politics, according to Barthes, stems from Camus’ deployment of a nonideological and nonhuman metaphor to represent the German Occupation. John Krapp sums up the importance of Barthes' critique: “it inaugurated the now notorious charge that Camus's novel, by virtue of its naturalizing evil, signifies a refusal to depict human existence as part of a historical equation” (Krapp 1999: unpaginated). 134

favor of an ex nihilo “creationist” perspective. He mimes Genesis, “In the beginning was the

Word, which is to say, the signifier” (Lacan 1992: 213). Of course this signifier is not the word of God, but the origin of a dimension of human history irreducible to scientific explanation.

Although the word is of this world, one could accuse Lacan’s symbolic order of fighting transcendental fire with transcendental fire. Is he not guilty of substituting the transcendental subject of existentialism with the structuralist notion of a strictly formal, all-determining, transcendental symbolic order? In Seminar VII, Lacan senses this objection and nods to historical materialism to ground the symbolic order in the material world. He states, “production is an original domain, a domain of creation ex nihilo, insofar as it introduces into the natural world the organization of the signifier” (Lacan 1992: 214). Instead of humans speaking out of the blue,

Lacan suggests that the roots of the symbolic order lie in production.84 The claim that homo symbolicus springs from homo faber, however, serves only to deflect the charge that his notion of the symbolic order is a form of transcendental contraband. The symbolic may have originated in production, but once it emerges it takes on a life of its own. In Marxist terms, the superstructure cannot be reduced to the base.

How exactly then is “psychoanalytic structuralism” more complicated than structuralism proper? How does Lacan avoid the twin traps of positivism—explaining the symbolic order as an effect of production—and transcendental structuralism—explaining the world as an effect of linguistic structures (i.e., social constructionism)? Yannis Stavrakakis poses the problem this way: “we have to locate an exteriority which serves as the cause of our social constructions, an exteriority which is in itself unrepresentable but constitutive of the play of representation. What

84 Lacan’s argument anticipates the work of Raymond Williams: “signification, the social creation of meanings through the use of formal signs, is then a practical material activity; it is indeed, literally, a means of production. It is a specific form of that practical consciousness which is inseparable from all social material activity” (Williams 1977: 38). 135

can this element be?” (Stavrakakis 1999: 67). For Lacan, this elemental remainder is the Real,

“the irrepresentable X on whose ‘repression’ reality itself is founded” (Žižek 1999: 74). In a first move, Lacan argues that the sudden appearance of the transcendental universe of symbols shears human history from natural history. But this shearing is incomplete because the symbolic order is non-totalizing. In a second move, Lacan argues that an irrepresentable X escapes the reach of the symbolic order. This repressed remainder paradoxically founds the symbolic order while being its effect. Thus, for Lacan, the symbolic order has a semi-autonomous existence from material reality. Once the “letter” arrives, the symbolic order takes on a life of its own. However, the quasi-transcendental status of the symbolic order does not imply that reality ceases to exist, that it is merely an effect of representation. The Real names that which escapes our representations of reality, and it grounds psychoanalysis in the material world.

Not surprisingly, the materialist concept of the Real invites comparisons with a philosophical predecessor: the concept of Nature. For example, we find the transcoding of the

Nature/Culture divide in philosophy into the Real/Symbolic divide in psychoanalysis in Žižek’s

Tarrying With the Negative, where he writes, “‘Nature’ qua Real remains the unfathomable X which resists cultural ‘gentrification’” (Žižek 1993: 129). If Nature, in general, represents one form of the Real, then natural disasters seem to be perfect instantiations of Lacan’s concept.

Indeed, Stavrakakis makes this very connection. “The unpredictability and severity of natural forces,” he writes, “have prompted people since time immemorial, to attempt to understand and master them through processes of imaginary representation and symbolic integration. This usually entails a symbolization of the real of nature” (Stavrakakis 1999: 87). Of course, the symbolization of the Real of nature fails; this “moment of the meaningless event, of the accident or the disaster that destroys a well-ordered social world and dislocates our certainties,

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[represents] a crisis in which we experience the limits of our meaning structures” (Stavrakakis

1999: 67). The event of a natural disaster, qua catastrophic Real, remains an unfathomable X in which we experience the limits of our symbolic order.

Camus’ The Plague narrativizes the symbolic failure to integrate the catastrophic Real.

Rieux’s comment, “a pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure,” directly comments on this failure as do the novel’s consistent references to the plague as “unaccountable,” “unexplainable,” and “unthinkable” (Camus 1948: 35). The character Cottard ponders that “you had to look closely and take thought to realize that plague was here. For it betrayed its presence only by negative signs” (Camus 1948: 129). He cites the absence of dogs as an example of how the plague betrays itself only negatively.85 The characters’ “negative representations”—how they describe the plague as something indescribable—combine with “negative signs” like the absent canines to reveal the plague as a crisis. They indicate the irruption of a meaningless event into what was once a well-ordered (albeit colonialist) social world.86

Where a psychoanalytic reading of Camus’ novel requires an eisegetic interpretation, a more exegetic illustration of the catastrophic Real comes from the contemporary heir of the existentialist literary tradition, José Saramago. The opening scene of his novel Blindness presents a psychoanalytic allegory of the Symbolic and Real. Blindness opens with a traffic light, the

85 Stavrakakis uses canines to illustrate “the gap between our harmonious fantasmatic constructions of nature and nature itself, between reality and the real” (Stavrakakis 1999: 63). He cites the Roosevelt administration’s conservation efforts, which were predicated upon a notion of nature without wild predators like wolves and coyotes (Stavrakakis 1999: 64). The socio-symbolic space of the “National Park” was constructed by excluding the Real of nature as embodied by these carnivorous canines. The story of Yellowstone wolves provides a perfect psychoanalytic lesson of how the Real returns in the form of what our symbolic constructions exclude. The wolf population disappeared from the park by the 1930s. In the 1990s, scientists noticed that the Aspen tree population was dwindling. A survey of the surviving Aspens uncovered that they were around seventy-years old. Scientists concluded that the absence of wolves allowed the elk to eat young Aspen trees unencumbered. Thus, the symptom (the disappearing Aspen) revealed the repressed Real (the wolves), and the paradoxical presence of an absent cause (the Real qua absent wolves), in turn, exposed the limits of the Symbolic (National Park). 86 For an interesting discussion and defense of Camus against the charge of colonialism, see Carroll, David (2007) Albert Camus the Algerian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice. New York: Columbia. 137

epitome of the modern symbolic order: “The amber light came on. Two of the cars ahead accelerated before the red light appeared” (Saramago 1997: 1). Other signs immediately follow:

“the sign of a green man,” “the white stripes painted on the black surface of the asphalt,” and

“the sign allowing the cars to go” (Saramago 1997: 1). After establishing the existence of the symbolic order, Saramago demonstrates its “transcendence” from empirical reality by disassociating the sign of the crosswalk from what it is meant to represent. He writes, “there is nothing less like a zebra, however, that is what it is called” (Saramago 1997: 1). In the final sentence of the opening paragraph, these arbitrary signs replicate into a metropolis-wide system.

The delay between lights “has only to be multiplied by the thousands of traffic lights that exist in the city and by the successive changes of their three colours to produce one of the most serious traffic jams or bottlenecks, to use the more current term” (Saramago 1997: 1). By mentioning that traffic jams are now referred to as “bottlenecks,” Saramago exhibits an awareness of the symbolic order’s impermanence and malleability. The emphasis on signs and how they function in the opening paragraph represents the Symbolic.

After laying the foundations of the symbolic order, the novel’s opening scene stages its collapse, at least for one man (the rest of the novel extends this collapse to the entire symbolic order). When the traffic light turns green, one car fails to move because blindness strikes its driver. There is “nothing to justify this upheaval” of the Real, and it leaves the man helpless.

“It’s a disaster, yes a disaster,” he says (Saramago 1997: 2, 3). The Real—“an impenetrable whiteness [that] covered everything”—takes the form of a disaster precisely because it derails the man’s relation to the symbolic order (Saramago 1997: 5). The blinded man struggles to

“retain inside his mind the final image captured, a round red light at the traffic lights” (Saramago

1997: 2). Saramago repeats the image of the stoplight to stress that the man’s sudden onset of

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Imaginary

Symbolic

Real

blindness represents a disruption of the Symbolic by the Real: “from now on he would no longer know when the light was red” (Saramago 1997: 3). From now on the man will no longer participate in the symbolic order he once knew for he has fallen victim to the catastrophic Real.

Saramago’s novel fails to be a perfect Lacanian allegory because it leaves out the psychoanalyst’s third order of human experience: the Imaginary (this despite blindness being a typical symbol of ideology, which as Althusser famously said, “represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence”). The Imaginary joins the Real and the Symbolic to comprise the three interrelated registers of human existence posited by

Lacanian psychoanalysis (see Fig. 5).

Fig. 5 The Three Registers of a Psychoanalytic Ontology

Saramago’s interest, which is characteristic of existentialism in general, lies with exploring what happens when humans directly confront the brute real of existence without symbolic mediation

(the Hobbesian “war of all against all,” the state of exception of martial law, biopolitics, mortality, etc.). However, Lacan contends that such a confrontation with the Real can only be fleeting at best. When we face the Real we do so with the armor of imaginary representations and the weapons of symbolic integration. 139

The inability to directly confront the traumatic kernel of the Real explains why Lacan distinguishes the Real from reality. What we experience as “reality is not the ‘thing itself,’”

Žižek explains, “it is always-already symbolized, constituted, structured by symbolic mechanisms” like linguistic communication, ideological conventions, social institutions, and the law (Žižek 1999: 73). Lacan equates these mediating mechanisms of the symbolic order with reality itself. The problem is that the symbolic order/reality ultimately fails to fully cover the

Real, and “this real (that part of reality that remains non-symbolized) returns in the guise of spectral apparitions” (Žižek 1999: 73-74). The Imaginary register then represses the symbolic deadlock of the Real with all sorts of fantasies and ideological specters. Plagues may kill or blind millions on occasion, but society—indeed the “reality” of the symbolic order—always suffers from a “plague of fantasies” (the title of one of Žižek’s books).

Having introduced Lacan’s tripartite structure, we can now understand the transcendental subject’s reaction to the catastrophic Real as an imaginary projection of moral inferiority

(medievalists), superiority (Kant), or responsibility (Sartre). We can also distinguish this fantastic, moralistic pose from the response of the Lacanian subject to the catastrophic Real. The subject of psychoanalysis cannot help but respond socially since the individual human animal does not achieve subjecthood until it assumes the language, mores, and laws of the symbolic order (as Bruce Fink puts it, “the subject is a relationship to the symbolic order”) (Fink 1995: xi- xii). The Lacanian subject exists within the knot of the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic, not just the Real and Imaginary.

Yet, the symbolic order cannot provide the subject with a satisfactory response to the

Real. As noted before, the symbolic order is incomplete; it is not an all-determining matrix of meaning that assigns everything its proper place. Because of the lack in the symbolic order, the

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subject cannot fully assume a symbolic identification or mandate, and is therefore reduced to asking basic ontological questions like, “Why am I what you (the big Other) are saying that I am?...Why am I what I’m supposed to be, why have I this mandate?” (Žižek 1989: 113). In other words, the lack in the symbolic order hystericizes the subject. Unmoored from its symbolic identity, the hysteric typifies the elementary subject position according to psychoanalysis—a void, lack, hole in the symbolic fabric. According to psychoanalysis, “the status of the subject is hysterical” because each subject embodies the general lack in the symbolic order (Žižek 1989:

181).

In premodern times when people instead of commodities were fetishized, the gap between subject and symbolic identification was less pronounced. People were “more immediately” the role they played in society. The discourse of the hysteric could only emerge with the advent of modernity and the expansion and intensification of capitalist reification. The psychoanalytic account of subjectivity only makes sense within the historical context of the rise of capitalism and the other modern phenomenon that melts all that is solid into air: science. In an interview with Josefina Ayerza, Žižek states that “the whole point of Lacan is that the subject of psychoanalysis is a hysterical subject, a hysterical subject in reaction to the scientific discourse which was founded through Cartesian Science” (Žižek 1992: unpaginated). Science, the discourse of the “Real of nature,” disassociates the ontic from the ontological, the brute facts of existence from their ultimate meaning. Put in psychoanalytic terms, science introduces the ontological difference between reality (the symbolic universe) and the Real (that which escapes the Symbolic). Only with the metaphysical link between the Symbolic and Real severed can natural disasters be understood as “natural” and symbolic identity be experienced as anything but. Only in a scientific world can the hysterical subject of natural disasters emerge.

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In The Plague, Rieux’s split reaction to the signifier “plague” exemplifies the hysterical confrontation with natural disaster. Camus writes that the word “plague” “conjured up in the doctor’s mind not only what science chose to put into it, but a whole series of fantastic possibilities utterly out of keeping with that gray and yellow town under his eyes…” (Camus

1948: 37). On the one hand, Rieux understands the plague scientifically as a disease that infects the body, emits certain symptoms, kills, etc., and he assumes his symbolic duty as a doctor to care for the disease-stricken. On the other hand, when gazing down upon the town of Oran he is anything but certain about the “unrest, the precariousness, of all things in this world” (Camus

1948: 37). The Lacanian point is that Rieux is not only anything but certain, he is nothing but this uncertainty. When assuming the symbolic identity of a doctor-scientist, Rieux can affirm

Descartes’ assertion, “I doubt, therefore I am,” but as a hysterical-psychoanalytic subject, Rieux is only able to claim, “I am only insofar as I doubt” (Žižek 1993: 69). Because this doubting creates an overwhelming sense of anxiety, the subject—what Tony Meyers aptly calls the

“vanishing mediator between nature and culture”—flees to a whole series of fantastic possibilities utterly out of keeping with the flashing traffic lights and gray and yellow towns of the symbolic order (Meyers 2003: 36).

The failure of the modern subject to fully assume its symbolic identity results in hysteria, but this failure does not mean that we can blame society in the abstract for irruptions of the Real like natural disasters. Lacan’s displacement of the location of the transcendental from the subject to the symbolic order does not imply a diffusion of responsibility for these types of events.

Instead, responsibility lies with each individual subject. Bruce Fink writes, “this specifically

Lacanian subject is not so much an interruption as the assumption thereof, in the French sense of the term assomption, that is, an acceptance of responsibility for that which interrupts, a taking it

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upon oneself. For Lacan claims that ‘one is always responsible for one’s position as subject’”

(Fink 1995: 47). Unlike the existential subject who is responsible for everything that happens to the symbolic order, the Lacanian subject holds a specific, but nonetheless radical, responsibility for how it identifies with and interrupts the symbolic order.87 The ethical challenge is to create, within each hysterical subject of natural disasters, a communal sense of complicity. The political challenge is to shape the symbolic order in a way that facilitates this communal sense of complicity.

Lacan and the Political Economy: Interrogating the Catastrophic Real(s)

We can finally return to Mirowski’s schema of the Natural and Social to see how

Lacanian psychoanalysis resolves the problem of acknowledging ontological difference without subscribing to social constructionism. As was previously noted, a broad conception of ontological difference can be found in all of the positions outlined by Mirowski except the first one. As long as the Natural and the Social are understood as disjunct, some form of ontological difference is implied, regardless if one views the Natural and the Social as individually lawlike

(2), the Natural as objectively stable while the Social is unstable but patterned on the Natural (3), or the Natural and Social as both unstable and jointly constructed (4).

Over his career as a lecturer on psychoanalysis, Lacan’s thought evolves through these stages. His early teachings in the 1950s and 60s assume Mirowski’s second position, understanding the Natural and Social as disjunct but individually lawlike (as was typical of the structuralist movement predominant at the time). When Lacan replaces the Natural with the Real,

87 On the issue of natural disasters and responsibility, Ronald Daniels, Donald F. Kettl, and Howard Kunreuther argue that “everyone cannot be responsible for everything and, as the government’s stumbling response to Katrina showed, someone has to be responsible for each important step…government inevitably plays a role in setting the rules of the game: how to set the right incentives and sort out the roles of private players” (Daniels, Kettle, and Kunreuther 2006: 11). There is no contradiction between this view and the psychoanalytic understanding of responsibility. 143

he situates it as an objectively stable element that renders the “patterns” of the Social incomplete and inharmonious (Mirowski’s third position). Only in the 1970s is the Real itself conceived as unstable and its relationship to the Symbolic “mutually supportive” (Mirowski’s fourth position).

As Stavrakakis explains, “the real cannot be conceived of independently of signification: it is revealed in the inherent failure/blockage of all signification…[and] can only be thought as the internal limit of the symbolic order” (Stavrakakis 1999: 68). Strictly speaking then, it is imprecise to discuss the Real in any substantial sense of the term, say as a plague or other natural disaster. As an abstract concept with a strictly technical definition, “the Real remains immanent to the Symbolic, its inherent traumatic core,” confirms Žižek. “There is no Real without the

Symbolic, it is the emergence of the Symbolic which introduces into reality the gap of the Real”

(Žižek 2008b: 319).

For Lacan, then, the Real and the Symbolic are both unstable and hence jointly constructed as mutually supportive, but not strictly out of interests, practices, or will. Recall

Mirowski’s fourth position (Fig. 6):

4. The Natural and the Social are both unstable and hence jointly constructed as mutually supportive a. out of interests (Latour, Haraway, actant-network theory) b. out of practices (modern pragmatists, Hacking, Rouse) c. out of will (Nietzsche, Foucault)

Fig. 6 Mirowski’s fourth configuration of the Natural and Social in Western Thought

The permutations Mirowski lists under position four deliberately or purposely construct what is

Natural in opposition to what is Social, and vice versa. The disjuncture between the Real and the

Symbolic suggests a much more unconscious process of joint construction. Lacan avoids the trap of social constructionism by theorizing what escapes our constructions of reality: the traumas, deadlocks, antagonisms, and unintended consequences that overdetermine how our interests,

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practices, and will power construct reality. To update Mirowski’s schema by adding a fifth position, I call “ideology” that which mediates the joint construction of the Real and Symbolic:

5. The Real and the Symbolic are both unstable and hence jointly constructed as mutually supportive out of ideology (psychoanalytic Marxism)

Fig. 7 A Lacanian configuration of the Natural and Social in Western Thought

Although this position is derived from Lacanian psychoanalysis, I list “psychoanalytic Marxism” as its representative to emphasize that an encounter with the Real at the limit or failure of the

Symbolic is “the moment of the political par excellence” (Stavrakakis 1999: 73). The political struggle for hegemony takes place on the ideological terrain where the Symbolic and the Real become codeterminate.

The purely formal nature of the Lacanian Real makes the above position sound more abstract than it actually is. The Real does not share the immaterial status of Kant’s das Ding an

Sich (Thing-in-Itself) and Derrida’s différance. Despite their faint family resemblance, the Real carries an ontological weight that Kant’s metaphysical and Derrida’s linguistic concepts defer to other philosophical investigations. Although insubstantial and dependent on the Symbolic to emerge, Lacan’s concept refers to a register of human experience with serious, physical consequences in the socionatural world. The Real does not simply encompass the limits of signification, as a Derridean might have it, but the limits of a thoroughly materialistic symbolic order. Nor when Lacan refers to the Real as “the impossible,” does this impossibility take the form of a transcendental limit of human experience that remains the same throughout time and space (Mirowski’s third position) (Lacan 1998: 45). The Real is only impossible for a specific people living within a specific time and place.

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That the Real is not only ontological but historical marks a second major difference between it and its immaterial second cousin concepts. To emphasize that the notion of a transcendental Real is errant, Jameson goes so far as to equate the Real with capital “H” History.

He states, “it is not terribly difficult to say what is meant by the Real in Lacan. It is simply

History itself” (Jameson 1988b: 104). Jameson transcodes the psychoanalytic notion of the Real into the Marxian conception of world history. The historical real “is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its ‘ruses’ turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention” (Jameson 1981: 102). Lacan’s pronouncement that “the gods belong to the field of real” refers to the premodern conception of history as a permanent cycle of traumatic events that cannot be explained, and which therefore trigger what we now recognize, from the perch of our scientific worldview, as so many mythologies (Lacan 1998: 45). The gods populated the untranscendable horizon of premodern peoples, who used them to explain painful and grisly events beyond their comprehension and control (a narrative, I should add, which enjoys a residual and profitable existence in contemporary industries like insurance and religion).

In what Max Weber describes as the “disenchantment of the world” during the advent of modernity, the gods of the Real fell from the sky to be replaced by a different agent of causality and engine of change: History. The Real on either side of the epochal sea change, from its premodern realm in the heavens to its modern domain in History, remains an abstract “ground and untranscendable horizon” that “can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force” (Jameson 1981: 102). However, the modern replacement of

History for myth entails that the Real is subject to historical variations that can be known and explained, even if such knowledge may only be posited retroactively in significations that re-

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present it. As an ultimately open ontological horizon, the Real can even be altered by great human effort on rare occasions. “The Lacanian Real is not some eternal essence, but strictly an historical Real,” Žižek clarifies. “Not a Real that is simply opposed to quick historical changes, but the Real that generates historical changes while at the same time being reproduced by these changes” (Žižek 2000b: 194).88 The modern, psychoanalytic conception of the Real sets limits to historical epochs that are inexorable but nevertheless subject to change. Its status is therefore thoroughly political.

That Jameson and Žižek discuss the Real in such similar terms is no coincidence considering that both are self-identified Marxists. By drawing from Lacanian psychoanalysis, their work has refined Marx and Engels’ timeless insight that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.” Jameson and Žižek use Lacan’s concept of the Real to emphasize the abstract structure of the class struggle, thus divorcing it from its orthodox reference to the conflict between bourgeoisie and proletariat during the period of the Industrial

Revolution (lest we mistake this specific historical manifestation for the “real” thing). Sean

Homer recognizes this mutual endeavor at philosophically fine-tuning the Marxist tradition when he observes that “the real for Žižek is precisely Jameson’s understanding of history as radically unsymbolizable and at the same time constantly threatening to erupt in our symbolic universe as the violence of class conflict and social struggle” (Homer 2006: 77). For Marxist social critics, the historical Real and class struggle are synonymous.

A few years ago, Žižek introduced a schematization of the Real to allay the confusion that this concept breeds when it is deployed to explain phenomena residing on different levels of

88 Žižek addresses the historicity of the Real in a conversation with Glyn Daly: “Of course, Real-as- impossibility is an a priori, but there are different constellations as to how you deal with the Real….The point is that the Real-as-impossible allows for radically different social constellations….What all epochs share is not some trans-epochal constant feature; it is, rather, that they are all answers to the same deadlock” (Žižek and Daly 2004: 74, 75, 76). 147

abstraction. He arrived at a solution to the problem of treating the Real as a homogenous concept by engaging in what Glyn Daly calls a “certain ‘deconstruction’ of the real-symbolic-imaginary triad, such that each of these terms should be regarded as fractally integrated or mapped onto each other” (Daly 2004: unpaginated). Instead of a singular ur-conception of the Real, Žižek contends that:

There are three modalities of the Real: the “real Real” (the horrifying Thing, the

primordial object, from Irma’s throat to the Alien), the “symbolic Real” (the real as

consistency: the signifier reduced to a senseless formula, like quantum physics formulas

that can no longer be translated back into, or related to, the everyday experience of our

life-world), and the “imaginary Real” (the mysterious je ne sais quoi, the unfathomable

“something” on account of which the sublime dimension shines through an ordinary

object). The Real is thus effectively all three dimensions at the same time: the abyssal

vortex that ruins every consistent structure, the mathematized consistent structure of

reality, and the fragile pure appearance. (Žižek 2004: 102-103)

Schematizing the Real in relation to the other two registers of human experience posited by

Lacanian psychoanalysis allows us to account for the seemingly contradictory uses of the term to refer to subjective traumas, gods, natural disasters, History, the antagonism of class struggle, etc.

Far from a theoretical sleight of hand, Žižek’s multiplication of the Real remains faithful to the dynamic of the Real-Symbolic-Imaginary triad. Lacan insists that none of these registers appears at any given moment by itself, that always they interpenetrate each other. Žižek takes Lacan’s triad to its logical conclusion when he maps out the dialectical combinations of its individual registers.

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Daly’s synopsis of Žižek’s theorization includes a few other examples of the three incarnations of the Real which are pertinent to the present argument. For example, Daly associates the “shattering experience of negation” of the real Real with what are commonly perceived as natural disasters: “the meteors, monsters and maelstroms of trauma” (Daly 2004: unpaginated). In this chapter, I have referred to the incarnation of the real Real in the form of natural disasters as the catastrophic Real. The plague that grips Oran in Camus’ novel and the blindness that strikes in Saramago’s narrativize the real Real.

Yet, in substituting “natural disaster” with “catastrophic Real,” we cannot forget the lesson of chapter one, namely that natural disasters serve only as the trigger that sets in motion the actual catastrophe that derails or even destroys a symbolic order: the capitalist disaster. It makes sense, then, to distinguish the grisly, brute, and meaningless “natural” part of a natural disaster (the real Real), from the exacerbating role of the capitalist economy in a natural disaster

(the symbolic Real). Where the former is a phenomenal and individualistic experience of disaster, the latter is structural and communal.

Žižek sometimes refers to the symbolic Real as the scientific Real to capture a sense of

“the anonymous codes and/or structures (vanishing points, space curvature, scientific formulae and so on) that are meaningless in themselves and simply function as the basic abstract ‘texture’ onto which (or out of which) reality is constituted” (Daly 2004: unpaginated). This interpretation of the symbolic Real as a scientific description of ontic reality also befits an interpretation of the symbolic Real as an economic description of the financial universe of the global Market.89 In the era of postmodern, late capitalism, “the new cyber stock markets—with their constant digital output—can be seen to function as a kind of oracular network of sacred information that in an

89 “In socioeconomic terms, one is tempted to claim that Capital itself is the Real of our age” (Žižek 2000a: 276). 149

abstract and indifferent way determines the fate of the Enrons, the Worldcoms and entire national and international markets,” indeed of every single person (Daly 2004: unpaginated).90

Describing the stock market as “a kind of oracular network of sacred information” sounds a bit overdrawn, but when we consider that the Market overdetermines our fortunes—financial and otherwise—to a degree that it now fulfills the role the ancients assigned to Fate, perhaps this description is not such a stretch after all. As the symbolic Real of our times, the capitalist world- system provides a perfectly disastrous complement to local irruptions of the catastrophic Real (if earthquake = real Real, then classquake = symbolic Real).

In The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America, Kevin Rozario analyzes the American culture of calamity within the historical context of the capitalist Real, although he does not use these psychoanalytic terms. Instead of the symbolic Real of our times, he refers to the “catastrophic logic of modernity,” of which the “rhymes and rhythms of modern

(capitalist) development” comprise a significant part (Rozario 2007: 10).91 He understands the

90 “Marx described the mad, self-enhancing circulation of capital, whose solipsistic path of parthenogenesis reaches it apogee in today’s meta-reflexive speculations on futures. It is far too simplistic to claim that the spectre of this self-engendering monster that pursues its path disregarding any human or environmental concern is an ideological abstraction and that behind this abstraction there are real people and natural objects on whose productive capacities and resources capital’s circulation is based and on which it feeds like a gigantic parasite. The problem is that this ‘abstraction’ is not only in our financial speculators’ misperception of social reality, but that it is ‘real’ in the precise sense of determining the structure of material social processes: the fate of whole strata of the population and sometimes of whole countries can be decided by the ‘solipsistic’ speculative dance of capital, which pursues its goal of profitability in blessed indifference to how its movement will affect social reality…it is the self-propelling metaphysical dance of capital that runs the show, that provides the key to real-life developments and catastrophes. Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, much more uncanny than any direct pre-capitalist socio-ideological violence: this violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals and their ‘evil’ intentions, but is purely ‘objective,’ systemic, anonymous. Here we encounter the Lacanian difference between reality and the Real: ‘reality’ is the social reality of the actual people involved in interaction and in the productive processes, while the Real is the inexorable ‘abstract,’ spectral logic of capital that determines what goes on in social reality” (Žižek 2008a: 12-13, italics mine). 91 The phrase “catastrophic logic of modernity,” Rozario asserts, “grasps modernization as a quest to make the world more secure (modernity as anti-disaster) through development patterns that move through cycles of ruin and renewal, bust and boom, destruction and construction, producing as their collateral 150

American response to disasters as opportunistic. By focusing on the silver lining of disasters and not their attendant horrors, Americans—in particular, those in power—have viewed disasters as agents of progress, especially with regards to enabling the “quest for endless development and economic expansion that has shaped and defined our world” (Rozario 2007: 26). Americans’ fascination with disaster has been a “crucial ingredient of the modernizing process—enabling, specifically, the corporate reconstruction of American society and the emergence of mass consumer culture,” argues Rozario, while the culture of calamity has offered an “imaginative counterpart to a modern economic and social order governed by processes of creative destruction” (Rozario 2007: 103).

Coming from an American Studies perspective, Rozario’s laudable study of disaster and the making of the modern U.S. seeks to understand the politics and poetics of disaster of our crisis-oriented imagination within a historical framework. He provides a selective history from the seventeenth century to the present of the relationship between aspects of the culture of calamity—religious teachings, mass media sensationalism, etc.—and the modern U.S. political economy. He raises the issue of an erotic dimension of disasters—what Susan Sontag refers to as the aesthetics of disaster—and links our current fascination with disasters to the “conditions of life in a postmodern world” (Rozario 2007: 5). He treads carefully, though, lest he put the cart of culture in front of the horse of production. “While there is analytical value in deploying terms such as ‘hyperreal culture’ and ‘the imagination of disaster,’” he writes, “we must insistently historicize emotional and political responses, paying attention to social fissures and grasping the culture of calamity as a field of conflict rather than simply an expression of a universal modern or postmodern response” (Rozario 2007: 182-183). Our emotional and political responses to

damage myriad social conflicts as well as technological and environmental hazards (modernity as disaster)” (Rozario 2007: 10). 151

disaster do not exist within a vacuum. If we dream of catastrophes and long for spectacles of calamity, this is because we live in a catastrophic world, “a world of systematic ruin and renewal, destruction and reconstruction, where technological and environmental disasters always loom,” i.e. a world shaped by the capitalist Real (Rozario 2007: 6). For Rozario, the world, quite logically, precedes our dreams.

Rozario’s historical focus explains why—although he acknowledges the explanations of evolutionary psychologists and psychoanalytic philosophers about how disasters have become the stuff of fantasies—his comments are brief, skeptical, and largely dismissive. (That he mentions evolutionary psychology in the same breath as psychoanalysis alone shows a fatal misunderstanding of the latter.) On the psychoanalytic interpretation of our libidinal investment in disaster, he writes, “this is all highly speculative, and we should be spending as much time thinking about how the social world shapes unconscious desires as investigating how the unconscious shapes the social world” (Rozario 2007: 6). Rozario’s admittedly cursory assessment suffers from a basic misperception of psychoanalysis, namely that the unconscious is located “inside” like a black box waiting to be recovered by the psychoanalyst from the wreckage of the analysand’s psychic life. In opposition to this popularly held belief about psychoanalysis, Lacan locates the unconscious “outside,” as externalized in the symbolic order.

“The fact that the symbolic is located outside of man is the very notion of the unconscious,”

Lacan writes (Lacan 2006: 392). To investigate unconscious desires is concomitant to thinking about the social world, and vice versa. In the first instance the world may precede our dreams, but once we begin to dream, separating the two becomes exceedingly difficult.

I bring up Rozario’s work to point out that in addition to historicizing instantiations of the real Real within the machinations of the symbolic Real (as I advocated in chapter one), Marxist

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scholars should draw on psychoanalysis to conduct cultural studies of society’s libidinal investments in disasters. To explicate the imaginary Real—perhaps the most important modality for the question of ideology—Daly points to the moment when dreams become nightmares, when “one encounters a particular image of horror-excess” in the dreamworld and “there is an immediate compulsion to turn away and escape back into reality; to wake up” (Daly 2004: unpaginated). Dreams are not the only place where we experience the imaginary Real. The imaginary Real can also appear in the collective fantasy of a waking world, as Žižek argues in his reading of the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001. Although there are critical differences between a terroristic and natural disaster, I believe that the concept of the imaginary

Real at the heart of Žižek’s reading of the WTC attack applies to natural disasters, mainly because we experience both types of disaster in the same hyper-mediated way through the lenses of Hollywood and televised news programming.

Just like an earthquake can double as a classquake, the trauma of the WTC attack was

“doubly inscribed” for many Americans (Daly 2004: unpaginated). The shattering experience of negation that was the event itself—the actual plane collisions and subsequent tower implosions—occurred in the modality of the real Real, but there was also “this dimension of the imaginary Real in which popular fantasies regarding the orgiastic destruction of New York (viz.

Independence Day, Godzilla, Deep Impact to name but a few) seemed to erupt through to reality” (Daly 2004: unpaginated). The imaginary destruction of New York produced by the

Hollywood dream factory made uncanny the actual attack on the Big Apple.92 In the key passage from Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates, Žižek argues that we should:

92 For an extended look at our culture’s fascination with destroying New York City, see Page 2008. 153

…invert the standard reading according to which the WTC explosions were the intrusion

of the Real which shattered our illusory Sphere: quite the reverse—it was before the

WTC collapse that we lived in our reality, perceiving Third World horrors as something

which was not actually part of our social reality, as something which existed (for us) as a

spectral apparition on the (TV) screen—and what happened on September 11 was that

this fantasmatic screen apparition entered our reality. It is not that reality entered our

image: the image entered and shattered our reality (i.e. the symbolic coordinates which

determine what we experience as reality)…the point is not to play a pseudo-postmodern

game of reducing the WTC collapse to just another media spectacle, reading it as a

catastrophe version of the snuff porno movies; the question we should have asked

ourselves as we stared at the TV screens on September 11 is simply: Where have we

already seen the same thing over and over again? (Žižek 2002c: 16)

The media coverage of Hurricane Katrina operated in much the same way as Žižek describes the experience of the WTC attack. Before the levies broke, we believed the destruction of a major

American city to be impossible. Thus we experienced Katrina through the same fantasmatic filter that allowed us to perceive debilitating natural disasters like the 2004 Asian Tsunami as something that takes place “over there,” in Second and Third World countries, but never in the

U.S. Our imaginary projections of disaster entered and shattered our sense of the cloistered, self- satisfied reality of postmodern, late capitalism. Hence Daly’s reference to films in the genre of

Escape from New York: coverage of Hurricane Katrina, like that from the WTC attacks, was from an American perspective reminiscent of the nightmares dreamed up by blockbuster disaster

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films (a subject which the next chapter takes up in the context of the current global financial crisis).93

When the American media establishment encountered an image of horror-excess on

September 11, their immediate compulsion was to turn away and escape back into a fictionalized version of reality. No enlightenend wake up call to the real conditions of the capitalist world- system and its concomitant Third World horrors followed the disaster. Instead, the media encouraged us to take flight to a reality structured by the fantasies and traditional ideological commitments of American society. Again, the televisual experience of Katrina operated in much the same way. What were we witnessing as we watched news footage of black men wading through muddy water waste-high, carrying televisions over their heads, but racist images we had screened countless times before? Scenes of looting, rumors of raping, and reports of the breakdown of law and order provided a ready-made fantasy framework that allowed Americans to escape the true horror of the situation: that the Third World exists right here within U.S. borders. “If what we experience as ‘reality’ is structured by fantasy,” Žižek writes:

and if fantasy serves as the screen that protects us from being directly overwhelmed by

the raw Real, then reality itself can function as an escape from encountering the Real. In

the opposition between dream and reality, fantasy is on the side of reality, and it is in

dreams that we encounter the traumatic Real—it is not that dreams are for those who

cannot endure reality, reality itself is for those who cannot endure (the Real that

announces itself in) their dreams. (Žižek 2006a: 57)

The imaginary Real announced itself on September 11 and August 2005. On 9/11, the supposed

“end of history” achieved by the hegemony of the liberal democratic capitalist order was exposed

93 Žižek makes this observation in “Escape from New Orleans.” http://www.lacan.com/zizfrance2.htm. His commentary on Hurricane Katrina can also be found in his follow-up piece, “The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape Revisted.” http://www.lacan.com/zizfrance3.htm 155

as a lie when the deep-seated discontents with globalization exploded in a misguided, reactionary act of terroristic violence.94 In August 2005, Katrina ended any illusion that this same liberal democratic capitalist order was post-racial, unearthing the profound disparities in wealth and power that persist within the U.S. Instead of confronting the traumatic truths that announced themselves in these raw events, the media establishment reasserted the symbolic coordinates which determine American “reality.” The dominate ideology derealized the imaginary Real, obfuscated the real antagonism underlying the global capitalist universe, and promoted obscene racist fantasies about Arabs and African Americans.

The Lacanian triad of the Real-Symbolic-Imaginary revitalizes the philosophical notion of ontological difference, which is crucial to defend against encroaching scientism on the one hand, and lingering metaphysics on the other. Lacan’s concept of the Real allows us to steer clear of the Scylla of essentializing Nature (the positivist error) and the Charybdis of de-essentializing

Nature to the point where it becomes nothing but a social fabrication (the constructionist fallacy).

His concept of the Symbolic avoids several half-baked ideas from the “qualitative” social sciences like the cognitive world of disaster perception, the noosphere, and bounded rationality, while maintaining the very real existence of the ideological dimension of natural disasters. The concept of the Imaginary affords a view of catastrophic events as imbued with libidinal investments. Charged with all sorts of fantasies, natural disasters transform into spectral apparitions that prevent us from confronting their “real world” ramifications.

Psychoanalysis can help the field of NDS to disentangle reality from the Real in all its modalities—the real Real of extreme natural events, the symbolic Real of the world-system of capitalism, and the imaginary Real of how we perceive the former while living within the latter.

Here psychoanalysis meets up with Marxism, for such a task requires us to recognize the role of

94 See Žižek 2002c: 50-51. 156

global capitalism in overdetermining the conditions in which the real Real becomes catastrophic in the first place and catastrophically interpreted in the second.

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Late Capitalist Disasters as Natural Disasters: Projections of the “Global Financial Crisis”

In ripe Hegelian fashion, then, the social construction of nature is typically mirrored by the naturalization of purely social contradiction. -Mike Davis

Metaphors That Destroy Us

On the morning of October 23, 2008, Alan Greenspan began his testimony on the so- called “global financial crisis” in front of the House Committee of Government Oversight and

Reform.95 After thanking the committee for the opportunity to testify, Greenspan said, “We are in the midst of a once-in-a-century credit tsunami.”96 When the former chairman of the U.S.

Federal Reserve relied on figurative language to describe the crisis, he joined a chorus of metaphor-mad commentators who have compared the floundering economy to a broken car that requires a jump-start, a sinking ship that should be bailed out, a compromised retaining wall that must be shored up, and a cardiac arrest patient whose heart needs a jolt, among others.97

Greenspan’s deployment of a natural disaster metaphor was not original either; everyone from the head of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee Chris Dodd to former Prime Minister of Iceland

Geir Haarde referred to the economic crisis variously as a perfect storm, whirlpool, hurricane, earthquake, tornado, and wildfire.

95 I say “so-called” because the phrase “global financial crisis” sacrifices accuracy for the sake of damage control. As M.I.T. economist Richard Wolff keenly observes: “To call it a financial crisis limits it in ways that make no sense…this crisis comes out of the entire economic system we have here in the United States.…[I]f we keep tinkering at the edges with our monetary system, because we need to call this a financial crisis, rather than a crisis of capitalism, which is what it is, we will all be very sorry” (Wolff 2009: 1, 13). In this chapter, I primarily use “global economic crisis” to avoid limiting the scope or meaning of the present crisis. 96 The transcript of Greenspan’s testimony can be found on the Committee on Oversight and Government and Reform. See http://oversight.house.gov/documents/20081023100438.pdf. 97 For a journalistic account of these metaphors, see Michael M. Phillips’ “In Financial Crisis, Metaphors Fly Like Bad Analogies.” The Wall Street Journal. 27 Sept. 2008. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122247765693581355.html. 158

In their seminal study Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson place metaphors at the center of how humans make sense of the world. According to Lakoff and

Johnson, we conceive of the world through metaphorical projections that involve “understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 5). Drawing a systematic correlation between two different types of things, metaphors allow us to project

“orientation and entity structure” onto an otherwise chaotic world (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:

162). By projecting economic crisis as natural calamity, for example, Greenspan understands the former by highlighting certain structural similarities it shares with the latter. Like a tsunami, the global financial crisis is a series of incessant waves of destruction that sweep away banks, homes, businesses, and jobs. Its obscure “submarine” origins lie in the intricate financial instruments of derivatives and mortgage-backed securities. Most dubious of all, as far as

Greenspan is concerned, the economic seaquake is unpredictable and therefore unpreventable.

Correlating the global economic crisis with a tsunami exhibits the double-edged nature of metaphors. A metaphoric projection like the “once-in-a-century credit tsunami” highlights certain aspects of what it seeks to explain at the expense of others which it downplays or hides altogether. “The very systematicity that allows us to comprehend one aspect of a concept in terms of another,” Lakoff and Johnson explain, “will necessarily hide other aspects of the concept” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 10). Metaphoric projections, in other words, can hinder knowledge of a subject as much as they can foster it. Their explanatory function is limited to providing a “partial understanding of one kind of experience in terms of another kind of experience” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 154, my italics).

In Greenspan’s case, the tsunami metaphor ignores the fact that the economy is a manmade system, unlike the natural environment. However unwieldy capitalism has become in

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its late financial stage of meta-reflexive speculations on futures, the economy—unlike a tsunami—is ultimately subject to human control.98 And although seaquakes remain as unpredictable as any type of earthquake, many who did not share Greenspan’s ideological blind spots foresaw the current financial crisis, even superstar capitalists like George Soros and

Warren Buffet. (Buffet famously called derivatives “financial weapons of mass destruction” that pose “megacatastrophic risk.” He also referred to those who invented derivative contracts as

“madmen,” which raises the question of what we should call those who refused to regulate them?)99

The partial understanding afforded by figurative language—the fact that it can conceal as much as it reveals—explains, in part, the longstanding bias of Western philosophy toward poetry. Philosophers since Plato have argued that Truth, since it is impartial and universal, must be sought via non-metaphorical concepts, not through the mediations of literary metaphors.100

For this reason, philosophers have traditionally been skeptical of a second group of potentially sophistic wordsmiths: politicians. Unlike the unacknowledged legislators of the world, the recognized high priests of society use metaphors with the intent to obfuscate truth in order to protect their interests. Because metaphors “play a central role in the construction of social and political reality,” it follows that whoever controls their construction controls the construction of

98 Perhaps Greenspan was appealing to the complex systems theory discussed in the introduction: “…somehow, out of the mysterious ocean of individual activity, great tidal waves all too frequently rise up to sweep us away. It will make no one feel any safer or happier to realize that these waves may be inevitable. But it is at least a step toward a greater understanding to recognize that the tumultuous course of humanity need not be the product of some deeply malignant human madness, but of ordinary human nature and simple mathematics” (Buchanan 2002: 242). I am not sure that Greenspan does not feel safer and happier having replaced his theory of “irrational exuberance” with historical physics. 99 To read the complete text of Buffet’s letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, Inc., see http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Business/pdf/2008/09/15/2002pdf.pdf. 100 In “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” Jacques Derrida argues for in the inseparability of metaphor and concept. See Derrida, Jacques (1985) The Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago. 160

reality itself (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 159). Indeed, Lakoff and Johnson argue that “…people in power get to impose their metaphors” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 157). Those in power impose metaphors to construct highly selective versions of social and political reality that are favorable to them, their party, or their cause. Frank Luntz, Lakoff’s sworn enemy, has written the bible on the practice of deploying deceptive, politically-motivated metaphoric projections.

Luntz’s Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear is the how-to guide for any aspiring spin doctor.

Lakoff and Johnson’s linguistic version of Marx’s “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas,” rehearses the Orwellian warning against the political corruption of language (a corruption that reaches its apogee in the perverse logic of doublespeak’s reified contradictions). Because Greenspan speaks from a position of power, his reference to a natural disaster sets off a series of associations that frame our public discourse on the economic crisis and capitalism at large. For Lakoff, a self-described linguist and cognitive scientist, the concept of “framing” is key to understanding the ramifications of metaphoric projections in the arena of politics.

In two “handbooks for progressives,” Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate and Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision

(with the now defunct liberal think tank the Rockridge Institute), Lakoff advises against the rationalist paradigm of appealing to voters’ self-interest through fact-based argumentation. He does not deny that voters use reason in making political judgments. Rather, he claims that they reason using the logic of frames, unconscious conceptual systems that determine peoples’ perception of common sense. “Frames,” he writes, “are the mental structures that allow human beings to understand reality—and sometimes to create what we take to be reality…Frames

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facilitate our most basic interactions with the world—they structure our ideas and concepts, they shape the way we reason, and they even impact how we perceive and how we act” (Lakoff 2006:

25). These mental structures come in two types. Surface frames are lexical and metaphorically- driven. In recent history, conservatives have enjoyed great success in concocting surface frames like “war on terror,” “tax relief,” “illegal immigration,” “free market,” and “climate change,”

(many of which are Luntz’s mad creations). Lakoff anchors the discursive associative webs of surface frames in the moral worldviews and political philosophies that constitute deep frames.

Surface frames work by activating or evoking these deeper, more basic frames. Lakoff provides the enlightening but extremely problematic example of the nation-as-family deep frame, an

“ontological” metaphor that understands the difference between conservatives and progressives as the difference between two versions of the idealized family structure: the strict father versus nurturing parent family units.

The problems with Lakoff’s model aside (its proclivity toward linguistic idealism and pseudo-Freudianism, its depth-model metaphoric, the conservatism inherent in the conception of the nation-as-family), it can be used to interpret Greenspan’s invocation of the horrific image of the 2004 Asian Tsunami, which killed 225,000 people, to describe an economic crisis only a few years later.101 Why risk offending, or at least alienating, those for whom this natural disaster remains a recent memory? One explanation is that the “once-in-a-century credit tsunami” serves as a surface frame to activate the deep frame of a conservative worldview. Where the set of metaphors that associate the capitalist world-system with a broken car, sinking ship, and sick patient create an analogy based on the idea of something in need of repair because it no longer

101 For a succinct criticism on how “Lakoff doesn’t take seriously enough HIS OWN emphasis on the force of metaphoric frame,” see the section titled “…to the Deadlocks of Political Engagements” in Žižek, Slavoj (2008) “Against the Populist Temptation.” Lacan.com. 4 March 2009. http://www.lacan.com/zizpopulism.htm. 162

works properly (much like the mechanical metaphor of a stock market “crash”), the metaphor that links the global economic crisis to a 1-in-100 year geological upheaval implies a very different logical structure. Instead of implying that the economy is broken but in our power to fix—a notion that elicits the deep frame of Third Way, Keynesian, New Deal welfare statists and mixed-economists—Greenspan’s metaphor naturalizes the market and the occasional crises that disrupt its “normal” functioning. As extreme weather events, the rare crises of capitalism are aberrations to the otherwise smoothly operating market (Bill Gates’ utopian dream of

“frictionless capitalism” comes to mind). They are also, somewhat paradoxically, inevitable disruptions beyond human responsibility and control. In the conservative deep frame, the market is as natural as air; we simply have to cope when it becomes difficult to breathe.

Put differently, with his opening statement Greenspan invokes the modern juridical concept of an “act of God,” a plea made by a party, like an insurance company, to be exempted from a contractual obligation or other form of liability due to unforeseen, naturally occurring, and unavoidable events, e.g. tsunamis. In a New York Times interview, Robert Rubin, former

U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and chair of the executive committee of Citigroup, appealed to an

“act of God” when asked if he was responsible for his corporation’s “staggering losses”: “People know I was concerned about the markets…Clearly, there were things wrong. But I don’t know of anyone who foresaw a perfect storm, and that’s what we’ve had here. I don’t feel responsible, in light of the facts as I knew them in my role” (qtd. in Schwartz and Dash 2008: 1, my italics). In the legal logic underpinning Rubin’s defense, a confluence of neither predictable nor preventable

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forces exonerates him from responsibility. After all, his role was limited by the incomplete facts he had at hand.102

Not surprisingly, Greenspan also refused to take personal responsibility for his role in the economic crisis, a role that many, including Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, believe he played a crucial part in perpetrating.103 In the ensuing hearing in front of the House

Committee, Greenspan conceded only to finding a flaw in his ideology of deregulation. To chairman Henry Waxman’s question “Were you wrong?,” he responded:

Partially…I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations,

specifically banks and others, were such is [sic] that they were best capable of protecting

their own shareholders and their equity in the firms…I found a flaw in the model that I

perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to

speak…That’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I had been going for forty

years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.104

To have the chairman of the Federal Reserve for eighteen years (1987-2006), the “oracle” and

“maestro” of the free market laissez-faire ideology that characterized the neoliberal era of

American economic policy, admit to finding a flaw with his worldview marks a moment of

102 In response to a lawsuit brought forth by Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump invoked the force majeure (“superior force”) clause on a construction loan for his ninety-two story condo project in Chicago. Trump said, “Would you consider the biggest depression we have had in this country since 1929 to be such an event? I would. A depression is not within the control of the borrower.” Lawyer Jared Black thinks Trump’s position is a stretch: “Judicial findings of force majeure are ordinarily reserved for unforeseeable and catastrophic events, such as hurricanes, earthquakes, or civil war. The conventional wisdom is that market downturns, however severe, are foreseeable events that are within the realm of acceptable risk for contracting parties, and therefore cannot constitute force majeure” (Beck 2008: unpaginated). 103 In an article written for the Guardian, Julia Finch writes, “the worst economic turmoil since the Great Depression is not a natural phenomenon but a man-made disaster in which we all played a part.” She then proceeds to place Greenspan at the top of the list of the “Twenty-five people at the heart of the meltdown….” See http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jan/26/road-ruin-recession-individuals- economy. 104 For the preliminary hearing transcript, see http://oversight.house.gov/documents/20081024163819.pdf. 164

world historical significance. That he was shocked by his discovery will go down as either one of the greatest cases of ideological myopia or cynical disingenuousness.

As proof of the latter, consider how his testimony echoes Rubin’s excuse that no one could foresee the financial “natural” disaster. Greenspan offers the platitude that no one is “smart enough” to accurately predict what will transpire in the economy. He argues:

the answer is that we’re not smart enough as people. We just cannot see events that far in

advance. And unless we can, it’s very difficult to look back and say, why didn’t we catch

something?...We cannot expect perfection in any area where forecasting is required, and I

think we have to do our best, but not expect infallibility or omniscience.

Typical of Greenspan—he said much the same during an October 27, 2008 appearance on The

Daily Show with Jon Stewart—this passage exemplifies one of the classic assumptions about human nature that characterize the conservative deep frame: not only is it natural for humans to follow their own self-interest, they should do so fully aware of their natural limitations (unlike arrogant, god-aspiring leftists who actually believe they can effectively run government).

Here psychoanalysis offers a supplement to a Lakoff-inspired linguistic interpretation.

Greenspan’s commentary on the inexactitude of the dismal science is unremarkable in and of itself; on the surface, no one would argue that our prognosticatory powers could possibly be infallible or omniscient. Stating this fact, however, only serves to obfuscate the true objective of his testimony, which is to absolve him from any wrongdoing for the crisis. The “no one is perfect” maxim provides a nice example of the psychoanalytic split between the subject of the enunciated and the subject of enunciation. At the level of what is enunciated, Greenspan plays a sage imparting a truism about the inaccuracy that besets our economic projections of the future.

As the subject of enunciation, on the other hand, he plays a weasel. The real meaning of his

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statement lies in the words he does not speak, the subtext of his explicit message which nonetheless comes across like a low frequency radio wave: “I, like all forecasters who are smart but far from ingenious enough to be prophets, cannot be held responsible for this mess.” This unconscious message obliges us to find blame elsewhere, hence the notorious “once-in-a-century credit tsunami” (hence also the convenient duality of the word “forecast,” which means to predict or estimate future financial and meteorological events).

Greenspan may be mortal when it comes to projecting the future, but he is human, all too human when he engages in a form of projection of the psychoanalytic variety in the first sentence of his prepared statement. In psychoanalysis, “projection is a defence mechanism in which an internal desire/thought/feeling is displaced and located outside the subject, in another subject”

(Evans 1996: 152). By framing the financial crisis as a tsunami, Greenspan engages in a kind of

“psychotic projection.” I am not calling Greenspan a psychotic, but I am claiming that his displacement of culpability from himself and the institution he presided over onto the external object of a force of nature is a psychotic projection. In the structure of neurotic projection, a subject transfers an internal feeling like guilt onto another subject. For example, precisely to avoid confronting his own guilt, a cheating spouse may project his guilt onto his faithful lover by accusing her of flirting, committing an infidelity, no longer loving him, etc. “Normal” projection is always an intersubjective affair.

The structure of what I am calling a “psychotic projection” is different. In one of his infamously difficult passages, Lacan explains psychosis as a form of subjectivity that derives from the foreclosure of the letter of the law and its symbolic function, which consequently “sets off a cascade of reworkings of the signifier from which the growing disaster of the imaginary proceeds, until the level is reached at which signifier and signified stabilize in a delusional

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metaphor” (Lacan 2006: 481). In order to avoid getting swept away by a deluge of signifiers like a deconstructionist crank, the psychotic latches onto a metaphor that has a very real, substantial existence for the psychotic, e.g. “God” in the curious case of Dr. Daniel Paul Schreber. I contend that Greenspan contributes to the growing disaster of imaginary discourses surrounding the global economic crisis by hitching his lifeboat to the “delusional metaphor” of a tsunami. His projection of the crisis as natural disaster is psychotic precisely because it forecloses the mediating role of the symbolic order, and the concomitant guilt and shame this order incites in the “normal” neurotic subject who recognizes him- or herself within its jurisdiction. Firmly planted in the imaginary, the psychotic projection externalizes the economic crisis in objective nature, thus exculpating all who played a role in creating it, especially the subject guilty of doing the projecting.105 As New York Times editorialist Frank Rich writes apropos the “leaders in the public and private sectors who enabled the economic debacle,” “perhaps they are channeling

Donald Rumsfeld, whose famous excuse for his failure to secure post-invasion Iraq, ‘Stuff happens,’ could be the epitaph of our age” (Rich 2009: unpaginated). For Greenspan, too, “stuff happens.”

In the social constructionist approach developed by Lakoff and Johnson, metaphors take on a memetic quality. As elemental units of meaning transmitted throughout public discourse,

105 Business writer Daniel Gross summarizes Greenspan’s role in the financial crisis: Last October, when Alan Greenspan appeared before Congress, he offered something of a mea culpa. Greenspan had been the chief proselytizer for the holy trinity of the Dumb Money creed: low interest rates, deregulated markets, and the ability of financial innovation to insulate markets from calamities. But Greenspan was experiencing a dark night of the soul. “I found a flaw,” in the theories, he said. “I was shocked because I had been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.” A flaw? The persistence of low interest rates, which, he assured us, made all the sense in the world, sparked a speculative orgy in securities and derivatives. These instruments, he had assured us, would help people manage risk; instead, they created systemic risk. And deregulated, free and open markets had gone so haywire they required massive government intervention. In short, pretty much everything Greenspan said about how this system was supposed to work turned out to be wrong. (Gross 2009: 2) 167

metaphoric memes carry immense power to create and transform the symbolic order. Lakoff and

Johnson write, “metaphors may create realities for us, especially social realities. A metaphor may thus be a guide for future action. Such actions will, of course, fit the metaphor. This will, in turn, reinforce the power of the metaphor to make experience coherent. In this sense metaphors can be self-fulfilling prophecies” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 156). The self-reflexive loop of metaphoric memes creates all sorts of “entailment relationships.” In the late capitalist era of media conglomeration especially, the delusional metaphoric meme of an economic natural disaster has replicated at the nanosecond speed of sound bites. This memetic proliferation produces an ingrained association of economic calamity with natural disaster. As our ability to differentiate between economic and natural disasters wanes, so, too, does our ability to act in accordance with their specific demands.

The economic devastation to the de facto company town of Wilmington, Ohio, where one in three people were employed by DHL until the economic crash lead to 10,000 layoffs, serves as a case in point for the replication of metaphoric confusion. In a January 25, 2009 piece,

“Economic Storm Batters Ohio Town,” 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley deploys a metaphoric hurricane to describe Wilmington’s suffering: “for a town this small it’s like the trauma of Katrina without the physical damage” (Pelley 2009: 2). A little over one month later, NPR’s Pam Fessler reports,

“It was still dark and cold when eleven semitrailers filled with food rolled into downtown

Wilmington recently. It was a lot like those caravans that arrive in the wake of a natural disaster.

People here say they are in the middle of a disaster—a kind of economic Hurricane Katrina”

(Fessler 2009: unpaginated). At best, the comparison to Hurricane Katrina is ambivalent. It can serve as an indictment of those who created the conditions that led to the catastrophic

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experiences of the residents of New Orleans and Wilmington. At the same time, the reference to a natural disaster lets everyone off the hook except Mother Nature.106

A solid indication that a self-fulfilling metaphor has turned memetic is when people use it even as they question its appropriateness. In the New Yorker piece, “Death of Kings; Notes from a meltdown,” Nick Paumgarten writes that “some have compared [the financial crisis] to

Hurricane Katrina, but Katrina occurred suddenly, and then all was aftermath. In this case, it’s as though the levees failed anew every day. We stay on the porch, carrying on with our card game, in water up to our necks” (Paumgarten 2009: 41). Paumgarten accepts the economic natural disaster metaphor while rejecting it. Simply by evoking a natural disaster, albeit a hurricane instead of a tsunami, he reinforces the conservative deep frame implied by Greenspan’s “once- in-a-century credit tsunami” (much like, in Lakoff’s favorite example, telling someone not to think of an elephant brings to mind the very thing prohibited).

Not all evocations of the credit tsunami unwittingly promote Greenspan’s worldview.

The business sector has quite purposely borrowed the metaphor to draw attention to a possible silver lining of the global economic crisis. In a recent advertisement campaign called “People-

Ready,” the multinational computer technology corporation Microsoft echoes the disaster opportunism of economist Joseph Schumpeter, who famously claimed in 1942 that capitalism’s incessant self-reinventions produce a “perennial gale of creative destruction.” Where Main Street finds woe and tragedy, Wall Street sees fortune and opportunity. One “People-Ready” commercial features Bob McKnight, President and CEO of Quicksilver. An off-screen narrator

106 The ease with which all metaphors of disaster—natural or manmade—can be substituted for each other is also on display. Consider the words of Wilmington resident Mike O'Machearley, who lost his son in the Iraq War in 2003 and his job at DHL: “Call it ground zero, Wilmington is ground zero. We’ve got to get back to being America. Because right now we’re losing sight of what my son died for. And what those other 16 soldiers died for. We’re losing sight of it. We need to fight hard to get it back” (qtd. in Pelley 2009: 4). 169

asks him, “Everybody’s talking about the economic tsunami. What does that mean to a surfing

CEO?” McKnight responds:

Um, a tsunami in surfing is sort of a thrilling prospect, but a tsunami in business is, uh,

kind of terrifying and you have to watch the, um, management of your assets very

carefully. You know, you have to do things at the speed of light these days to stay, um,

ahead of the wolf pack. And without technology, we would be nowhere. It helps you to

still, uh, rip it up.

The animated advertisement depicts McKnight surfing on top of a tidal wave reminiscent of

Katsushika Hokusai’s famous print “The Great Wave off Kanagawa.” At another point, rays of light representing (Microsoft) technology propel him ahead of another wave that takes the form of a wolf pack. Microsoft’s “Quicksilver” ad thus uses Greenspan’s tsunami metaphor in two different ways, one which depicts the company as seizing an opportunity to “rip it up” on a

“perennial wave of creative destruction,” the other which depicts the company’s competitors as the tsunami to be outmaneuvered (indicating that Microsoft can help companies overcome the global economic crisis).107

Perhaps the surefire indication that a metaphor has become a bona fide meme, at least in the United States, is its registry by Hollywood, what Žižek calls the “nerve centre of the

American ideology which exerts a worldwide hegemonic role” (Žižek 2002a: 240). The ideological state apparatus that is Hollywood renders “reality” legible for millions of people. Of course, the coordinates the movies provide for making sense of what appears to be infinitely complex events like the global economic crisis often mislead and thus require critical investigation. Just as metaphors hide as much as they reveal by the very logic of their existence,

107 Microsoft’s “Quicksilver” commercial can be viewed at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXPpgdSaV8E&feature=related. 170

Hollywood’s construction of social and political reality censors facets that it finds problematic for the box office. Once an ideologically sanctioned and commercially viable version of reality like Greenspan’s “once-in-a-century credit tsunami” becomes available, the American metaphor factory can mechanically reproduce it with an efficiency unrivaled by any other apparatus in our late capitalist society.

On November 13, 2009, Roland Emmerich, the contemporary heir to Irwin Allen’s 1970s disaster film legacy, will unleash 2012, a megadisaster blockbuster based on the ancient Mayan calendar’s doomsday prediction. In Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow (2004), a tsunami crashes into New York City, followed by a rapid freeze that spreads across the city, right up to the lightning rod at the top of the Empire State Building. At the time, The Day After Tomorrow’s proleptic images of the current global economic crisis and credit freeze were intended to warn against the dangers of the Bush Administration’s complacent stance on global warming. Viewing the trailer to 2012, one gets the distinct impression that Emmerich sensed how his 2004 cinematic tsunami could be recycled to represent the current “climate changes” of the economy.

In the trailer, a Buddhist monk runs up to the belfry of a monastery that sits on top of a peak in what looks to be the Himalayas. Shots of the monk ringing the bell are interspersed with text that reads, “How would the governments of our planet prepare six billion people for the end of the world?” The ocean appears behind the snow-capped mountains of the background. The implausibly raised sea level cascades over the mountains, submerging them before crashing into the monastery and blowing it apart. A final cut to text reads, “They wouldn’t.”108 To understand how this image represents the “once-in-a-century credit tsunami,” the next section sketches an abridged history of disaster film criticism with the aim of establishing a methodology for reading disaster films as political allegories, for understanding how the surface frame metaphors within

108 The trailer for 2012 can be viewed at: http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/2012/. 171

disaster films can operate as powerful vehicles to transmit the ideological messages of deep frames. The final section then applies this methodology to read two recent disaster films as allegories of the global economic crisis that take their cue from Greenspan’s tsunami meme.

A Critical Genealogy of Disaster Film Criticism

Crisis films…generally operate on a high metaphoric level. The metaphor of catastrophe in such films permits anxieties to be avoided in their real form, but metaphor is itself a kind of aesthetic/psychological defense against threats to social ideals, a therapeutic turning away. It is through a deciphering of the metaphors by asking what they turn away from, therefore, that those symptomatically absent sources of anxiety can be deduced. –Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner

Disaster film criticism begins like most areas of professional aesthetic criticism: with taxonomy. To define a filmic genre a scholar must specify its characteristics, and to do that requires classifying films based on their formal and thematic similarities. Two founding texts that carry out these taxonomic tasks with the disaster film genre are Susan Sontag’s 1965 essay

“The Imagination of Disaster” and Maurice Yacowar’s “The Bug in the Rug: Notes on the

Disaster Genre” (1977) (David Annan’s 1975 illustrated survey Catastrophe: The End in the

Cinema does so for a more popular audience). Each of these essays analyzes a genre by breaking it down into its constituent parts. Yacowar, for example, identifies eight basic types of disaster films—natural attack, the ship of fools, the city fails, the monster, survival, war, historical, and the comic—and provides numerous examples for each. He lists twice as many disaster genre conventions. Casts are comprised of impotent specialists, pragmatic laymen, religious figures, and besieged families who represent a cross-section of American society. The spectacular destruction wreaked by a disaster of contemporary significance and immediacy to the audience results in systemic failures, exposing the savagery and class struggle underpinning civilization in the process. The conflicted and isolated cast must unify and take gambles to survive, their individual fates tied to a sense of poetic justice based on the “assumption that there is some

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relationship between a person’s due and his or her doom” (Yacowar 1986: 292). Throw in a romantic subplot or two and you have the typical disaster film according to Yacowar (Yacowar

1986: 284-293).

Although Sontag’s essay takes science fiction B-films of the 1950s and 1960s as its object of study, its focus lies with disaster films and “the aesthetics of destruction” (Sontag 1997:

425). Sontag claims “science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art” (which itself raises the question, “What then are disasters about?”) (Sontag 1997: 425). “The Imagination of Disaster” begins like Yacowar’s essay with an emphasis on the formal elements of the sci-fi disaster film. Sontag identifies a few versions of their basic plot structure. One opens with the arrival of the “thing” as witnessed by the hero. The hero’s report is confirmed by further witnesses to the thing’s acts of destruction. A national emergency is declared and conferences between scientists, government officials, and military leaders take place. Further atrocities follow, including destroyed cities and massive casualties.

After more conferences, the hero’s strategy is put into action and the thing is overcome (Sontag

1997: 423).

Criticism that focuses on generic conventions and formal elements invariably includes thematic analysis. Sontag partakes in mythic and archetypal criticism when she claims that

“mainly [the sci-fi disaster films of the fifties and sixties] offer new versions of the oldest romance of all—of the strong invulnerable hero with a mysterious lineage come to do battle on behalf of good against evil” (Sontag 1997: 427). She furthers her ahistorical claims by interpreting the lure of these films in psychological terms. The fantasy of generalized disaster

“releases one from normal obligations,” supplies the satisfaction of “extreme moral simplification,” and allows for the “aesthetic enjoyment of suffering and disaster…a

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dispassionate, aesthetic view of destruction and violence—a technological view” (Sontag 1997:

427). From a perfectly safe vantage point—the Kantian sublime experienced in a movie theater seat or from a couch—“one can participate in the fantasy of living through one’s own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself” (Sontag 1997: 425).

Sontag does not, however, circumscribe the imagination of disaster in universal psychologisms or humanist themes such as mortality, Manichaeism, or apocalypse.109 Her study contains an explicit dialectic between synchronic and diachronic analysis. She insists that “from a psychological point of view, the imagination of disaster does not greatly differ from one period in history to another. But from a political and moral point of view, it does” (Sontag 1997: 434).

This dialectical view allows her to claim, for example, that while the popular images in disaster films “express man’s perennial, but largely unconscious, anxiety about his sanity,” they also convey a “historical anxiety, also not experienced consciously by most people, about the depersonalizing conditions of modern urban life” (Sontag 1997: 433). Likewise, these films articulate our universal anxiety over death and the historically-located trauma of possible nuclear

109 The persistence of this type of criticism must be due to its attraction. In Visions of the Apocalypse: Spectacles of Destruction in American Cinema (2003), for example, Wheeler Winston Dixon writes: “there is, after all, something comforting in the thought of imminent destruction. All bets are off, all duties executed, all responsibilities abandoned. Contemplating not just one’s own mortality, but that of an entire civilization, somehow makes the unthinkable not only palatable, but also vaguely reassuring….” (Dixon 2003: 2). Dixon continues: This, then is the true and humbling nature of genuine apocalypse; not an atom of the Earth will remain to bear witness to our birth, life, and death. What makes this appealing is the thought that if none shall survive, then, at last, all class, social, and racial boundaries will have been erased. No more slavery, no more sweatshops, no more prejudice, and nor more inequality. As the Earth atomizes into cosmic dust we will at last achieve the true perfection of nonexistence with nothing but some space debris to bear witness to our passing. We are all, thus, equal in death. (Dixon 2003: 3). Although this vision makes a pretense of being universally valid—hence the “genuine apocalypse”—it is thoroughly the vision of someone living in a struggling democratic society at the beginning of the twenty- first century. Dixon further exemplifies the historicity of all apocalyptic visions when he confuses the end of cinema, which, in his own estimation, is due to digital technologies and the hyperconglomeration of Hollywood, with the end of the world! Ahistorical criticism is prone to such severe cases of metaphorical slippage and lack of meta-awareness of one’s own historically-located perspective. 174

annihilation. Sontag cites an ambivalence toward science, mistrust of intellectuals, and utopian desire for peaceful international coexistence achieved, ironically enough, through a “good war”

(modeled after (the cultural imaginary of) WWII I suppose) as other examples of distinctly modern themes represented by sci-fi disaster films in an allegorical manner (Sontag 1997: 431).

Although “The Imagination of Disaster” moves to historicize disaster films, the framework with which it works is too abstract. Sontag notes how these films voice concerns about automation, dehumanization, and technological rationality, but she fails to specify the historical forces that give rise to these epiphenomena. Part of the blame can be delegated to the films themselves (they are B-productions after all!). Sontag says enough when she argues that:

there is absolutely no social criticism, of even the most implicit kind, in science fiction

films. No criticism, for example, of the conditions of our society which create the

impersonality and dehumanization which science fiction fantasies displace onto the

influence of an alien It….the imagery of disaster in science fiction is above all the

emblem of an inadequate response. (Sontag 1997: 433, 434)

Disaster films offer an inadequate response to the “unremitting banality” and “inconceivable horror” of the modern “age of extremity,” as they neutralize what is abhorrent and even

“inculcate a strange apathy concerning the processes of radiation, contamination, and destruction” (Sontag 1997: 434, 435). In short, they make their viewers complicit with the nightmares of modernity.

Yet, the critic also shoulders some of the blame for her own inadequate response to these films. Because Sontag does not address the political and economic forces that create such

“unremitting banality” and “inconceivable horror,” she cannot demonstrate how the response of these films is, at the very least, more complicated than she believes it to be. The central problem

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lies with how critics like Sontag and Yacowar isolate their object of study. Granted Yacowar’s study is more hermetically sealed than Sontag’s, but her historical observations cannot rise above the level of generalization due to her failure to adequately question the historicity of the sci-fi disaster form. Why these movies now (in the fifties and sixties)?

Jameson criticizes the insufficient historical analysis in Sontag’s essay. He contends that she “provides a thorough working through of the materials of science fiction taken on its own terms. But what if those terms were themselves but a disguise, but the ‘manifest content’ that served to mask and distract us from some more basic satisfaction at work in the form?” (Jameson

1988a: 14). Jameson agrees that these films displace their political content, but he argues that taking them on their own terms prevents us from interrogating how their framework offers more fundamental symbolic gratifications about the experience of work and collective forms of existence in the fifties and sixties. The figure of the scientist, for example, has nothing “to do with science itself but is simply a distorted reflection of 1950s male feelings and dreams about work, alienated and nonalienated: it is a wish fulfillment that takes as its object a vision of ideal work, or what Herbert Marcuse would call ‘libidinally gratifying’ work,” which, in part, consists of a “return to older modes of work organization, to the more personal and psychological satisfying world of the guilds, in which the older scientist is the master and the younger one the apprentice” (Jameson 1988a: 15). When we avoid taking these films on their own terms but brush them against the grain, so to speak, we can discover the displaced, historically-specific, and rather mundane utopian desires of post-WWII, late capitalist, American subjects.110

110 Simplifying a bit, we could say that Jameson replaces Sontag’s Weberian allegory of sci-fi disaster films with a Marxist one. Jameson’s interpretation might strike some as itself not historical enough, trading one “universal” hermeneutic for another. However, his reading is materially-grounded, having to do with work, desire, everyday experience, social life and production, whereas Sontag’s ruminations (and the sci-fi disaster films’ explicit themes) about the modern world are primarily metaphysical. I would also claim, echoing a point made somewhere by Jameson, that allegory is simply unavoidable in the practice 176

Nick Roddick’s 1980 essay “Only the Stars Survive: Disaster Movies in the Seventies” provides a nice bridge between formal and historical studies of the disaster film genre. To interrogate the historical cycle of the 1970s blockbuster disaster films, Roddick begins much like

Yacowar and Sontag, with definition, classification, and formal analysis. He provides a working definition of the genre: films with a “diegetically central” disaster that is unexpected but plausible, all-encompassing and indiscriminate, and that takes place “in a setting or environment close enough to the audience’s experience for identification to be possible” (Roddick 1980: 246,

247). In a fashion reminiscent of Yacowar, he categorizes 70s disaster films as revolving around three types of disasters (futuristic, natural, or mass transport), and breaks them down into their constituent thematic elements (isolation, luxury, a random gathering of people, cause and nature of the disaster, and reaction to the disaster). Like Sontag, he provides a summary of their typical narrative structure. “With minor variations,” submits Roddick, “the formula is as follows”:

As a result of a catastrophe which kills most of the people around them, a random

selection of people assembled in a comfortable modern environment find themselves cut

off from the outside world and threatened with death; after a more or less protracted

initial period of chaos and panic, they are organised into a hierarchic collectivity by a

natural leader and, through an ingenious and courageous response to the technology of

their shattered environment, manage for the most part to escape. (Roddick 1980: 250)

Roddick’s lengthy formal and structural considerations of the 70s cycle of disaster films serve as a pretext for him to examine the cycle’s political content. He concludes that films like Airport

(1970) and The Towering Inferno (1974) embrace a latent corporatist ideology. Besides offering

“straightforward spectacular entertainment,” films in the 70s disaster cycle “are consistently and

of hermeneutics. We are therefore best served by allegories that are as historical as possible, that is, by a Marxian hermeneutic. 177

seductively the embodiment of a corporatist world view, a pleasingly simple solution to the troubling problems of our age within an effective narrative framework…” (Roddick 1980: 262).

These films pillory the corrupt and incompetent leaders of liberal democratic capitalist society while proffering a new race of white, uniformed, males to unite and lead the incompetent and inefficient masses, whose attempt at self-governance has been an unmitigated disaster in its own right. Under this elite leadership, “the people can be united into a corporate identity” so that society can function smoothly (Roddick 1980: 261). In contemporary theoretical lingo, we might say that 70s disaster films promote a post-ideological agenda of biopolitical administration and technocratic management.

What makes Roddick’s essay remarkable is its demonstration of the interconnectedness of ideology and aesthetic form. His examination of the narrative framework of 70s disaster films continually hints at an ideological interpretation before one is actually provided. Within the above formulaic plot, for instance, the organization of a random selection of people into a hierarchic collectivity by a natural leader alludes to the “spectre of corporatism” that his essay only later identifies as haunting the American political imagination. Roddick’s essay shows how the formal and ideological elements are in fact inseparable. He states: “a hierarchal structure in which individual initiative leads to disunity, disunity leads to disaster, disaster is replaced by order and the individual becomes a passive follower, is as much a part of the movies’ narrative strategies as it is of their ideological content” (Roddick 1980: 261, my italics). “Only the Stars

Survive” announces a shift in disaster film criticism from a focus on the spectacular cinematic object of the film itself to its politico-ideological context. After Roddick, disaster film criticism that fails to link formal analysis of narrative structure with analysis of ideological content risks anachronism.

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Revealing the ideological signs of a disaster film’s time is easier said than done. Roddick himself warns against speculating on how a cycle of movies can emerge at a particular time in history. “Popular culture is not simply a matter of cause and effect,” he writes, “needs do not arise clearly and cultural products do not materialize expressly to fulfil them” (Roddick 1980:

244). Thus, “a sort of post-Watergate depression, a national inferiority complex after the

Vietnam debacle, or even a ‘bread and circuses’ attitude caused by ‘the erosion of democracy and the Western materialist way of living’” do not suffice as substantial or verifiable explanations for the financial success of 70s disaster films (Roddick 1980: 244). Indeed, critics antagonistic to Roddick’s methodology could surely add the “spectre of corporatism” to the above list. Despite the pitfalls of historicizing films, Roddick, like Jameson, believes that “the movies are worth studying in detail because they give clear indications of how a cultural industry reacts to a period of economic and political crisis in capitalist society, and how culture can become ideologically active” (Roddick 1980: 245). Reservations about historicist methodology notwithstanding, I find this statement axiomatic. Mass-produced cultural products like blockbusters address popular fears and fantasies about, and provide imaginary solutions to, the very real crises of capitalist society.

At the same time, I am sympathetic to the argument that Roddick and Jameson approach disaster films in an insufficiently historical manner. Alienated labor and the specter of corporatism represent broad problems of the capitalist world-system. Their presence in American science fiction and disaster films of the fifties, sixties, and seventies is not unique. As long as we live in a capitalist society that dehumanizes its workers and seeks a more “efficient” political system to facilitate its operations, we will find projections, however convoluted, of the desires for fulfilling work on the side of labor and for corporatist cohesion on the side of capital. The

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problem of alienation and the lure of corporatism are transhistorical in the sense that they are ever present within an economic system that persists in a permanent a state of crisis. As long as the system exists, certain epiphenomena of this system are bound to repeat themselves. These phenomena are, of course, historical, and they will be more pronounced at some moments while muted at others. The historicist question remains, why is this phobia or that wish-fulfillment being pronounced by a particular film at a particular time?

Although Roddick and Jameson present theoretically correct arguments, their readings of disaster films could be less abstract and more historically precise. In their capable hands, disaster films become more like allegories for Marxist theory than they do concrete historical interpretations of the text. This is especially true of Jameson’s essay which, in his defense, is an argument for a particular methodology and not a close political reading (see n.15). Roddick’s essay can be criticized for not identifying the historical referents of the incipient corporatism he understands as the latent content of 70s disaster films. His implicit definition of corporatism, for example, is closer to an ahistorical definition of fascism than it is to the alliance of Big Business and Big Government that defines the United States’ particular brand of corporatism. His analysis would be better suited to focus on the rise of Republican rule, Democratic capitulation, and neoliberal policies like deregulation in the seventies rather than social Darwinism, masculine supremacy, and technocratic positivism (a precise historical reading might even read the latter as epiphenomena of the former, thus emphasizing the capitalistic roots of fascism itself).

For a superior historical analysis of the 70s historical cycle of disaster films, we have to turn to Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner’s 1988 book Camera Politica: The Politics and

Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film. In the second chapter, Ryan and Kellner take “crisis films” as their object of study, a more malleable designation that allows them to include monster

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movies like Jaws (1975) and horror flicks like The Exorcist (1973) in their discussion of disaster films proper. They read these films as projections of a “legitimacy crisis” that swept through the

United States in the seventies, and identify several “real events” underlying the waning of confidence in American business and governmental institutions:

revelations of corporate wrongdoing (price-fixing, bribery, the manufacture of unsafe

products, deliberately harmful pollution), economic recessions accompanied by inflation

that led to a dramatic rise in the price of goods and to major unemployment, revelations

of unethical practices by government officials, highlighted by the disclosure in the

Pentagon Papers of Lyndon Johnson’s lies during the Gulf of Tonkin incident and by

Republican Vice-President Spiro Agnew’s downfall, a collapse of the legitimacy of the

presidency as a result of the Watergate scandal, which forced Richard Nixon out of

office, and the disclosure of illegal practices by the nation’s intelligence agencies. (Ryan

and Kellner 1990: 49)

Ryan and Kellner then provide close readings of four major disaster films that express anxieties about the legitimacy crisis of American institutions and posit imaginary solutions to restore confidence in them and heal our national wounds. The middle-class ethos of Airport mediates between traditional individualism and Mr. Boeing’s corporatism; the religiosity of The Poseidon

Adventure (1972) offers evangelical and born-again Christianity as a “solution to corporate irresponsibility and failed secular leadership”; the alliance between the working class and the professional managerial class represented by The Towering Inferno reassures the American public that a benevolent form of capitalism will prevail; and the total devastation depicted in

Earthquake (1974) reflects the deepening economic and political crises of the seventies (Ryan and Kellner 1990: 52-56).

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Ryan and Kellner’s succinct study marks an improvement to disaster film criticism on several fronts. They contextualize their object of study within a zeitgeist that is broad enough to encapsulate the entire cycle of films of the period. Aware that some critics like Roddick will find

“legitimacy crisis” too general to substantiate as a referent of disaster films, they list real historical events that define 1970s America. Instead of assuming our familiarity with the

“legitimacy crisis” (like Roddick does with “corporatism”), they break down what this term means through individual readings of films (as opposed to conducting a general survey of a film cycle’s formal features). Attention to textual and historical detail affords them the ability to witness a shift in the fears registered by disaster films about the crisis of confidence in American business and government. Where crisis films of the early seventies respond negatively to the cultural movements of the sixties, “by the mid-seventies they are more concerned with economic issues and with the psychological effects of back-to-back recessions” (Ryan and Kellner 1990:

51).111 Finally, they show how these films appealed to traditionalist ideals and solutions that prefigured the ascendance of the conservative movement in the 1980s. “One could say that

Ronald Reagan was actually elected somewhere around the mid-seventies,” Ryan and Kellner write, “when cultural imagery first began to summon him forth” (Ryan and Kellner 1990: 295).

111 Ryan and Kellner agree with Roddick that “the 1970s cycle of disaster movies both responded to and exploited…a wide-spread contemporary phobia that traditional values are somehow threatened, if indeed they have not already collapsed,” but they locate this reaction in disaster films of the early seventies (Roddick 1980: 257). Roddick takes the entire cycle as a depiction of Western society that has: lost sight of “frontier values,” has grown weak through excessive self-indulgence and total reliance on a protective shell of technology, whose moral codes are threatened by liberalism and permissiveness, and whose institutions have been diverted from their original purpose: instead of protecting the collective and providing a firm foundation for individual initiative, they now frustrate initiative and act as a safety net for the weak, the incompetent and even the criminal” (Roddick 1980: 258). Ryan and Kellner allow for a higher degree of nuance, reserving natural disaster as a “metaphor for the ‘immortality’ and ‘disorders’ of the late sixties, or of the ‘democratic distemper’ which conservatives saw at work during the period” for films earlier in the decade (Ryan and Kellner 1990: 51). Despite this difference, both agree that disaster films quell their metaphoric phobias through the symbolic reimposition of paternal power and traditional family values. 182

One could also say that the disaster film genre continues to be a vehicle for conservative ideology, and that the methodology developed by critics like Jameson, Roddick, Ryan, and

Kellner remains as relevant today as it was two decades ago. Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America, an ABC made-for-network-television movie that aired in May 2006, imagines a pandemic scenario of the H5N1 avian flu virus (a scare that has now been replaced by the H1N1 swine flu).

In the beginning of the movie an American businessman visits one of his company’s manufacturing plants in Hong Kong. On a tour of the plant, the American businessman’s Hong

Kong associate enthusiastically informs him of the laborers’ long hours. Spliced into the businessman’s aghast reaction are images of the zombielike factory workers, one of whom suffers from a violent coughing fit. In the sequences that follow, the businessman returns to the

States infected, and the bird flu spreads throughout America.

Although we learn that the virus originated in a rural Hong Kong marketplace, the

Amerocentric perspective of the movie combined with its visual associations yields the ideological message that repressive Chinese communist business practices are to blame for the outbreak of the pandemic. (To add ideological insult to injury, the movie faults the French for not releasing a vaccine to the international community.)112 Fatal Contact is less about the origin of the bird flu, the culling of millions of Hong Kong chickens, and the possibility of a global contagion than it is about assigning responsibility for the negative effects of global capitalism.

Read metaphorically, the movie projects blame for capitalistic externalities away from the

“civilized” business practices of the United States and onto its “barbaric” Eastern brethren. (Seen in this light, perhaps the makers of Fatal Contact chose Hong Kong to deflect direct criticism away from mainland China, the U.S.’s second largest trading partner.) Although Fatal Contact

112 The last observation was made by Alessandra Stanley. See “Bird Flu Comes to American, at Least in a TV Movie.” New York Times. 9 May 2006. 2 June 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/09/arts/television/09stan.html. 183

expresses an anxiety about a possible dark side of globalization—the fear of ocean-hopping communicable diseases—its ideological function is to reassure Americans that the enemy lies outside our national borders—as is so often the case within the conservative worldview—with the Chinese Other. Of course, exonerating the U.S. in this way raises a separate set of national worries about the rise of China as a rival superpower.

While ideological analysis of disaster films as metaphors for society and political allegories persists, the recent wave of genre criticism takes a more synoptic approach, covering the aesthetic form, ideological function, historical cycles, and industrial imperatives of these mass cultural artifacts in full-length studies. In Disaster Movies: The Cinema of Catastrophe,

Stephen Keane provides a primer on the main twenty-year disaster cycles from the first decade of the twentieth century through the first decade of the twenty-first. He bases his overview of these cinematic cycles on ideological and industrial factors. As he puts it:

Ideological readings follow the argument that generic cycles are sparked by resonant

ideas, that they are acutely reflective of social, cultural and political developments.

Conversely, the more practical, industrial reasoning is that it only takes one commercially

successful film to spark an interest in bringing certain long-forgotten and financially

obsolete genres back round again. (Keane 2006: 4)

Highlighting commercial considerations allows the new generation of critics to comprehend the decline of the disaster film genre at the end of the seventies and its renewal during the late nineties.113 In Dying for a Laugh: Disaster Movies and the Camp Imagination, Kevin Feil sheds

113 Robin Wood demonstrates how ideological and industrial analysis can be woven together. Since disaster movies of the seventies are “expensive super-productions, producers’ rather than directors’ movies, studio-dominated with a minimal intervention of individual creativity (which is almost invariably disruptive to some degree), the films are very strongly determined by status quo ideology, hence they are as much survival pictures as disaster pictures, concerned to demonstrate capitalist society’s ability to 184

light on how Hollywood escaped the endgame of disaster film exhaustion by transforming the once obsolescent genre into camp. Through a hybrid methodology of “historical reception analysis, genre criticism, queer studies, and historical poetics,” Feil illustrates how camp inflections appeared in the disaster film once its form was disassociated from its content (Feil

2005: xvi). When the genre’s ideological machinations became transparent and its conventions appeared outmoded and old-fashioned in the context of more contemporary aesthetic norms, the disaster film endured in a sort of half-life state, now fueled by self-parody, pastiche, theatricality, reflexive nods to predecessors and popular culture, and other techniques that ironized its generic origins. New life was also breathed into the genre by the introduction of computer-generated imagery (CGI) at the end of the nineties. Combining camp with visual excesses proved to be a winning formula for high concept blockbusters meant to sell tickets rather than wow critics, let alone impress academics.

While Feil provides a recent history of the disaster film genre, he also traces the history of a postmodern aesthetic that exceeds his cultural object of study. My interest in the development of postmodernism has less to do with aesthetic or even industrial concerns, as postmodern camp does for Feil. Of course Hollywood must “make it new” and adapt to the public’s reaction to its products. With changes in the mode of production of movies, we will obviously witness new aesthetic forms, especially hybrids of old ones. However, for my money, the ironic strategies of postmodernism serve as an ideological symptom of the American public’s current state of sociopolitical and economic disorientation. A brief sketch of Feil’s industrial and formalist history shows why.

come through. Even their expensiveness is a comforting assertion of the stability of the capitalist system” (Wood: 1986 28). 185

Feil sees a dialectic between earnest and ironic representations and receptions of disaster in the cinema. “Audiences initially take ‘disaster movies’ seriously,” writes Feil, “as symbols for national anxieties, social neuroses and the downfall of Hollywood, when they explode into popular consciousness in 1974” (Feil 2005: xix). However, by 1975 and 1976, the melodramatic and formulaic genre already starts to fall into disrepute, and “by 1978, movie critics begin to observe how the straight-faced disaster film manages to inspire more laughter (or yawns) than thrills. As a degree of deliberate camp becomes increasingly standard in other action movies, the ever more creaky disaster movies fall prey to unintentional camp” (Feil 2005: 18). Deliberate camp takes over as the modus operandi of eighties action and comedy disaster film hybrids like the Gremlins, Ghostbusters, and Die Hard series, which are not pure examples of the form but nonetheless recycle certain motifs and iconography. The disaster film proper returns in the late nineties for the reasons mentioned above (CGI, camp’s ability to win over jaded audiences), but as films like Twister (1996), Independence Day (1996), and Armageddon (1998) engage in camp strategies, “they compensate for their irony and hyperrealisitc special effects with romantic, patriotic storylines” (Feil 2005: 143). With the 90s cycle of disaster films, we enter the world of post-irony, a place where films attempt to be real and spoofy at the same time, where “cynicism and credulity coexist, irony and seriousness work in concert, and the sadistic depiction of violence does not necessarily negate sympathy” (Feil 2005: 72). The ironic incongruities of 90s high concept camp movies thus represent a dialectical synthesis of straightforward and campy disaster films.114

Like all dialectical syntheses, however, this one remains provisional at best for historical reasons. The confusion between extreme hilarity and dramatic gravity in nineties disaster films

114 Feil provides a very enlightening table to compare the stylistic elements of these three types of films on pages 100-101. 186

only increases with a post-9/11 return to seriousness. Gene Seymour of the Los Angeles Times captures this self-righteous turn in aesthetics: “The whole notion of making entertaining spectacle out of mass destruction now seems trivial and indulgent at best, insensitive and tasteless at worst” (Seymour 2001: F10). Indeed, in response to the end of Francis Fukuyama’s

“end of history,” Hollywood held back the release dates of some movies (Collateral Damage), censored others (Spider-Man), and even worked with the government to promote patriotism (The

Sum of All Fears) and improve national security (writers were asked to imagine possible disaster scenarios).115 From their post-9/11 retrospective, conservatives viewed disaster films of the nineties as signs of an insensitive, vulgar, and hedonistic culture in decline (Feil 2005: 145).

Such a view represents a bit of historical revisionism on the part of pundits, for the

“decadent” disaster films of the nineties also celebrate the pinnacle of U.S. unilateral power.

Here Feil’s aesthetic history cannot help but seek out historical referents:

millennial fears notwithstanding,116 the campiness of the late 1990s disaster cycle asserts

a mood of national comfort, a country whose stability can afford a little self-directed

humor combined with fantasies of near dissolution. What is more, these movies

ultimately express faith in the institutions that they initially parody, with the military,

federal government and civic forces finally pulling through to save the day. (Feil 2005:

143-144)

On one hand, the response of conservative critics after 9/11 made little sense because nineties disaster films are plenty patriotic. On the other hand, their response made perfect sense because these films also express anxieties about U.S. national and international identity at the turn of the

115 See Karen Brandon’s October 14, 2001 article in the Chicago Tribune, “To help military, Hollywood writers imagine novel terror strikes.” 116 For an interesting study of these “millennial fears notwithstanding” in popular film, see Thompson, Kirsten Moana (2007) Apocalyptic Dread: American Film at the Turn of the Millennium. New York: SUNY. 187

twenty-first century and the country’s role as the world’s sole superpower. The celestial destruction of a U.S.-led world by comets or aliens (let alone terrorists) could be taken as a sign of vulnerability; hence, it was an image that critics on the Right wished to censor post-9/11, i.e. buy into the Washington Consensus willy-nilly or bust.117

I do not see the respect and ridicule for American institutions of nineties disaster films as a sign of ambivalence worthy of censorship, but as an indication of a post-ironic confusion about institutions that had only twenty years prior experienced a full-blown legitimacy crisis. Post- irony is a disoriented and disorienting response that cannot be understood in strict aesthetic and/or industrial terms, as Feil would have it, because postmodernism is a political, as well as cultural, concept. The oscillation between seriousness and camp in disaster films of the late nineties reflects an inability to historically contextualize our experience in the world-system of late capitalism. It’s not so much that events have become so mediated as to have lost their original referents; it’s that causal relationships between local and global spheres of existence have grown so complex as to render them seemingly incomprehensible. Post-ironic disaster films that leave us unable to decide whether to laugh or cry, cheer or jeer, are a symptom of this more fundamental political and economic opacity.

As the first decade of the new century comes to a close, we can rest assured that while the forces of global capitalism continue to operate opaquely, the disaster film genre will maintain its popularity—the post-9/11 prohibition on simulated destruction be damned.118 Disaster cycles that have projected the eschatological, nuclear, technocratic, corporatist, and terroristic threats of

117 For an example of an extended political reading of how one disaster film in the 90s cycle “served American power in the name of attacking it,” see Rogin, Michael (1998) Independence Day. London: BFI. 118 As per usual, the call for censorship invited its own counter-narrative for exhibition. Although movies like The Core (2003) flopped in the aftermath of 9/11, the 2004 release of The Day After Tomorrow was a box office smash. As Tad Friend of the New Yorker surmised, paraphrasing Emmerich, “the terrorists will have won if they keep us from destroying New York onscreen” (Friend 2004: 35). 188

their times have turned the page to a new phobia: eco-apocalypse.119 The theme of environmental collapse has been around for quite some time, but a cluster of global warming pictures since The

Day After Tomorrow (2004) and Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth (2006) suggests the formation of a new cycle of disaster films. As Max Page notes:

In the early years of this century, natural disaster became environmental disaster, caused

by human action, or inaction. Some earlier works had hinted at human culpability. But

now the movies and stories showed humans provoking not degradation—not a natural,

steady state of decline—but a dramatic shift in the earth’s fortunes that would lead to

cataclysmic shifts in the earth’s atmosphere. (Page 2008: 220)

Global warming presents a very serious threat to life on the planet, even if films like The

Happening (2008) and Wall-E (2008) are not always themselves so serious. But my criticism of two (and counting) eco-disaster flicks from this recent bunch is not that they lack a sense of urgency about humanity’s culpability for cataclysmic shifts in the earth’s climate, but that their environmental message displaces another serious threat: econo-apocalypse (or econocalypse). As a cinematic theme, global warming has reached a saturation point that leads one to wonder: if there is no longer a need to raise awareness of global warming, then what if, to paraphrase

Jameson, it has become a disguise, the “manifest content” that serves to mask and distract us from some more basic anxiety at work in the form, i.e. a free-market catastrophe?

In the following section, I read the post-ironic disaster films, The Day the Earth Stood

Still (2008) and Knowing (2009), as latent expressions of the global financial crisis. Since “the imagery we call on to comprehend horrific events is as often as not the commercial camp product of our disaster-obsessed culture,” I defend as necessary the methodology of historicizing disaster

119 Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann’s 2009 Ecology and Popular Film: Cinema on the Edge (New York: SUNY) provides an extended study of eco-disaster films. 189

films to decode the ideological messages with which they shroud horrific events, economic and otherwise (Page 2008: 216). Examining these cultural artifacts allows me to gauge the extent of our current sociopolitical and economic disorientation.

The Imagination of Economic Disaster: The Day the Economy Stood Still and “Knowing” Nothing About It

And though we don’t worry about the banality of everyday life, we do fear the insecurity of work, and the powerful, invisible forces of globalization. The workings of the global economy—moving capital and jobs dramatically around the globe according to decisions made on the Internet and in corporate headquarters—feel as inevitable and unstoppable as bad weather. –Max Page (in response to Sontag’s “The Imagination of Disaster”)

That disaster films do not overtly treat the current global economic crisis but refract it through the lens of global warming and environmental apocalypse indicates our prevalent confusion about the global economy. My first inclination is to read The Day the Earth Stood Still and Knowing à la Sontag, as emblems of an “inadequate response” to the global financial crisis, as pieces of pop cultural detritus that “inculcate a strange apathy concerning the processes” of the capitalist world-system. Yet, there must be political ramifications for cultural representations that displace economic crisis onto environmental calamity. Why is the economic crisis being translated into a vast, seemingly uncontrollable rise in the temperature of the planet that the conservative label, “climate change,” suggests is an implacable force for which humans cannot be held accountable? Whose interests do cultural representations that naturalize economic crisis serve? When we acknowledge that global warming is a manmade disaster, can the displacement of econo- onto eco-disaster be read in any progressive ways?

These questions and the logic behind Greenspan’s “once-in-a-century credit tsunami” motivate my ideological interrogation of two sci-fi disaster films which, in typical post-ironic fashion, wish to be received as flippant camp and reverent defenses of faith. Salon film critic

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Andrew O’Heir has already raised a red flag about interpreting Scott Derrickson’s remake of The

Day the Earth Stood Still as historically significant:

Maybe I’m supposed to begin by droning on about how timely it is for a big Hollywood

spectacle that imagines the end of civilization—and let’s put an asterisk on the word

“imagines,” as it pertains to this dismal and second-rate film—to appear in this season of

global economic implosion. Well, sorry. The fact is that apocalyptic yarns are always in

fashion. (O’Heir 2008: unpaginated)

For O’Heir, Day’s campy elements make it “pseudo-timely” and leave it with the “vestige of a message” (O’Heir 2008: unpaginated). I understand the impulse to dismiss kitsch out of hand; if the filmmakers are not willing to put the time and effort required to make a quality film that takes its serious subject seriously, why should a critic waste any time and effort to treat the inferior product seriously? Nevertheless, in an era of post-irony, kitschy films are precisely the ones we should take more seriously than they take themselves. In this section, I am going to drone on about how timely it is for these two apocalyptic yarns to appear during a global economic implosion. Before providing close readings of these films, I need to establish that they are indeed allegories of the economy instead of, or at least in addition to, the environment. To accomplish this task, I revisit Jameson’s theory of mass cultural products, but this time from the angle of “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.”

In this seminal essay, Jameson defends and demonstrates (through readings of Jaws and the Godfather films) the critical practice of subjecting products of the culture industry to ideological analysis. He develops his methodology by rewriting in social terms the Freudian mechanism for managing desire. In psychoanalysis, this mechanism:

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comes into play only after its object—trauma, charged memory, guilty or threatening

desire, anxiety—has in some way been aroused, and risks emerging into the subject’s

consciousness. Freudian repression is therefore determinate, it has specific content, and

may even be said to be something like a “recognition” of that content which expresses

itself in the form of denial, forgetfulness, slip, mauvaise foi, displacement or substitution.

(Jameson 2000: 137)

Jameson believes that the management of desire in psychoanalysis applies to the repression of social fantasies as well. Mass culture arouses socially illicit desires that it can only recognize through defense mechanisms like repression. When it comes to products like disaster films,

“genuine social and historical content must be first tapped and given some initial expression if it is subsequently to be the object of successful manipulation and containment” (Jameson 2000:

142). Because this genuine social and historical content is so libidinally charged, to openly discuss it ranges from taboo to faux pas. Therefore, popular culture must strategically deal with this content, carefully handling it in order to symbolically defuse that which threatens to explode into public consciousness (in Lacanian terms, the threat is that this latent content will be revealed to and registered by the Big Other, all but forcing a societal change).

Because “the drawing power of the works of mass culture…cannot manage anxieties about the social order unless they have first revived them and given them some rudimentary expression,” the role of the cultural psychoanalyst is to work backwards from the rudimentary expression of a pop cultural artifact to the anxiety it represses about the social order (Jameson

2000: 142). For the analyst to effectively elicit a confrontation between the consumer of the product of mass culture and the societal trauma it expresses in a distorted and repressed unconscious form, this trauma must be correctly identified within the historical context of the

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product. In other words, to analyze a work of popular culture like a disaster film, the cultural psychoanalyst must historicize it while exposing its mechanism for managing desire. It is not sufficient to only recognize the mechanism; otherwise, one leaves open the window for specious interpretations of disaster films, e.g. they provide the substitute satisfactions of Schadenfreude, for seeking vengeance against society by “going postal,” etc. Such a reading commits the universal psychologisms found in Sontag’s “The Imagination of Disaster.” As a shorthand, I follow Sean Homer in referring to Jameson’s methodological combination of psychoanalysis and ideology critique as “structural historicism” and its practitioners, whom I have called cultural psychoanalysts above, as “structural historicists.”120

Day and Knowing present extraordinary cases for the structural historicist because each film’s mechanism for managing desire enacts a double displacement of its genuine social and historical content. In rudimentary ways, each film taps the historical fear of global warming, an environmental problem that the scientific community achieved consensus over during the past two decades, as witnessed by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

(1992), the Kyoto Protocol (1997), and the various reports published by the Intergovernmental

Panel on Climate Change since 1988 . The more recent green marketing campaigns for all manner of products and the involvement of celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt,

Morgan Freeman, Glenn Close, and Alanis Morissette in eco-documentaries (The 11th Hour, e2

Design, Home, Global Warming: The Signs and Science), indicate the extent to which global warming has reached popular consciousness.

Although talk of global warming proliferates, the makers of Day and Knowing feel a need to filter this hot button issue through the lens of a New Age form of religious fundamentalism.

120 See Homer, Sean (2006) “Narratives of History, Narratives of Time.” On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalism. Eds. Caren Irr and Ian Buchanan. Albany: SUNY, 73. 193

To avoid directly addressing the societal trauma of manmade global warming, which remains politically contentious despite international scientific consensus, both films frame the issue within a metaphysical narrative of alien intervention. In Day, the alien Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) is a diplomat for a group of intergalactic civilizations who lands in Central Park to speak with the world leaders of the human race at the U.N. He intends to “save the Earth” by convincing them to put an end to the environmentally unsound practices of modern life. When U.S. leaders respond with unilateral violence instead, Klaatu begins the process of collecting the animal life forms of the Earth’s various ecosystems in globular “arks” before unleashing a swarm of self- replicating nanobots to destroy human civilization, thus saving the Earth from us. He reasons:

We’ve watched, we’ve waited and hoped that you would change…It’s reached the tipping point. We have to act.

Eventually, with the help of Karl Barnhardt (John Cleese), a physicist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on biological altruism, the Princeton astrobiologist Helen Benson (Jennifer

Connelly) convinces Klaatu that humans can indeed change, and he interrupts the attack of the insect-like bots.121 Like the original Day, the remake sustains the religious allegory of a wrathful

121 The remake’s fraudulent feminism is exposed in how Klaatu is finally convinced to spare humanity in his bid to “save the Earth.” In a supposedly progressive way, the remake turns the traditional stay-at-home mother of the original (Patricia O’Neal) into a Princeton astrobiologist who is important enough to be put on a “vital list” of scientists and engineers who the U.S. government calls upon in the event of an imminent collision of “Object 07/493” with Manhattan. However, this liberal update is nothing but subterfuge. Throughout the movie, Benson tries repeatedly to persuade Klaatu that humans can change, including taking him to see Professor Barnhardt. The unflappable Klaatu begins the process to end the world anyway, and remains unconvinced by Barnhardt’s syllogistic arguments. In the film’s climatic moment of revelation—emphasized by a shot of Klaatu that slowly zooms-in to a medium close-up— Klaatu sees Benson consoling her stepchild (Jaden Smith) at his father’s grave. Only after witnessing a mother’s love does he feel that there is another side to humans (besides their unreasonable and destructive one), and curtail the attack of the killer nanobots. Unwittingly then, Benson changes Klaatu’s mind based on the advice Barnhardt gave her as they fled his house: “Change his mind not with reason, but with yourself.” In your standard anti-feminist fare, Barnhardt’s advice can only mean one of two things: being a family-friendly film, the remake of Day passes on Benson’s seduction of Klaatu, deciding instead to confirm that she is a mother first and foremost, her position as reputable scientist at a prestigious American university be damned. 194

Old Testament God who takes human form to empathize with his creation, thus becoming the loving God of the New Testament full of mercy for humans if they repent and atone (as Klaatu says, “It would come at a price to you and your way of life.”). When Klaatu leaves in his spherical spaceship, Benson states, “It’s leaving.” Her stepson Jacob (Jaden Smith) corrects her,

“No, He’s leaving,” sealing religious allegory as the ultimate reading intended by the filmmakers.

Alex Proyas’ Knowing is even more paranoiac than Day in its reliance on the deus ex machina of aliens to resolve the contradictions of its political content (for both films, as Lacan would say, the Other beyond the other exists). Knowing’s trenchcoated aliens, listed in the credits as “the Strangers” but referred to in the film as the “Whisper People,” might as well be

God or some other kind of divine creatures—some reviewers have suggested angels—since they are omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, at least from the vantage point of humans. They whisper telepathic prophecies of disaster and show visions of the apocalypse to chosen individuals like Lucinda Embry (Lara Robinson).

The film opens in 1959 with Lucinda in elementary school. Instead of drawing a depiction of what she believes the future will look like for the school’s time capsule, she furiously fills the front and back of a piece of paper with numbers. When the capsule is unearthed fifty years later and the drawings distributed to the current students, Caleb Koestler

(Chandler Caterbury) receives Lucinda’s drawing. Caleb lives with his father John (Nicolas

Cage), an MIT astrophysicist, who mourns the death of his wife by taking to the bottle (she died in a Phoenix hotel fire, while on a business trip, a year prior). He becomes obsessed with

Lucinda’s scrawls after his tumbler leaves a drink ring around the numbers “0911012996.” With the help of Google, Koestler cracks the code: the numbers provide the date and death tolls for

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every major global disaster in the past fifty years and three that have yet to take place

(0911012996 = September 11, 2001; 2996 deaths).122 When he witnesses the first of these final three imminent disasters by accident—or was it predetermined?—he discovers that the code also provides their longitude and latitude location.

With the help of Lucinda’s daughter Diana (Rose Byrne), Koestler figures out that the blocky “33” in the place of the final death toll is actually an inverted “EE” that stands for

“everyone else,” and with the aid of MIT cosmologist Phil Beckman (Ben Mendelsohn), he forecasts that extra solar activity will produce a solar flare of apocalyptic proportions that will fulfill Lucinda’s final prophecy. Although the super flare is extraterrestrial, Knowing treats it as a metaphor for global warming. (As Owen Gleiberman sums up the movie, “Knowing is a portentous numerological global-warming-to-the-nth-power thriller” (Gleiberman 2009: unpaginated).) For example, in a phone call to his estranged pastor father (Alan Hopgood),

Koestler warns him:

I have a prophesy. It’s about to be proven accurate. I need you to respect it and receive it as the truth. The heat we are experiencing isn’t going to get better. It’s going to get worse, much worse!

The end of the movie delivers a fire and brimstone eco-apocalypse that destroys the planet as we know it, but not before the aliens swoop in to save Caleb and Abby (Lara Robinson), Diana’s daughter, who are the only ones able to hear their whispered prophecies of doomsday. As Caleb tells his father:

He said only the chosen must go, those who have heard the call…We have to go with them. They’ve been protecting us all along, Dad. They sent a message ahead of them to prepare the way and now they’re coming for us.

122 The conservative push for a post-9/11 return to seriousness in aesthetic representations of disaster continues to the present day. Consider the opening paragraph of New York Post film critic Kyle Smith’s review of Knowing: “UH-UH. Non. Nein. Negative. Sept. 11 is not to be used as the setup for a cheesy disaster prophecy flick” (Smith 2009: unpaginated). 196

The aliens fly away in an Ezekiel wheel-looking spaceship with Caleb, Abby, and two white rabbits, only to drop off their passengers on a new Edenic planet, outfitted with its own Tree of

Knowledge.123

Day and Knowing thus couch their global warming commentary in a Christian fundamentalist version of ancient astronaut theory (where aliens supposedly colonized Earth with humans). The only difference is that Day is slightly less Calvinistic than Knowing. As

Armageddon commences at the end of Knowing, Koestler’s father states, “This isn’t the end, son.” Koestler, who has reunited with his religious family, responds, “I know.”124 Such fundamentalist knowledge, combined with the fact that the solar flare is unpreventable, strips humans of all agency while sealing them in a predetermined fate. Where Day at least pays lip service to the idea that humans can alter their destiny (albeit with the help of extraterrestrials who bring our unsustainable modern civilization to a grinding halt), Knowing stars a character whose conversion from cynical atheist who thinks that “shit just happens” to fundamentalist

“believer” who knows that “the numbers are the key to everything,” thwarts human agency either

123 Many reviews and online commentators have pointed out how Nordic the aliens look in their human guise. When these Aryan aliens choose two white children from New England to help restart humanity, a critic cannot help but wonder about the film’s racial politics (although other ships are seen landing on the new planet, presumably carrying multicultural children). 124 Here is a good place to mention Žižek’s defense of an orthodox reading of disaster films as psychoanalytic allegories, an approach that need not contradict the historicist methodology I use in this chapter: The usual reproach to psychoanalytic criticism is that it reduces everything to family complexes: whatever the story, it is “really about” Oedipus, incest, etc. Instead of trying to prove that this is not true, one should accept the challenge. The films which are furthest from family dramas are catastrophe films, which cannot but fascinate the viewer with a spectacular depiction of a terrifying event of immense proportions. This brings us to the first psychoanalytic rule of how to read catastrophe movies: we should avoid the lure of the “big event” and re-focus on the “small event” (familial relations), reading the spectacular catastrophe as an indication of the family trouble. (Žižek 2008c: unpaginated) Žižek cites Spielberg’s corpus, Titanic, Deep Impact, and Armageddon as proof of his thesis. Sure enough, Day and Knowing confirm that the spectacular catastrophe in disaster films is really an indication of family trouble. Both films focus on the problems that a single parent and his or her only child face in the absence of a third family member who tragically died. 197

way.125 Regardless of which film takes its Christian allusions more literally or propagandizes for

Intelligent Design more adamantly, both depoliticize the issue of global warming by containing it within a Christian metanarrative.

Knowing and Day recognize the genuine social and historical issue of global warming, but express this content in the form of denial. They assuage the public’s fear of environmental catastrophe by assuring us that those in a position of power will take care of the problem, or “it’s all part of God’s plan” anyway. We might even interpret the Christianity of the films as a stand in for ecology, with similar conservative political implications. Žižek sees the predominant form of ecology as another instantiation of the politics of fear. He writes that:

the ecology of fear, fear of catastrophe—human-made or natural—that may deeply

perturb, destroy even, human civilization…has every chance of developing into the

predominant form of ideology of global capitalism, a new opium for the masses replacing

declining religion: it takes over the old religion’s fundamental function, that of having an

125 Almost every reviewer of Knowing notes its similarity to M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs (2002), which features Graham Hess (Mel Gibson), a reverend whose lapsed faith due to his wife’s tragic death is restored through an alien encounter (the only difference being that Knowing casts its protagonist’s father as the religious figure). In the key piece of Sign’s dialogue, Hess says: People break down into two groups. When they experience something lucky, group number one sees it as more than luck, more than coincidence. They see it as a sign, evidence, that there is someone up there, watching out for them. Group number two sees it as just pure luck. Just a happy turn of chance. I’m sure the people in group number two are looking at those fourteen lights in a very suspicious way. For them, the situation is a fifty-fifty. Could be bad, could be good. But deep down, they feel that whatever happens, they’re on their own. And that fills them with fear. Yeah, there are those people. But there’s a whole lot of people in group number one. When they see those fourteen lights, they’re looking at a miracle. And deep down, they feel that whatever’s going to happen, there will be someone there to help them. And that fills them with hope. See what you have to ask yourself is what kind of person are you? Are you the kind that sees signs, that sees miracles? Or do you believe that people just get lucky? Or, look at the question this way: Is it possible that there are no coincidences? In Knowing, Koestler delivers a similar speech to his class about randomness versus determinism in the universe, and defends contingency because he has become an alcoholic atheist as a result of his wife’s death (of course!). Koestler’s alien encounter assures him that what he tells Caleb to allay his fears about parental abandonment—“You and me together, forever”—is true: the entire Koestler family will reunite someday in heaven. 198

unquestionable authority which can impose limits...although ecologists are all the time

demanding that we radically change our way of life, underlying this demand is its

opposite, a deep distrust of change, of development, of progress: every radical change can

have the unintended consequence of triggering a catastrophe. (Žižek 2008b: 438, 439,

439-440)

Because Day’s Klaatu comes to Earth to preserve its ecosystems, he can be read as one of these conservative ecologists. In a deep distrust of change, development, and progress, he freezes time at the end of the film, signified quite literally by Secretary of Defense Regina Jackson’s (Kathy

Bates) stopped wrist watch and a series of shots that represent modern development and progress shutting down: computers, city lights, industry, transportation, oil and space exploration, etc. turn off throughout the developed world (specifically the U.S., U.K., and Australia).

An analysis of the ideological function of these two works of mass culture could stop here with a modicum of satisfaction. Still, I contend that viewing these films as centered on environmental catastrophe fails to pinpoint their more precise historical context. While acknowledging Roddick’s warning that “popular culture is not simply a matter of cause and effect” and that “needs do not arise clearly and cultural products do not materialize expressly to fulfil them,” I argue that identifying the global economic crisis as the historical referent of Day and Knowing provides the most compelling framework for a structural historicist analysis of these films (Roddick 1980: 244). The economic crisis began in the summer of 2007 when the

European Central Bank and the U.S. Federal Reserve injected $90bn into financial markets.

Although Day and Knowing had been in development for a few years, they were shot several months after the initial warning signs that the economy was faltering, with Day opening on

December 12, 2008 and Knowing on March 20, 2009. Since the production process of a film is

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nonlinear and recursive, it is fair to assume that the final version of these films had plenty of time to “recognize” the global economic crisis, whether deliberately or not.

I am not claiming that these hybrid disaster films reflect the economic crisis directly.

Rather, from a structural historicist perspective, I view them as refracting this historical content in a double displacement. Taken on their own terms, these sci-fi disaster films are religious allegories that serve to mask and distract us from the latent anxieties they express about global warming. Yet, and this is the crux of my argument, the reading of these films as global warming allegories is the real ruse: it is not, to paraphrase Freud, that the manifest cinematic-content of the religious allegory screens us from the true meaning of the films (their latent cinematic- thoughts on global warming), but that their New Age hogwash functions like “dream-work” to transpose their latent cinematic-thoughts on the global economic crisis into the global warming allegory that is their manifest cinematic-content. Day and Knowing fulfill and simultaneously repress an unconscious desire to address the latest meltdown of global capitalism, hence they can be viewed as free-market catastrophe films.

Take the previously mentioned scene from Day where Klaatu freezes time on “the day the earth stood still.” This scene does not simply stage the wish-fulfillment of deep ecologists for an end to the unsustainable ways of modern life. The montage of shots in this scene metaphorically depicts the freezing of credit markets across the globe. Oil derricks stop pumping and trading vessels float motionless at harbor. The skeletons of cars sit on a stilled assembly line as workers exit the frame. When combined with the image of a 2008 Buick LaCrosse shutting off in the middle of a bridge, part of this sequence can be understood as expressing anxiety over the future viability of the American automobile industry, which the global financial crisis pushed past the tipping point in 2008.

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Before pulling the plug on global capitalism, Klaatu activates the swarm of nanobots that expands with everything it consumes, known to sci-fi aficionados as the “grey goo” end-of-the- world scenario or global “ecophagy,” a term coined by Robert Freitas which literally means

“eating the environment.” After escaping the flash facility at the Mt. Weather Emergency

Operations Center in Bluemont, Virginia and consuming a salvo of air-to-air Sidewinder missiles

(off-screen), the first thing that this futuristic plague of locusts obliterates is an eighteen-wheeler and the highway it travels en route to New York City, the financial capital of the world. In other words, the nanobots begin their assault by stopping the distribution of goods. As a symbolic instantiation of the financial crisis, the bots disrupt the capitalist mode of production, which requires commodities to be produced, distributed, and consumed for them to realize their value.

When capital fails to be invested in production because banks have become insolvent and consumption drops due to consumer worry, tractor trailers have fewer containers to deliver. As global exchange slows down, so does interstate commerce, which means truckers experience layoffs and cutbacks in their routes, a fear which Day recognizes by including the driver in this scene. (He also happens to be a white male, by far the largest demographic in the industry, whose profile alludes to the specific fears of what David Roediger calls the “wages of whiteness.”)126

The next stage of ecophagy moves from the quintessential representation of American commerce—the interstate eighteen-wheeler—to the American Mecca of late capitalist consumption: the professional football stadium. The whistling roar of metallic bugs wipes out

Giants Stadium, a nice image of the vast service and entertainment industry’s drop in revenues since the economic crisis (even the National Football League cut 10% of its headquarters’

126 See Roediger, David R. (1999) The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Revised Edition. New York: Verso. 201

staff).127 When a military advisor tells Secretary of Defense Jackson that every strike against the swarm of bots makes it larger, she asks, “And the mass—Where is it heading?” The advisor’s response, “Everywhere,” provides an apt description of the scope of a global economic crisis which currently encompasses the whole process of capitalist production, distribution, and consumption; negatively affects all sectors of the economy, including financial, industrial, and service markets; and ranges from the U.S. and U.K. to Iceland and Africa.128

In addition to the “grey goo” scenario and Klaatu’s stilling of the Earth as metaphorical representations, Day directly addresses the global economic crisis through the convention of televised newscasts. Disaster films often use this device to provide plot exposition and/or to expand the world of the film, i.e. to show that what is happening to the cast has a global sweep.

Day includes two such newscasts that roughly break the film into thirds. The first telecast doubles as the initial civilian, as opposed to professional, response to the arrival of Klaatu and company. Instead of the typical run on a convenience store or other perfunctory scene of mayhem (Day makes sure to include scenes of looting and rioting later), news footage of the

New York Stock Exchange floor, sellers, tickers, and façade flash across the screen. The blown- up images fill the frame and appear grainy to signify their televisual authenticity. The voice of a male newscaster reports:

127 There are less metaphorical explanations for why Day destroys Giants Stadium. 20th Century Fox included this scene in trailers, not just because it is a money shot, but to spark interest among National Football League fans (Day could just as easily followed every other disaster film by destroying one of New York’s token monuments). Fox owns the rights to broadcast almost half the league’s games, and I can attest to the trailers being infinitely looped during the season. It is also notable that Giants Stadium will be demolished in 2010. Watching it repetitively destroyed in advance must have generated excitement in New York fans for moving into the new Meadowlands Stadium, and boosted the sale of the personal seat licenses that helped pay for its construction. 128 This scene could also be read progressively when the nanobots are substituted for terrorists. Read this way, the scene argues that military aggression only exacerbates the problem of international terrorism, increasing the threat the “War on Terror” is meant to quell. 202

Global markets are panicked in early trading this morning in response to the crisis in Central Park. Trading has been halted on the New York Stock Exchange, the Nikkei, and the Hang Seng as Manhattan prepares for a massive evacuation.

At the bottom of the screen, a CNN-esque ticker scrolls: “Breaking News: Financial markets react to alien invasion” and “…crisis sparks global selloff: Tokyo -53%, London -61%, Frankfurt

-56%, Hong Kong -69%, Sydney -44%, Paris -48%, Johannesburg….” Also included in the footage are two shots of newspaper stacks. On top of one, the New York Post leads with,

“CRASH! Wall Street’s blackest day rocks nation,” and on the other the headline of the Daily

News declares, “PANIC!”

That Day represents a stock market crash as the first civilian response to what the newscaster reports “may be the vanguard of an impending alien invasion,” is a similarity to

“actual events” that is anything but “purely coincidental.” The use of stock news footage only enhances the cinema vérité effect of this allusion to real historical events. In Day, aliens visit the planet to reason with humans about curbing greenhouse gas emissions, but the possibility that they intend to invade causes a global economic crisis. In some sense, the extreme measures taken by the aliens to save the Earth—the nanobots and worldwide blackout—are redundant. Their mere arrival is cataclysmic to the economy in the world of the film, just as deregulating intricate financial instruments like derivatives and mortgage-backed securities became for the real world economy. As Film4’s Matthew De Abaitua observes in his hilarious review of Day:

Although this is a one-star movie down to its boots, one aspect of the farrago couldn’t be

helped: the credit crunch. Klaatu’s big trick is to stop all the machines of the Earth. But,

as we now know, he doesn’t need superior alien technology to do that. An over

investment of astro-dollars in the sub-prime housing market would have ensured the

manufacturing and consumption cycle ground to a halt anyway. Who needs a giant robot?

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The footage of the stock market in turmoil due to the alien landing brings a grim laugh:

maybe they should have reimagined The Day The Earth Stood Still as The Day Aliens

Called The Humans Upstairs And Told Them They Were Letting Them Go. (De Abaitua

2008: 3)

Viewed in light of econo-apocalypse instead of eco-apocalypse, Klaatu converts from an eco- terroristic Greenpeacekeeper into an “outer space managerial liberal-fascist” (De Abaitua 2008:

3). Indeed, a second round of news footage of rioting and food shortages accompanied by the crawler: “World in Turmoil…Chaos in Streets,” confirms that “our technocratic rulers must be cruel before they can be kind” (De Abaitua 2008: 3). That our own terrestrial Klaatus are the ones who giveth and taketh away is the true nightmare too close to our reality, to paraphrase the closing lines of Sontag’s “The Imagination of Disaster.”

Discerning Knowing’s references to the global economic crisis is a trickier proposition.

The most obvious place to begin tracking historical referents is with Knowing’s reliance on the same news footage stint as pulled by Day. In the first sequence, Koestler tunes into television news broadcasts to confirm the realization of the first imminent disaster. The sequence is set up by two establishing shots, one of Koestler’s house and one of the sheet of paper covered with numbers. The voice of a female newscaster accompanies these shots, her words so barely audible that subtitles are required to make out what she reports:

And at the ASX 200 index in Australia, one of the bigger losers so far today in the recession, down about 1.5%....

Although Koestler turns the channel to discover if the disaster has taken place, we should not be so quick to dismiss this report on the global recession as insignificant (and focus on the stories that follow about solar flares and scorching temperatures, which foreshadow the finale of the film). The report on the recession is linked to the numeric prophecies, but is also associated with

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the aliens. The opening shot of Koestler’s house is not the typical “objective” establishing shot; it is filmed from the perspective of the aliens. Although the aliens do not appear within the frame, later shots of the house from this perspective include them in the foreground. If we consider the report we hear as dialectically related to the images we see of the aliens’ view of the house and

Lucinda’s note, then, in a sense, Koestler tunes out the aliens’ forecast of financial ruin.

Knowing uses television news later to further intimate that the real apocalyptic disaster is economic in nature. At a gas station convenience store (where else?), Diana exits her car. A newcast plays on the station’s outdoor speakers:

Now let’s get back to the financial markets, if we may, for a moment. Let’s check it out on the grid here this morning. We’ve got Treasuries moving up…

When Diana approaches the clerk to prepay, the source of the newscast reveals itself to be a television set inside the store. The anchor continues, “India is a better bet than the U.S. or

Europe, and that the dollar will continue its long slide….” An Emergency Broadcast

Transmission (EBT) cuts her off to warn viewers of the solar flare. In the same way that Day’s potential alien invasion crisis stands in for the real global economic crisis, so, too, does

Knowing’s killer solar flare. The news anchor could have been reporting on anything when

Diana arrives at the gas station; the mention of monetary troubles right before the EBT creates an undeniable association of one crisis with the other.

The use of news footage is not the only technique Knowing shares with Day to refer to the global economic crisis. The final sequence of Knowing delivers a montage of money shots of the solar flare strike.129 The way the flare steadily traverses the Earth’s surface, vaporizing everything that crosses its path into a billowing dark cloud of smoke could be read in a similar

129 In the scene prior, the Allegretto from Beethoven’s 7th plays while Koestler drives his 2006 Ford F-150 through a crowd of panicking people. When juxtaposed with the next scene of rumbling apocalyptic disaster, the hymn-like melody of Beethoven’s second movement creates a disturbing religious fundamentalist association. 205

fashion as the “econo-phagy” scenes in Day, as metaphorical representations of a recession spreading across the globe. This comparison, conveniently enough, brings me back to Greenspan and his “once-in-a-century credit tsunami.” Although Day and Knowing do not include tsunamis

(Emmerich’s 2012 will take care of that), their disasters invoke the tsunami-like quality of the global economic crisis: an implacable “wave” of destruction that sweeps away capitalist civilization. Since any cultural representation of disaster during an economic crisis could be considered its symbolic substitute, I acknowledge the expediency of such a reading; however, I believe it worthwhile to extend this game of metaphors to the agent that accompanies and possibly instigates these film’s disasters: an alien race.

The aliens in Day and Knowing do not hail from the impenetrable depths of the ocean like a tsunami, but their origin is likewise shrouded in mystery. The only thing we know about them is their function. In Day, they come to save the Earth. In Knowing they rescue the children to restart human civilization elsewhere. The reason for the inclusion of aliens, beyond their role as plot devices, becomes clearer when the films are read as allegories of the global economic crisis: these cinematic shapeshifters metamorphose into the economists who invented and wielded the “financial instruments of mass destruction” that eluded or were simply ignored by regulators (played, logically enough, by Drs. Benson and Koestler).

The comparison of aliens with economists, which I realize will come as a stretch to only a few of my readers (ha-ha), makes plenty of sense. Each film’s disaster takes place only after the aliens arrive on the scene, kind of like the partial repealing of the Glass-Steagall Act during the Clinton years enabled the creation of the shadow banking system and the trade of the mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations that lie at the epicenter of the global economic crisis. Although Klaatu’s astral origins are otherworldly, one could not be

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faulted for mistaking them with the “virtual Rubin constellation,” Jackie Calms’ name for the group of economic advisors tapped by the Obama administration to fix the economy (who only wish they had the power to carry out this mother of all fix-it jobs by stretching out their hands to touch a glowing sphere). Calms, a national economic policy correspondent for the New York

Times, points out that former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin’s protégées, Larry Summers,

Timothy Geithner, and Peter Orszag, “have been followers of the economic formula that came to be called Rubinomics: balanced budgets, free trade and financial deregulation” (Calms 2008: unpaginated). Although she notes that this combination “was credited with fueling the prosperity of the 1990s,” the latter two elements undoubtedly played a part in creating the conditions that led to the current global economic crisis. Even an economist like Robert R. Reiland, who is not a friend of the Left, likens their appointment to “putting some of the nation’s most notorious foxes in charge of guarding the chicken coop” (Reiland 2008: unpaginated). Summers et al. are now responsible for stopping a crisis that they helped start in the first place, much like Klaatu stops the same nanobots that he let loose.

The specific historical referent for Klaatu is less important than his embodiment of the hopes for the new Obama administration. Although a “new boss, same as the old boss” reservation persists with the American public, so, too, does a hard to dismiss hope that, as Day repeats like a mantra, “we can change.” Perhaps Klaatu symbolizes a vote of confidence in

Obama’s economic team that they can leave Rubinomics behind, adapt to new political and economic conditions, and maybe even set new rules for the game.

The aliens in Knowing personify a slightly different belief and, in many respects, offer a more compelling comparison with economists to analyze. In Knowing even more so than in Day, aliens play the role of what Lacanian psychoanalysts call the “subject supposed to know.” In the

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course of psychoanalytic treatment, a transferential relationship develops between analyst and analysand. Analysands presuppose that analysts know the meaning of their words and the truth of their desire. The belief that the other knows creates the “subject supposed to know.” Analysts, of course, know that they do not know, that the truth of their patients’ desire will be discovered only through the intersubjective process of analysis. One indication of the end of analysis comes when an analysand de-supposes that the analyst is this subject supposed to know.

The subject supposed to know is not restricted to the analytic setting. The presupposition that someone or some institution embodies knowledge is widespread, perhaps even a fundamental characteristic of all human societies. Certain figures exemplify a modern version of the subject supposed to know, an other who possesses “knowledge in the Real,” i.e. knowledge in the language of mathematics. One such figure is the scientist, specifically the physicist. In

Knowing, Koestler, a MIT astrophysicist, vies for this role. He is not privy to the Strangers’ visions and messages about the future like Lucinda, Caleb, and Abby, but once he cracks their code he gains access to the prophetic “knowledge in the Real.”

However, Koestler is an imperfect subject supposed to know. Only after Koestler successfully decodes Lucinda’s letter from the future in its entirety can he confirm that the findings of his extra solar activity study were correct. Only after is he able to speak from the impossible position of the subject supposed to know to tell his father with absolute certainty that the heat will get much worse. Beforehand, Koestler struggles to ascend to the role of the prophet.

His lack of knowledge of what lies beyond the numbers leads him to mistake the second imminent disaster, a subway accident in New York City, for a terrorist attack. His scientific training prompts him to constantly doubt that the random numbers have a meaning (as his colleague Beckman chastises him, “My scientific mind is telling me I should have nothing more

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to do with this”). He also betrays his humanity in his paranoid and hysterical reaction to cracking the code. He initially internalizes the message as full of “warnings meant for me.” As he becomes more desperate and doubts whether the message has a purpose, he wonders why he received a prediction if he can do nothing about it. With classic camp delivery he asks, “How am

I supposed to stop the end of the world?” A legitimate subject supposed to know does not react like Koestler. Although Koestler is a physicist, he is more analysand than analyst.

Besides the physicist, there is another figure exemplary of the modern subject supposed to know because he is privy to numerical knowledge: the economist. Although economics is technically a social science, which implies that it is “softer,” i.e. more qualitative, subjective, correlative, tentative, etc., than its cousins in the natural sciences, this branch of knowledge boasts the title “Queen of the Social Sciences” because its conclusions are purportedly based on hard, mathematical data. Philosopher G.B. Madison sums up the dilemma over categorizing the epistemological status of economics as follows:

either economics is an “objective,” “positive” science dealing with quantitative

magnitudes by means of statistical techniques which give rise to testable hypotheses (in

which case there is no need for “interpretation”); or, economics, dealing as it does with

meaningful action on the part of human beings, is a hermeneutical, interpretive discipline

and should thus renounce the use of formal, quantitative models and the attempt to

construct “objective,” causal explanations. (Madison 1991: 42-43)

Economist Philip Mirowski traces the conception of economics as an objective, positive science back to its inception as a legitimate discipline of study in his book More Heat Than Light:

Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics. He argues that neoclassical economists appropriated the trappings of physics to construct economics as a field of scientific

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inquiry that could ignore or stand apart from its sister disciplines in the social sciences like history and philosophy. The original sin of neoclassical economists was to develop isomorphic concepts based on the notions of mechanical physics, e.g. in the formation of neoclassical economics “energy” became “utility.” In the introduction to the collection Natural Images in

Economic Thought: ‘Markets Read in Tooth & Claw,’ Mirowski summarizes his thesis:

in appropriating the formalisms of mid-nineteenth-century energy physics and adapting

them to the language of utility and prices, the progenitors [of neoclassical economics] and

their epigones adopted a certain worldview, one that had to stress the extreme near

identity of physics and economics. Veering so close to becoming subsumed in pure

identity could be attractive only to a personality who was convinced of a far-reaching

unity of science, one necessarily founded on the bedrock of a natural law external to all

human endeavor. (Mirowski 1994: 10-11)

My present concern lies less with the scientific pretenses of economics than it does with the

American public’s perception of the “near identity of physics and economics.” The universalization of the capitalist world-economy, also known as globalization, has been taken as evidence that a “far-reaching unity of science…founded on the bedrock of a natural law external to all human endeavor” is not merely a curious worldview, but a description of reality itself, of just “the way it is.”

The belief that neoclassical economics is physics, physics is mathematics, and mathematics is reality itself, pervades the film Knowing. Read metaphorically, the Strangers double as physicist-economists. They know the future because they wield the bedrock formulas and numerical codes of the natural laws of reality, economic and otherwise (much like Klaatu finishes the formula on Professor Barnhardt’s chalkboard in Day). These laws are external to

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human endeavor and, for the most part, lie beyond the capacity of humans to understand. Even when scientific figures like astrophysicists catch a glimpse of them, they do so in an incomplete manner.

Of course, the Strangers and the black philosopher’s stones they pass out to the theologically chosen do not exist in real life. As supernatural creatures, they are mere placeholders for our belief in a subject supposed to know. Recall that the idea of the subject supposed to know does not imply that said subject actually knows, but refers to the knowledge imputed to this subject by another. The Strangers in Knowing literalize the subject supposed to know because they actually do know, contrary to any psychoanalyst worthy of the name. The

Strangers know that events like major global disasters will occur beforehand and choose certain people to share this knowledge with who become prophets of doom. Their primary form of communication is to whisper in numerical code, thus reducing the future course of human events to a series of numbers. To quote Koestler once more, “the numbers are the key to everything.”

In late liberal-democratic capitalist society, economists function in much the same way as subjects supposed to know for the body politic. Even during economic crises, a society in thrall to capital (especially its democratically-elected politicians) imputes to economists an exclusive knowledge of the most fundamental level of reality that undergirds everyday life: “the economy, stupid!” We expect economists and their esoteric formulas to be able to explain why certain phenomena like recessions happened while others like depressions failed to transpire because we believe that they know, as the trailer to Knowing reads, “There is an order to our deepest fear.”

We presume the accuracy of their forecasting powers and mathematical models because we believe that they know, as the trailer claims, “There is a pattern to predicting the future” (even if they, a.k.a Greenspan, know no such thing). Released in the midst of global economic chaos,

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Knowing expresses a wish-fulfillment that economists, despite their dismal track records, can rediscover the order and pattern of economics as a hard “science,” so they can restore the capitalist system and allay our deepest fears of layoffs, foreclosures, unemployment, debt, healthcare costs, fiscal dependency, our children’s future, etc. Put simply, Knowing proclaims a faith, not just that God exists, but that these aliens we call economists are smart enough to save capitalism from itself.

Putting faith in others because they supposedly know that an economic system, however broken and crisis-ridden, is right, natural, and/or good, prevents us from analyzing how capitalism itself, and not just its excesses and bad apples, systematically creates our deepest fears.130 That said, no one expects to find a fully fleshed out socialist vision in mainstream works of mass culture. To forgo the search for progressive values in Hollywood products, however, denies the other half of Jameson’s thesis in “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” that “the works of mass culture cannot be ideological without at one and the same time being implicitly or explicitly Utopian as well” (Jameson 2000: 142). Jameson maintains that:

anxiety and hope are two faces of the same collective consciousness, so that the works of

mass culture, even if their function lies in the legitimation of the existing order—or some

worse one—cannot do their job without deflecting in the latter’s service the deepest and

130 What Ryan and Kellner have to say about 70s disaster films also applies to Day and Knowing: “Yet the films also enact a problem which cannot be resolved by conservative ideals. They accurately depict the negative consequences of the conservative economic policies which are inseparable from the traditionalist social structures which seem most to respond to the needs the films articulate. The films therefore point to an irresolvable dilemma or antinomy of conservative ideology in American culture. Conservative ideology most readily responds to the need for care and community because it celebrates family and patriarchal authority, yet it also regenerates the very problems which inspired that need in the first place. Thus, the films are both reactionary and radical, both a closing off of significant desires and a blueprint for the inevitable reopening of them” (Ryan and Kellner 1990: 57).

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most fundamental hopes and fantasies of the collectivity, to which they can therefore, no

matter in how distorted a fashion, be found to have given a voice. (Jameson 2000: 142)

Ryan and Kellner observe that historical crises can promote regressive reactions that buttress the status quo and revive “more familiar and secure traditional social models and cultural representations,” or they can induce progressive attempts to “construct new representational codes and social attitudes” (Ryan and Kellner 1990: 49). No doubt, when taken in their entirety, some films are regressive while others are progressive. Jameson’s point is that even the most conservative works of mass culture contain utopian elements that cannot be ignored.

My readings of Day and Knowing show how the anxieties they express about the global economic crisis also give voice to a hope that economic and political elites can restore order to the capitalist system. This hope fails to be progressive because it seeks to revive a traditional social model. If even the hope voiced in these films is reactionary, how can they possibly be read as vehicles for any positive fantasies of the collectivity, as Jameson insists all popular culture transmits no matter how distorted its leftist subtext may be? Are there any anti-capitalist kernels in Day and Knowing?

In their closing remarks on the need for the Left to embrace popular film as a medium that can “construct socialism as a possible object of desire,” Ryan and Kellner articulate my hesitations over shining a progressive light on films like Day and Knowing (Ryan and Kellner

1990: 295). “It would be difficult to say how progressives could use monsters and disasters to their advantage,” they write. “The revolution is not a Halloween party, after all.” Yet, in the next breath, they propose a way out of the quandary: “Nevertheless, the very striking fear of uncontrollable forces determining peoples’ lives which are projected or metaphorized in the horror and disaster genres are at least indicators that the social system of capitalism is not

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working smoothly” (Ryan and Kellner 1990: 294). As I have argued, the doomsday scenarios in

Day and Knowing metaphorize the economic forces presently determining peoples’ lives.

Dialogue in Day stresses how people perceive these forces as uncontrollable.

Jacob: Should people run, or should we stay and fight? Klaatu: Neither. Jacob: What should we do then? Klaatu: There’s nothing you can do.

Later, when Dr. Benson implores Secretary of Defense Jackson to respond with diplomacy instead of militancy, she says, “You can’t stop him…You’re not in control. You don’t know what he is capable of.” The third person pronouns in Benson’s warning refer to Klaatu, but could just as easily be taken to mean the current crisis of capitalism. That these disaster films bring to an end the world as we know it indicates a prevalent discontent with capitalism, the uncontrollable God that fails repeatedly.

In his genealogy of cultural representations of New York City’s destruction, Max Page echoes Ryan and Kellner’s comments on the representation of capital as an uncontrollable force.

Page argues that we destroy the capital of capitalism “on film and paper to escape the sense of inevitable and incomprehensible economic transformations” (Page 2008: 9). The theme of predestination in Day and Knowing represents the sense of inevitability that accompanies the global economic crisis. That these films globalize the destruction of New York City that so fascinates Page signals how vast and incomprehensible the financial meltdown feels. For example, both films include shots of Earth from space, the archetypal image of totality. In the opening credits of Knowing, shots of the Earth at night zoom in from the planet to the U.S., to the Northeast, to Massachusetts, to Boston, to one of its suburban roads, etc. The movement from global to local foreshadows an event that will devastate all levels of society, from Wall Street to

Main Street, as the media was so fond of saying in its coverage of the financial crisis. Likewise,

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Knowing’s movie poster depicts Earth with its Southern Pole cracking up from the heat of the solar flare. Debris in the shape of numbers flies off the surface, as if a stock market crash literally blew up the planet and ticker digits magically kept their shape as they left their electronic grids to enter orbit. The enormity of our problems and our inability to know what to do about them, as

Page suspects, produces a desire to escape. Day and Knowing conclude with God’s-eye view shots of alien spacecraft escaping the Earth’s atmosphere. Faced with the prospects of a post- econocalyptic world, we can only wish we were onboard.

Some hope can be found in the potentially progressive anxieties communicated by disaster films released during a global economic crisis. Despite the ideological work carried out by these films, they do not merely mollify our anxieties about the viability of capitalism by appealing to traditional forms of authority, social models, and other sundry conservative solutions (of which they are guilty). They also register serious objections to capitalism’s inability to work smoothly, to the uncontrollable and incomprehensible forces it unleashes that determine livelihoods the world over, and to the methods employed to overcome its crises that inevitably pave “the way for more extensive and destructive crises” (Marx and Engels: 1998 58). Neither

Day nor Knowing envision an alternative economic system; nevertheless, one stops the world while the other blows it up—faint echoes of the revolutionary desire for an end to capitalism.

In response to the global economic crisis, French philosopher Alain Badiou recently channeled a fellow philosopher and countryman, the late Jean Baudrillard. In the 1983 book

Simulations, Baudrillard includes a footnote on how “so-called historical events” like strikes, demonstrations, and crises have lost their references to reality and turned into simulacra of

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themselves. Disaster films do not contain historical referents he argues, history itself has become a hyperreal disaster film. As he phrases the matter:

The energy crisis, the ecological setting, by and large, are themselves a disaster film, in

the same style (and of the same value) as those which currently do so well for

Hollywood. It is pointless to laboriously interpret these films by their relationship with an

“objective” social crisis, or even with an “objective” phantasm of disaster. It is in the

other direction that we must say it is the social itself which, in contemporary discourse, is

organised according to a script for a disaster film. (Baudrillard 1983: 75-76 n.5)

Given these remarks, Baudrillard would surely frown upon my attempt, over twenty-five years later, to laboriously interpret contemporary Hollywood disaster films by their relationship with the objective global economic crisis. So would he protest the writing of a genealogy of cultural representations of a particular type of disaster, e.g. a critical examination of how the image of a tsunami has taken on various metaphorical meanings depending on the crisis of the times, from the stock market crash in Deluge (1933) and the threat to traditional values in The Poseidon

Adventure (1972) to global warming in The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and the global economic recession in 2012 (2009).

Badiou’s remarks on the current global economic crisis provide a dialectical sublation of the mutually exclusive positions of hyperreality versus historicity. Our access to historical referents has not been lost forever in the postmodern epoch, nor is the idea that our media- saturated society gives everything a hyperreal luster bunk. If both are true, what are critics of postmodern works of mass culture to do? Following Baudrillard’s cue, Badiou affirms that, by and large, the global economic crisis is organized according to the script for a disaster film. He writes:

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As it is presented to us, the planetary financial crisis resembles one of those bad films

concocted by that factory for the production of pre-packaged blockbusters that today we

call the “cinema.” Nothing is missing, the spectacle of mounting disaster, the feeling of

being suspended from enormous puppet-strings, the exoticism of the identical—the

Bourse of Jakarta placed under the same spectacular rubric as New York, the diagonal

from Moscow to Sao Paulo, everywhere the same fire ravaging the same banks—not to

mention terrifying plotlines: it is impossible to avert Black Friday, everything is

collapsing, everything will collapse…. (Badiou 2008: unpaginated).

After having some fun by listing cast members and concocting a saccharine ending where

“Sarkozy kisses Merkel, and the whole world weeps for joy,” Badiou shifts from the

Baudrillardian position on the Real being indistinguishable from the spectacle to a more radical position that opposes the “real of peoples” to the “nefarious spectacle of capitalism” (Badiou

2008: unpaginated). The millions who struggle in their daily lives exist outside the script as the collective audience to the logic of capitalism’s speculative contrivances. Badiou argues that it is from the vantage point of the audience, of the invisible mass of spectators he calls the “popular real,” that “one can observe capitalism without flinching, including the disaster movie that it is currently inflicting upon us. The real is not this movie, but its audience” (Badiou 2008: unpaginated).

I believe that Hollywood disaster films can serve a didactic function. Read critically, they can help us adopt the perspective of a collective audience which, in turn, can train us to observe and deconstruct the disaster film of capitalist reality without flinching. It is only from the perspective of the popular Real that we may be able to leave this shadow theater and hit the streets, bleary-eyed but ready to co- write, produce, direct, and star in a less catastrophic flick.

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