[syndicate] Fw: <nettime> Oh to have lived to see the day
Alan Sondheim
sondheim at panix.com
Sun Sep 4 14:12:50 CEST 2005
On Sun, 4 Sep 2005, Aliette Guibert wrote:
> to notice (but you have read it by yourself probably)
> A.
yes, and it's too easy. plug-in theory.
-
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Bruce Sterling" <bruces at well.com>
> To: <nettime-l at bbs.thing.net>
> Sent: Sunday, September 04, 2005 10:30 AM
> Subject: <nettime> Oh to have lived to see the day
>
>
>>
>> From: ctheory at lists.uvic.ca
>> Subject: [CTHEORY] Event Scene 164 - Katrina-Baghdad
>> Date: August 31, 2005 3:37:55 PM PDT
>> To: ctheory at lists.uvic.ca
>> Reply-To: ctheory at lists.uvic.ca
>>
>> _____________________________________________________________________
>> CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 28, NO 3
>> *** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
>>
>> Event-Scene 164 31/08/2005 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
>> _____________________________________________________________________
>>
>> *************************
>>
>> 1000 DAYS OF THEORY
>>
>> *************************
>> _____________________________________________________________________
>>
>>
>>
>> Katrina-Baghdad: Initial Iterations of a Strange Attractor
>> ===========================================================
>>
>>
>> ~Dion Dennis~
>>
>>
>> On August 30, 2005, George W. Bush was sent to the wrong place, at
>> the wrong time, to deliver, in his pseudo-folksy ham-handed way, the
>> wrong script: Bush's political choreographers crafted a speech that
>> was delivered at a 60th anniversary commemoration of the end of World
>> War II, held at a California Naval Air station. As a salvo in the
>> propaganda war over Iraq, Bush histrionically claimed the moral
>> authority of World War II for the current U.S. occupation of Iraq.
>> Besides the highly dubious claim of moral equivalence, the timing of
>> the speech turned out to be inept. Unfolding events caught Bush and
>> his handlers off-guard.
>>
>> Fifteen-hundred miles away, a concurrent event, the Category Five
>> Hurricane Katrina, laid waste to a significant American city, New
>> Orleans, and to a contiguous two-hundred mile swath of the Gulf Coast
>> east of New Orleans. Mississippi's Governor, the former head of the
>> Republican National Committee, Haley Barbour, unreflexively invoked
>> another descriptive icon of World War II, as well. "It looks like
>> Hiroshima is what it looks like," muttered a shocked Barbour,
>> describing parts of a devastated county on the coast. Meanwhile, the
>> Louisiana levees broke in at least three spots, unleashing the fury
>> of the swollen waters of Lake Pontchartrain on New Orleans. Potable
>> drinking water, electricity, and the other taken-for-granted basics
>> of mundane life disappeared into a twenty foot high stew of sewage,
>> toxic chemicals, Mississippi Delta mud, and Lake Pontchartrain
>> spillage. Basic infrastructure was destroyed. Tens of thousands of
>> houses were severely damaged or simply obliterated. Bloated bodies
>> floated in the water, as much of the coastal population became a
>> large and instant group of internal U.S. refugees. Meanwhile, police
>> looked on passively as looters raided both the upscale downtown shops
>> such as the Bon Marche, and less status-conscious looters stripped
>> the shelves of several outlying stores of the behemoth proletarian
>> vendor, Wal-Mart. On the night of August 30th, the CNN website
>> described it this way: "New Orleans resembled a war zone more than a
>> modern American metropolis on Tuesday." As Army Reservists and a
>> remainder of National Guard troops rolled into New Orleans, they
>> resembled nothing as much as their comrades-in-arms concurrently
>> stationed in Iraq. Ironically, the shock and awe produced by
>> Katrina's Gulf Coast invasion mirrored the effects of the Iraqi war,
>> in novel and all-too-tragic ways. On Tuesday night, August 30, 2005,
>> New Orleans became the ~de facto~ American Baghdad, as the contiguous
>> Gulf Coast east of New Orleans became an analogue for the Iraqi
>> countryside. It was no surprise, then, to see the juxtaposition of
>> the following morning's (Wednesday, August 31st) split-screen front
>> page headlines on MSNBC.com. A story on the "Nightmare" of Katrina
>> refugees was paired with the "Baghdad Stampede" that killed 800 or
>> more Iraqis. Panic, disaster, public disorder, the mass movement of
>> refugees, tightening military occupation, combined with the key
>> linkages between the disruption of oil production and refineries and
>> long-term economic dislocation and debt accumulation; these are just
>> the initial components of Katrina-Baghdad as a "strange attractor."
>> This emergent strange attractor we now call Katrina-Baghdad will spin
>> off and/or accelerate a series of complex economic, political and
>> social iterations over the near and longer term.
>>
>> Today, there's a post-apocalyptic sensibility in the air. Mayor
>> Nagin's mandatory evacuation order of New Orleans will be carried
>> out, in part, by dispatching 475 buses contracted by FEMA (the
>> Federal Emergency Management Agency) to move tens of thousand of
>> Katrina refugees from the damaged New Orleans Superdome to the
>> recently shuttered Houston Astrodome. According to the ~New York
>> Times~, Texas state government officials expect to house the refugee
>> residents of this new "Dome City" for months, if not longer.
>> Meanwhile, as Howard Fineman notes, the bulk of the personnel,
>> equipment and financial resources necessary for a "war-like" response
>> to such devastation are sunk into another delta, a half-a-world away,
>> at the mouth of the Tigris and the Euphrates. Already consuming
>> eighty percent of the world's lending capital in prolifigate fiscal
>> and consumer consumption, sharp and immediate rises in oil and
>> natural gas prices, combined with tens of billions in infrastructural
>> reconstruction costs, may well set off an accelerating chain of
>> events (such as rising interest rates and the collapse of the housing
>> market bubble). The result could lead, in very short order, to a
>> steep decline in personal and national fortunes.
>>
>> Finally, we should take note of a particular incident of
>> destruction. Across Lake Pontchartrain, two seven mile bridge spans
>> of Interstate 10, connecting New Orleans to the eastern U.S.
>> mainland, were catastrophically shredded into dozens of disconnected
>> concrete chunks. As both a metaphor and event precursor, this
>> particular piece of devastation is profoundly symbolic. The
>> shattering of this part of I-10 connotes the liabilities of a fragile
>> and deep interconnectedness, in a global economic and ecological
>> system. A product of the mid-and-late 20th Century height of the
>> American Empire, the Interstate Highway System was a triumph of
>> economic nationalism and Fordist progressive capitalism. Katrina's
>> demolishing of this portion of I-10 can be understood as signifying
>> the shattering of the remaining structural supports for the effective
>> maintenance of such an economic nationalism, while revealing,
>> immediately and decisively, the hubris and frailty of the Imperium.
>>
>>
>>
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------
>> With enduring interests in representation, communication, culture and
>> technology, Dion Dennis is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice
>> at Bridgewater State College.
>>
>> _____________________________________________________________________
>>
>> *
>> * CTHEORY is an international journal of theory, technology and
>> * culture. Articles, interviews, and key book reviews in
>> * contemporary discourse are published weekly as well as
>> * theorisations of major "event-scenes" in the mediascape.
>> *
>> * Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
>> *
>> * Editorial Board: Jean Baudrillard (Paris), Paul Virilio (Paris),
>> * Bruce Sterling (Austin), R.U. Sirius (San Francisco), Siegfried
>> * Zielinski (Koeln), Stelarc (Melbourne), Richard Kadrey (San
>> * Francisco), DJ Spooky [Paul D. Miller] (NYC), Timothy Murray
>> * (Ithaca/Cornell), Lynn Hershman Leeson (San Francisco), Stephen
>> * Pfohl (Boston), Andrew Ross (NYC), David Cook (Toronto), Ralph
>> * Melcher (Sante Fe), Shannon Bell (Toronto), Gad Horowitz
>> * (Toronto), Andrew Wernick (Peterborough).
>> *
>> * In Memory: Kathy Acker
>> *
>> * Editorial Correspondents: Ken Hollings (UK),
>> * Maurice Charland (Canada) Steve Gibson (Canada/Sweden).
>> *
>> * Editorial Assistant: Ted Hiebert
>> * WWW Design & Technical Advisor: Spencer Saunders (CTHEORY.NET)
>> * WWW Engineer Emeritus: Carl Steadman
>>
>> _____________________________________________________________________
>>
>> To view CTHEORY online please visit:
>> http://www.ctheory.net/
>>
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>> _____________________________________________________________________
>>
>> * CTHEORY includes:
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>> * 1. Electronic reviews of key books in contemporary theory.
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