Metaphors in Crisis
This short chapter contextualizes my study of the Istanbul, San Francisco, and Tokyo earthquakes within the extensive literature that already exists and addresses natural disaster. The scholarly field of catastrophe studies has grown over the past decade, generating a number of methodological conventions that I both adopt and challenge throughout this book. The second section of this chapter describes many of these conventions and the points at which my work intersects with and diverges from them. However, writing about disaster is certainly not unique to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Disasters—and the various ways in which they might be endowed with meaning—have generated political and literary interest for a long time. As one scholar has pointed out, many European historians describe the 1755 Lisbon earthquake “as a watershed event dividing the premodern from the modern age.”1
I do not argue that any one disaster ought to serve as such a distinct historical signpost. I do, however, address much of the literature that does make these types of claims, and the first section of this chapter, “Historical Disaster Writing,” is thus a broadly conceived review of three centuries of writing on disaster. In it, I analyze the ways in which, historically, various earthquakes have been endowed with meaning, and I make the case that a disaster’s political meaning has been determined via the production and invocation of the subject in ecstasy. In the second section of the chapter, “Contemporary Disaster Writing,” I argue that despite this historical trend, the contemporary historiography of disaster is in many ways split—divided into texts that insist upon a bounded subject and subtexts that insist upon a shattered one. I conclude by situating this study within both the modern history of disaster writing and the contemporary historiography that constitutes catastrophe studies. In the process, I set a foundation for the more detailed discussion of subjects beside themselves that appears in later chapters.
My particular interest in this section is the metaphorical life of the natural disaster—and especially the earthquake—between the mid-eighteenth century and the mid-twentieth century. It was over these two hundred years that both modern disaster response and modern political relationships were developed, and so it makes sense that disaster metaphors should also have taken on a distinct political meaning over this same period. There are indeed a number of clear and common themes that seem to run through the modern rhetoric of disaster. In general, for example, these metaphors all invoke in different ways the disintegrating, eccentric, ecstatic subject—and in general they all seem to do so in order to turn the political or natural situation they are describing into something recognizable. At the same time, the modern earthquake metaphor is a shifting trope in which it is never entirely clear what precisely is signifying what. What I do over the course of this section, therefore, is address, first, a few examples of disasters as politics, second, a few more examples of politics as disaster, and then finally, a couple of examples where the referent is not obvious. My focus is the gradual process by which the politics of disaster became a politics of ecstasy—and by which the metaphor of the disaster gradually became a concrete reality.
Before I get to these eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century discussions of disasters, however, I turn to a mid-seventeenth-century earthquake that does not conform to my theories of subjectivity and disaster law. This is an early modern analysis of earthquakes that in a number of ways supports Foucault’s point about the contradiction between the rationality of theology and the ecstatic potential of spirituality2—an analysis that distinctly invokes the unitary, bounded, self-conscious subject as a means of revealing the rational and verifiable religious truth of the disaster. It thus serves as an effective jumping-off point for the story I tell in the remainder of this section about the gradual articulation of a modern politics of disaster and of ecstasy.
In 1668, in response to an earthquake that struck primarily the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire, the Dutch writer, Leopold Wettersteint de Hodenstein, determined that the disaster promises (1) “good and prosperous success to Christians,” (2) that “the infernal powers shall be converted and turn’d against one another,” (3) that “the miscreant Turks by internecine wars and divisions shall tear the very heart of the Ottoman Empire asunder,” and finally (4) that “he that has hitherto been invincible, and proudly insulted over Christian Kings and Princes, now the very earth (the lowest, basest, and vilest of all creatures) scorns to bear him and begins to shake him off.”3 This discussion is a relatively straightforward example of natural disaster understood as, first, a tool in religious prophecy and, second, a punishment from God for religious and political misbehavior.
At the same time, it can likewise be read as something of a variation on Cartesian rationalism and dualism, where the base earth/body responds to the will of the exalted government/mind. Natural disorder—described elsewhere in the text as the “commoting of the earth”—is analogous to political disorder—internecine wars—and each is subservient to religious truth. Nature or the body personified as Earth, “the creature,” is obedient to rational Christian will and Christian need, attempting to shake off the Muslim Ottomans altogether. What I highlight in this passage, however, is less the relationship between political disorder and natural disorder in Wettersteint de Hodenstein’s universe—a relationship that is relatively obvious—and more the way in which this disorder is made understandable.
First of all, there is a direct causal relationship between God’s displeasure and the “commoting of the earth.” This is a disaster, in other words, that is logical above all else—the meaning is there for anyone to see. More to the point, the political subjects involved this disaster are likewise the political subjects that take center stage in Wettersteint de Hodenstein’s analysis of it. There are Christians and there are Turks. Each is directly affected by the earthquake. There are, contrarily, no offstage Indians or pirates to make this disaster meaningful. Indeed, given that the earth is seeking in the future to throw the Turks offstage, their central role in the present is quite clear. This is a rational, logical earthquake that is made intelligible—and the political meaning of which is made clear—via reference to central, unitary subjects.
Almost one hundred years later, the natural disaster remained for many writers a rational and logical event that assumed a similarly bounded, unitary subject. According to a 1750 article in the British Gentleman’s Magazine, for example, earthquakes were “evidently placed among those methods by which God punishes a rebellious and wicked people . . . all [of] which makes it abundantly plain, that Earthquakes are under the divine management, and are made use of by God to fulfill his pleasure.”4 Nonetheless, disasters were also becoming more complicated throughout the eighteenth century and, as Maxine Van de Wetering argues in her study of earthquakes and Puritan sermonizing, the process of endowing them with meaning was becoming increasingly fraught.
One Puritan thinker, for instance, divided earthquakes into two categories—natural and supernatural—the former occurring “at the climax of an observed sequence of ‘meteorological warnings,’ ” and the latter “delivered apparently without sequential physical warning.”5 The former, this writer suggests, was “lawful,” whereas the latter was the consequence of “God’s direct intervention into His own lawful mechanism.”6 Van de Wetering’s analysis of this division is that “to action-driven Puritans, such an [irrational] God would have been morally immobilizing, and the obvious disjunction between the natural and the moral governments would be ethically crippling to the community.”7 As a result, “the Puritan God was forever being startled, so to speak, out of His normal habits of operation through natural law by some kind of human behavior.”8
But there is an additional reading of this interpretation of natural and supernatural earthquakes. Again, the supernatural earthquake, unbounded by law and a function of, as the Gentleman’s Magazine notes, God’s pleasure, remained prophetic and punitive, functional in the realm inhabited by Leopold Wettersteint de Hodenstein. The natural earthquake was quite different, a product of law and legal structures, seemingly unrelated to God’s desires. The supernatural earthquake proved the existence of God; the natural earthquake proved nothing more than the existence of law. Supernatural earthquakes occurred without any direct reference to law; natural earthquakes occurred without any direct reference to God. I suggest, however, that despite all of these differences, these two types of earthquakes were by no means disconnected from one another in the broader politics of eighteenth-century Puritanism.
Given that God made the laws that governed the natural earthquake, and that the supernatural earthquake proved the existence of God, neither the natural earthquake nor the legal system it followed could exist without the possibility of a supernatural earthquake. It was the supernatural earthquake, in other words that, in its very lawlessness, made law possible. This was an articulation of disaster and politics that in almost every way prefigured Carl Schmitt’s analysis of the state of exception. For Schmitt, the exception proved the existence of the sovereign, and thus the existence of the day-to-day jurisprudence (even in its suspension) as it was overseen by the sovereign.9 For the Puritans, the supernatural earthquake proved the existence of God and thus the existence of the natural law (even in its suspension) that was overseen by God.
Put another way, it was the very thing that was unknowable, that was by definition ecstatic—God in his decision to wreak divine destruction or the sovereign in his decision to suspend day-to-day jurisprudence—that endowed law with meaning. Even when God was, as it were, ruling by decree, however, it is important to keep in mind that these decisions made rational and logical sense: men were evil, God responded. The difference between Leopold Wettersteint de Hodenstein’s analysis and this early eighteenth-century Puritan analysis, therefore, is not that one is rational, embedded in causal relationships, while the other is not. Rather, it is that one is unitary while the other is not. In the late seventeenth century, in the apparent era of Cartesian dualism, there was a one-to-one correspondence between religious will and natural disaster—between political disorder and natural disorder. There was none of this questioning of the relationship among law, politics, and divine decree, between legal subjects and their religious or political counterparts. The early eighteenth-century Puritans, however, in their very religious fervor, brought law, and thus legal subjects, into the picture. In the Puritan analysis, the Cartesian structure was shattered. And the result was a situation in which the rational, lawful mechanism and its rational, lawful subjects could be real, could be endowed with meaning only via reference to that hyperbolically ecstatic and offstage being—that being who is defined above all as He who is outside of the law—God. We have the beginning here, that is, of legal systems, of laws of disaster, that become real only via reference to the ecstatic subject.
My point in bringing up Puritan analyses of disaster is not to suggest that religious belief or the lack thereof is what is key to this transformation in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century earthquake metaphors. Rather, I argue that by the eighteenth century there was a gradual shift in focus away from the unitary subject and toward the ecstatic, eccentric one. Indeed, if we turn to one of the most famous eighteenth-century European discussions of natural disaster—Voltaire’s poem on the 1755 Lisbon earthquake—we can see precisely this transformation in action. Voltaire’s poem on “the axiom ‘all is well’” plays with two themes. The first is that God’s existence is becoming increasingly dubious in the face of the enormous human suffering that follows disasters such as the 1755 earthquake. The second is that it is more ethical to relate to human beings as discrete individuals than it is to relate to them as members of an undifferentiated religious or even national group. As such, the poem appears at first glance to be very much in opposition to the Puritans’ religious sermons and very much in support of the unitary, bounded, rational subject. Although the poem can be placed superficially into these categories, however, in one important way—in its invocation of the ecstatic subject—it is identical to the Puritan writing.
As Rita Goldberg argues, for example, “what made Voltaire’s evocation of suffering caused by the Lisbon earthquake unusual was that most eighteenth century writers remained more interested in the compassionate response of the observer than in suffering itself.”10 Voltaire, contrarily, “devotes himself entirely to the victims of the earthquake in his poem,” and thus “the shattered domesticity of Lisbon offers a challenge to representation as well as belief.”11 Voltaire’s “audience,” she concludes “is not his subject.”12 His audience is not his subject. What does this mean? Most clearly, as Goldberg suggests, it means that the poem is not just a poem about religious belief; it is a poem about shifting modes of representation. Whereas other eighteenth-century writers collapsed subject and audience into one—attempting to produce sentimental political subjects by talking to and about sentimental political subjects—Voltaire’s scene is fractured. He, too, is trying to create (political) subjects, but he is doing so by talking to citizens and philosophers about the suffering population of Lisbon.
Just as the Puritans’ rational system of natural law could become meaningful only by invoking the eccentric, ecstatic subject that existed outside of it, so too Voltaire’s rational, thinking individual could become meaningful only via recourse to a shattered Lisbon both at the center of, and at the margins of, the political scene. To repeat, rather than talking to the population of Lisbon about their suffering, rather than talking to citizens or philosophers about their sentimentality, Voltaire is instead talking to citizens or philosophers about the suffering population of Lisbon—in order to make a broader point about political and religious identity. Producing a split in the scene—a divide between audience and subject—Voltaire is arguably understanding ecstasy as the most effective starting point for a conversation about subjectivity.
Just as the 1668 earthquake was a political metaphor for Wettersteint de Hodenstein, that is, the 1755 earthquake was the same for Voltaire. Unlike Wettersteint de Hodenstein, however, Voltaire does not read the disaster as something relevant only—or even primarily—to the population in the disaster zone. What has occurred in Lisbon is explicitly not that the people misbehaved and that therefore they were punished. Rather, the 1755 earthquake is relevant to a population far removed from Lisbon—a population on the verge of becoming rational, progressive, and aware of its various rights—a population, however, whose liberal existence is predicated precisely upon reference to the ecstatic subjects of Lisbon.13 Voltaire’s poem is thus in many ways an example both of disaster as politics and politics as disaster. It operates, therefore, as an excellent jumping off point for my next collection of earthquake metaphors. What we will see in the following passages is a number of moments at which politics become disaster, rather than disaster politics. I emphasize again, however, that it is still Braidotti’s metaphysical crisis that is at the heart of these metaphors—and it is still the subject in ecstasy that makes them intelligible.
The first of these metaphors was published in 1788, when The Columbia Magazine reprinted an essay by David Hume, “On Civil Liberty.” In this essay, we learn that “private property seems to me almost as secure in a civilized EUROPEAN monarchy, as in a republic; nor is danger much apprehended in such a government, from the violence of the sovereign, more than we commonly dread harm from thunder or earthquakes.”14 Second, and at around the same time, Edmund Burke was gradually popularizing the rhetoric of disaster—his reference to the French Revolution, for instance, as “the greatest moral earthquake that ever convulsed and shattered this globe of ours,” and his insistence that only “justice” could “defy” it, was reproduced repeatedly in early nineteenth-century British journals as a textbook example of flawless political eloquence.15 By the 1850s, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine was arguing in reference to the 1848 revolutions, variously, that “Canada has lately shared largely in the moral earthquake which has so violently shaken all parts of the British Empire,”16 and that, but for the Reform Act, “the British constitution would infallibly have been overturned during the moral earthquakes in Europe which followed the French Revolution of 1848.”17 Two years later, the editors noted in another essay on “earthquakes”: “so violent were the shocks of the revolutionary earthquake in the Fatherland [i.e., pre-unification Germany], that the entire disruption of society and ruin of the national independence seemed to be threatened by its effects.”18 The Saturday Evening Post argued ten years later that “since the time when the throes of ‘that world’s earthquake, Waterloo’ convulsed and changed the destinies of Christendom, nothing has so powerfully excited the public mind as the present revolt in India.”19
Switching focus to the United States, an anonymous writer of 1815 attacked inappropriate political violence in France and England by insisting that, “if the island of Great Britain and the whole territory of France, should now be sunk by an earthquake, the loss of lives would perhaps be less than what has been occasioned by the voluntary and anti-Christian wars of the two nations.”20 The author then concludes by asking whether “the people of the United States [should] continue to follow the bloody examples of these nations in offering human sacrifices ? God Forbid!”21 Finally, jumping ahead a number of decades, the Civil War in the United States, according to Sheila Hones, was “presented most often . . . in the image of a gulf, or chasm,” produced by “the national ‘earthquake,’” and creating “a metaphorical dislocation . . . both spatial and temporal at the same time.”22 She continues that the war “was remembered as ‘unnatural,’ first because of its association with the absence of intelligent, moral leadership [on the battlefield] and second because of its image as a war of massacred armies rather than thoughtful individuals.”23
I could continue with these examples of politics as disaster ad infinitum, but since my primary interest in this book is disaster as politics, and since all of this serves principally as context, I will stop here. What I want to highlight, however, again, is the type of political subject that these inverted politics/earthquake analogies assume. What is it about these various political activities—the sovereign seizure of private property, various revolutions and anticolonial movements, inappropriate declarations of war—that turns them into disasters? And why is it that, to the extent that protective solutions are advanced, these have to do with variations on the rule of law? First of all, this decision to render various forms of political activity disastrous or calamitous is identical to the decision to differentiate between “military violence” and “great disasters” in the early twentieth-century American Red Cross reports. Doing so delegitimizes certain types of political activity, empties them of meaning, and dehumanizes their perpetrators. At the same time, however, just as in the Red Cross reports, there is also something more going on in these disaster metaphors than a simple process of delegitimization.
If we consider the last example, for instance, we can see that the Civil War in the United States is defined as an earthquake above all (if perhaps paradoxically) because it is “unnatural.” It is, in turn, “unnatural” because there is an apparent absence of thoughtful, rational leadership on the battlefield, and a turn toward undifferentiated armies massacred without reason. What makes something an earthquake in this rhetorical space, therefore, is quite specifically the invocation of a mass of irrational, shattered, butchered bodies—bodies that, by definition, are beside themselves, dismembered, that can in no way become unitary subjects. Similarly, in the second to last example, what makes an earthquake different from warfare is that the latter is “voluntary” whereas the former implicitly is not. What makes an earthquake the same as warfare is that each is a form of “human sacrifice.” Once more, therefore, the way in which warfare becomes an earthquake in this passage is via reference to irrational, butchered (in this case sacrificed) bodies—bodies that are, again, in no way part of the seemingly voluntary logic of nondisastrous political structures. To emphasize, the issue that is key to defining the meaning of the political violence here is less agency or activity—“voluntary” warfare, after all, is made rhetorically identical to involuntary disasters. Rather the issue that is key is the condition of the bodies—the shattered state of the physically ecstatic subjects of war/disaster.
The rhetoric that turns anticolonial and revolutionary violence into disaster is slightly different in that it takes spaces or states as its subject rather than bodies or citizens—but it nonetheless plays on almost identical themes. A revolution is an earthquake because it convulses land, changes the course of history, threatens independence, and disrupts society. A revolution is also an earthquake because of what can prevent it, namely constitutional law. The way in which an act of political violence becomes an earthquake, therefore, is via the invocation of a shattered, indefinable, spatially and temporally disrupted land that can never function, like a state, as a rational political subject. Contrarily, the way in which this political violence remains undisastrous is by invoking the rational, unitary subject that is apparently demanded by the rule of law—a point made clear in Hume’s positing of respect for “civil liberties” as the thing that differentiates civilized sovereign activity from its disastrous counterpart.
Again, my interest in this book is less the way in which various political events have been defined as disasters, and more the ways in which disasters are turned into politics. My last set of examples of metaphors in crisis, however, also suggests that the line between these two rhetorical positions—the difference between referent and reality—is not as obvious as it might appear. Indeed, what follows now are a number of muddled metaphors—hypothetical disasters in the imagined future turned into present political realities, or hypothetical political violence in the imagined past turned into a future natural disaster. What I suggest in these last few paragraphs is thus, first, that politics and disaster are far too entangled to address separately, and second, that both disasters and the political structures that develop out of them become intelligible only via reference to the ecstatic, eccentric subject.
I begin, therefore, with a typical example of politics, in this case imperial politics, colliding with disaster rhetoric. In March 1894, New Peterson Magazine conducted an interview with the geologist and earthquake expert John Milne. Rather than inviting Milne to discuss the physical causes or effects of earthquakes, the interviewer asked him instead to satisfy his readers’ curiosity about their “moral effects,”24 and concluded the conversation as follows:
in such places as Japan and Naples, we find light hearted carelessness and disregard for the morrow more prevalent than elsewhere, and in all earthquake countries, the arts conducive to pleasure are highly cultivated. If, says, Professor Milne, the seismic force of South America were turned loose in England or Germany, it would ultimately produce a people with no idea of permanency among whom everything spiritual would collapse and might result in sinking Germans and Englishmen to the lowest level in the ranks of civilization.25
This passage is a straightforward and unremarkable example of nineteenth-century racism and civilizational rhetoric.26 The climate and geology of England and Germany have led to civilizational superiority; the climate and geology of Japan, Naples, and South America have led to civilizational inferiority. I bring it up, however, less to highlight the relationship between scientific rationalism and imperial violence that developed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and more to stress the extent to which the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century politics/disaster metaphors that I discussed above had become a concrete reality by the turn of the twentieth century.
If we compare this discussion of civilization and disaster to a second one published thirty years later, we can see that this transformation had by the 1920s become complete. By 1923, in fact, Germany had fallen into precisely the trap foretold in the above passage, and in an article entitled “Germany in Earthquake,” we discover the following: “Germany is sick. And a bulletin on her condition is inevitable. The question is no longer whether she has suffered for her sins but whether, as Germany, she will survive.”27 In 1894, in other words, we were told that civilizations existing in earthquake zones are impermanent and civilizationally inferior. In 1923, German politics are in fact “in earthquake,” and—as expected—Germany has become sick, backward, and impermanent.
Although related to the nineteenth-century discussion of the “revolutionary earthquake” that had disrupted society and threatened the “Fatherland’s” independence, therefore, I want to emphasize that this analysis is also something of a departure. Before, politics and natural disaster were analogous to one another, each serving in different ways as a reference point for the other. Here, the analogy has disappeared. Politics per se—revolutions, elections, battles—do not show up at all in the text; they have been consumed entirely by the disaster. Germany is in earthquake. Period. And, biologically, it is sick. There is no longer any political reference point, there is only material, scientific discussions of actual natural disasters and actual biological illness. What had once been a literary device has become a reality. More to the point, however, this device has made the subject offstage, the subject in ecstasy even more insistent than before. The only way to understand Germany, to make Germany intelligible, to make Germany a political subject, and—most important—to comprehend Germany’s disaster in this analytical universe28 is to invoke the fantastic, pleasure-loving Japanese, Neapolitans, and South Americans. It is only by turning hypothetical subjects in ecstasy into a legal and political norm that Germany as a concept—and the German disaster in particular—makes any sense at all.
Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in fact, we see repeated anecdotal examples of the new reality of the disaster/politics metaphor and the paradoxical centrality of the eccentric subject appearing in analyses of earthquakes. In the context of the U.S. empire, for instance, an American correspondent writing in 1902 on the occupation of the Philippines stated the following:
A certain well-known Pacificator of Provinces confessed that, though not a cruel man, if a tidal wave had to follow upon the earthquake, he hoped it would sweep with overwhelming force over a certain district where, despite frequent announcements of peace, the rebellion rages. “We might drown them out, but this rubbing out process is proving too expensive.”29
Switching scenes, Said Nursi, a late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century Ottoman and Turkish philosopher, engages in an analysis of God’s use of earthquakes and other natural disasters to “wake up” the careless.30 In a reversal of Leopold Wettersteint de Hodenstein’s position, however, Nursi understands God to afflict believing populations with disasters in the here and now so that they will not have to suffer in the next world.31 Moreover, Nursi speaks a careful language of law, religion, and civil officialdom quite divorced from Wettersteint de Hodenstein’s, where functionaries who behave in a treacherous or illegal manner in the name of “law” are identical to earthquakes, droughts, illnesses, or storms.32 Finally, altering the context one last time, the 1954 Japanese film Godzilla encapsulates the concrete reality of political violence as natural violence in what has now become an almost paradigmatic manner. The story of a monster that wakes up and destroys Tokyo following American nuclear testing, Godzilla, as Susan J. Napier argues, “demonizes American nuclear science in an obvious reference to the atomic tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”33
Although occupying vastly different cultural and aesthetic positions, each of these discussions is an example, first, of the now concrete nature of the disaster/ politics metaphor and, second, the increasing centrality of the subject in ecstasy. In the American colonial context, the “pacification” of the Philippines and the “rubbing out” of rebellious soldiers will ideally conform to the overwhelming force of a tsunami. If it should operate in conformity with an actual tsunami, however, so much the better. In the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, the treachery of functionaries and their political misbehavior writ large occupy the same category as natural disasters. They are not like earthquakes or famines; they are earthquakes and famines—each undermines in exactly the same way the health and prosperity of the population. Finally, in Godzilla, this trend is brought to its logical conclusion. In the years following the Second World War, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were increasingly depicted as natural disasters rather than as deliberate, politically motivated acts of violence. Godzilla, therefore—ironically or not—turns this rhetorical point into a concrete reality. Again, it is not that these bombings were like a natural disaster—they were a natural disaster. The connection is direct, and it is the monster, not the bomb, that ends up destroying the urban center.
Moreover, in each of these examples, as the disaster metaphor becomes increasingly concrete, it relies increasingly on the ecstatic subject to determine its political meaning. The discussion of the Philippines, for example, takes the assumptions underlying the American Red Cross reports one step further, and turns not just the rioting “rebels”—the equivalent of rioting “race”—into a force of nature, but also the U.S. military’s response to them. The only way in which military violence can make sense in this context is in reference to indefinable subjects. Likewise, the rule of law in the Ottoman Empire can be defined only via recourse to the treacherous official as natural disaster. And finally, Godzilla is essentially playing the same role as the Puritan God was two hundred years before. He is irrational, destructive, and quite obviously outside the rule of law—but it is only by making him the subject of the legal and political narrative that the deliberate, politically motivated bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can make any sense at all.
Once more, my purpose in bringing up these anecdotal examples of the disaster metaphor is to emphasize the extent to which Braidotti’s crisis of the rational subject remains very much with us, and the extent to which the legal and political rhetoric of disaster assumes an ecstatic subject. I have provided a number of different variations on the metaphor—earthquake as politics, politics as earthquake, and earthquake/politics situations in which the referent is not clear. I repeat, however, that my interest in this book is predominantly the first of these associations. And I address the legal and political structures that develop when a disaster becomes the reference point for politics. At the same time, as I have suggested, the line between these two types of metaphor is not in any way an obvious one—and it is precisely this ambiguity that lends the subject in ecstasy its rhetorical power.
Having touched on the historical literature that addresses disaster, I turn now to the more recent work that has appeared in the field of catastrophe studies. In particular, I am interested in the various ways that this scholarship has grappled with defining the disaster. Again, my own hypothesis is that a disaster comes into existence when the ecstatic subject becomes the normative figure of law and politics. Obviously, however, there are other ways of approaching this issue, and the purpose of this section is to address these alternative approaches, to examine some common themes that emerge in them, and to try to find points of overlap between these conclusions and my own. I address, especially, three broad arguments that appear in contemporary discussions of the disaster.
The first of these is the notion that disasters become disasters when they occur at some commonly accepted center. According to this argument, a disaster occurs when it has been effectively framed within a coherent cultural, civilizational, or geographical context. The second approach suggests that disasters become disasters only upon their articulation as well-worn narratives. Scholars who implicitly or explicitly support this position argue that disasters come into existence only when they are articulated via a coherent and rational story that is already comforting and familiar. And finally, the third position that I address concerns the everyday—it rests on the notion that a disaster becomes a disaster when the everyday or daily life becomes a template for politics.
I would like to begin with what is probably the most common thesis about the relationship between reality and disaster—namely, that a disaster happens when it destroys some “cultural center.” As a 2006 law school textbook on Hurricane “Katrina and Beyond” puts it:
the flooding destroyed New Orleans, the Nation’s thirty-fifth largest city. Much as the fire that burned Chicago in 1871 and the earthquake and fire that leveled San Francisco in 1906 destroyed the economic and cultural centers of an entire region, so too did Hurricane Katrina destroy what many considered to be the heart of the Gulf Coast. The destruction also called to mind the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, which thoroughly devastated the town of Galveston, Texas. At the time, Galveston was an economic and cultural center of Texas and was the State’s fourth largest city . . . [Y]et, Hurricane Katrina not only damaged far more property than any previous natural disaster, it was also the deadliest natural disaster in the United States since Hurricane San Felipe in 1928.34
It is, in other words—and repeatedly—the destruction of a center, a heart, that turns something into a disaster. New Orleans, Chicago, San Francisco, and Galveston are moved to the center of the cultural scene, and it is as a result of this centrality that their destruction is a disaster. Indeed, there is an implicit assumption in this writing that loss of life itself becomes disastrous only when it happens at the center. Violence thus codes as a crisis if and only if it is central—with all of the political consequences that this association implies.
This approach to disaster—along with critiques of it—has become common in recent years. At the same time, however, much of the recent writing that accepts the center of culture paradigm also attempts to subvert it in some way, or at least to shift its meaning. While accepting that a reference to the center defines a disaster, these discussions also seek to destabilize the notion of centrality itself and to reevaluate the political rhetoric that is produced via references to centers. In an analysis of the 1923 Tokyo-Yokohama earthquake, for instance, one writer states first that “on Saturday, 1 September 1923, a devastating earthquake hit the Tokyo-Yokohama area. The initial jolt lasted nearly fourteen seconds. Over 100,000 people were killed, many more were injured, and hundreds of thousands of homes were destroyed by the quake and the ensuing fires.”35 He then continues, “a lesser known disaster . . . followed fast on the heels of the 1923 earthquake. This was the massacre of hundreds of Koreans in Tokyo, Yokohama, and other places in the days immediately following 1 September.”36 In a very different context, a second writer argues in a discussion of “Peru’s Five Hundred Year Earthquake” that “the society that confronted the major seismic event on the afternoon of May 31, 1970, was in many ways already a catastrophe.”37 The reason for this, according to the author, is that the economy was “characterized by acute boom-and-bust cycles and chronic mal-distribution,” meaning that “Peru was and continues today to be in a vulnerable condition.”38
Although operating in different frameworks, and seeking to prove different points, these two writers are nonetheless working with the same assumptions about what precisely makes a disaster meaningful. In the first passage, there is a reference initially to the destruction of a cultural center that killed x number of people. The point of invoking this destruction, however, is to recenter a “lesser known disaster,” the massacre of the Koreans. By accepting the relationship among disaster, cultural centrality, and mass death, the writer is able to reframe what for him is the real catastrophe—the politically motivated persecution of Koreans in the disaster area. In the second passage, we can see a similar rhetorical process at work. There is first the disaster at the center—in this case the 1970 earthquake. By invoking this disaster, however, the writer is, again, able to reframe what he sees as the real calamity. What is important in this passage is not that an earthquake occurred, not that centers of culture were destroyed, not that many people died; rather what is important is that Peruvian society was “already a catastrophe”—that Peru’s vulnerable economy was in crisis. Each of these writers is simultaneously reinforcing and reinventing the connections among centrality, death, and disaster.39
A second theme that appears in catastrophe studies is that unitary narratives are key to making disasters intelligible. The question that gets asked in this scholarship is less what makes a disaster meaningful than what the media does to make a disaster meaningful. The starting point of much writing on media and disaster is indeed that media representations of disaster insist (inappropriately) upon discrete, bounded, unitary narratives, even if these narratives are in turn linked to shattered, unthinkable bodies. As one analysis of “The Media Response to Oil Spills in Great Britain” argues, for instance,
the disaster narrative frames employed by the media vary surprisingly little from one disaster to another, drawing upon existing broad underlying themes which serve as templates for cultural constructions of reality . . . [I]n so-called environmental disasters such as oil spills, the focus is generally on the effects of the ecology, and not on the effects on the human communities. This is an attempt to naturalize the disaster.40
A second discussion, which links media narratives of disaster to “body horror,” rests on the idea that “the thrill of disaster reports does not derive from close up photography of corpses or body parts but from restrained imagery tied to stories of fatally bad luck . . . [I]n picturing disasters, bodies are generally absent or signified by spatters of blood.”41 In one final passage that describes, in this case, apocalyptic literature rather than news media representations of disaster, we learn that the “ultimate object” of apocalyptic literature is “an image of purity so absolute that it denies the organic messiness of life.”42 At the same time, however, “the end result of apocalyptic purification often seems of less importance than the narrative pleasure derived from the bizarre and opulent tribulations of the bodies”—bodies that are “perverse . . . unstable and mutating from maleness to femaleness and back again.”43
In each of these discussions of disaster and the media, there is an emphasis on—or critique of—the discrete, unitary, ordered narrative that ignores or redefines the disordered, pained human or body. In each, indeed, the very incomprehensibility of the human or body is rendered comprehensible when it is, quite literally, incorporated back into the narrative. In the first, the human cost of oil spills—and the oil spill itself—are subsumed under a master narrative of “nature” and ecological catastrophe. In the second, the narrative is a story of fatally bad luck—a story that requires a restrained evocation of the destroyed body rather than a direct photograph of it. Finally, in the apocalyptic literature, although the “narrative pleasure” derived from experiencing bodies in ecstatic pain often overwhelms the apparent goal or purpose of the genre writ large, the “ultimate object” remains: hyperbolically disordered bodies are reordered in the name of a coherent, meaningful narrative of redemption.
The last recurring trope in catastrophe studies that I want to discuss here is the trope of the everyday. The notion that a disaster occurs when something called the “everyday” is either disrupted or revealed as the template for politics is certainly not a new one. What many of these more recent studies do, however, is question the very notion of the everyday. Like the analyses of the media narratives, these discussions frequently maintain a certain rhetorical distance from the disaster itself—asking not just what makes a disaster real, but what makes the things that it destroys and disrupts real. As one sociologist argues, for example, a compelling reason to study disasters is that “disasters provide opportunities to examine aspects of social structures and processes that are hidden in everyday affairs,” and are “invaluable opportunities to study sense-making mechanisms, at both collective and individual levels, in their most visible forms.”44
Other scholars have examined the mobilization of the everyday as a response to, or a model for, the politics of disaster—often coming to quite different conclusions about its desirability or efficacy. On the one hand, for instance, Veena Das has suggested that it is possible to make “a space of destruction our own not through an ascent into transcendence but through a descent into the every day.”45 On the other hand, some feminist scholars have argued that since “disaster management tends to be a male-dominated, top-down process” reinforcing “existing masculine-dominated gender relationships,” the “return to ‘normality’ sought by emergency planners tends to be an oversimplified picture. The ordinary and the everyday need to be seen as difficult and requiring interpretation.”46 Obviously these interpretations of the everyday are quite different. The one attempts to obviate the occasionally hysterical “vulnerable spaces” rhetoric by invoking personal normality. The other attempts to rescue the everyday from a sexist “normality” that operates at the level of emergency planning and procedure.47
All three of these discussions, however, seem to be drawing on similar assumptions. According to each, a disaster is endowed with meaning upon the invocation of the everyday. Moreover, although this everyday is open to interpretation, it is always a clear, coherent, concept. It is knowable and decipherable. Above all, it orders. In the first passage, it in fact orders so effectively that it can “hide” key social structures and processes and obscure sense-making mechanisms. In the second, it orders (or reorders) lives wracked by destruction. It is the opposite of transcendence—the opposite of ecstasy with all of its eccentric messiness. Finally, in the third, it orders the normality sought by patriarchal emergency planners. It orders the male-dominated gender relations that appear in the days following the disaster. What makes the disaster intelligible, in other words, is the invocation of yet another unitary, bounded narrative—the narrative of the everyday.
My own approach to catastrophe studies engages all three of these trends in the existing literature, but it also diverges from them in significant ways. What I have shown over the past few pages is that the ecstatic, eccentric subject is by no means alien or unrelated to contemporary writing on disaster. When the “center of culture” trope, for example, is rhetorically subverted, we are seeing in one sense a new focus on the eccentric subject. When references to the everyday or to the slippage between media narrative and bodily disorder in turn destabilize even these new centers, we are likewise seeing an invocation of the ecstatic subject. The problem is that as soon as these shifts in perspective have been effected, as soon as the lives of those beside themselves or outside of the center have been reframed, there is an immediate return to the bounded, unitary subject or narrative. Reframing, that is, does no more than reinforce the notion that centrality and coherence are what make a disaster meaningful.
What I do in this book is make the case that if a frame exists at all in the politics of disaster, its purpose is to define what lies—and what will always lie—outside of the picture. I argue that the disaster comes into existence because of what is, and always will be, offstage. What I think needs to be considered in discussions of disaster is thus not that a disaster in x marginal space is just as meaningful as a disaster in y central space—not that destruction of x marginal population must be recognized as tragic in the same way that destruction of y central population is. Rather, I suggest that disasters are produced via reference to spaces and subjects that do not have—and never will have—any actual relationship to the destruction itself. What produces a disaster is the invocation of spaces and subjects so far offstage, in such a state of ecstasy, that they can never become central or bounded. What produces a disaster are fantasy Indians and undersea pirates thousands of imaginary miles from the space of destruction.
I conclude this chapter by citing one last influential work in the field of catastrophe studies—a work that makes this point better than I do. Near the end of his book, Dead Cities, Mike Davis states:
last June (1998) Science published a short article about polar bears on the Arctic island of Spitzbergen in the Barents Sea. A team of Norwegian scientists has been systematically tranquilizing and tagging the animals in a long-term study of their population dynamics. They were shocked to discover that an anomalous number of the bears are hermaphrodites. They suspect that polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which condense from the cold Arctic atmosphere and concentrate in the marine food chain, are the endocrine disputers responsible for the bizarre sex-change. Amid all the environmental tremors of the recent past, including Hemisphere-scale droughts and continentsize wildfires, it is the hermaphroditic polar bears that most haunt me.48
In a book devoted to every conceivable sort of destruction, from floods to tsunamis to toxic spills—in a book about countless populations starving, dying, and becoming ill—what makes disaster meaningful for Davis are intersexed bears in the arctic. What frightens him about disaster is the possible existence of bears of uncertain gender. The reason that I end this chapter with the above passage is that it highlights the logical conclusion to the reframing process that I discussed above. It is a hyperbolic variation on the theme of the ecstatic, eccentric subject of disaster. And I believe that it returns us in a strangely apt way to Braidotti’s initial point—that gender and sexuality are in fact at the heart of any rhetoric of crisis.