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Hurricane Katrina: The Dynamic Processes of Normality and

Vulnerability

By Irene Shaver

Lewis and Clark College Portland, OR

May 2008

Professor Robert Goldman

Environmental Studies Department

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of a Bachelor of Arts

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Abstract:

Using Hurricane Katrina as a case study, this thesis addresses theoretical explanations of vulnerability to natural disasters. I use a modified Hazards of Place Model and an

interdisciplinary theory of multi-scale, multi-system interaction Panarchy as heuristic devices to show the dynamic and rhizomatic character of vulnerability and its creation by

the intersections of the driving subsystems of modernization. This paper argues that selected processes of modernization prompt an intensified matrix of vulnerability.

Beginning with the abstraction of human systems from time and scale I argue that uneven geographic development, the socialization of the means of production, globalization, and

bureaucratic rationality merge with a geographic context (site and situation) to create vulnerability of place as witnessed in Hurricane Katrina. Though vulnerability, danger or

risk are material conditions, they are also cognitive and social constructs. The way disasters are socially constructed and portrayed in modern media is drawn from deeper modes of thought and conceptions of nature, property, science, personal responsibility, and spectacle. These conceptions, assumptions and ways of making sense of this event

create a level of consciousness or the ideological basis for whether or not human systems are able to become reflexive and alter their vulnerabilities. Consciousness regarding the

conditions of risk, becomes distorted and over-simplified by the mobilization of spectacle and the process of reification. Within the contemporary context of the political economy

of neoliberalism many of these processes are intensified and used for self-optimizing purposes constantly re-creating a disproportionately high-risk vulnerable population. If this mal-adaptive system and ideology combined with the other selected processes of

modernization continues with a policy of more of the same, we may create the precondition for disaster (vulnerability) chronically and at such a level that we will

compromise our overall ability to respond and recover thus, undermining our resiliency.

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“New Orleans is surprising evidence of what men will endure, when cheered by the hopes of an ever-flowing tide of all mighty dollars and cents (Kelman 2003: 7 ).”

“The definition of danger is always a cognitive and social construct. Modern societies are thus confronted with the bases and limits of their own model to precisely the degree they do not change, do not reflect on their effects and continue a policy of more of the

same (Beck et. al 1994: 6).”

Introduction

In early 2001 FEMA warned that a hurricane flood in New Orleans would be

one of the three major catastrophes along with a terrorist attack in Manhattan and a

California earthquake expected to strike the US in the near future (Davis 2007). In 2004,

250 emergency officials from 50 parish, state, national, and volunteer organizations spent

8 days analyzing possible responses to a hypothetical class 3 hurricane named Pam

(Congelton 2006). They recognized that a large number of people would not be able to

evacuate and the economic and human costs would be at levels not seen in the last

century of US history. The Scientific American in 2001 and The Times-Picayune in 2002

made chillingly similar predictions of the flood danger in their articles called “The Big

One” and “Drowning of New Orleans” (Davis 2007). The 150-year-old history of New

Orleans is riddled with hurricanes, floods, and levee breeches. Hurricane Katrina---the

costs, the levee breeches, the problems with evacuation---was the most accurately

predicted disaster in US history despite the quotes from George Bush who said, “ I don’t

think anybody anticipated a breech of the levees” and the Homeland Security Secretary,

Michael Chertoff who said, “the size of the storm was beyond anything his department

could have anticipated”(Davis 2007). It became clear after Katrina that there was a

disjuncture between the ability to predict the impending disaster and the political decision

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making about how to plan for such a disaster (i.e., prioritizing and allocating resources).

This is further emphasized by the ignored levee repair requests made in 2002

and 2004 that left the levees unfinished and in need of repair and eventually in shambles

as they were overcame by the storm surge of Katrina (Congelton 2006). Why, inspite of

the accurate weather predictions did the response to the ensuing crisis falter so badly?

Some of the answers are easy to identify - the Bush administration has not been known

for paying attention to empirical information and FEMA had been badly compromised by

the moves to consolidate political power with Homeland Security. But I shall argue there

is more to it than that - that the crisis has been in the historical making for some time now

and lies at the deepest levels of capitalist political economy as systems of modernization.

The mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, announced a mandatory evacuation

less than 24 hours before Katrina made landfall. It had been predicted that 100,000

people would either stay put, or be unable to leave the city. In spite of better existing city

evacuation plans, the ‘Superdome plan’ was established with food, water and space

preparations regardless of the fact that this plan and preparation was sufficient for only

one fifth of those expected to stay behind and ride out the hurricane (Congelton 2006).

On August 29, 2005 Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. As the category 3-storm surge

hit New Orleans it entered Lake Pontchartrain through its channel to the gulf, overcame

its floodwalls and inundated 80% of downtown New Orleans. After the city flooded it

took the Federal government 24 hours later to declare it a national disaster, allowing the

mobilization of relief (Comfort 2006). Three-fourths of the federal disaster preparedness

grants originally for natural disasters had been diverted to counter terrorist

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scenarios.Because of the war on terror, the Bush administration had folded FEMA under

the Department for Homeland Security, and turned it over to a political appointee,

Michael Brown, who had no prior experience with managing the crisis situations

prompted by disasters such as Katrina. One third of the Louisiana National Guard and

much of its heavy equipment had been deployed to Iraq (Davis 2007). Thus deprived of

critical resources and experienced administrators, coupled with the absence of an

effective preparedness plan, we can see an emergency management system hamstrung

from the start. As an aside, I might suggest that this retelling reveals an inadequate level

of reflexive modernization1 indeed, it suggests a system in which reflexive coping

strategies have been compromised by narrow political agendas.

In the superdome, 25,000 people, disproportionately African American and

poor, waited five days until the federal government showed up with food, water and

relief. Others waited on rooftops and freeways for rescue (Comfort 2006). Close to two of

every three African American homes were inundated as opposed to one in every four of

white homes. The aggregate impacts were focused in Jefferson and Orleans Parishes,

even though the less densely populated St. Bernard Parish absorbed a heavier blow in

terms of the flooding (Muro et.al 2006). Jefferson and Orleans parishes together made up

89% of the metro's affected population, contained 90% of occupied housing and 88% of

the elderly within the flood zone. However, between the two parishes, the largest impacts

(deaths, homes, property) were felt in Orleans Parish which is 80.3% non-white, has

1Reflexive Modernization or Structural Reflexivity: agency set free from the constraints of social structure, and then reflects on the rules and resources of such structure; reflects on the agency’s social conditions of existence (Beck et al. 1994).

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average household income of $38,263, has more renters than homeowners, and a poverty

rate of 29.5%. This is in contrast to Jefferson Parish with an average household income of

$56,297, is 26.2% non-white, has a majority of owner occupied housing, and has a

poverty rate of 10.1%( Muro et. al 2006). In contrast, St. Bernard Parish, accounted for

10% of the affected population despite the fact that 84% of its residents lived in the flood

zone (Muro et.al 2006). Socioeconomic status, age and access to resources were the main

differences in the impacted populations.

The majority of deaths were African Americans, though proportionate with the

racial makeup of the city. The elderly (over 60 years) and infirm who make up 15 % of

the population, accounted for 74% of the deaths (Reed 2006). This recount of the deaths,

affected populations and disproportionate impacts regardless of equal flood damage,

illuminates the material importance of risk and vulnerability. The uneven distribution of

risk and vulnerability, by population, became immediately visible as the national media

showed footage of inner-city poor black people in the superdome. The poor and

dispossessed were predominantly African American , but discussion of the racial

dimension of Katrina is more substantial and radical if it simultaneously addresses its

connection with poverty. This would illuminate the contradictions that create poverty and

allow domination and exploitation. As Adolf Reed says, race is a language through which

American capitalism's class contradictions are commonly expressed (Reed 2006). I would

agree and by extension, these are the contradictions that create vulnerability

disproportionately and constantly.

Across the states affected by Katrina---Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana—

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the total costs of Katrina have been staggering. It was the most expensive disaster in US

history and the deadliest since the1928 Okeechobee Hurricane. More than 1,723 people

died (1,577 of them in Louisiana), 1.5 million people were displaced, 60,000 million

homes were totally destroyed; an estimated $200 billion in disaster assistance and

rebuilding costs in addition to the $52 billion appropriated by Congress (Comfort 2006).

The long term effect on the U.S economy in terms of the damaged oil refineries and

operations is a cost as well. The political costs of losing a democratic African American

stronghold will have ramifications not to mention record job and insurance losses (Reed

2006).

During the rebuilding process, the expression of neoliberal agendas and

inequality were even more evident. Many private contracts were doled out to Bush's

cronies as the Gulf Coast became a free enterprise 'opportunity zone' for development.

All of the renter homes and pubic housing were destroyed or razed (with no intention of

rebuilding) and there is evidence of redlining and discrimination in insurance claims and

loan allocations (Gotham 2007). The schools have become predominately private.

Significant proportions of the displaced population (predominantly black) has not

returned and the most recent estimates are that only 56% of the the original population

will return by this year (Davis 2007). Mayor Ray Nagin and his Bring New Orleans Back

Commission (BNOB) are jockeying to redefine the city as the ultimate luxury theme park

spectacle, hoping to make obscene revenues in tourism despite the fact that there is still

no affordable housing or substantial permanent working class population yet (Davis

2007). This rebuilding process intensifies existing trends of inequality, segregation, and

uneven geographic development. For these reasons it courts and even more risk-filled

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future.

Aside from the "uncontrollable" effects of the hurricane, half of the disaster

was the government's violation of the victims’ contractual rights to protection. Katrina

struck more than the states where it made landfall. It revealed in fractured images and

moments that our current political and economic policies, systemic conceptualizations

and processes for development are heavily biased, ineffective, and over drawn.

Furthermore, they are disastrous because they have created new risk and vulnerability in

an especially disproportionate way. It was a national disaster in that it represented a

larger scale example of the consequences of modernity and especially, the horrifying

success of last 30 years or so under the global political economic system of neoliberalism

to redirect resources where they are not needed, weaken the state to a point of handicap

and abandon "disposable" populations to sink or swim. Furthermore, the weak indebted

government, and the private rebuilding contracts were all 'disasters by design' under

neoliberalism perhaps even as predictable as the storm itself. As Adolf Reed says, "The

storm exposed the consequences of neoliberalism's lies and mystifications, in a single

locale and all at once (Reed 2006)." An example of this is the concentrated areas of

poverty and highly segregated landscape of New Orleans. Though these divisions existed

on a smaller scale prior to neoliberalism, they were no doubt compounded by its

existence. After 1976 the city became so segregated that now the average African

American lives in a neighborhood that is 82% black (Muro et al. 2006). From 1970 to

2000 the rate of poverty remained relatively constant but the number of census tracts

classified by extreme poverty increased by two thirds. Thirty-eight of the forty-nine

extreme poverty census tracts flooded (Muro et al. 2006).

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When presented with a clear case of human suffering within our own country

and the capacity to alleviate it why didn’t we, or why couldn’t we? Why did the

following of rules and bureaucratic rationality prevail over improvisation and quick

relief? Why do the rebuilding efforts reflect no change in priorities or an elevated

consciousness from the lessons gained by Katrina? Why aren’t we prepared with all of

our experts, science, money and technology? If a widely predicted ‘natural’ disaster with

calculable impacts showed we are still unprepared then what are we prepared for? Has

the focus on expert knowledge, predictability, and control (the original intents of

modernization) served us? Should we question the benefits of those processes? Should

we question the kinds of normalcy it has produced and the hidden costs and risks upon

which it rests?

To effectively address the scale of the drivers that create the geographic context

and social fabric where an event like Katrina takes place I chose first to analyze the

largest adaptive cycle in human systems--- modernity. I will argue that processes of

modernization intended to insulate us from vulnerability and deviation from the quotidian

routine, actually produce in an unintended fashion - vulnerability. I will focus on the

following processes that explain the vulnerability in New Orleans: the abstraction from

time and space and the dominance of rational symbolic systems, reification, bureaucratic

rationalization, the socialization of the means of production (emphasizing nature), uneven

geographic development, globalization, the mobilization of the spectacle, and the rise of

neoliberalism.

Defining Vulnerability

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Before I analyze the processes of modernization it is first important to define

vulnerability. One way of understanding vulnerability is through theories of crisis.

Vulnerability is the precondition for crisis. Crisis comes from the Greek word meaning to

decide, or to separate (O'Connor 1987). It is a point of discretion or "moments of truth

when the significance of men and events are brought to light (O'Connor 1987)." On the

larger scale, vulnerability is demonstrated by the fact that the modern crisis becomes a

general crisis. Political or social crises sync with economic crises to create a structural

crisis. Structural crises are long term conjunctures and multiple contradictions in

economic, political, cultural and social spheres that accumulate to form a point in history

where one accumulation model must be substituted for another or when some structures

deteriorate and others are built (O'Connor 1987). Essentially, we have reached a point in

our development where the relationships we have formed, infrastructure, knowledge, and

subsystems, which we depend on, contain within our relationship to them their own

negation and contradiction. Crisis becomes a solution, a necessary mode for

reorganization. For capitalism in particular, crisis is the forcible solution to the

contradictions of accumulation. Furthermore, in the current era, historical contradictions

of capital can no longer be defined by the limitations of capital but by the limitations of

the political and state's legitimating capacities and mechanisms (O'connor 1987). This

new liability of the political (the state) leads to the fiscal crisis of the state, which I will

discuss in more detail later on.

Crisis is no longer isolated within its origin subsystem. This makes the

vulnerability of one subsystem the vulnerability of the whole structure. The political and

economic crisis finds its expression in the social sphere and vice versa (O'Connor 1987).

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The subsystems that we have tried to isolate and control reveal themselves to be

inseparable in undeniable ways. This makes problems inherently interdisciplinary and

'wicked' in that their effects, drivers or solutions no longer fit into our arbitrary

distinctions between environmental and social or between political and economic. In this

situation vulnerability and crisis, where it arises, spreads and becomes systemic. This (re)

alignment of vulnerability and crisis tendencies threatens to qualitatively change the

whole structure (O'Connor 1987).

This is the vulnerability of modernity as exhibited by Katrina. For example,

media coverage of clear governmental ineptitude created a political legitimation crisis,

the state's deficit and overspending in Iraq created an economic crisis, and the victims in

the Superdome exemplified the social crisis of racism, inequality, and poverty. The

collusion of these crises during Katrina revealed an alignment of vulnerabilities across

subsystems. The inseparable relationships between these crises became glaringly obvious

and led to increased legitimation demands and criticism.

The opportunity in vulnerability and eventual crisis exists because they offer a

point of discretion where the struggle exists to influence the decision to continue on the

same track or change. This decision is determinant of the precondition for the next

accumulation model and its eventual structural crisis. As James O'Connor says, "Since

capital defined as class domination maintains itself first and foremost by individualism

and other hegemonic ideologies and practices, "crisis" is a social struggle within and

against these ideologies and practices; the turning point with regard to their economic,

social, and political efficacy; the time to decide whether to accept or reject them

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(O'Connor 1987:155)." This decision point allows reflexivity and is the premise of

reflexive modernization, which I will discuss in more detail later on.

Within the framework of modernization, vulnerabilities align to precipitate

general crises. Both critics and proponents of capitalism see crisis as inherent within the

economic system. Indeed, it may be seen as a necessary phase that helps inaugurate

subsequent stages of growth. This pattern contributes to a chronic vulnerability to crisis.

In a more conventional sense, biophysical vulnerability has been extensively

covered by hazards research and is fairly intuitive in what it entails. Social vulnerability

however, is largely ignored in disaster research because it is so difficult to quantify, a

reason based in our modern dependence on predictable, measurable and quantifiable

things exclusive of many important qualitative factors. As Susan Cutter says, “ Social

vulnerability is partially the product of social inequalities---those social factors that

influence or shape the susceptibility of various groups to harm and that also govern their

ability to respond (or resiliency). It also includes place inequalities--- those characteristics

of communities and the built environment, such as the level of urbanization, growth rates

and patterns, and economic vitality, that contribute to the social vulnerability to places

(Cutter 2006:243).” Katrina revealed that calculating and controlling only the biophysical

vulnerability was insufficient and in no way explained or prevented the human

consequences of the disaster. An analysis of the social vulnerabilities of Katrina is needed

to understand what created the human impacts of the hurricane. Focusing on the social

construction of disaster questions the conceptualization of this disaster as natural and

gives indication as to what needs to be included in disaster research, policy and

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mitigation. Furthermore, because disasters magnify the existing trends--social, economic,

and political--in places it is useful to study these trends and their vulnerabilities that

aligned with the dominant views, and resulted in the pre-event state that made Katrina so

devastating.

Social and biophysical vulnerability interact to produce the overall place

vulnerability. I will use the Hazards of Place Model developed by Susan Cutter (with my

additions) as a model for assessing vulnerability as a product a larger hazards paradigm.

It will serve as a visual representation or conceptual map of the skeleton of this paper.

(Modified from Cutter 2006)

The Hazards of Place Model, modified to include the processes of modernity I

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chose to highlight, shows the interactions, distortions, fracturing and rhizomatic dynamic

processes that occur to create place vulnerability. In completing this assessment I hope to

reveal that through these processes we may be in a situation where the exception---

disaster---threatens to become the norm.

By this I mean that we have created ways to rationalize our abstraction, focused

on control of select variables, and unevenly allocated and distorted risk through

development and technology. We have created new dependencies and varying degrees of

dis-embeddedness from the interdependent systems that make up our existence. The

result is an incomplete understanding of these processes. Parts of them have become

disposable, have disappeared or have operated in an impoverished state.

This dis-embeddedness, which is a requirement and success of modernization,

allows for information and experience to be significantly modified by reification and the

media spectacle resulting in a simple non-reflexive consciousness. If there is no change in

our consciousness, policies or values and just more of the same will we constantly create

this level of social and biophysical vulnerability? If we continually create the

preconditions for disaster will the impacts of disaster become chronic in that we can

never fully recover from them? Could we afford the levels of devastation and loss of

meaning evidenced in Katrina psychologically or fiscally again?

(Un) Natural Disasters

To speak of natural disasters as forces of nature fails to distinguish between the

actual force of nature, like the hurricane, which is more accurately ‘the disaster agent’

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and the disaster itself that is a social phenomenon (Britton 1986). The real disaster is the

human settlement on a floodplain, humans' spectacular challenge to nature to build cities

on hurricane prone coastlines, the dire pockets of poverty and social vulnerability, and

the brewing cauldrons of disproportionate risk that have accumulated throughout the

process of modernization, and particularly urbanization. The disaster is the incomplete

rationalization that justifies irresponsible economic development, which beget ecological

and social degradation.

To understand the process of modernization in regards to natural disaster I

would first like to de-construct the phrase 'natural disaster' and interrogate the dominant

view of events like Katrina. This will reveal that the social construction of disasters as

'natural' is deeply tied to protecting the continuation of modernization.

What is the dominant view of disasters?

The dominant view maintains that causality or the direction of explanation of

the event runs from the physical event to its social impacts. “Dominance is evident in the

resources allocated; in the number of highly trained personnel involved and the volume

of their published works; and perhaps most of all, in the attachment of this view to the

more powerful institutions of the modern states (4 Hewitt 1983).” It is evident in the

history of technical control of one variable-the Mississippi, and the focus on scientific

prediction of the geophysical “extremes” i.e.: the cyclone (Hewitt 1983 my emphasis).

The framing of the event as ‘naturally out of human control’ or ‘unexpectedly disastrous’

places all social and economic factors in a dependent position, as if “disaster occurs

because of the chance recurrences of natural extremes, modified in detail but fortuitously

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by human circumstances (5 Hewitt 1983).” This view lends itself to particular types of

management like monitoring and predicting geophysical processes, disaster plans,

zoning, disaster insurance and ultimately the relentless search for “natural science-

technological fix” (Hewitt 1983).

It is technocratic approach supported by scientific knowledge and a false

separation between nature and society define this socio-cultural construct of natural

disaster. It is essentially a historically contingent “construct reflecting the shaping hand

of a contemporary social order” (4 Hewitt 1983). As Ken Hewitt writes, “Unlike virtually

all past views of calamity, materialism, especially in its technocratic form, cannot readily

attribute disaster to ‘acts of God’ or ‘acts of man’! (16 Hewitt 1983)” If disaster were

framed as an act of man it would fundamentally put into question human action as

directly inviting catastrophes and therefore fundamentally challenge the legitimacy of

management, planning, and material accumulation (Hewitt 1983). This paradox shatters

the utilitarian assumptions of materialism and modernity and can only be reconciled by

framing man’s role in disaster as ‘by accident’ or by absolving responsibility entirely and

framing disaster as ‘out of human control’ in rational scientific terms (Hewitt 1983).

Modern industrial society has much invested in maintaining that only the

extremes of nature are unpredictable, and all other aspects of human life are predictable

or stable. This polarization of ‘opposites’ makes the dominant view of disasters a cosmic

myth that masquerades as a fact or a normal conception of reality (Hewitt 1983). The

dominant discourse of natural disasters constantly reinforces otherness and discontinuity

with words like uncertainty, unprecedented, unaware (Hewitt 1983). This definition

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allows the forces of natural disasters to become “subordinate to objective dimensions and

impersonal dynamics…We are now free to speak of hazards alone, as if all these events

and all that happens within each one belong not only to a separate domain, but to a single,

albeit ‘multivariate’ reality (14 Hewitt 1983).” It allows a non-reflexive self-reinforcing

monologue for the society where disaster (a life-threatening risk) is an “especially

intractable problem for scientific rationalism and technocracy” as well as capitalist

accumulation and modernization (Hewitt 1983). This conception may be the greatest

impediment to improve our understanding of natural disasters and our ability to cope with

them.

For the above reasons, I seek to re-conceptualize natural disaster so that the

direction of explanation is from the state of society first and then to the impacts caused by

the actual chance physical event. Ken Hewitt offers an alternate definition of natural

disaster that is more conducive to analyzing human vulnerability and the contradictions

of capital accumulation and modernization in creating that:

1) Most natural disasters or most damages in them are characteristic rather than accidental features of the places and societies where they occur.

2) The risks, pressures, uncertainties that bear upon awareness of and preparedness for natural fluctuations flow mainly from what is called ordinary life rather than from the rareness and scale of those fluctuations.

3) The natural extremes involved are in a human ecological sense, more expected and knowable than many of the contemporary social developments that pervade everyday life. (25 Hewitt 1983)

The emphasis of disaster recovery and restoration is on restoring ‘normalcy’

and re-instituting technocratic containment and prediction of nature. What disaster policy

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and response fail to consider is that maybe “normal everyday life turns out to have

become abnormal in a way that affects us all (25 Hewitt 1983).” Perhaps this endless

restoration of normalcy and maintenance of status quo creates the major ingredients for

the probability of disaster to be especially devastating. What if normalcy itself is

disastrous?

The disaster-as-a-social-product perspective focuses on the complex workings of

society that create everyday life that must be analyzed to understand natural disasters

(Britton 1986). This increased complexity requires one to analyze disasters on multiple

scales, and through the interactions of the complex systems that create daily life. Britton

writes, “If one seeks an understanding of what happens at the interface between extreme

physical phenomena and social systems, it is necessary to look at the relationship

between the context of ‘normality’ and the processes of disaster (257 Britton 1986).”

I seek to reveal the context of normality and what allowed the construction of

disasters as natural and what that construction sought to mask and protect. But this

normality is a reality in only one system (the human system), although it only exists

within a larger context of interacting systems. To address this scale and complexity, I will

use an interdisciplinary theory that allows for the collusion of multiple scales and

integrated systems that are in constant flux and contradiction, which make up the

processes of disaster. I have chosen a framework that is not based on equilibrium or

separation of interconnected systems. Rather it is based on constant change and strikes at

the heart of human survival, which is essentially one’s adaptive capacity or resilience.

Within this framework, surprises such as natural disaster are not the exception but the

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rule and thus part of everyday life. In this way, stability and control are called into

question. The framework is called Panarchy.

Panarchy is a framework of analysis used to show the interactions of multiple,

nested, complex systems within the axis of time and scale. Each complex system is a set

of adaptive cycles that are organized in a hierarchical cascading order (Gunderson and

Holling 2002). The older, slower cycles set the precondition for the functions of the

faster, younger cycles. However, each cycle remains semi-autonomous and the faster

cycles have greater flexibility that allows them to experiment and create novelty. Within

each adaptive cycle there are four phases: the alpha phase, the R phase, the K phase, and

the omega phase (Gunderson and Holling 2002). They can roughly be categorized as

reorganization, exploitation, conservation and release/creative destruction.

Panarchy is specifically not a hierarchy because it is a process and not a reified

state and because its parts retain their relative autonomy as well as the capacity to invent

and create novelty irrespective of the asymmetric relationship between the larger slow

cycles and the younger fast ones (Gunderson and Holling 2002). Healthy processes of

adaptive cycles within a panarchy do not reproduce the same thing over and over again;

there is constant destruction, reorganization, experimental cycling and novelty

(Gunderson and Holling 2002).

There are three dimensions of each adaptive cycle: potential, connectedness

and resilience. Potential runs along the y-axis and is the capital (monetary, social,

biomass) accumulation that is acquired throughout the cycle flow (Gunderson and

Holling 2002). Connectedness runs along the x-axis and represents the degree of

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interconnectedness among the controlling variables. Therefore, the conservation phase

would be the point of medium potential but highest connectedness soon to result in

rigidity and a drop in potential; thus the release/creative destruction phase (Gunderson

and Holling 2002). The point of highest brittleness is at the end of the K phase of growth

because it leads directly to the alpha phase of creative destruction . The transition from

the alpha phase to the omega has the highest probability for the development of novelty,

or unexpected forms of renewal to emerge, as well as unexpected crisis to occur. During

this phase of reorganization in the adaptive cycle, numerous diffuse elements are

disconnected and heavily affected by external forces (Gunderson and Holling 2002).

The third dimension of adaptive cycles is resilience. Resilience is “the

magnitude of disturbance that can be absorbed before the system redefines its structure

by changing the variables and processes that control behavior (34 Gunderson and Holling

2002).” “This definition allows resilience to be far from a steady-state, where instabilities

can flip a system into another regime of behavior, i.e.. to another stability domain (34

Gunderson and Holling 2002).” I would like to define resiliency as both material and

psychological in social systems because in abstracted systems ideology is as important or

even more than material. Resiliency is especially ideological in terms of urban centers.

We must believe them to be resilient, we must believe ourselves and our government to

be resilient or we loose our ability to make sense of our existence. But it is important to

emphasize again that resiliency is not stability but hinges on the edge of chaos where the

ratio of chaos to order determine our ability to adapt. Sense making and signification

create a third hierarchy in human systems, equal to time and space for structuring systems

dynamics. “Routines and even resources may suffer a loss of resilience but as long as the

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structures of signification stay in place, the whole system will not transform radically, but

rather still return to a previous equilibrium (Gunderson and Holling 2002).” “If meaning

is lost, human systems seem unable to recover (Gunderson and Holling 2002).”

Resiliency is not inherently “good” and there is always the possibility of a

stability domain that is incredibly resilient as well as destructive. This is called a rigidity

trap, which, I argue, defines the current political-economic system of neoliberailism, a

discussion I will explore later in the paper. There is also the possibility of a poverty trap

which may occur “If the adaptive cycle collapses because the potential and diversity have

been eradicated by misuse or external force, an impoverished state can result with low

connectedness, low potential, and low resilience, creating a poverty trap (96 Gunderson

and Holling 2002).” This state is similar to the Mississippi Delta, which has been misused

by perverse subsidies and pollution.

Creating or managing for resiliency by this definition means maintaining the

existence of function or ecosystem efficiency as opposed to maintaining the efficiency of

function or engineering efficiency to raise the probability of resiliency by maintaining the

most possible stability domains (Gunderson and Holling 2002). This is a significant

paradigm shift from current systems management because it acknowledges that “the very

success of limiting variability of a target leads to the unperceived shrinkage of stability

domains” and therefore the loss of resiliency (Gunderson and Holling 2002). This

management concept will be emphasized throughout this thesis.

Panarchy and Human Systems:

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Within a Panarchy of natural disaster it is important to understand the dynamics

of social systems as adaptive cycles because they have some very specific qualities not

found in ecological systems. Ecological systems are dependent on a remember phase that

is transmitted from a larger, slower scale cycle that acts as a conserving force and saves

the smaller cycles from experiencing mistakes or experiments over and over again

(Gunderson and Holling 2002). This is not the case for social systems, which have no

such relatively stable conserving device.

The unique features of social systems in panarchy are as follows: 1) Temporal

and spatial restraints and organizers of ecosystems do not apply to social systems. 2)

Social systems are characterized by reflexivity and consciousness. 3) We have the ability

to expand our capacity across numerous scales and time to externalize our logic in

technology (Gunderson and Holling 2002). These characteristics make social-system-

panarchies riddled with contradiction, special interest, agency, manipulation, and risk.

These unique features will be extrapolated on and applied to the case study of Hurricane

Katrina throughout the paper.

Panarchy theory admits the complexity of our increasingly interconnected

world and is comfortable with processes of inherent creative destruction in every system

of it. To situate the panarchical processes of natural disaster it is most useful to apply it to

late modernity as we have shifted from a risk society to reflexive modernity. Panarchy

theory insists on consciousness and reflexivity. Understanding how consciousness and

reflexivity are gained and lost, manipulated or short-circuited, through the processes of

modernization is useful to understanding our ideological vulnerability in regards as to

23

being able to change our social construction and therefore material conditions,

management or practices. This investigation will reveal our prospects for resilience to

natural disasters.

Using the Panarchy framework along with a more comprehensive definition of

'natural' disaster I seek to use the moments of reflexivity that Katrina in general prompted

as well as a critical analysis of key processes that remain hidden and normalized to reveal

the complexity of these processes and their interrelationship in prompting an intensified

explosion of vulnerability that set the stage for the devastation of Katrina.

Risk Society and Reflexive Modernity

To situate this investigation of the vulnerability evident in Katrina in the cycle

of modernity it is important to introduce the theory of risk society and reflexive

modernization. These are theories developed primarily by Urlich Beck but Anthony

Giddens, and Scott Lash as well. These concepts seek to explain the evolution of

modernity and its unintended consequences.

As I said earlier, the modern crisis is a structural crisis, which means that our

current accumulation model has been challenged. At this point, the perspective and

reflexivity exists to exchange one accumulation model for another. These theorists

propose that this new model is reflexive modernization. Although we have not quite

reached full reflexive modernity, which would mean the reflexivity of the masses, we are

approaching it and the time is now to decide what parts of modernity are worth keeping

and what are worth discarding. “Reflexive modernization means the possibility of a

24

‘creative destruction’ for an entire epoch: that of industrial society. The ‘subject’ of this

creative destruction is not the revolution, not the crisis, but the victory of Western

modernization (2 Beck et. al 1994).” (Creative destruction is not meant here or in

Panarchy as a negative process or completely self-destructive. It is more a process of self-

alteration that lets the deleterious components go, reorganizes and creates novelty.) This

places us in risk society toward the end of the k phase, approaching reflexive modernity

at the alpha phase of creative destruction in the big, slower moving adaptive cycle of

modernization. This implies that modernity has become rigid and brittle and in need of

destruction and reorganization or that risk society is exemplary of a structural crisis and is

at a turning point where a decision to keep the processes of modernization or reject them

is a possibility. We reach this era unbeknownst to ourselves, it appears surreptitiously and

as an extension of normal modernization. In the transition from industrial society to

reflexive modernity the contradictions and conjunctures of that development accumulate

to create the risk society. “Risk society is a catastrophic society. In it, the exceptional

condition threatens to become the norm.” (24 Beck 1992) The side effects of

modernization begin to creep in latently and dominate everyday life, they cannot be

absorbed by the system of industrial society and therefore cause a self-confrontation with

the risks modernization has created (Beck. et. al 1994).

This is essentially the point at which everything we have tried to externalize

becomes internalized (Beck. et. al 1994). We no longer have an environmental crisis but

an institutional crisis of industrial society itself. We have exceeded our social idea of

safety (Beck. et. al 1994). We have exploited our foundations—natural and cultural—

whose existence facilitated modernization itself (Beck et. al 1994). We are forced to live

25

in a “broad variety of different mutually contradictory, global and personal risks (Beck et.

al 1994).” As noted in Panarchy theory humans have abstracted from time and space,

which takes place early on in industrialization pre-risk society and pre-reflexive

modernity. It is precisely this abstraction, this dis-embeddedness that makes risk society a

reality and that requires a re-embedding in reflexive modernity (Beck et. al 1994). It is

only through the triumph of modernization and the normality that it creates that we

realize how profoundly abnormal everyday life has become and are forced into self-

confrontation (Beck et. al 1994). This is the end result of modernization. This is the

context within which the devastation of Katrina was made possible. I would now like to

elaborate on how risk society becomes a reality through certain processes of

modernization.

The Experiment of Modernization:

Modernization was intended to control or even out vulnerability. It was

believed that with more knowledge of natural and human worlds we had, the more

predictable and controllable they would become (Beck et al 1994).

Modernization (and our own vulnerability) begins with the abstraction from

time, space, and scale (Holling and Gunderson 2002). This is what differentiates us from

ecological systems. This abstraction requires the domination of rational symbolic systems

such as money, science, technology and expert specialization. The dominance of money,

in particular, helps contribute to the annihilation of space and time by allowing each to

become commodities and each to be exchanged. Harvey explains this concept: “…it was

labor time that defined money, while the price of time or profit was the fundamental

26

dimension to the capitalist’s logic of decision. From this Marx could derive what he saw

as a necessary impulsion under capitalism to annihilate the constraints and frictions of

space, together with the particularities of place (179 Harvey 1989).” This is the liberation

of time from space as well as the particularities of place. This initial abstraction allows

incredible mobility, power and freedom of human systems on the one hand. But on the

other hand, it allows incredible vulnerability because it separates human systems from

other systems in the Panarchy. Instead of acknowledging our place in ecological systems,

we live, through abstraction, in a malleable, socially constructed reality.

Rationalization

When rational symbolic systems prevail, rationalization prevails. Rationalization is the

historical penetration (originally under capitalism) of all social spheres with a logic of

formal rationality (Arato et al. 1982). “ This logic is defined by the principle of

orientation of human action to abstract, quantifiable, and calculable and instrumentally

utilizable formal rules and norms (Arato et al. 1982).” This definition excludes all that is

irrational and unpredictable, qualitative or sensuous. Formal rationality de-

anthropomorphes or dis-enchants both the contemporary organization of knowledge and

the 'practical conduct of life' (Arato et al. 1982). In this process, knowledge becomes the

specialized domain of experts and institutions while all other forms of knowledge that are

not equally abstract--such as local knowledge--become subordinate and negotiable

(Holling and Gunderson 2002).

This process reveals a major re-appropriation of knowledge and power into narrow

specializations and one limited logic. The production of specialized knowledge then

27

becomes a major source of political power. As David Harvey writes, “Knowledge

(perceived or imagined) becomes an integral part of the power of society to reproduce

itself. The symbolic power to impose the principles of construction of reality—in

particular, social reality—is a major dimension of political power.” (274 Harvey 1989)

The dominance of symbolic rational systems in conjunction with an abstraction from time

and space effectively grants the experts and the political and economic elites the power to

shape social reality to serve them. Because the social construction of reality becomes so

politically contested and enforcing and reproducing power relations is the primary aim,

this power must be justified by continual legitimating ideologies and myths.

"Legitimation depends on the capacity of the political system to secure a consensus of

political policies from groups which will not be harmed or will benefit from capitalist

accumulation ---a task which typically requires that policies be defined and presented to

the public in ways that conceal their true nature...(O'Connor 1987:110)."

This is possible because the coordinates of truth shift as well in early

modernization from formulaic to propositional. Contingent truths are mobilized

indefinitely as a way to mask the consequences of modernization (Beck et al 1994).

Those with the greatest material interest in the path of modernity, the bourgeoisie, have

interests in distorting its reality (in a sense to postpone reflexivity). As Barthes says, “The

bourgeois wants to keep reality without keeping the appearances: it is therefore the very

negativity of bourgeois appearance, infinite like every negativity, which solicits myth

infinitely (Barthes 1970).” He continues, “The bourgeoisie is constantly absorbing into its

ideology a whole section of humanity which does not have its basic status and cannot live

28

up to it except in imagination, that is, at the cost of an immobilization and an

impoverishment of consciousness (Barthes 1970).” The impoverishment of consciousness

that must accompany modernization fosters a failure of imagination, an inability to

perceive anything otherwise, and draws into question one of the main components in

social systems--consciousness itself. If consciousness is impoverished, the whole system

is impoverished (Holling and Gunderson 2002). This concept can be referred to as the

reification of consciousness because knowledge and the political processes that develop it

become inaccessible to the majority.

Reification

The process of trying to control and dominate nature and man is what Marx

referred to as the socialization of the means of production. Max Weber called this

concept rationalization, bureaucratization or de-magicization. George Luckas synthesized

these concepts to create the concept of reification (Arato et al. 1982).

Rationalization of all of social life by way of specialized abstracted logic

allows for explanations and relationships to be equally abstract, impersonal, objective and

fragmented. The capital fetish works along with this by making every relationship a

relationship only between things. This radical social reduction constitutes a mechanical

system that Lukacs calls a second nature (Arato et al. 1982). This second nature is a

stabilized, but fractured vision of the whole. It is always incomplete or fetishized. The

second nature is comprised of reified things. Reification takes place when something

exists outside of its original context, stripped of some or all of its original connections or

meaning and stabilized with power and attributes it may never have had (Arato et.al

29

1982). It allows the inversion of thought between object and subject, or between means

and ends. It reflects a real practice where attributes (properties, characteristics, features,

powers), which exist only by virtue of a social relationship between people, are treated as

if they are the inherent, natural characteristics of things. The reverse is also true, that the

attributes of inanimate things are treated as if they are attributes of human subjects (Arato

et al. 1982).

The dominance of the cycle of capital is an example of reification. The

reification of capital allows capital to have laws of its own which renders it a cycle

beyond human control, much like the hurricane cycle that created Katrina. This creates a

situation where the Panarchy becomes very hierarchical in that the business cycle of

capital becomes the most real, most important cycle and creates shocks and crisis that

affect the numerous other adaptive cycles. These cycles must then constantly adapt to

maintain the cycle of capital. These adaptations become new spaces of vulnerability and

risk.

Under capitalism and bureaucratic rationalism, reification seeps into all of

social life to the point that the work-place becomes the model for all social relations. The

fate (atomization, commodification, fragmentation) of the worker is the same for all

humans. The result is the inevitable integration of the individual into an impersonal,

objective system where one is reduced to a spectator of his own and others' existence

under a distorted consciousness (Arato et al. 1982). Reification and the position of

individuals as spectators in their own lives mask the fact that we are actors in the

experiment of modernity and falsely relinquish our agency to become self- consciously

30

involved in the construction of reality. In this way reification appears to eliminate the

realization of domination and of empowerment.

Bureaucratic Rationalism

Domination by rational rule requires legitimacy and according to Weber, state

rationalization always takes the form of bureaucratization. Bureaucratization reveals itself

as the most rational mode of organization and penetrates into all forms of social life

(Arato et al. 1982). This extension becomes increasingly precarious for bureaucracy. As

O'Connor says,

"[The] rationalization of social life, or the extension of subsystems of purposive-rational

action beyond the confines of the market, law, and the administration, generates a

dynamic whose consequences may undermine the very legitimacy of such rationalization

processes... the extension of administrative-instrumental control may lead to its own

process of demystification. Domination does not become anonymous. As a process of its

own generation becomes transparent through the apparent intervention of the political

apparatus into all domains of social life, domination relations may be subjected to

increased legitimation demands" (O'Connor 1987:132)

This situation explains the legitimation crisis during Katrina but also points to the fact

that the state becomes increasingly indispensable to the other subsystems by way of

legitimating or absorbing their displaced crises. The state is also used through the

processes of modernization for neutrality and to mask or compensate for the

contradictions that these processes generate. This situation exists because the state is

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relatively autonomous. It must balance the demands of capital for reproduction and

accumulation and the demands of public for legitimacy (O'Connor 1987). I introduce this

point because the state (in a system of federalism) is especially important in the times of

natural disaster, in relief and policy. The over-extension of the state not only creates

legitimacy problems but also fiscal problems. The latter is called the fiscal crisis of the

state. It refers to the 'structural gap' between state revenues and expenses, which leads to

economic, social and political crisis (O'Connor 1987). This makes the state vulnerable.

This vulnerability is useful to keep in mind while reading the following passages where

the instrumental uses and draining of the state are discussed in more detail both prior to

and throughout Katrina.

The Iron Cage of Bureaucracy

Bureaucratic rationalism always emphasizes efficiency of function, only to the extent

that it supports certain mandates (Arato et al. 1982). This choice unintentionally creates a

rigid inefficient system as well as eliminates options for improvisation or alternative

functions. By default, this system looses control, looses flexibility, redundancy, diversity

or innovative capacity and resources. One example of this could be the creation of the

Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The rigidity and inefficacy that the DHS

exhibited through FEMA's performance in Katrina could be compared to what Max

Weber referred to as the ‘iron cage’ of bureaucracy.

The iron cage essentially means that rules and control would prevail over

improvisation with the consequence of creating an incredibly rigid system of domination

(Arato et al. 1982). This risk of increased rigidity and centralized failure is especially

32

important in pre-disaster preparedness, policy, and relief because this rule-oriented

bureaucracy is the major relief provider as well as instigator of mitigation, funds and risk

assessment. If these functions are undermined by miscommunication following irrelevant

rules or contradictory intergovernmental coordination, especially during disaster when

relief must be fast, flexible and effective, then the consequences can be devastating.

The creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) completely

incapacitated FEMA and therefore incapacitated the disaster response to Katrina (Davis

2007). After 9/11, with the realization of our vulnerability, the American people's

tolerance for risk went to zero and the government decided to fit another link in the iron

cage by adding another layer of bureaucracy. The creation of the DHS by the

consolidation of 21 other independent organizations, including FEMA, under one

department, as well as the acceptance of the U.S Patriot Act demonstrated an

administrative, bureaucratic, hierarchical response that provided more surveillance, more

control, and a more centralized government to decrease vulnerability (Comfort 2005).

The resources were pooled, personnel was downsized, and FEMA came under another

regulatory body and layer of bureaucracy.

One major problem was that FEMA was plundered for resources as three-

fourths of its original funding was redirected to counter terrorism and its leading

personnel had been replaced with novices like Michael Brown who had no previous

experience in disaster management (Kettl 2006, Harrald 2006). The creation of the DHS

created vulnerability for FEMA because it's relative autonomy was undermined as it lost

cabinet status and was swept into a larger matrix where communication, responsibilities

33

and coordination became more ambiguous. For one example of miscommunication,

Micheal Chertoff (secretary of DHS), as late as Sept. 2, was recorded on national public

radio saying that the scenes of desperation at the superdome were "rumors and

anecdotes"(Davis 2007). The time-line of the events, in contrast to when they were

responded to, reveals miscommunication and a lack of coordination between all levels of

government as well as between NGOs and other emergency responders (Comfort 2006).

This type of organization and response exemplifies the logic of rationalization

and the unfortunately debilitating orientation of bureaucracy towards more centralized

control (Stehr 2006). This is an example of managing for efficiency over existence. It is

also shows the negative consequences that this rationalization has on resiliency. I am not

contending that we have too much government, rather that it is too rigid in its

construction.

As exhibited in the introduction, Katrina was widely predicted and we could

have had evacuation plans, more food rations, water, personnel, and supplies in the

superdome or immediately there after the storm. It appeared that there was a disjunction

between expecting the disaster to happen and mobilizing resources in a timely manner.

This disjunction could be explained in reference to Ken Hewitt's argument at the

beginning, that framing disaster as an act of man puts all of our policy, management and

entire way of life (material accumulation) into question. This would further imply that we

would have to admit that we created the precondition for disaster before we could ever

fully rationalize and prepare for it. Real preparedness would disrupt the flow of capital

immensely. On this same note, there is evidence that political rules are followed in times

34

of disaster and that could perhaps further explain, in part, the lack of (federal) political

will in declaring Katrina a national disaster.

When Katrina hit, political rules prevailed and stalled the declaration of

national disaster and, consequently, the mobilization of resources. Governor Blanco

declared Louisiana a state of emergency on the 26th of August but it was not until the

29th, after Katrina hit at 6 a.m. that morning, that the president declared the affected

states disasters and allowed federal resources and supplies to be deployed. When this

occurred, twenty-four hours after the fact, at least 150,000 people were already in the

superdome, while others remained stranded on rooftops or wading to higher ground

(Comfort 2006). The reasons for this delay are up for debate, but there is evidence that

FEMA disaster declarations follow political rules. States with political importance are

declared disasters more often than ‘unimportant’ states, which, under the current

administration were mostly democratic (Garrett and Sobel 2003). In regards to Louisiana,

with its most impacted area being a long-time democratic stronghold, it is no surprise that

the declaration was delayed (Davis 2007). Furthermore, disaster relief was allocated

unevenly. The red state of Mississippi received 5 times more aid per distressed household

than the pink state of Louisiana irrespective of the proportionate impacts (Davis 2007).

It is clear that it is fundamentally against our interest, if our interest is

maintaining normalcy, to adequately avoid or prepare for disaster. This means that

political economic rules have to prevail in times of disaster and be followed because they

insure normalcy and must be upheld for the possibility of eventual recovery. This

becomes incredibly disturbing when the lack of political will essentially lets people die in

35

the name of preserving the hegemonic system of domination.

Rationalization and the Calculation of Risk

Another expression of the logic of formal rationality in Katrina was the

National Flood Insurance Plan (NFIP). In this case, exemplary of our position in risk

society/reflexive modernity, the policy mechanism for offsetting risk has revealed itself

to be irrational and too costly. The insurance crisis after Katrina revealed that we have no

mechanism to legitimate the pervasive and constant risks we have created. To begin, it is

of foremost importance to understand the origin of insurance, why it becomes necessary

and then, how it fails in this era of late modernity.

Risk starts with the vulnerability of property and therefore development. Insurance is a

way of reordering reality and making risks quantifiable and manageable (Burby 2006).

Insurance arose from the first stage of risk in modernization. In this stage, risk exists in a

predictable world that is upheld by statistics. The fundamental premise of insurance is

that risk is calculable and can be exchanged for monetary value. It is also based on the

idea that risks are expected and unavoidable.

In the case of the NFIP, the rates based on the risk calculations became so high that the

flow of capital was interrupted, and continued development was in danger. The response

on the government's part was to intervene with lower rates (that do not reflect the true

costs) and essentially subsidize risk assumption. But politics have a breaking point, (the

fiscal crisis of the state) which was evidenced very clearly in Katrina. To put this into

perspective, since the NFIP was created in 1968, the claims from Katrina alone exceeded

36

the amount paid throughout its entire history (Bagstad et al. 2007). The NFIP has not

been able to cover its costs on a regular basis and has continually relied on the Treasury

to foot the bill (Burby 2006).

In part, this is due to low rates, but the risk has also risen so high that development is

irrational because loss is so frequent. This is certainly the case in the two most impacted

parishes in New Orleans. The Orleans and Jefferson parishes rank first and second

nationally for their numbers of claimants receiving repeat payments for damage under

NFIP between 1978 and 1995. Together they account for 20% of the nation's properties

with repeat losses (Muro et al. 2005). In reflexive modernization, risk pooling is not

effective if the only purchasers are those in constant predictable risk (Beck et al. 1994).

This is exemplary of our contemporary world in which even technical experts cannot

effectively calculate and manage the risks that modernization generates.

The problems with NFIP are also grounded in the fact that building standards and

floodplain management requirements must be enforced at the local level, but all costs are

borne on the federal level (Kunreuther 2006). If the standards and mitigation

requirements are enforced, the result is a 35% reduction in flood and erosion damage

(Kunreuther 2006). However, none of the states hit by Katrina have mandatory local code

enforcement nor local comprehensive plans for development. These are the same states

that have the highest NFIP claims (Kunreuther 2006).

The NFIP in New Orleans subsidizes irrational development and occupancy in hazardous

areas because it fails to adequately reflect risk, operates at an overall loss, and is not

enforced. (Burby 2006). In terms of development, there is evidence to suggest that

37

undeveloped flood-prone land is sold at discount prices but developed flood-prone land is

sold at a premium, thus providing an incentive to build in flood-prone areas to maximize

profit (Bagstad et. al 2007). There is also evidence that the availability of insurance acts

as a moral hazard, encouraging people to make investments that they would not normally

make. Risky coastal development and density are the inevitable result. High-risk

development is 15% higher than average with NFIP (Kunreuther 2006). Insurance like

that offered by the NFIP ultimately externalizes the risk associated with development

while imposing the added social cost of vulnerability and loss and squandered taxpayer

funds. As Robert Congelton says, “The national government’s responsibility after a flood

or other disaster is mainly that of a (taxpayer-subsidized) insurance company, and has

been since the Great Depression (Congelton 2006: 13).”

The government's role in these developments is disabling. It financially supports

building in hazardous areas, yet is obligated to step in when the same development is

destroyed. This paradox of so-called "safe development" is expressed in the following

sections, which discusses uneven geographic development and the socialization of nature.

It is this focus on maintaining development through calculability and exchange value of

risk, regardless of its clear downfalls, that is disturbingly revealed in Katrina. The

consequences and costs of irresponsible development are manifested in the loss of human

lives (for the poor in low-lying housing projects) and in huge insurance claims paid by

taxpayers (for the suburbanites living on floodplains). In this case, we have allowed

development beyond rational risk assumption and the bonds of insurance. The failure of

NFIP exemplifies the limits of rationalization for the state to continually compensate,

38

alleviate and legitimate economic crisis.

Uneven Geographic development

The structural crisis of modernity finds its geographic expression in sectoral

crises of cities, states or even countries ( O'Connor 1987). For example, a city like Detroit

could be seen as a sectoral crisis of de-industrialization and outsourcing and also as a

manifestation of the structural crisis of modernity. Uneven geographic development is a

specific process of modernization that is oriented around capitalism (Harvey 1989). The

concept, simply defined, refers to how capital moves through the landscape.

The landscape must be spatially organized, rationalized, and controllable to

extend the logic of modernization. Furthermore, uneven geographic development is

inherent to capitalism. Capitalism creates spatial organization as one of the preconditions

of its own perpetuation. It is in constant pursuit of a spatial fix (Harvey 1989). Insofar as

uneven geographic development is a stabilizing outlet for the contradictions of

capitalism, the agency (the State) that helps promote that is indispensable. Harvey writes,

“Control over spatial organization and authority over the use of space become crucial

means for the reproduction of social power relations. The state, or other social grouping

such as financiers, developers, or landlords, can thus often hide their power to shape

social reproduction behind the seeming neutrality of their power to organize space

(Harvey 1989:187).” The power to organize space depends on appearing neutral because

it is an inequitable process of reinforcing class relations and has some very negative

environmental and social repercussions especially in regards to natural disasters.

39

How these power dynamics played out in New Orleans, pre-Katrina, made

some people more vulnerable than others when the storm hit. The poor and rich alike

occupied low lying flood-prone land. All of the twenty-first century suburbs flooded

along with all of the public housing projects and poor inner city parishes (Calhoun 2006).

The difference in impact between rich, white parishes and poor, black parishes was

dependent on how many layers of risk uneven geographic development had accumulated

into each parish (Calhoun 2006). The ratio of renters to home owners in each parish, the

density of housing, the amount of insured property, the initial levels of income before the

storm, and most especially, the number of residents with cars all created layers of

vulnerability that were distributed unevenly through the investment and development of

space. This collusion of vulnerability in certain underdeveloped geographic locations was

very evident in Katrina.

For example, the predominately white Jefferson and St. Bernard parishes, which have

higher incomes, lower density housing, more homeowners than renters, more people with

cars, and lower poverty rates, experienced less overall impact from Katrina. Even though

84% of the residents of St. Bernard were in the flood zone its affected population only

accounted for 10% of the whole flooded population (Muro et al. 2005).

Another example of this same issue is the public housing projects in New

Orleans. The Housing Authority of New Orleans was created in 1937 and was the first

agency of this kind to receive federal funds for slum clearance and publicly subsidized

housing projects (Colten 2006). Over a 30-year period, money flowed in to create public

housing. The public housing sites were slotted in only poor or topographically marginal

40

neighborhoods, often displacing racially mixed or middle-income working class

neighborhoods and at the time, were legally segregated (Colten 2006). This worked to

isolate and concentrate poverty in certain parts of the city as well as segregate whites

from blacks. Despite income restraints, blacks were also experiencing redlining and

discrimination, which limited their housing options. Furthermore, soon after the majority

of housing projects were constructed, the suburbs exploded and whites fled the city. Over

the next 30 years, extreme poverty increased by 60% in every census tract where the

projects were located (Colten 2006). When Katrina made landfall, the 10 public housing

projects contained 9% of the most economically vulnerable population of the city. All of

these neighborhoods (except one) has a census tract overall poverty rate above 40%

(Colten 2006). And all but one of these neighborhoods flooded and will not be rebuilt.

This may seem like an insignificant amount of people (in proportion to the city), but the

underlying logic is irrational (in terms of human security in high risk areas like New

Orleans) since it promotes siting public housing into topographically vulnerable,

economically dilapidated places. Marginalized populations are crushed under layers of

vulnerability so that in the face of natural disaster, complete loss is a product of design.

Adolf Reed furthers this point when he says that the people swept away (by Katrina) are

the same ones already swept aside in the model of urban revitalization which is

predicated on their removal (or for my purposes, their concentration in low quality, high

density projects) (Reed 2006).

The fragmentation and pulverization of space has to take definite forms and land

becomes subservient to money and a ‘fictitious capital’. Capitalism has only survived by

41

occupying and producing new space. Creative destruction of space leaves whole urban

infrastructures and life-styles prematurely obsolescent. As Harvey says, “Place specific

devaluation of the capital embodied in social infrastructures, to say nothing of the

destruction of traditional ways of life and all forms of localism built around social and

human institutions, then becomes one of the central elements of crisis formation and

resolution (O’Connor 1987).” In New Orleans this place specific devaluation of capital

was exhibited first by the decline of the sugar plantations before WWII, then by the

decline of heavy industry, refineries, and oil and gas production after 1970. Between

1970 and 2000 New Orleans lost 13,500 manufacturing jobs (23% compared to the

national average of 3%) and by 2000 28% of its population was living in poverty (Muro

et al. 2005). The response was a dramatic shift towards tourism. Tourism is reflective of

the last forms of value for capitalism, the point of complete commodification or last

resort (Gotham 2007). These shifts are exemplary of more widespread trends associated

with globalization like de-industrialization, and outsourcing. In this way, New Orleans

and the recurrent economic vulnerability that these shifts created is not the exception but

rather the norm for modernization.

Globalization

This fractioning of space makes spaces homogeneous, measurable, and

objective and allows what Henri Lefebvre calls a “ ‘generalized explosion of spaces’ in

which the relations among all geographic scales are continuously rearranged and

territorialized (361 Brenner 2000).” The power to re-organize scales then becomes

contested and under capitalism it becomes the precondition for the control of social

42

relations (Brenner 2000). “..The power to re-organize geographic scales—in their role

both as containers and as hierarchies—has become an essential basis of power to

command and control social space as a whole (Brenner 2000:374).” In our current

political economic climate of neoliberalism, the highest echelons of society are the

bearers of this capability. “The scalar flux induced through neoliberal restructuring

strategies has severely unsettled entrenched scalar hierarchies without, however, creating

a new privileged scale for the regulation of capital accumulation (Brenner 2000:375).”

This is essentially referring to the dominance of capitalist control on the global scale but,

inevitably, global crisis becomes local crisis. The incapacity of the state or any governing

body frozen on the national, regional or local scales to regulate globally makes them

particularly powerless to global crisis.

These differences of scale-jumping capabilities are measures of mobility,

power, and embeddedness. They create tensions and vulnerability between the cycles of a

Panarchy as the cycles are organized on the axis of differing scales and times but are

inextricably related.

Oil extraction in the Gulf of Mexico, off the Louisiana coast, is an example of

the interrelation and tension between scales that has resulted in increased vulnerability

across multiple scales. State officials encourage the exploration and extraction of oil,

which accounts for 20% of the nations natural gas and 30% of its crude oil (Peterson et.

al 2006). Locals work for the companies but also absorb all the risks of protective

wetland loss, the construction of pipelines that cause subsidence, the seven million tons

of oil that spilled as a result of Katrina. As compensation they receive wages that have

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steadily fallen since 1980 (Peterson et. al 2006). When production fell after Katrina it

caused largest spike in oil and gas prices since the OPEC embargo of 1973 as well as the

loss of 1/5 of the nation’s domestic petroleum output. It was no coincidence that opening

ANWAR was discussed immediately in the White house (Peterson et. al 2006). The

storm disrupted 247 subsurface pipelines, caused 38 billion losses in revenue alone

between August 26, 2005 and May 3, 2006, and destroyed the only increasingly

productive domestic oil producer. The combination of this loss, our current foreign policy

of ‘oil at all costs,’ and unwavering consumption will have significant implications for

the US as it becomes more reliant on foreign oil (Peterson et. al 2006). These types of

interactions shed light on the complexity of our current compressed vulnerabilities, which

cross numerous scales simultaneously. New Orleans has become a space of global capital

and it is tied into a larger matrix of accumulation and vulnerability.

The Global City

Exemplary of the uneven geographic development of the "black belt," deep

south, and in particular, Louisiana, is the fact that the state is recognized on the periphery

but is driven by the needs of the core (Reed 2006). Despite its incredible wealth in natural

resources, Louisiana is the second poorest in the nation (Muro et al. 2005). The state is

known for political corruption, close business and state relations, cheap labor, low

regulations, and high subsidies. This has made it attractive to capital and made the state

itself a center of capital (Bagstad et al. 2007) .

Under neoliberalism, cities strive to become what Saskia Sassen calls 'global

cities'. Global cities, she argues are spaces of capital (Sassen 2001). With the

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disinvestment and push to privatization federally, local governments try desperately to

connect to global mobile capital regardless of the costs (tax incentives, subsidies). New

Orleans has struggled with this because it has relied so heavily on export industries,

which come at an incredible rate and make it hard to capture the profits in the locale. It

has continually restructured to meet the needs of capital regardless of the consequences.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this section, there are consequences of these

shifts and dominant phases of capital. They are felt locally, physically, environmentally,

and monetarily but also realized federally as the state becomes an indispensable guise for

neutrality in organizing space. Some examples of these consequences are in the form of

subsidy, toxic releases, and ecosystem service loss. For instance, Louisiana has the

largest industry subsidy per capita of any US state even though it also has the forth-

lowest state taxes (Kenneth 2007). This long time focus to make Louisiana attractive to

industry—namely chemical and petrochemical—has created ‘cancer alley’ where 135

petrochemical plants line an eighty-five mile stretch from Baton Rouge to New Orleans

(Bullard 2005). Louisiana ranks first in the nation in per capita toxic releases to the

environment, second in total toxic chemical releases and wastes injected in the ground

and third in air releases (Bullard 2005). These were released in the flooding of Katrina

and now the land is being tested for arsenic and other contaminants that would inhibit

rebuilding.

The state, with national support, maintains navigation channels, levees, and

highways free of charge for industry use. Forty-five hundred sea-going vessels and one

hundred thousand barges travel the state waterways every year (Bullard 2005). The

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infrastructure that is necessary to maintain these ship ways increases coastal land loss,

which amounts to 60-100 sq km annually (Davis 2005) or one acre every 35 minutes.

This has also caused the city to sink at a rate of 5-10 mm/year so that now 80% of New

Orleans is below sea level, in some places more than 12ft below (Brich et al. 2006).

These are the costs of industry shifts of the past. Now I will turn to the costs of the

current industry in New Orleans--tourism.

In Sassen's analysis of the most global cities--New York, London, and Tokyo--

she documents the effects of 'becoming global.' There are three general consequences on

the urban landscape. They are as follows: 1) gentrification 2) the casulaization of general

labor 3) the exacerbation of inequalities, particularly along racial or ethnic lines. This

analysis reveals that these shifts are not isolated events, but could even be considered

wider patterns. Regardless of the fact that New Orleans will never be a 'global city' it has

experienced the consequences of trying to find a place in the global economy. New

Orleans has been fairly successful in attracting global corporate interest. As Kevin

Gotham says, "the growth of corporate tourism and the increasing penetration of global

entertainment firms bespeaks a shift in property ownership away from many small groups

towards a more transnational corporate influence in the Vieux Carre (Gotham 2007)."

The shift to tourism essentially requires gentrification and the casualization of

labor. The results of this are often reflected in the economic marginalization of the

majority. For example, in New Orleans the service sector grew by 136% and retail grew

by 76% during the same 30 years that manufacturing jobs dwindled. The significance of

this that manufacturing jobs pay 63% more than service industry jobs, hence the

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persistent poverty regardless of a net job increase (Muro et.al 2005). Segregation, as I

noted earlier, increased dramatically along with the bifurcation of class (Muro et. al

2005).

Globalization allows capital to move more quickly as it ties all locales into a

larger matrix. This greater geographical range allows what could be considered another

further abstraction from the confines of time and space--time/space compression.

Technology and time- space compression

As stated in Panarchy theory, human systems have technology and therefore

can manipulate time and space and externalize their logic throughout. One way to do this

is to use technology to compress time and space and affect multiple scales and spaces at

the same time (Harvey 1989). Under neoliberalism especially, but late capitalism in

general, information technologies prevail as a means to maximize the reach and

frequency of market transactions and in turn compress the density of market transactions

in time and space (Harvey 1989).

Neoliberals have created an intensified burst of what Harvey calls ‘time-space

compression’. This means “the greater the geographical range (hence the emphasis on

globalization) the better for the term of market contracts. The short-term contract is often

described as the post-modern condition where “the temporary contract supplants

permanent institutions of the professional, emotional, sexual, cultural, family and

international domains, as well as in political affairs (4 Harvey 2005).”

In regards to Katrina, under a short-term contract the levees, which require

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long-term funding and maintenance, are not viable. For this reason, they have been built

in short bursts, usually following a major disaster (Comfort 2006). This poor maintenance

has contributed to their failure, as no consistent funding or comprehensive planning could

ever be developed or implemented. A similar fractured history is evident in the history of

disaster preparedness, relief and policy in US, which is characterized by short intensive

bursts of political activity usually immediately following a disaster (Comfort 2006).

Inconsistent policies and increased financial exposure of the federal government have

been the result of these methods (Comfort 2006). Funding long term planning or

protection is not economically or politically sensible in this post-modern condition.

The short-term contract, and the need for capital to be ever-expanding, forms the major

contradiction of capital. Social relations of production are constantly being undermined

by the means of production, even though they are interdependent in the reproduction of

capital. Capital moves ever more quickly, with crises all the more recurrent. In

panarchical terms, this creates a disjunction between interdependent cycles; a temporal

contradiction that threatens to explode as higher rates of places and people are left even

more prematurely obsolescent in the wake of capital. Furthermore, the short contractual

agreement (present in only human systems) often assumes things like ecological systems

to be linear and cannot account for the slow cycling speed, feedbacks, or

interconnectedness of most humanly useful resources in ecological systems (Holling and

Gunderson 2002). Again, in this instance, capital accumulation undermines its means of

production. Theses are examples of how we externalize our incomplete rationality

through the speed provided by technology and we use it to evade responsibility, planning

or long term commitments.

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The logic of the short term contract intensifies uneven geographic development

and resource depletion. It further fractures communities, policies, and spaces. It leaves

holes of high exposure as these subsystems try to reorganize, recover, or sync with the

break-neck speed of capital. This rapid fluidity is what Zygmut Baumun calls liquid

modernity--the waste machine leaves in its wake everything that has become disposable

to it (Kellner 2007). All this waste, contradiction, and externalities are being created at an

ever faster rate. Waste is never completely lost in the system but continues to accumulate,

creating a risk society where all we have tried to externalize becomes internalized.

The Technological Socialization of the Mississippi River

Historian Perice Lewis describes the founding and settlement of New Orleans as

impossible but inevitable. The situation was immensely profitable to commerce because

it was the mouth of the largest water highway in North America. The site was accepted

under the condition that it could be altered, or in Marx's terms--socialized.

Through the aforementioned socialization of society, nature becomes socialized and

internalized. The obvious result is that humans do much to scar the natural world. But the

results go further so that “the diversity of erstwhile natural systems are now products of

human decision-making (Beck et. al 1994)." This socialization of the natural means of

production marks the end of 'nature.' In retelling a brief history of the Mississippi it

becomes clear that this is, in fact, the case. Why the socialization of nature makes humans

more vulnerable to nature that they have created is twofold. First, it encourages new

dependencies like levees, canal, and pumps, which become new sources of vulnerability.

Second, socializing nature allows humans to displace and normalize risks associated with

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nature, like natural disaster. Presently, the hazards imposed by the Mississippi River and

the flood plain are products of about 300 years of decision-making. Since the beginning

of the urban development in the area, the Mississippi was effectively socialized and

humans were naturalized in this inevitable but impossible metropolis (Kelman 2003).

As early as 1900, the creed and intention of modernization was stated clearly by Smith

Leech, an army corps engineer. Prophetically he said, “What nature has failed to do, and

what remains for man to accomplish in order to fit the Mississippi river to his wants and

uses, is summed up in one word, control ( Kelman 2003: 169).” Within a century of its

founding, man-made levees extended 135 miles. Furthermore, at the beginning of WWI,

the waterfront, with the development of the railroad and Audubon Park, became the

domain of commerce alone (Kelman 2003). The levees were so high by that time that one

could no longer see the river. Consequently, few people came into contact with the

Mississippi daily. 'Nature' was effectively socialized.

This location could have never been rationalized unless the federal government

absorbed some of the externalities associated with this location. These externalities are

primarily in terms of costs of flood control and disaster relief. Levee externalities made

the government assume primary responsibility for the flood control over a century ago.

As early as 1849 the federal government was involved in providing land grants to

encourage development and pay for levees. By 1870, the Crops of Engineers took over

complete control (Kelman 2003). In 1936 the passage of the Flood Control Act

strengthened the ties between the Corps, the US government, real estate, industry

lobbyists, and local levee boards. As an expression of these multiple interests between

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1947 and 1970, 500 sq. miles of wetlands were lost each year to agriculture, levees, other

flood control projects and flood plain development.

All the human decisions that shaped this landscape had unintended

consequences. The levees system created externalities. Those who had higher levees were

more protected than those who lived farther downstream who received faster currents and

higher water. In the case of New Orleans, coastal inhabitants experienced land loss and

subsidence due to lack of replenishing sediment (Congelton 2005). Levee externalities

(and the associated power relationships) are exemplified by the flood of 1927 when

business elites decided undemocratically that levees in the lower parish should be

demolished to save the city district (Kelman 2003). This inundated lower New Orleans,

killed 250 people, made160,000 families relocate, drowned hundreds of acres of crops

and livestock and completely exterminated the muskrat population that had made New

Orleans one of the leading cities for fur trapping at the time (Kelman 2003).

In 1965, Hurricane Betsy produced a 10 ft. storm surge that overcame the

levees and prompted the rebuilding of higher, wider levees--designed to withstand a

category 3 surge-- around Lake Pontchartrain (Congelton 2005). The benefits of this

project were 21% justified in protecting existing development and 79% justified in

allowing new development (Burby 2006). The swaps along the border of the lake dried

out to some extent, although they were essentially muck and still sinking at varying

degrees (Lewis 1976). This federally supported project subsidized development as the

development in the swaps exploded and continued until around 1985 when growth

plateaued. As an example of this growth, "during the decade after Congress authorized

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the Lake Pontchartrain hurricane protection project and launched the NFIP, Jefferson

parish added forty-seven thousand housing units and Orleans parish added twenty-nine

thousand (Burby 2006)." When Katrina hit, the next major hurricane after Betsy, all of

this development was under 20 ft of water (Burby 2006). Ultimately, the new

technological fixes intended to eliminate hazards, invited catastrophe instead.

Another example of the unintended effects of socializing nature is the canal

system. The major canals were made in 1927 and in the late 1960s. Some were built to

increase shipping and others were built for flood protection. Unintentionally, they created

new direct avenues for storm surges to reach the city (Congelton 2005). It was later

revealed that the canals made the water 20% higher and 100%-200% faster as it crashed

into the city when Katrina hit (Congelton 2005).

Despite the improvements prior to Katrina, the levee breeches were attributed

to poor design and engineering failure, revealing that the levees were more suited for a

category 1 or 2 hurricane (Davis 2005). The category 3 levee system was a system of

protection by name only, yet its creation normalized risk enough that development and

everyday life up until Katrina seemed reasonably safe.

This natural history of New Orleans and its relationship to the Mississippi

reveals that through the practice of control, isolation of one variable (the Mississippi),

avoidance imperatives, and gross federal dependency, new vulnerabilities and

dependencies have emerged. The end result is an overall loss of physical resilience on the

site of the city itself, not to mention the detrimental effects on its inhabitants. Most of the

deaths from Katrina were concentrated in New Orleans and can be attributed to the

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particular location of the city, but more importantly, to the three-century-long efforts to

control the flood risks of that location.

Neoliberailism

Through the cycling of the processes of modernization, contradictions and crisis

tendencies multiply between social needs and social production on one side and

individualist ideologies and practices on the other. Because cycles of crisis and

contradiction build off each other, this makes the newest processes assume more extreme

forms. The contemporary form is neoliberalism. To analyze the political, economic

adaptive cycles of the panarchy during the time of Katrina, it is first important to place

the state of the political economy within its historically contingent context. This context

is the current political economic system of Neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism arose in Brittan under Thachter and in the US under Reagan in the

late 1970s. After the high economic growth of ‘embedded liberalism,’ or Keynesian

economics, in the 1950s-1960s, and the accumulation crisis in 1970, there appeared to be

a clear threat to upper class economic and political security (Harvey 2005). A wave of

‘creative destruction,’ unparalleled in the history of capitalism, followed and continues in

hopes to redistributing and securing class power (Harvey 2005). The first experiment was

the creative destruction of Chile by way of a coup and neoliberal state implementation,

which showed that “revived capital accumulation was highly skewed under forced

privatization (Harvey 2005).” Neoliberalist policies revealed themselves to be incredibly

effective at redistributing wealth. As only the top one percent of the population has seen

economic growth in real wage increases in the last 15 years in the US, redistribution of

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wealth from the masses to the richest has been neoliberalism’s only substantial economic

claim to fame (Harvey 2005). Neoliberalism "simultaneously tries to contain the

contradiction between social existence and individualistic ideologies... this contradiction

threatens to explode and form new creative self conscious forms of cooperation

(O'Connor 1987:155)."

Neoliberalism and the Rigidity Trap

Neoliberalization was, from the very beginning, a project to achieve the

restoration of class power (Harvey 2005). This component of neoliberalism is a major

reason why neoliberalism could be considered a mal-adaptive system constrained by a

rigidity trap. Panarchy theory gives the following definition of rigidity trap that fits well

with neoliberalism. “The high resilience would mean a great ability for the system to

resist external disturbances and persist, even beyond the point where it is adaptive and

creative. The high potential would be measured in accumulated wealth. The high

connectedness would come from efficient methods of social control whereby any novelty

is either smothered or sees its inventor ejected. It would represent a rigidity trap (96

Gunderson and Holling 2002).”

Neoliberalism’s main think-tanks have incredible social control as evidenced

by the policies implemented in Iraq and in New Orleans; the privatization of the military

and rebuilding efforts that allow huge, no-bid contracts to be given to the same people

over and over again. The political power is demonstrated by the contractors’ and think-

tanks’ strong Republican contributions and lobbying. As Naomi Klein writes, “…the top

20 service contractors have spent nearly $300 billion since 2000 on lobbying and have

54

donated $23 million to political campaigns. The Bush administration, in turn, increased

the amount spent on contractors by roughly $200 billion between 2000 and 2006 (412

Klein 2007).” Neoliberals take advantage of the 'blank slate' that is a result of creative

destruction, embodied in war or natural disaster. In this stage of reorganization they seek

to control the production of novelty to support their agenda.

The Manipulation of Crisis--Disaster Capitalism

The newest form of Neoliberalism capitalizes on creative destruction events so

that it can smother all other types of novelty that undermine the restoration of class

power. Disasters cause opportunity zones for economic gain. Everything has to be rebuilt;

there are clean up and relief demands, as well as security demands, and the more

devastating the disaster, the higher the number of contracts that are granted. As O'Connor

says, “Crises are the cauldrons in which capital qualitatively restructures itself for

economic, social, and political renewal and further accumulation (94 O’Connor 1987).”

Naomi Klien quotes Milton Friedman, one of the original neoliberalists: "Only a crisis—

actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are

taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to

develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the

politically impossible becomes politically inevitable (Klein 2007)." Fiscal, social, natural,

or political crises, all of which were represented in Katrina, cause transfers of ownership

and power to those who keep their own assets intact and who are in a position to create

credit. “As the most fundamental contradiction of capitalism is between the classes, so

the most fundamental role of crisis-as-solution is restoring the balance of class forces

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such that capital can resume its growth, i.e., growth in its control of the working class and

society (59 O’Connor 1987).” To do this and appear legitimate is the challenge.

Neoliberalism uses the ‘naturalness’ of war or natural disaster and the ‘blank

slate’ to legitimately plunder resources and manipulate crisis to redistribute wealth. This

complete regression of space and people caused by natural disaster or war is not creative,

morally or otherwise, because it ultimately undermines capital by fiscally draining the

state and traumatizing the social relations of production. Of Panarchy, Holling and

Gunderson say that for adaptive cycles that serve the larger system, anticipating and

creating useful surprises needs to be an actively adaptive approach, not a predictive,

optimizing approach (58 Gunderson and Holling 2002). Clearly for neoliberals, their

anticipation and use of crisis is optimizing.

A good example of this tactic is demonstrated by the policies and contracts, or,

in Friedman's words, the "ideas laying around" that were implemented in the wake of

Katrina. Only 20 schools of the original 117 schools (public) have reopened and 17 of the

20 are charter schools (Klein 2005).This was a direct recommendation of the Heritage

Foundation (a neoliberal think tank). They also implemented “the Davis-Bacon" laws that

require federal contractors to pay workers a living wage. The Heritage Foundation also

made “the entire affected area a flat-tax, free-enterprise zone," which provided

comprehensive tax incentives and waived regulations (Klein 2005). No-bid contracts

were allotted to the same contractors that received contracts in Baghdad, who make

disaster recovery their business. Halliburton got 60 million to reconstruct the military

base on The Gulf of Mexico, Blackwater received funds to protect FEMA personnel, and

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Shaw, Flour, CH2M Hill—all top Iraq contractors—were hired to provide mobile homes

to the New Orleans evacuees (Klein 2005). Kenyon, a major Bush campaign contributor

and part of a funeral conglomerate, got the contract to retrieve the dead bodies after

Katrina while charging the state an average $12,500 per body (Klein 2005). These are all

examples of how immorally profitable disaster has become under neoliberalism.

Neoliberialism systematically and intentionally creates a polarization and

consolidation of wealth resulting in chronically vulnerable populations while

overextending the growth phase for the few, monetarily, and for the majority,

ideologically. Today it has become “a hegemonic discourse with pervasive effect on

ways of thought and political economic practices to the point where it is now part of the

commonsense way we interpret, live in, and understand the world (3 Harvey 2005).” It

has become a new ethic, substituting all other ethics that guide human action. The market

becomes the most real thing in our lives and the ultimate panacea that is seemingly

outside of human control (Harvey 2005). These are all examples of ideological

domination that must couple capital accumulation, especially of this incredibly unequal

sort. This marks the ultimate reification and hierarchical position of capital in the

Panarchy of disasters.

As David Harvey says, on one side there are the disposable people who are cast

out of the market system with nothing to expect from neoliberalization except poverty

and despair, and “at the other end of the wealth scale, those thoroughly incorporated

within the inexorable logic of the market and its demands find that there is little time or

space in which to explore emancipatory potentialities outside of what is marketed as

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‘creative’ adventure, leisure, and spectacle. Obliged to live as appendages of the market

and of capital accumulation rather than as expressive beings, the realm of freedom

shrinks before the awful logic and the hollow intensity of market involvements (185

Harvey 2005, my emphasis).” This false resignation of power to the market logic is

accompanied by the mobilization of the spectacle.

Spectacle

Because Katrina got 24-hour, national news coverage, and many of the 'first

responders' were media personnel, the main way that the international and national

communities learned about and processed the event was through what is called 'the

spectacle.' “Disasters are becoming a mode of spectacle in which the characteristic

features of entertainment fragmentation, ephemerality, immediacy, and intense drama

determine the representation of tragic events (Gotham)." The media coverage of

Hurricane Katrina was the ultimate spectacle in that it revealed the duality of the

spectacle. It created a legitimation crisis, revealing the inability of the political body to

compensate for economic crisis while also uncovering the lies and mystifications of

neoliberalism and modernization in fractured moments and splices of reflexivity.

However, at the same time, it showed the media structure align with power to demobilize

the masses as New Orleans was repeatedly reported as a war zone of black urban

pathology and Hobbesian social break down.

In order to grasp what happened in the coverage of Katrina it is important to understand

why the spectacle arises and what its characteristics are. I will then go on to explain the

way it created legitimation in Katrina and the implications in regards to reflexivity. This

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will show the duality of the spectacle but also reveal the vulnerability of society as we

become unified as consumers under a deceptively false consciousness. This risk is

exemplified by the plans for rebuilding New Orleans, which threaten to restore an even

more fractured representation of normality than existed before the storm.

Guy Debord developed the concept of the “spectacle to refer to a new stage in the

development of capitalism, a shift to an image-saturated society where advertising,

entertainment, television, and mass media, and other culture industries increasingly

define and shape urban life while obscuring the alienating effects of capitalism (Gotham

2007:84).” In this way, “it has been captured as both a symbol and instrument of

community unification under bourgeois control in conditions where unemployment and

impoverishment have been on the rise and objective conditions of class polarization have

been increasing (Gotham 2007: 270).” Following the same vein,” process of

spectacularization is not neutral but reflects relentless pursuit of corporate profit as ruled

by the dictates of capitalist competition, commodification, and the rationalization of

production and consumption (Gotham 2007:82)"

Spectacle can be represented in something as small as a billboard or as large as

an entire city. Like downtown New Orleans, "whole built environments become

centerpieces of urban spectacle and display (Gotham 2006).” The French Quarter and

Bourbon Street, at least from the view of the tourist, make New Orleans seem united. But

the glorification of the poor black jazz musicians only seeks to hide the squalor and

inequality that actually exists (Gotham 2006). This disneyfication of cities frequently

occurs across the US and seems to reflect the elite’s hopes for reconstructing New

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Orleans (Gotham 2007).

In Capitalism, “the spectacle is the developed modern complement of money

where the totality of the commodity world appears as a whole, as a general equivalence

for what the entire society can be and can do (Harvey 1989).” Spectacles are designed to

maximize consumption. As Gotham says, "The intensity and speed of these images and

social and technological changes abstract events from the lived and affective experience,

creating a social condition of chronic ephemerality, fragmentation and discontinuity."

This marks the totalization of commodification, complete abstraction, and mystification

of reality. People become spectators in their own lives passively consuming and do not

live as reflexive creative beings (Gotham 2007). The spectacle corresponds with a reified

social life in which relationships are between things, and are representations.

The Spectacle in the Media:

Much of how the national or international community learns about an

‘unexpected’ event like hurricane Katrina is through the spectacle. The spectacle is

dangerous in the televised media because the spectacle has both positive and negative

qualities that threaten to appear at the same time. I would like to first focus on the

positive qualities. They are positive because they can allow the audience to be reflexive.

Gotham explains this characteristic of the spectacle. He says, “Spectacles cannot totally

hide the nature of exploitation and power dynamics in modern society because they are

anchored within and express the discordant and antagonistic relations that constitute

modern capitalism...They are a double-edged socio-political process: they encompass the

historical process of capitalist development and the heterogeneous, politically contested

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interpretations of that ostensibly conflictual process. However they also display the most

divisive social conflicts, reveal and make transparent the contradictions, fragmentation

and polarization of modern society (Gotham 2007:89).” In this way, the spectacle always

has the possibility of enhancing reflexivity.

The federal government's failure to show up in a timely manner after Katrina

allowed a power vacuum and a moment of exposure during the coverage when news

reporters were talking about race, poverty, and the war in Iraq. Even the president spoke

of a “legacy of inequality” and “deep persistent poverty [with] roots in a history of racial

inequality (Peck 2006:702).” These instances prompted moments of reflexivity and

elevated consciousness because that is the nature of reporting an accident or scandal. In

order to describe this I will use the theory of purposive news-making from Harvey

Molotch to discusses the characteristics of accidents and scandal and reveal the

possibility for reflexivity.

The Scandal and Accident in News Reporting

Media reflects the agendas of those who have the power to control it, and

regardless of the news, how they choose to portray an event can determine the experience

of others. News-making is a purposive behavior often obscured by a belief in reality that

there is some ‘out there’ to be described through the so-called objective view of news

promoters and assemblers (Molotch and Lester 1974). Even from the beginning, at the

precise moment after an event occurs there is a selection that takes place, a cognitive

decision to make it an ‘issue’ that is always constrained by the reason for doing so

(Molotch and Lester 1974).

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However, the people that control news making report accidents like Hurricane

Katrina in a particularly risky way. This is because accidents “foster revelations which

are otherwise deliberately obfuscated by those with the resources to create routine events

(Molotch and Lester 1974: 109).” Accidents are especially important to everyday people

because they allow access into the inner-workings of political economic institutions,

governing bodies and personal lives that normally have the “psychic and physical

resources to shield their lives from public view (Molotch and Lester 1974: 109).”

Accidents often lead to a series of scandals. Only in scandals and accidents is the routine

political work of mass media elevated to a higher ground, allowing access to potentially

harmful and contradictory information regarding those groups who typically manage

public event making (Molotch and Lester 1974:111). Because people are unprepared to

report, information is variable and cannot be checked; the ‘event structuring process’ is

most clearly revealed during these events (Molotch and Lester 1974). In Katrina the event

structuring process was evident in the reporting on looting, rape and shootings in the

superdome that turned out to be completely untrue, revealing false information.

The spectacle or the tribunal, which are both places where the Other threatens

to appear in full view, become mirrors. This is because the Other is a scandal, which

threatens his essence (Barthes 1970). But sometimes the Other is revealed in an

irreducible way, by race in the case of Katrina, and reveals bias and long standing issues.

In this case, the Other (African Americans) becomes a pure object, like a clown or a

spectacle in and of itself separated from the whole spectacle and in Katrina demonized

and blamed. With the clear racial dynamic of Katrina, reporting was especially revealing

in that white people were reported as finding food and goods as African Americans were

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repeatedly reported as looting and as thieves (Gotham 2007).The event was compulsively

reported as an unrelenting story of social pathology. National and local news was

saturated by incessant photo ops, sensationalizing media coverage and individualized

human-interest stories that were disconnected from a critical analysis of larger socio-

economic trends and developments (Gotham 2007). This is evidence of the re-alignment

towards power structures and the need for the spectacle to maximize drama as a means to

maximize consumption.

The future of New Orleans

Gotham proposes the three possibilities for the future of New Orleans. The first is

a cultural wasteland, the second is a disneyified metropolis like Las Vegas and the third is

city of cultural renaissance as new identities, racial dynamics and local organizations re-

define New Orleans’s authenticity. Currently, collective struggles over meaning and

definitions of local authenticity are shaping and constraining development. Some

supporters of the market-centered view believe that the rebuilding process will define

itself because the city will be left to individual and private choices. New race relations

might be formed with migration and displacement. There is also significant outrage and

organization on the local level as people are trying to rebuild in a just and equitable way.

However, the political and economic elites have been making unnerving propositions

including rebuilding organized according to investment zones. These zones would be

based on historical significance, topography, home ownership, and flood inundation. The

suggestion from the BNOB commission was to only re-develop neighborhoods that could

prove themselves self-sufficient.

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The political and economic elites in New Orleans are promoting and structuring

the rebuilding process in a way that promotes free market capitalism. Reed, referring to

the leading developers and BNOB commission, equates the rebuilding to asking a fox to

design a chicken coop. They are trying to re-create the city as a spectacle to maximize

consumption and maintain and mask power relations. In this way, the negative qualities

of the spectacle threaten again to be the plans for rebuilding New Orleans. This would

intensify the gentrification, casualization of labor, segregation as well as erase the

displaced residents by creating a fractured, fake, spectacular, and reified representation of

New Orleans for the tourist gaze.

The spectacle in the built environment is the place where nostalgia can call

home. It is a place where our comfort with the absolute fake is revealed and where we

reconstruct our built environment in an attempt to perfect the past and resemble a

nostalgia for a future we once believed was possible (Herron 2007). The spectacularized-

built environment then becomes another self-reinforcing experience devoid of reflexivity

and effect.

Conclusion

When I saw the footage of the satellite images of the Katrina moving towards

the gulf coast, New Orleans under 20 ft of water and then all the people stranded at the

superdome or stranded on rooftops and expressways I hardly felt a thing. It was not until

I watched “When the Levees Broke” a documentary by Spike Lee, and watched people

talk about waiting for the federal government to save them, not being able to feed their

screaming children, and watching people expire in the heat and suffering that I really

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began to comprehend what happened and be affected by the suffering. It was then that I

realized exactly how unnatural Katrina was.

Parts of Katrina were inexplicable, just blatant disregard or incompetence, but

on the other hand, large parts of Katrina were attributable to some of the most profound

processes and ways we make sense of the world. If we have flawed at that level by

creating a viral dissemination of risk and vulnerability then what can we do? How could

capital move across the landscape in a more equitable way? How could we have cycles of

production that don’t exhaust themselves? What would another system of accumulation

look like? How would we structure flexible bureaucracy? Can we slow down or become

less vulnerable to the fluctuations of the global matrix? These are all questions that don’t

have easier answers but they need to be asked. Reflexive modernity allows these

confrontations, these questions and another opportunity to try again. Every thing we

depend on and love must go through processes of creative destruction and that includes

modernity. For me, modernity was an experiment and perhaps it is time to try another.

I have shown that these processes and conceptions of our reality are constructed.

We participated and allowed them to be constructed and that alone means that they can

be changed. Katrina prompted the perspective to reflect on the consequences of

modernization. It freed human agency to see the holes in the ‘second nature’

representation of our reality. If we deny these holes and continue to over extend our

growth phase, perpetually externalizing and displacing crisis and vulnerability we will

spawn vulnerability indefinitely. This point becomes more important considering that

more than half of the nations 297 million people live in coastal areas--most in major

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cities and 7 of the top 10 fastest growing cities are coastal. This means that there has been

a direct increase in our vulnerability to coastal disaster (Birch et al. 2006). The policy of

more of the same will create fertile ground for disasters to be continually devastating.

This will come at a cost to our resiliency and therefore the belief in the human project.

.

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“Neoliberalism is a theory of political economic practices proposing that human well-

being can best be advanced by the maximization of entrepreneurial freedoms within an

institutional framework characterized by private property rights, individual liberty,

unencumbered markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an

institutional framework appropriate to such practices. The state has to be concerned, for

example, with the quality and integrity of money. It must also set up military, defense,

police, and juridical functions required to secure private property rights and to support

freely functioning markets. Furthermore, if markets do not exist (in areas such as

education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution), then they must be

71

created, by state action if necessary. But beyond these tasks the state should not venture.

State interventions in markets (once created) must be kept to a bare minimum because the

state cannot possibly possess enough information to second-guess market signals (prices)

and because powerful interests will inevitably distort and bias state interventions

(particularly in democracies) for their own benefit (Harvey 2005).”