The
article that my friend in London refers to in his comments to one of my posts is worth your taking a look at. It's by that Euro-smartypants Slavoj Zizek, and it touches on a subject that I've thought about in the wake of Katrina: the vicious lies about blacks raping and murdering with wanton glee that were reported as facts by the national media.
We all remember the reports on the disintegration of public order, the explosion of black violence, rape and looting. However, later inquiries demonstrated that, in the large majority of cases, these alleged orgies of violence did not occur: Non-verified rumors were simply reported as facts by the media. For example, on September 3, the Superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department told the New York Times about conditions at the Convention Center: “The tourists are walking around there, and as soon as these individuals see them, they ‘re being preyed upon. They are beating, they are raping them in the streets.” In an interview just weeks later, he conceded that some of his most shocking statements turned out to be untrue: “We have no official reports to document any murder. Not one official report of rape or sexual assault.”
The reality of poor blacks, abandoned and left without means to survive, was thus transformed into the specter of blacks exploding violently, of tourists robbed and killed on streets that had slid into anarchy, of the Superdome ruled by gangs that were raping women and children. These reports were not merely words, they were words that had precise material effects: They generated fears that caused some police officers to quit and led the authorities to change troop deployments, delay medical evacuations and ground helicopters. Acadian Ambulance Company, for example, locked down its cars after word came that armed robbers had looted all of the water from a firehouse in Covington—a report that proved totally untrue.
Zizek alludes to New Orleans to make a larger point about the nature of segregation in the age of globalization: it's much, much worse.
We are thus not dealing with “globalization as an unfinished project,” but with a true “dialectics of globalization.” The segregation of the people is the reality of economic globalization. This new racism of the developed world is in a way much more brutal than the previous one: Its implicit legitimization is neither naturalist (the “natural” superiority of the developed West) nor culturalist (we in the West also want to preserve our cultural identity). Rather, it ‘s an unabashed economic egotism—the fundamental divide is the one between those included into the sphere of (relative) economic prosperity and those excluded from it.
The excluded other, according to Zizek, then becomes the canvas onto which we project our fear and desire, ala New Orleans post-Katrina. I know a few of the Tgnosis regulars are familiar with Zizek and I'd like to hear what you make of this. I think his "solution" as he puts it forth here sounds nice enough, but is awfully vague. (I'm sure he expounds upon this at length elsewhere but it probably involves reading about Lacan.)
...the real solution is to tear down the true wall, not the police one, but the social-economic one: To change society so that people will no longer desperately try to escape their own world.
