Although many things have been said about Katrina and New Orleans, and Space and Culture will have a themed issue (9.1) to appear in early 2006, I thought I’d just add another comment – if only to evidence that although Durkheim is certainly old hat, his conceptual repertoire might have some interesting bits to help us make sense of post-apocalyptic life in urban America.
‘The recent events in New Orleans show that civilization is merely a thin veneer’ said one British HK_New Orleans survivor in a local newspaper The Nottingham Evening Post. This reminds of Durkheim’s work on anomie and his far-from-optimistic analysis of the transitional process now commonly referred to within social theory as ‘modernity’. Durkheim (1984) wrote about the decline of organic solidarity as a consequence of the division of labour and about the need for the establishment of a new form of mechanical solidarity that was better attuned to the functional differentiation of social roles and identities. In a later work he suggested that social relationships could provide an effective protection against the pressures of modern life, which are now more commonly known as ‘individualization’. Finally, before he died, he wrote about the need for the development of a ‘conscience collectif’ within social systems, which needed to become increasingly abstracted from everyday life if they were to continue to function in modern life.
Durkheim’s sociological imagination has travelled quite well into the vernacular sociology of everyday life, particularly that of local media. We now tend to see modern society as constantly on the verge of breakdown, and events such as the aftermath if Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans ‘prove’ this to be true. It does not take much for social systems to plunge into lawlessness, for social norms and codes to be pulverised by the naked violence of ‘gun-toting criminals’, for ordinary, ‘law-abiding citizens’ to take to the streets and loot everything that moves.
The events of Hurricane Katrina have shown a peculiar inversion of the logic of globalization. The powerful, i..e the white western tourists, were now trapped in localities where their allegedly cosmopolitan lifestyle and knowledge brought them no advantages. They were at the mercy of those they would normally not seek to encounter, and probably most likely to avoid. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina showed that those who are used to being trapped in local settings, who do not possess cars, credit cards or other means of escape, were far better adapted to a post-apocalyptic life.
This, however, suggests that the situation one would describe as ‘anomic’ is not as disordered and pathological as an invocation of Durkheim’s social theoretical repertoire might allude to. Even in a post-apocalyptic urban wasteland, there still seem to be rules. This becomes more apparent, if one considers the ‘normal’ events of so-called pre-apocalyptic modernity, in which gang violence and violent policing produce excessive numbers of deaths on a day-to-day basis. There were perhaps more killings in the days before Katrina struck than afterwards.