disaster utopias

2038-01-19T03:14:07Z

A few quotes from the New York Times book review of Rebecca Solnit's new book "A Paradise Built in Hell" on the transformative power of disaster.

She criticizes Naomi Klein, the author of “The Shock Doctrine,” for portraying civilians as merely frightened and disoriented during times of crisis, rather than invigorated and capable. She notes that the British intellectual Timothy Garton Ash fed stereotypes after Katrina, saying that the storm’s “big lesson is that the crust of civilization on which we tread is always wafer thin.” Ms. Solnit’s optimistic book advances just the opposite worldview.

Crises force us to wake up and actually see the world. Therefore the best way to grow is to force oneself into unfamiliar threatening territory. There are those (like me) who are content like rabbits in cages to live dull lives based on illusionary security. Nothing much happens. Its easy to fall into a rut, most of us do I think. Disasters, although traumatic, force us to break out of our routines, and can lead to something stronger.

The provocative image that stuck with me from “A Paradise Built in Hell” is this one: When the electrical power failed after the 1989 Bay area earthquake and after Hurricane Katrina, the light pollution that usually blotted out the night sky vanished. All the stars came out.

“You can think of the current social order,” she writes, “as something akin to this artificial light: another kind of power that fails in disaster.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/books/21book.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/books/excerpt-paradise-built-in-hell.html?ref=books

I came across similar ideas recently in Allan Stoekl's "Bataille's Peak". Bataille posits an economy of excess which negates the ideas of scarcity which are tied to the official ideology of private property and the engine of profit which drives our society. We are squeezed ever tighter to produce profits, and yet what is being created with the surplus?

From Allen Mozek's For the Birds:

What is productivity if it is the means and also the goal of a capitalism mechanism? We must ask ourselves if productivity is just another myth. Our common understanding is that “when one considers the totality of productive wealth on the surface of the globe, it is evident that the products of this wealth can be employed for productive ends only insofar as the living organism that is economic mankind can increase its equipment.” But we “…forget the fact that the ground we live on is little other than a field of multiple destructions.” The fate of all profit is waste, and our ignorance of this fact, according to Bataille, is that “…it causes us to undergo what we could bring about in our own way, if we understood. It deprives us of the choice of an exudation that might suit us. Above all, it consigns men and their works to catastrophic destructions.”

We are tied to a chain of destruction we believe to be natural. And perhaps it is, as even stars burn themselves out and explode in supernovae. So too mankind has the potential to destroy itself. We have to be open, not to the apocalypse, which is only a myth, albeit a powerful one, but to the traumatic rupture, always coming, it seems, some time in the (near) future. Open to the tragic which binds us together. "The tragic is unthinkable, but it is incumbent on us to think it."

"I love the ignorance concerning the future." - Nietzsche

tricycle

disaster utopias