New Orleans and its Storm: Exception, Example, or Event?

As the waters began to rise after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, a pressing question surfaced: was the fate overtaking New Orleans an exceptional or an exemplary one? Was this gruesome spectacle of life stripped bare something in excess of the everyday, or did it in fact recapitulate the new shape of American society? In its formulation, the question was and remains a historicist question of a particular kind: it attempts to understand the hybrid occurrence that New Orleanians now call "the storm" through its relationship to past and present known conditions. Whether by accident or design, this way of framing the definitional questions surrounding Katrina effectively recuperated the unknown to the known before the waters had receded. The naming of an exception marks a deviation from a cumulative historical norm, but that act of naming also preserves the norm in the exception itself: the exceptional qualities of the exception are typically comparative amplifications or contractions of the customary and the easily categorized. For its part, the example hews the median line so closely that it summarizes and in this way exemplifies a ready historical truth.

This tendency to characterize the issue at hand as a question of the exception or the example—the inclination, in other words, to "historicize" the storm in this way—has encouraged an implicit but growing sense that what transpired in New Orleans during and after the storm was and is nothing especially new. In doing so, this framework has effectively neutralized the collective outrage expressed worldwide immediately following the collapse of this major urban culture. As in other similar scenarios, this neutralization process saw supposedly "good" people submitting the victims of injustice to a backlash of indifference and hostility that was misnamed "compassion fatigue." This so-called compassion fatigue was actually the entirely predictable product of the either/or question already described. Faced with the choice of reading the situation in New Orleans as either an exception or an example, one perfectly reasonable and exceedingly popular judgment on the matter was to say plus ça change, plus c'est la meme. There is nothing truly new in either the exception or the example; there is, consequently, no cause to think or to be differently. This last assumption is the unacknowledged effect of the exception/example choice implicit in an unthinking and reflexive historicism.

The reflexive historicizing of the destruction of New Orleans has made it, I am suggesting, very hard to articulate what might be notably original about this particular death-filled week in this "city of the dead." It has also blocked the only appropriate response to that new: a reconfiguration of knowledge and a reprioritization of action at the level of the subject and the social organism effected through an unrelenting commitment to observe and engage that which is emerging despite the dread such an engagement often entails. At the end of the day, if in fact that day has ended, the either/or approach to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath has made it all too easy to tame and contain an irruption of something beyond the words, the paradigms, and the metaphors available at the moment of its occurrence.

Given this scenario, how might scholars working in American literature, American studies, and affiliated fields honor, acknowledge, and successfully archive that which was fully and terrifyingly original in this storm and its aftermath? How might one do this in an intellectual climate dominated, moreover, by a version of historicism with seemingly no room for the absolutely new? Furthermore, how might this be accomplished without having recourse to that vexed category of apprehension, the sublime, or its corollary definitional evasion, the exception/example binary?

Indeed, the temptations of the historicist binary and the sublime will be just as strong for the scholar as they were for the general public; the extent and spectacular theatricality of the storm would, after all, appear to mark it as an exceptional instance bordering on sublimity. From the outset, many have referred to Katrina as an exceptional tragedy unforeseeable, unforeseen, and of a magnitude exceeding comprehension. President George W. Bush's infamous comment that...