New Orleans: A Lecture

"And if in our age of quasi-dwarfs the colossal scandal of being a genius permits us not to be stoned like dogs or to starve to death, it will only be by the grace of God."

Salvador Dali said this early in the twentieth century, referring to a number of conditions that we do not allow now in public conversation - namely "genius" and "God." I believe that New Orleans has genius, a genius of the locus, named New Orleans, and that this spirit of place, this locus genius, has intervened with God to protect the city numerous times in the past. The protection didn't always work, and we experienced the Calamities that are part of our history: Hurricanes, War, Yellow Fever epidemics. The difference between those Historical Calamities and the recent Storm is that the expectations of modernity, of our mediated reality, is that the United States of America should have an immediate solution to Catastrophe. Since 9/11 we must be Totally Prepared and Ready to Rebuild. We have a Phoenix-complex: we must rise from the ashes as quickly as possible and cure our wounds in forty-eight minutes, not including commercials. Katrina, the floods, and government at all levels have done to New Orleans what weather and history have done to many places in the past: they devastated it. But now there is an added element: the instant expectation of renewal. This expectation is not benign; it serves the rich, and it screws the poor.

We have already committed some major mistakes unknown to the Calamitous Historical Past. I will list them in order of gravity, and then give you my solutions, only some of which are architectural.

1. a. Evacuation of the people from the city.

2. b. A confusion of authorities.

3. c. The politicizing of every decision; the reinsertion of race politics, including old civil rights agendas, into the process; The Blame Game.

4. d. The race for a comprehensive solution, including the revival of every failed civic plan ever conceived.

5. e. The invention of schemes for reinventing the city.

In order then: 1. Evacuation of the people from the city. A completely evacuated city is an automatic ruin. To bring it back is nearly impossible. Send in the archeologists. To the credit of some people, they never left the city. The French Quarter and Uptown, where many people stayed, have been quickly reinhabited and are functioning. They are a small percentage of the city, now known as The Sliver by the River, or the Isle of Denial. The Sliver by the River is the original city of New Orleans, built next to the natural levees formed by the Mississippi River. The Isle of Denial is indeed an island whose inhabitants can spend the rest of their lives ignoring the vast ruin of the city around them.

One of New Orleans' proudest claims to fame is its provincialism. This is a city of neighborhoods that guard proudly their accents, neighborhood rituals, and mutual-aid and carnival societies. This provincialism is also the ur-ground for the product known as New Orleans culture. A closer look at New Orleans culture reveals two opposing phenomena: culture without quotation marks and "culture" in quotes. The culture-sans-quotes of neighborhoods, bars, clubs, carnival societies, funeral societies, second-lines, burial customs, different types of music—all segregated by race and divided by neighborhood—comes together in the Carnival Season when the city of New Orleans becomes a single entity visible to locals and outsiders alike as the city of New Orleans. New Orleans "culture" in quotes is the kitschified version of Carnival, an autonomous and marketable product that is the packaged, faked, and de-sacralised Carnival marketed to tourists. Its marketing and profits are not in the hands of people who have produced it, and there is very little incentive in this market to help create or maintain culture without quotes.

This is one of the paradoxes that stand squarely in the way of what is being called "restoring," "rebuilding," or "bringing back" New Orleans. Without the people there is no New Orleans to bring back. When the people...