Crisis response

Something that came up on Friday is that catastrophe is, possibly, marked out as such because of the human response to it – like the tree falling in the forest going unnoticed, or the cataclysm that wiped out the dinosaurs being generally referred to as a natural event in the planet’s history rather than an overarching tragedy.

Marko mentioned the ‘I was there’ thing, the need to implant oneself in the disastrous situation, which links to ‘where were you’– see JFK for the obvious one – and the tendency, also mentioned on Friday, to narrow big stories down to smaller, digestible bites: how many Britons were killed in the Asian tsunami, what their individual stories were. Which again takes us back to what (I think) is one of Blanchot’s primary assertions – the disaster is the blind spot, the hole in the fabric, the thing that cannot exist in either space or time because its existing negates all other existence, and as such it cannot be seen or witnessed, it is always already past or always an immediate threat but never the now (whatever the now may think itself).

I was wondering what we come up with, then, culturally, to help us cover over that blind spot. We disassociate by watching rolling news or YouTube ‘porn’, turning the Real – if there is a real? – exhaustion of the disaster into a small and unthreatening series of images (like the painting we saw on Friday of ship in tidal wave, which reduces terrifying nature to aesthetic object and allows us to look at it, appreciate and turn away unscathed). If the blank spot at the nexus of catastrophe can be compared to the ultimate threat, that which must not be viewed, of castration, then like castration it must involve all flavours of distraction and displacement to help us avoid looking. The necessity of not knowing castration can implement trauma and pathology; does this effect repeat itself on more generic disaster?

As an example, there seems to be a knee-jerk humour response to catastrophe in British culture. After the July 2005 bomb attacks on the London transport system some strong-jawed types set up this website to make a point that London would not be cowed; within hours this had gone up to make the point that London would not take anything seriously, even suicide bombers. Or if you’re on Facebook take a look at this, it’s a mass piss-take of the ‘I survived’ thing that people do after disasters. Humour as defence, humour as response, distancing mechanism, social cohesion device even. We know this, and we know the heroically inflected and ‘inspirational’ response to 9/11 in New York; it would be interesting to examine the public responses to disasters in other countries, find out whether these two diametrically opposed reactions are specific to the west, how, perhaps, Buddhist Thailand’s response to the tsunami differed. (I realise that one can’t dissolve an entire country down to one point of view, or define an entire population by their passports or lack thereof; this is necessarily going to involve some inelegant generalisations. However I think they’d be justified to some extent if they provide an understanding of the media and governmental response to disaster, the public face, as these are often the crucial clues as to how a country sees itself, how its self image operates.)