‘Katrina and the waves: bad organization, natural evil or the State

Abstract

This paper considers Deleuze and Guattari's notions of the smooth and the striated as a basis for rethinking the events of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans in September 2005. It is argued here that popular narratives of Katrina, and perspectives on disaster from the field of organization studies, have tended to be conditioned by a long‐standing and restrictive dualism between ‘man’ (organization) and ‘nature’ (disorganization), and an associated, anthropocentric moral framework. By contrast, Deleuze and Guattari are seen to offer a set of concepts relating to spatial and material patterns of organization which allow us to move beyond such a conceptual dualism towards other ways of thinking the events of Katrina. Furthermore, they are also understood to have provided the basis for some radical reflections on the role of the State in the reproduction of a particular material and conceptual logic of disaster management and planning. According to an application of their concepts of the smooth and the striated, Katrina is described here, not according to notions of natural disorder, but as a Deleuzo‐Guattarian ‘war machine’, operating according to an alien mode of organization to that of the State. It is this encounter, between two irreducibly different modes of organization, which is seen to account for both its extreme ‘catastrophic’ effects, and for some of the unusual organizational phenomena occurring in its aftermath. In contrast to some recent papers in the field of organization studies that have tended to treat Deleuze and Guattari's work in abstract and theoretical terms, this paper proposes to make a distinctive contribution to this Deleuzo‐Guattarian ‘turn’ by situating, or putting to work, their thought in the context of Katrina as an empirical event.

Keywords:

• Deleuze and Guattari
• Katrina
• New Orleans
• smooth
• striated
• war machine
• The State
• evil
• nature
• organization
• disaster
• catastrophe

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors of this special edition, Russell Dudley‐Smith, my doctoral supervisor Dr Damian O'Doherty and the other participants at the SCOS 2006 Conference in Nijmegen, Netherlands, for their invaluable comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. In this article, the terms ‘Katrina’ or ‘the events of Katrina’ will be used to refer to not only the hurricane ‘itself’, but also to the organizational phenomena associated with it, including those organizational factors which predate and follow the hurricane event(s) of September 2005. Furthermore, the ‘effects’ of Katrina or Hurricane Katrina, though focused on New Orleans and its nearest coastline, can be seen to range further afield, to encompass not only the US States of Louisiana and Mississippi, but the rest of the US and the wider world as a global media event (Sturken 2006).

2. As we will see, the term ‘catastrophic’ is placed in quotes here – as will in places be the term ‘disaster’ – to indicate that the particular understandings of the relationship between order and disorder implied by these terms will be among those themes brought into question in this paper.

3. FEMA stands for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and is the agency of the US government tasked with ‘Disaster Mitigation, Preparedness, Response and Recovery planning’ (http://www.fema.gov).

4. This swift publication was perhaps influenced by the popular success of the 9/11 Inquiry Report (US House of Representatives 2004), whose paperback edition quickly became a US bestseller and its ‘official’ narrative the basis for a major Hollywood movie. See also Brown (2001) and Lawson (2005) on ‘inquiry sensemaking’.

5. This led the Geographer Pierce Lewis to refer to new Orleans as an ‘impossible but inevitable city’ due to the strange combination of its ‘suboptimal’ site with its ‘optimal’ situation ‘as a trading outlet for the extended hinterland of the Mississippi–Missouri basin’ (Colten 2005, 2; see also Fra Paleo 2006).

6. See also Manaugh and Twilley (2006) on landscape and architecture in New Orleans in relation to this point.

7. In this context, Lavin and Russill (2006) make the argument that the notion of a ‘battleground’ in a war between man and nature, as a way of understanding the relation between the city of New Orleans and the Mississippi river, is a characterization that has contributed to, rather than prevented, the destructive impact of Katrina.

8. Oliver‐Smith considers disasters such as Katrina to be valuable objects of study as ‘a mode of disclosure of how the interpenetration and mutuality of nature and society …are worked out’ (Oliver‐Smith 2002, 26). For Oliver‐Smith, ‘there are few contexts in which the mutual constitutionality of the physical and the social are so starkly displayed as in a disaster’ (ibid.).

9. In the aftermath of Katrina, the property of the wealthy is also understood in many cases to have been protected from theft or damage by private security companies (Protevi 2005, 9; see also Wilson 2005).

10. The particular systems perspective proposed by Perrow can be seen to contribute to this bounded separation, in terms of what is know as a closed systems model, concerned with the relations between rigid system components and in clear distinction from its ‘environment’, the two being separated according to a defined system boundary. This is in contrast to open systems perspectives, which theorise flows across permeable system boundaries and shifting system configurations that arguably produce more sophisticated accounts of socio‐material organization and change (Bertalanffy 1968; Prigogine and Stengers 1984), and of which it could be argued Deleuze and Guattari have been the foremost theorists (see for example De Landa 2002).

11. While this can be seen to be potentially problematic in terms of the ‘rhizomatic’ manner in which those concepts are understood to be necessarily mutually supporting (see MP 1–25), aside from considerations of space, this selective focus has been adopted, not only to bring to the fore some arguably undervalued concepts in their ‘toolbox’, but also to try to provide a distinctive point of access to Deleuze and Guattari's work, and the attendant vocabulary of their ideas, for those that are broadly unfamiliar.

12. Deleuze references Emmanuel Laroche (1949) in describing a distinction between aspects of distribution and aspects of allocation, and how this particular form of distribution entails the nomos of a space without precise limits: ‘The pastoral sense of nemo (to pasture) only belatedly implied an allocation of the land. Homeric society had neither enclosures nor property in pastures: it was not a question of distributing the land among the beasts but, on the contrary, of distributing the beasts themselves and dividing them up here and there across an unlimited space, forest or mountainside. The nomos designated first of all an occupied space, but one without precise limits (for example the expanse around a town) – whence too, the theme of the ‘nomad’’ (1994, 309 n. 6; see also MP 557 n. 51 and MP 572 n. 12).

13. It is noted by Bonta and Protevi (2004, 118), however, that ‘the pure social formation of nomad society is an abstraction’: ‘the elements of nomadism … enter into de facto mixes with elements of migration, itinerancy, and transhumance’ (citing Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 420). Bonta and Protevi also acknowledge here the work of Miller (1993, 1998) who is critical of Deleuze and Guattari's use of anthropological sources regarding nomadism.

14. As Deleuze and Guattari say, and which we might relate to their use of the smooth and striated here: ‘We only invoke dualism in order to challenge another’ (MP 20).

15. On Deleuze and Guattari's complex relation to the work of Wittfogel, see Bonta and Protevi (2004, 167, and MP 19, 63).

16. We might also note here the importance Deleuze and Guattari place on ‘The figure of the engineer (in particular the military engineer), with all its ambivalence’ in relation to the intersection of what they call State and nomad science (MP 362) – with reference here to the role of the US Army Corps of Engineers in the construction and maintenance of flood defences in New Orleans.

17. We might note a resonance or intersection here with notions of ‘regulating’ and ‘securing’ in Martin Heidegger's description of the hydroelectric plant, in his ‘Question Concerning Technology’ (Heidegger 1993, 321).

18. It is important to note here that for Deleuze and Guattarri, ‘the two spaces in fact exist only in mixture: ‘smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space’ (MP 474). However, for Deleuze and Guattari, ‘the de facto mixes to not preclude a de jure, or abstract, distinction between the two spaces’, and that ‘it is the de jure distinction that determines the forms assumed by a given de facto mix and the direction of meaning of the mix (is a smooth space captured, enveloped by a striating space, or does a striated space dissolve into a smooth space, allow a smooth space to develop?)’ (MP 475).

19. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, ‘just as Hobbes saw clearly that the State was against war, so war is against the State, and makes it impossible’ (ibid.). See also Reid (2003) and Newman (2001) for more on this relationship between the State and war in the thought of Deleuze and Guattari.

20. Hence: ‘What we call a military institution, or army, is not at all the war machine in itself, but the form under which it is appropriated by the State’ (MP 418, see also MP 358).

21. And indeed, we can consider such islands and wetlands as being effective in this, despite being some of the lesser‐striated landforms when compared to, say, sedentary agricultural spaces or dense urban formations (MP 481).

22. In the Earth's atmosphere, similar to the sea, there is also understood to have been an ‘extended confrontation’ between the smooth and the striated, to the extent that, since the advent of aircraft, the air has been striated by the state as ‘air space’, ‘the columnar territory of air ‘owned’ by a nation state’, though importantly this is never a complete operation (Bonta and Protevi 2004, 51). In relation to Katrina we consider here the work of the US National Hurricane Centre to involve acts of striation, in terms of providing surveillance and mapping of atmospheric movements according to metrics ‘whose dimensions are independent of the situation’ (MP 370, see description on metrics in main body of text).

23. It is perhaps also interesting to consider the work of the insurance industry here in striating the smooth space of the region with rapid striations of information and damage assessment.

24. Material is in ‘scare’ quotes here due to the fact that, as we have seen, for Deleuze and Guattari, hierarchical (‘arborescent’) organizational aspects of organization are no less material than the levees that protected New Orleans.

25. Or, we might instead say that the creation of smooth spaces led to the expansion or emergence of such modes. See Deleuze and Guattari (MP 341) on ‘reverse causalities’ and the idea that to ward off the State is to anticipate it. On ‘the criminalisation of New Orlenians in Katrina's wake’, see Kaufman (2006).

26. Furthermore, as Protevi argues, not all gangs were predatory, with many young armed gang members having been reported on occasions as having secured areas by force and supervised the distribution of looted materials to the most needy (Protevi 2005, 11; see also US House of Representatives 2006, 243).

27. For a first‐hand account of patterns of ‘spontaneous’ social cohesion and State intervention in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, see Bradshaw and Slonsky (2005), or Clark (2006) on the social as an emergent property with respect to Katrina and disaster. See also Harada (2000) for description of the spatio‐martial aspects of survivor communities in a public shelter after the ‘great earthquake’ in Japan in January 1995.

28. For reflections on the ‘coding of populations’ in relation to Deleuze and Guattari's notions of the smooth and the striated, see Genosko and Bryx (2005) on the struggle over processes of ‘informatic striation’ relating to the numbering of Inuit populations in Canada in the late 1960s. See also Oliver‐Smith (2005) on disasters and ‘forced migration’.

29. We might add another dimension or ‘loop’ to this question of the relationship between the military and smooth spaces by considering the research of Eyal Weiszman (2007), who records the influence of Deleuze and Guattari on Israeli Defence Force policy, in terms of the idea of the creation of ‘smooth spaces’ used by the Israeli military in urban warfare operations in the Palestinian territories.

30. In addition to these we might also note the use by wealthy civilians of private security firms such as Blackwater to protect their homes and property, as further indication of the ambiguity existing between the civil State, and the appropriation of instances of war machines in the smoothed spaces of the immediate aftermath Katrina, for the advantages their mode of organization can offer under these conditions (Wilson 2005).

31. See Irons (2005) on Katrina as a ‘predictable surprise’.