Reality and Fantasy in New Orleans

[Dave Monroe]

Features > October 20, 2005
The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape
Reality and fantasy in New Orleans
By Slavoj Zizek

According to a well-known anecdote, anthropologists
studying “primitives” who supposedly held certain
superstitious beliefs (that they descend from a fish
or from a bird, for example) asked them directly
whether they “really” believed such things. They
answered: “Of course not—we ‘re not stupid! But I was
told that some of our ancestors actually did believe
that.” In short, they transferred their belief onto
another. 

We do the same thing with our children by going
through the ritual of Santa Claus. Since our children
(are supposed to) believe in him and we do not want to
disappoint them, they pretend to believe so as not to
disappoint us by puncturing our belief in their
naivety (and to get the presents, of course). Isn’t
this also the usual excuse of the mythical crooked
politician who turns honest? “I cannot disappoint the
ordinary people who believe in me.” Furthermore, this
need to find another who “really believes” is also
what propels us to stigmatize the Other as a
(religious or ethnic) “fundamentalist.” In an uncanny
way, some beliefs always seem to function “at a
distance.” In order for the belief to function, there
has to be some ultimate guarantor of it, and yet this
guarantor is always deferred, displaced, never present
in persona. The point, of course, is that this other
subject who directly believes does not need to
actually exist for the belief to be operative: It is
enough precisely to presuppose his existence, i.e. to
believe in it, either in the guise of the primitive
Other or in the guise of the impersonal “one” (“one
believes
”).

The events in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina
struck the city provide a new addition to this series
of “subjects supposed to
”—the subject supposed to
loot and rape. We all remember the reports on the
disintegration of public order, the explosion of black
violence, rape and looting. However, later inquiries
demonstrated that, in the large majority of cases,
these alleged orgies of violence did not occur:
Non-verified rumors were simply reported as facts by
the media.... “We have no official reports to document
any murder. Not one official report of rape or sexual
assault.”

The reality of poor blacks, abandoned and left without
means to survive, was thus transformed into the
specter of blacks exploding violently, of tourists
robbed and killed on streets that had slid into
anarchy, of the Superdome ruled by gangs that were
raping women and children. These reports were not
merely words, they were words that had precise
material effects: They generated fears that caused
some police officers to quit and led the authorities
to change troop deployments, delay medical evacuations
and ground helicopters....

Of course, the sense of menace had been ignited by
genuine disorder and violence: Looting, ranging from
base thievery to foraging for the necessities of life,
did occur after the storm passed over New Orleans.
However, the (limited) reality of crimes in no way
exonerates “reports” on the total breakdown of law and
order—not because these reports were “exaggerated,”
but for a much more radical reason. Jacques Lacan
claimed that, even if the patient’s wife is really
sleeping around with other men, the patient ‘s
jealousy is still to be treated as a pathological
condition. In a homologous way, even if rich Jews in
early 1930s Germany “really” had exploited German
workers, seduced their daughters and dominated the
popular press, the Nazis ’ anti-Semitism would still
have been an emphatically “untrue,” pathological
ideological condition. Why? Because the causes of all
social antagonisms were projected onto the “Jew”—an
object of perverted love-hatred, a spectral figure of
mixed fascination and disgust.

And exactly the same goes for the looting in New
Orleans: Even if all the reports on violence and rapes
had proven to be factually true, the stories
circulating about them would still be “pathological”
and racist, since what motivated these stories were
not facts, but racist prejudices, the satisfaction
felt by those who would be able to say: “You see,
Blacks really are like that, violent barbarians under
the thin layer of civilization!” In other words, we
would be dealing with what could be called lying in
the guise of truth: Even if what I am saying is
factually true, the motives that make me say it are
false.

Of course, we never openly admit these motives. But
from time to time, they nonetheless pop up in our
public space in a censored form, in the guise of
denegation: Once evoked as an option, they are then
immediately discarded.... This is exactly what Freud
meant when he wrote that the Unconscious knows no
negation: The official (Christian, democratic 
 )
discourse is accompanied and sustained by a whole nest
of obscene, brutal racist and sexist fantasies, which
can only be admitted in a censored form.

But we are not dealing here only with good old racism.
Something more is at stake, a fundamental feature of
the emerging “global” society. On September 11, 2001,
the Twin Towers were hit. Twelve years earlier, on
November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. November 9
announced the “happy ’90s,” the Francis Fukuyama dream
of the “end of history”: the belief that liberal
democracy had, in principle, won, that the search is
over, that the advent of a global, liberal world
community lurks just around the corner, that the
obstacles to this ultra-Hollywood happy ending are
merely empirical and contingent (local pockets of
resistance where the leaders did not yet grasp that
their time is over). In contrast, 9/11 is the main
symbol of the end of the Clintonite happy ’90s, of the
forthcoming era in which new walls are emerging
everywhere, between Israel and the West Bank, around
the European Union, on the U.S.-Mexico border. The
rise of the populist New Right is just the most
prominent example of the urge to raise new walls.

A couple of years ago, an ominous decision of the
European Union passed almost unnoticed: a plan to
establish an all-European border police force to
secure the isolation of the Union territory, so as to
prevent the influx of the immigrants. This is the
truth of globalization: the construction of new walls
safeguarding the prosperous Europe from a flood of
immigrants. One is tempted to resuscitate here the old
Marxist “humanist” opposition of “relations between
things” and “relations between persons”: In the much
celebrated free circulation opened up by the global
capitalism, it is “things” (commodities) which freely
circulate, while the circulation of “persons” is more
and more controlled. We are thus not dealing with
“globalization as an unfinished project,” but with a
true “dialectics of globalization.” The segregation of
the people is the reality of economic globalization.
This new racism of the developed world is in a way
much more brutal than the previous one: Its implicit
legitimization is neither naturalist (the “natural”
superiority of the developed West) nor culturalist (we
in the West also want to preserve our cultural
identity). Rather, it ‘s an unabashed economic
egotism—the fundamental divide is the one between
those included into the sphere of (relative) economic
prosperity and those excluded from it.

In the beginning of October 2005, the Spanish police,
who have dealt with the problem of desperate African
migrants trying to penetrate the small Spanish
territory across Gibraltar with lethal force,
displayed their plans to build a wall between the
Spanish and Moroccan border. The images presented—a
complex structure with all the latest electronic
equipment—bore an uncanny resemblance to those of the
Berlin Wall, only with the opposite motive, designed
to prevent people from coming in, not getting out. The
cruel irony is that it is the government of Zapatero,
arguably the most anti-racist and tolerant in Europe,
that is forced to adopt these measures of
segregation—a clear sign of the limits of the
multiculturalist “tolerant” approach which preaches
open borders and acceptance of Others. It is thus
becoming clear that the solution is not “tear down the
walls and let them all in,” the easy, empty demand
often put forth by soft-hearted liberal “radicals.”
Rather, the real solution is to tear down the true
wall, not the police one, but the social-economic one:
To change society so that people will no longer
desperately try to escape their own world.

This brings us back to rumours and “reports” about
“subjects supposed to loot and rape:” New Orleans is
one of those cities within the United States most
heavily marked by the internal wall that separates the
affluent from ghettoized blacks. And it is about those
on the other side of the wall that we fantasize: More
and more, they live in another world, in a blank zone
that offers itself as a screen for the projection of
our fears, anxieties and secret desires. The “subject
supposed to loot and rape” is on the other side of the
Wall—this is the subject about whom Bennett can afford
to make his slips of the tongue and confess in a
censored mode his murderous dreams. More than anything
else, the rumors and fake reports from the aftermath
of Katrina bear witness to the deep class division of
American society. 

http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2361/


		
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