Notes for Right Now by Eli S. Evans: On the Spectacle of The Disaster
For weeks, now, online news outlets have been running live streaming video of the Gulf Coast oil leak, courtesy of British Petroleum. And I don’t mean, by this, that the oil leak itself is courtesy of BP—which, of course, it in large part was and is (but also of the whole bloody system that produces and sustains something like BP in the first place)—but that the live streaming video has been provided by BP itself, as a part of the company’s damage-control performance of a commitment to keeping the public abreast of the situation. The idea seems to be to counteract the negative publicity that has resulted from the oil spill itself and the unprecedented environmental and economic damage that has attended to it with a show of unprecedented corporate transparency. But if the live streaming video of the underwater leak is its sign and symbol, BP’s turns out to be an odd sort of transparency, indeed no matter what time of the day or night one tunes in to the underwater video feed, what one sees is always the same: a hopelessly muddy image, as though photographed through a mud-covered lens, of a kind of muddy muddiness gushing into muddily muddy water. If there were any doubt about the muddy opacity of all of this transparency, it was erased once and for all when, just the other day now, we were treated to muddy underwater footage of actual mud being pumped into the underwater oil well in yet another effort to somehow staunch the spewing. It’s difficult not to wonder if, in predictably cynical fashion, BP located precisely that point of view from which seeing absolutely everything meant seeing absolutely nothing at all—just mud in mud through mud—and promptly installed their show-the-public-everything cameras exactly there.
Unfortunately, for BP, deception is rarely so simple. Every effort to conceal inevitably reveals, and perhaps this is only doubly the case when, as in the present instance, what is concealed includes the very work of concealment itself. I am thinking of a passage I re-read, not a couple days ago, from Don DeLillo’s 1989 send-up of postmodern America, White Noise. At lunch with his colleagues from the Department of American Environments, the novel’s protagonist, Jack Gladney—irreparably monolingual chair of The-College-on-the-Hill’s department of Hitler Studies—brings up a recent Friday night spent with his family watching television footage of disaster, catastrophe, and calamity from around the world. He is unsettled by, more than the mere ease with which they played spectator to the suffering of others, the degree to which that suffering mesmerized them, held them almost lustily captive. “We’d never before been so attentive,” muses Gladney, “to our duty, our Friday assembly” in front of the television set.
Alfonse Stompanato, chair of American Environments and The-College-on-the-Hill’s resident popular culture guru, is not surprised by the scene Gladney describes. “It happens to everybody,” he tells him. “It’s because we’re suffering from brain fade. We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information…Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them.” Given how little 1989 really knew about this “the incessant bombardment of information” to which he refers—1989, after all, was before the internet had entered into the drama of daily life, no less taken center stage—I can’t help but wonder if Stompanato shot a bit wide of the mark in his efforts to explain the captivation of Gladney’s family before the televised spectacle of disaster. Perhaps closer to the heart of the matter, in fact, was the caveat he added immediately to his explanation: “As long as they happen somewhere else.”
For in the 1989 of White Noise, wasn’t that just the thing: that the machinery for the dissemination and reception of “information,” as it were, was still structured such that to be witness to the spectacle of disaster in itself meant that it was not happening here, that it was not happening to you? Perhaps the punctuation-like clarity Stompanato attributes to these “TV disasters,” as he describes them in DeLillo’s novel, had less to do with any supposed interruption of the “incessant bombardment of information”—after all, the images of “lava, mud and raging water” that Gladney describes came to him and his family through the television tubes, just so many more specks, waves, particles, and motes—than with the (if only momentary) crystal clarity of the distinction the very phenomenon of disaster as spectacle still drew, now twenty years ago, between us and them, here and there, apart and a part? In the world of prototypically postmodern disorientation DeLillo describes in White Noise—shopping malls, supermarkets, televisions sets, airports—one can imagine the spectacle of disaster, of “catastrophe on television,” providing its witnesses with a few passingly delicious moments of situatedness, of knowing, if not precisely who (or where) one was, at the very least where (and who) one was not.
Only twenty years on (a historical nanosecond), circumstances have changed more, I imagine, than DeLillo or his professor characters, as plugged in as they may have been to the impossible acceleration of late twentieth-century life, could possibly have imagined themselves. There are, of course, innumerable ways of describing these current circumstances. In an essay forthcoming in Soft Skull Press’ The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, my friend and occasional editor Benjamin Kunkel describes them, better than I could, in terms of the rise of the “digitosphere” and the “always on, un-turn-off-able internet.” In terms closer to those suggested by DeLillo’s Stompanato, we might here say that now, as opposed to then—in large part as a result of the internet-age rise of social and user-generated media—we have overwhelmingly become the source and the primary producers of the stream of “information” with which we are only more incessantly than then bombarded. The exponentially increased accessibility of the means of production and reception, in combination with the instantaneity of dissemination, makes this true even—and perhaps especially—when we find ourselves right at the heart of a given disaster, calamity, or catastrophe (the Twittering-gone-wild that followed the 2009 elections in Iraq comes to mind as only one example). This new era may have been initiated with the collapse of the World Trade Centers in 2001: a certain New York-based network television anchor’s confusion when the first tower fell (“I’m not sure exactly what’s happening,” I remember him saying as it imploded, and I was yelling at the television, “It’s falling down, you idiot, it’s falling down”) was, as well, the first time I can recall events outpacing their reformulation as that particular form of information called “news.” But it may have at last found its abiding symbol, and symbolic embodiment, in the now months-long video stream of BP’s underwater oil leak: a conflagration of muddiness in muddiness through muddiness the real world correlate of which is the irreparable muddying of the crystal clear distinction the spectacle of disaster in and of itself once drew between us, who bore witness, and them, who underwent—between those of us who stood at a distance, watching, and those others who were right at the bloody core, suffering.
We’ll have to wait on history, of course, to know just what we have become in these last twenty years, and why, and whether for good or evil, or better or worse. At the same time, it only takes a couple of seconds in front of the computer screen, watching this live streaming video of mud in mud through mud, to come to rather unsettling the realization that when the suffering to which we bear daily witness may well be our very own, it ceases to be mesmerizing and, instead, becomes just mesmerizingly boring.
A lot like white noise.
Possibly the BEST topic I have read in my life!!!