phobogenesis

Music: David Bridie: Act of Free Choice Finally today on the television someone dared to say it: On the Today show Chris Matthews said that the real issue was one of race, and that Katrina has ripped the "scab" of poor race relations right off. Two days ago Andrei Codrescu touched on the issue when he said New Orleans was once home to the most brutal slave trading operation, and suggested (albeit indirectly) that the fantasy of miscegenation white people, roaming the quarter with their beads and tacky hurricane tubes, seem to embrace is just that, a fantasy. The celebration of the "melting gumbo pot" of a racially harmonized community is a screen for phobic fantasies about black men. Carnival—as anyone who has been to the parades will likely admit—is a mournful event, the eve of apocalypse.

I'm on a number of listserv groups dedicated to New Orleans and Baton Rouge culture, and folks "on the scene" are posting reports of what's really happening. The one thing that everyone is saying is Flava-Flave: "don't believe the hype." It's important to repost the latest message I have received, since I think it best captures the general sentiment of the posts and emails I'm getting from friends:

Delivered-To: mailing list brgoths@esotericka.org Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2005 06:59:20 -0700 (PDT) From: "-k." To: brgoths@esotericka.org Subject: Re: [brgoths] Hurricane suckfest

[someone] wrote: i am about 1800 hundred miles from ground zero, but my friends and family are telling me it looks like all hell is fixin' to break lose in baton rouge.

Jesus fucking Christ, for the last time there are: -No lootings -No Rioting -No rapes -No murders -No carjacking -No fires

There have been a couple minor incidents quickly handled by the BRPD. Baton Rouge is doing fine. Parts of the city still don't have power (for instance [so and so] and i still are out) and gas and hotel rooms are hard to come by. Other than that the city is puttering along fine. PLEASE stop spreading the bullshit misinformation.

As with any catastrophe, the deep-seated fantasies that provide us maps of meaning begin to surface; rumors are passed along that transform a relatively innocuous incident into a violent confrontation (remember the game in kindergarten, "I Got a Secret," where you whisper something in your partners ear, and by the time it reaches the end of the room, passing among 13 of your bestest friends, it has become its opposite?). Wal-Marts in Baton Rouge are experiencing a run on guns. Shaun Treat reported that a family went into a service station and asked for free food. They were turned away and left peacefully. Hours later it was reported that a "gang" of "black thugs" tried to hold up the service station.

Fortunately, the news media are starting to write about the rumor problem. This morning NBC journalists were reporting, from New Orleans, that bus drivers and other emergency personnel were not driving into the city to evacuate people because they feared for their lives. The very same kind of misinformation is contained in a myriad of posts that I am seeing on LSU listservs. The chair of one department at LSU alerted its members that "The security problems of New Orleans are affecting our area. Please be careful as you walk or drive across campus or in downtown Baton Rouge. LSU has taken the precaution of locking all buildings on campus, even during the day." A lock down? Is that really necessary? My friends there say that it is not necessary.

Mass hysteria should be defined less in terms of Hollywood (e.g., the depiction of people in Spielberg's War of the Worlds) and more in terms of what it really is: a collective form of anxiety hysteria, "where the anxiety is attached in more or less stable fashion to a specific external object (phobias)" (from Laplanche and Pontalis's The Language of Psycho-Analysis). We have in this essentially mediated situation two phobic objects: (a) the black male (e.g., "thug" is the word that is used in the posts I'm seeing); and (b) the angry mob (e.g., the Hollywood idea of mass hysteria, which is a barbaric fantasy we can trace back to Hobbes "bellum omnium contra omnes" in the so-called state of nature). In this case, thought, the angry mob is underwritten by the black male (read: "gang") because, to riff on Frantz Fanon, since the days of slavery, the black male has functioned as a "phobogenic object" (for an awesome and timely dissertation project on racial fantasy, see Kami Chisholm's webstie!). A phobogenic object is that "external thing," the constitutive outside if you will, that anchors fantasy so that it can function to produce meaning for our lives. Everyone—-most especially black men—-can succumb to a phobic fantasy because it is woven into a culture that we internalize as we grow older, the very same culture that you and I internalize and share to give our subjectivity a sense of place—-an anchor (Stuart Hall would term this a "cognative map," but it is still fantasy all the same).

In times of crisis, the objects that we consciously use to anchor a meaningful subjection are thrown to the wind (in this case, quite literally), and so we tend to rely on more deep-seated fantasies and their objects. In the aftermath of Nine-eleven, the State deliberately chose to evoke the fantasy of spiritual warfare (good vs. evil), although these choices were scripted more than they know, and the object of anxiety was the demon. In this natural catastrophe recourse to a righteous goodness simply does not fit (though I'm sure Pat Robertson will eventually say something to the effect of "them sinful people brought it on themselves" . . . just you wait!). This time the hysterical phobic fantasy is racial in nature; if you want the complete coordinates of the phobogenic object around which it orbits, look no further than the lyrics to Ice T's "Straight Up Nigga":

Damn right I'm a nigga/and I don't care what you are/Cause I'm a Capital N-I-double-G-E –R/Black people might get mad Cause they don't see/That they're looked upon/As a nigga just like me I'm a nigga not a Colored man/Or a Black or a Negro/Or an Afrom American I'm all that/Yes I was born in America true/Does South Central/Look like America to you?/I'm a nigga a straight up nigga/From a hard school/Whatever you are/I don't care/that is you fool/I'm loud and proud/Well endowed with the big beef/Out on the corner/I hang out like a house thief/So you can call me dumb or crazy/Ignorant, stupid, inferior or lazy/Silly or foolish/But I'm badder and bigger/And most of all/I'm a straight up nigga

Should we be surprised, then, that there are untruthful rumors that young women are getting raped in shelters, or that "gun toting thugs" are stealing cars. Should we be astonished that the White Republican Regime that runs our government and that wages war against "brown" others across the globe was slow to respond to "the Big One"? Not surprised. Angry.