Tuesday, December 11, 2012

The Deluge of Capitalism; an Examination of the Rebuilding of Post-Katrina New Orleans




It’s important to address young people in the reopening of New Orleans. In rebuilding, let’s revisit the potential of American democracy and American glory.
- Wynton Marsalis

I’m sure that there are reasonable people that had some reasonable projections about the future of New Orleans, but none of those could include not trying to rebuild the city and make it better than it was before.
- Harry Connick, Jr.

My administration is going to stand with you – and fight alongside you – until the job is done. Until New Orleans is all the way back, all the way.
- President Barack Obama

And I wound up in New Orleans for all those years and it was a great place, really a catalyst creatively.
- Jimmy Buffett
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           It was well over seven years ago that Hurricane Katrina devastated the Southern coast, but it appears that the rebuilding process is far from over and that life especially in Louisiana’s most populated city has not yet completely returned to normal. With eighty-percent of the city flooded, a couple thousand confirmed dead, billions of dollars of damage, and a subsequent diaspora of many of the area’s native population, it may be that New Orleans will never be as it was before. Rebuilding efforts began as soon as the storm passed, and yet more than half a decade later, there remains widespread debate and conflict about a variety of issues, including the inadequate response of the government to provide the financial support the area needed, as well as disputes about how the city should be reconstructed now. Unfortunately, for the public, the rebuilding process has been marked by capitalist interests, which are backed by government and state apparatuses. In this way, the city is no longer an authentic site of the cultural commons that was created through the historical developments of the city through influence by the public sphere. Rather, it is now simply a place where monopoly rent can be extracted from the deliberate construction and representation of the cultural codes of the city in order to make a profit. New Orleans is quickly becoming a space of corporate hyperrealism, fueled by the rhetoric of an economic revitalization from the political and capitalist authorities that have taken control of the structural transformation of the city, a process that can only be combated by a revolutionary defense against capitalist urges.
            In order to see how the rebuilding of New Orleans has been shaped by economic forces, it is important to first examine how the city fits within the understanding of the public sphere. In the introduction to Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas McCarthy points out that the “liberal public sphere took shape in the specific historical circumstances of a developing market economy” (xi). Later, Habermas argues that any examination of the public sphere must always be “investigated within the broad field formerly reflected in the perspective of the traditional science of ‘politics’” (xvi). In this way, as the physical site of the public sphere, the city has its foundation in both the economic circles of the production of capital and the relevant political forces. Furthermore, the “element of early capitalist commercial relations… manifested their revolutionary power… [when] the national and territorial economies assumed their shapes” (17). These “national and territorial economies” can be applied to the New Orleans of the 1800s, as the adolescent United States gained the area with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 while the mid-1800s saw the region become an important port city with access to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico (The Library of Congress, Liu et al. 264). The growth of the city resulted in the “emergence of the diffuse public [that] formed in the course of the commercialization of cultural production” that spurred the creation of “new social categor[ies]” (Habermas 38). As such, in ideal circumstances and application, the public sphere serves as the “functional element in the political realm… for the self-articulation of civil society with a state authority corresponding to its needs” (74). That is, without the function of the public sphere, the general population loses much of its power through numbers against the political authorities. However, “changing political functions” can alter the public sphere through a “systematic structural transformation,” a reconstruction that eventually can lead to a “downfall” (142).
            While the structural transformation of the public sphere might more readily attain to political and economic restructuring at the level of agencies and state apparatuses, post-Katrina New Orleans has seen its share of physical, material transformation. It is estimated that 70% of the housing units within the city’s borders were damaged by the storm itself and subsequent flooding that occurred once the levees broke (Olshanksy et al. 273). Furthermore, a study completed the year after Katrina by the Urban Land Institute concluded that 45% of the housing structures had been built before 1950 (compared with the national 21%) and thus perhaps lacked the foundations to withstand hurricane forces (Liu et al. 265). In some neighborhoods, such as the Lower Ninth Ward, whole streets of housing units were washed away. As David Harvey notes in Rebel Cities, “urban restructuring” is often in the form of “creative destruction,” which usually affects the marginalized groups that are stifled under political and social authorities (16). Despite the fact that the destruction of New Orleans came from a natural source, it nevertheless remains a reality that particular areas of the city were affected more so than others; the Lower Ninth Ward, for example, had a high percentage of African-American homeowners and renters who lost everything (“New Orleans”). The mistrust between various racial groups in the South presents a “unique” problem in the reconstruction effort, for “White families have historically had the most power and money… [with] gracious homes built on the higher ground… [to avoid] the flooding that plagued other residents” (Olshansky et al. 282). However, the suspicion raised by the minority groups in New Orleans towards any building plan supported by the elite planning groups appears to be valid in this case. For example, Jimmy Reiss, the head of the New Orleans Business Council, claimed that “the diaspora after Katrina created an opportunity to build a city with fewer poor people” (Olshansky et al. 282). In this way, it appears that White elites in New Orleans view Katrina as a distressing, but perhaps valuable “destruction” that can be capitalized for the “urban restructuring” of the city.
            Furthermore, Harvey argues that the urbanization of capital implies that “capitalist class domination [occurs] not only over state apparatuses… but also over whole populations—their lifestyles… their cultural and political values (66). This appears to be occurring as the various state-run and politically-driven groups that came forward in the first couple of years after Katrina sought to propose their own vision for the rebuilding of the city. These elite groups laid claim to the will(power) to shape and re-shape the city by “the process of urbanization” and through the rhetoric of economic revitalization (Harvey 5). In 2007, the issue with rebuilding intensified with the revelation that plans to restore the city were concentrated into seventeen specific areas of focus, ranging from the “ruined Lower Ninth Ward” to “not hard-hit… but still in need of renewal [areas like]… the Bywater area” (Nossiter 1). It seems obvious that the majority of funding for the rebuilding process would go to the areas most devastated by the hurricane and to those who had lost their homes, their belongings, and their livelihoods. Yet, then-Mayor C. Ray Nagin claimed the development of these areas would be “driven by incentives and a market-driven approach” (Nossiter 1). At the same time, the Mayor’s “recovery chief” Edward J. Blakely said that the areas “all centered on the old markets, on which the city was built in the first place.”
            The combination of a business-driven rhetoric with the pseudo-sentimental position of rebuilding the historical areas of significance to the city manifested themselves in various agencies and building plans, such as the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, the Unified New Orleans Plan, and Office of Recovery Management (Olshanksy et al. 275-7). To some extent, most of these agencies and plans failed, or took so long to establish that they became useless. In one significant example of the failure by one of these agencies to navigate the process, the Bring New Orleans Back Commission (BNOBC) backed the Urban Land Institute in suggesting the conversion of the “lowest-lying, most heavily damaged neighborhoods to green space through government-financed buyouts of property” (Olshanksy et al. 275). However, the ugly face of politics reared its head, as Mayor Nagin, running for reelection, sought votes by announcing “his intention to allow all residents to decide where to rebuild,” despite being the very individual who created the BNOBC in the first place. In the end, neither the BNOBC nor Nagin’s proposal ended up being much of an achievement, and the struggle to solidified rebuilding plans continued. In fact, it was not until the Louisiana Recovery Authority approved the New Orleans Strategic Recovery and Redevelopment Plan and the Unified New Orleans Plan before funding was allocated for the rebuilding effort, almost two full years after the disaster itself (275-7). Meanwhile, the residents who had decided to stay through the storm attempted to rebuild their homes and businesses themselves regardless of government assistance or the support of the elite planning agencies.
            It is thus assumed that through the rebuilding and revitalization process, New Orleans can become the cultural center it once was, or possibly even stronger than before. However, this assumption relies on the idea that the cultural experience of a city can be commodified. As such, Harvey argues that it is the economic force of capitalism that simultaneously produces and shapes localized cultural notions while pursuing global venues of capital accumulation, and it is this paradoxical construction that allows capitalistic endeavors to fixate on particular spaces to “appropriate and extract surpluses” (109). Today’s global economic circuitry provides the means to commodify and commercialize “everything,” even the structure of the city as a whole. The drive for the collective symbolic capital on a global level leaves “in its wake all the localized questions about whose collective memory, whose aesthetics, and whose benefits are to be prioritized” in any capitalist undertaking (106). In this particular case – and perhaps, in all cases involving capitalist ambitions – it is safe to say that it is the capitalist and state authorities who assert their memory, their sense of aesthetics, and their benefits, all in the inexhaustible search for profit. In the case of New Orleans, the combination of corporate incentives, business rhetoric and a capitalistic drive to gain profits from a land ravaged by natural forces are results from the tried-and-true strategy of developers to “reserve the choicest and most rentable piece of land in some development in order to extract monopoly rent from it” (102). In this strain of argument, the commercialization of the city by capitalist forces echoes Habermas as he saw the “transfer of public functions to private corporate bodies” as the “progressive ‘societalization’ of the state… with an increasing ‘stateification’ of society” (142). 


            However, the question arises as to how exactly modern capitalism produces and shapes localized cultural notions in order to extract profit. To see this manufacturing in action, one only has to consider the tourism commercials that construct the post-Katrina New Orleans landscape as unchanged, the culture as thriving, and the place as providing a singular, authentic experience. The New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau’s “You’re Different Here” advertising shtick seems to suggest that there is still life and culture to be found in the city despite the widespread devastation, even going so far as to blatantly claim the city as the “most fun and authentic city in America, y’all!” (0:26). On the other hand, Harvey seems to paint the “traditional city” as being always-already “killed by rampant capitalist development, a victim of the never-ending” capitalist drive “no matter what the social, environmental, or political consequences” (xvi). The rhetorical strategy of the “You’re Different Here” commercial seems to posit that everything is fine down in good ‘ole Louisiana, and that the hard-working, folksy but resilient people of New Orleans are just waiting and willing to provide the traveler with a one-of-a-kind experience. Nevertheless, Harvey rightly notes that the “urban commons… are appropriated all too often not only by developers, but by the tourist trade” as well (106). In this sense, the city resident’s “right to the city” is supplemented in favor of the tourist’s “right to entertainment,” and thus, the city becomes a brand to be controlled and marketed in order to make a profit. In response, Harvey offers up the city of Barcelona as a warning, for the “irresistible lure” of the collective symbolic capital that came with accomplishments in architectural design presented “more and more homogenizing multinational commodification” (105). To put a stop to the homogenizing commodification of New Orleans would mean that corporate interests, including those of the tourism industry, be curtailed in favor of residential stability and quality of life. This, however, would put the city in a financial dilemma. A great deal of the economic stability of the region relies on tourism, and to hinder the encouragement of travelers in seeking out the city would mean a drop in revenue more significant than losses now.
            Nevertheless, the representation of New Orleans in such advertising formats seems to directly position the city as somehow more authentic then ever before while ignoring the fact that much of the city has been or will be rebuilt. After all, it is not hard to observe how a cultural place itself can become a commodity to be marketed, sold, and bought when accompanied by a rhetoric of “life, heritage, [and] collective memories” that can only be found at that singular space (Harvey 89-90). The cultural fabric undergoes what R. Altmann deems “communification,” or the creation of the community through “publicity work” (Habermas 201). This is precisely what the tourism commercials for New Orleans are doing: constructing a false sense of community through the work of the media and public relations. These commercials urge the uncertain or reserved traveler to visit the city, but they neglect to point out that much of the city is not there, or at least not in its original construction. Furthermore, this false creation of community and space relates to Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco’s ideas about simulacra and hyperreality. Baudrillard defined the art of simulation as the Real “produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models—and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times” (366). In this way, every single individual who views one of these tourism commercials and believes the hype essentially contributes to the replication of the false identity of New Orleans. Furthermore, in Travels in Hyperreality, Eco relates how he went from the “recreated New Orleans of Disneyland [to]… the real city, which represents a still intact past… that American civilization hasn’t remade, flattened, replaced” (29). Unfortunately for Eco, this seems to be an erroneous statement now, for New Orleans has indeed been flattened by Katrina, remade according to capitalistic notions of revitalization, and replaced by a simulated representation of the culture of the city.
            The process of remaking and replacing appears to be reliant upon the collective symbolic capital of the city, or the site’s value as a place of “authenticity, uniqueness, and particular non-replicable qualities” (Harvey 105). However, as Harvey questions, why would anyone accept this “Disneyfication,” where the process of rebuilding that follows particular commodified cultural notions creates a simulated construction that supplements the real thing? In the “New Orleans” episode of No Reservations, host Anthony Bourdain makes note of this aspect of the rebuilding process of the city by remarking that he sees celebrity appearances in the city as contributing to the “real peril of the ‘yuppification’ of New Orleans,” which is like “swapping Brooklyn for Disneyland” (17:29-49). While Harvey sees the “Disneyfication” as occurring in a wide range of cities around the globe, this argument seems especially pertinent to the actual city of New Orleans as Disneyland opened the themed area of New Orleans Square in 1966, replicating the look and feel of the city in a miniaturized, hyperrealistic manner. For example, small plaques can be found near the entrance of each of the shops and restaurants in New Orleans Square. These plaques are modeled after markers that buildings in the French Quarter had to have in order to prove they had fire insurance; a lack of a plaque meant the building would burn to the ground. If tiny, irrelevant and largely disregarded details like the fire insurance plaques are replicated in a place far removed from the actual site itself, then one could plausibly argue that the New Orleans Square of Disneyland is such a hyperrealistic simulacra of New Orleans, Louisiana that the theme park now holds, especially in a post-Katrina world, the most “authentic” place in which to experience “New Orleansness.” Here is a perfect example of the “cultural commons… becom[ing] commodified… by a heritage industry bent on Disneyfication”—quite literally, in this particular case (Harvey 72). Additionally, in this way, the fact that New Orleans can be essentially replicated alludes to the destruction of the value of the place itself as an authentic and unique site.


            There is, however, some small hope for the way that New Orleans can be represented more truthfully by the media. Specifically, consider at length the No Reservations episode of New Orleans, shot in 2008. The episode opens up with shots of the devastated city, expansive reaches of city blocks that are devoid of buildings, cars, and people. No voiced commentary accompanies the first gloomy forty-five seconds. The lack of Bourdain’s overtly sarcastic and profanity-laded observations seems strangely divergent from other episodes in the travel series, and yet, the silence is entirely appropriate. In this way, he presents the city in a more accurate context. Two minutes into the episode, Bourdain notes that New Orleans (of 2008) is “not all better; it’s not recovered or bounced back, or any other chamber of commerce platitudes” (2:10). Following his eagerness to portray the local flavor of the city, Bourdain focuses the interviews, commentary, and locales he visits on the residents and laborers who choose to stay, rebuild, and attempt to carry on with their lives. In this manner, it can be argued that the New Orleans of No Reservations speaks against the commodification of the city, as it shows the reality (or, at least, some version of “reality”) of the difficult rebuilding process on a local, residential level. On the other hand, Bourdain does end the episode with a pointed address to the camera, asking the viewer why they have yet to come “here” (43:30). The show is, after all, a travel show, and it would be inaccurate to suggest that Bourdain is not selling a specific angle to each city he visits. However, it remains that the New Orleans that is presented (or represented) by No Reservations and Bourdain stands in stark contrast to the New Orleans of the “You’re Different Here” approach.
            Nevertheless, even with a more pragmatic outlook to the rebuilding process of New Orleans comes the sad realization that the public influence of any city remains mediated through a “pseudo-public or sham-private world of cultural consumption” rather than a logical, realistic approach to the continuation of city life (Habermas 160). It remains certain that as long as profit can be extracted from valued spaces, no matter the level of simulation, hyperrealism, or construction, capitalism will continue to seek the structural transformation of the city. After all, it seems difficult, perhaps impossible, for the everyday individual to face “political power… [that] seeks to reorganize urban infrastructures and urban life with an eye to the control of restive populations” (Harvey 117). In this way, the “right to the city is an empty signifier. Everything depends on who gets to fill it with meaning” (xv). Examining the physical rebuilding of New Orleans and the political strategies used to limit the public’s involvement suggests that it is the corporate and political entities, supported by state authorities and apparatuses, that are filling the “New” New Orleans with their own consumption-driven, capitalist meaning. Tim Oakes echoes this in “Tourism and the Modern Subject” when he notes that: 

representations of space are necessarily ideological, and are mobilized in the service of power, for they conceive an idealized space in which the needs of capital, of the state, and other forms of social power, are met… the power of place is found in its insistence on grounding the flows of people, capital, information and other media in a precise location. (1)
In this way, the space of New Orleans is being rebuilt along the lines of the dominant ideological and political discourses. What outright power or authority does the public have against corporate entities, backed by state apparatuses with monetary interest in the commodification of the city? It remains that perhaps the only way to stop the relentless capitalistic drive is through a “revolutionary” perspective of the public’s “right to the city.”
            In the concluding chapter of Rebel Cities, Harvey aligns his thinking towards a more classical Marxist approach to anti-capitalist struggles, in that he calls for those affected by capitalism to band together in order to fight the oppression. He sees the “association between people and places [as] extremely important as the source of common bonds,” and this seems to directly speak to the rebuilding process of New Orleans (146). It is the “laborers [who] are engaged in producing and reproducing the city [that] have a collective right… [to] what kind of urbanism” the city should produce (137). It is the “neighborhood spaces” that embody “profound cultural ties based… in ethnicity, religion, and cultural histories and collective memories” (133). It would take, then, the whole of the city’s inhabitants, across the whole range of social, racial and class-based divisions, to rise up against the political and corporate apparatuses that have taken the reins in the redevelopment process. This would mean rising up against the “competitive urban entrepreneurialism” that results from “city administrations us[ing] a wide variety of incentives to attract (in other words, subsidize) investment” (141). If Harvey is to be believed, and the “traditional centrality of the city has [already] been destroyed,” then it is up to the social forces of influence that the public sphere holds to dictate the new meaning of the city (xvii). Harvey argues that in order for civilians to assert their right to the city, they must “claim some kind of shaping power over the process of urbanization, over the ways in which [the city is] made and remade” (5).
            Unfortunately, this level of revolutionary change seems unlikely to happen, at least in New Orleans. The long history of mistrust between the racial groups coupled with the diaspora caused by the damage to particular neighborhoods has resulted in a drastic change in the diversity and cultural make-up of the city. Furthermore, divisions between the races and classes in the area make it difficult for the public to come together as one body to fight the commodification and restructuring of the city. In light of these issues, it seems appropriate that Harvey ends the chapter on “The Creation of the Urban Commons” with the idea that: 

the dismantling of the regulatory frameworks… that sought, however inadequately, to curb the penchant for predatory practices of accumulation has unleashed the après moi le déluge logic of unbridled accumulation and financial speculation that has now turned into a veritable flood of creative destruction, including that wrought through capitalist urbanization. (86)
It is the imagery of the deluge, the tidal wave of oppressive capitalist forces that seeks, especially in the case of post-Katrina New Orleans, to wash away all the cultural ties to how the city once stood in favor of profit, commodification, and homogenization. Following along with this line of thinking, Harvey elaborates to some length on the destruction of a city’s authenticity that accompanies the re-branding process by the tourism industry. At the same time, he singles out the city of Porto Alegre as “actively constructing new cultural forms and new definitions of authenticity, originality, and tradition” in light of the community effort to resist globalization and multinational capitalism (111). How exactly Porto Alegre manages to assemble and identify its own cultural commons is not necessarily important to how New Orleans would (or should) construct its own meaning. All that remains clear is that there is no going back to the Old New Orleans and the pre-Katrina cultural commons. What is left is the realization that what is being constructed in the rebuilding process is the New New Orleans, a place that must be defined and defended aggressively by the public, who must come together as one in order to rebuild, for themselves, an image of the city in their own eyes. Or else, they must stand back and let the deluge of capital, the rising tide of commodification, and the tempest of profit overtake the city.





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Works Cited and Consulted

Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacra and Simulations.” Literary Theory: An Anthology 2nd Edition. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 365-377. Print.

Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality. Trans. William Weaver. Trans. Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1986. Print. 

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. Trans. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991. Print. 

Harvey, David. Rebel Cities From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso, 2012. Print. 

The Library of Congress. “Louisiana Purchase.” The Library of Congress Virtual Services Digital Reference Section. 29 March 2011. Web. 10 December 2012. 

Liu, Cathy Yang, et al. “Re-Creating New Orleans: Driving Development Through Creativity.” Economic Development Quarterly 24.3 (2010): 261-275. Sage. Web. 10 December 2012. 

“New Orleans.” No Reservations. Host Anthony Bourdain. Travel Channel, 2008. DVD. 

New Orleans CBV. “New Orleans – You’re Different Here.” YouTube. New Orleans Convention Center and Visitors Bureau, 2 June 2011. Web. 10 December 2012. 

Noisster, Adam. “New Orleans Proposes to Invest in 17 Areas.” The New York Times 30 March 2007. Web. 10 December 2012. 

Oakes, Tim. “Tourism and the Modern Subject: Placing the Encounter Between Tourist and Other.” Seductions of Place. Eds. C. Cartier and A. Lew. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Web. 10 December 2012. 

Olshansky, Robert B., et al. “Planning for the Rebuilding of New Orleans.” Journal of the American Planning Association 74.3 (2008): 273-287. Academic Search Elite. Web. 10 December 2012.