The Culture of Disaster

By Marie-Hélène Huet

From antiquity through the Enlightenment, disasters were attributed to the obscure power of the stars or the vengeance of angry gods. As philosophers sought to reassess the origins of natural disasters, they also made it clear that humans shared responsibility for the damages caused by a violent universe. This far-ranging book explores the way writers, thinkers, and artists have responded to the increasingly political concept of disaster from the Enlightenment until today.
 
Marie-Hélène Huet argues that post-Enlightenment culture has been haunted by the sense of emergency that made natural catastrophes and human deeds both a collective crisis and a personal tragedy. From the plague of 1720 to the cholera of 1832, from shipwrecks to film dystopias, disasters raise questions about identity and memory, technology, control, and liability. In her analysis, Huet considers anew the mythical figures of Medusa and Apollo, theories of epidemics, earthquakes, political crises, and films such as Blow-Up and Blade Runner. With its scope and precision, The Culture of Disaster will appeal to a wide public interested in modern culture, philosophy, and intellectual history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Oct 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9780226358239

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The Nature of Disasters

Writing in Paris at the height of the cholera epidemic that devastated the city in 1832, Chateaubriand observed:

If this scourge had plagued us in the middle of a religious era, and penetrated the poetry of customs and popular beliefs, it would have left a striking example. Imagine a pall floating like a banner from the towers of Notre-Dame . . . churches filled with imploring crowds, priests chanting day and night the prayers of a perpetual agony, the viaticum carried from house to house with bells and candles, bells tolling incessantly, monks with a cross in hand, calling for the people to repent at crossroads, preaching that God’s anger and judgment were visible on the corpses already blackened by the fire of hell.

. . . None of this: cholera reached us in a century of philanthropy, incredulity, newspapers, and material administration. This plague without imagination has encountered no cloisters, no monks, no graves or gothic crypts; like the terror in 1793, it has strolled mockingly in broad daylight, in a brand-new world.¹

In these lines Chateaubriand makes a dual statement about disaster and modernity: in a world no longer dominated by religious beliefs, disasters have lost their tragic dimension. No mystical anguish presides over the devastation. The rituals of prayer and penance that attended medieval epidemics have given way to the cold appraisal of material needs. But the city may confront a disaster more frightening than the plague of ancient times: Cholera had its terror, Chateaubriand adds, the brilliant sun, indifferent crowds, and the banality of life that went on everywhere endowed these times of plague with a new character and a new kind of dread. . . . In Paris, merchants were accused of poisoning the wine, liquors, candy and food; several individuals were slaughtered, dragged through the streets, and thrown into the Seine. The authorities had themselves to blame for imprudent or false announcements.² In this post-Revolutionary era, disaster bears the stamp of a terror haunted by mob violence and summary executions. Paranoia, the great disease of the French Revolution, fed rumors, anger, and uprisings. Choleric riots spread throughout Europe as quickly as cholera itself, taking their toll in every country. If there is a hint of regret in Chateaubriand’s evocation of past calamities—and he notes that these pages are written from the rue d’Enfer³—it is unclear at this point which he regrets more: the passing of the religious fervor that channeled anguish into remorse, or the rational discourse that freed men from their guilt but failed to control this deadly disease. In many ways, the cholera epidemic of 1831–32 ushered in the era of disaster as an administrative problem of political containment. Both a consummate politician and an apologist for Christianity, Chateaubriand was quick to perceive that cholera meant more than sudden death, mob scenes, and swift executions. For Chateaubriand, cholera was a properly modern disaster, that is, a natural disaster that could only be fully understood when redefined in political terms.

This book seeks not to examine the political and natural disasters that have lined the path to modernity, but rather to show how efforts to understand disastrous events have shaped post-Enlightenment thought. Our culture thinks through disasters. Implicitly or explicitly, disasters mediate philosophical inquiry and shape our creative imagination. The Enlightenment project is widely credited with the recognition that natural disasters were not sent by a wrathful God but stemmed from the workings of a violent universe. Plagues, earthquakes, and fire had to be understood—and exorcised—through the rational examination of physical causes. But the vision of a disaster willed by God was swiftly replaced by one of human-engineered calamity. If volcanoes erupted and the earth shook without divine intent, humans made the damages greater and more grievous to bear. Through an examination of reactions to natural catastrophes and political upheavals, this book argues that the state of emergency that characterizes current Western culture—which is related to what Giorgio Agamben describes as a state of exception—stems from a pervasive anxiety about catastrophic events now freed from their theological meanings and worsened by human failures.⁴

ETYMOLOGIES

There is a rich semantic field devoted to the description of the misfortunes that have been recorded since the beginning of human history. Although the origin of the word calamity has not been entirely established, it is usually thought to be derived from the Latin calamus, meaning stalk; the word first designated the loss of a harvest or the threat of famine. Catastrophe, closely associated with classical tragedy, originally meant the turning downward, or the fatal turning point that would seal the destiny of the tragic hero. Peril has a particularly complex etymology: Roman law may have been the first to define the concept of financial risk as disaster in the making. The word periculum, according to Antoine Leca, designated the fortune of the sea, and referred by extension to a hazardous contract, one no more secure than a ship in rough waters.⁵ The perils of the sea yielded a periculo creditori, a risk to those lenders whose investments were at the mercy of a shipwreck. Leca further observes that the word risk itself may have come from the Latin resecum, that which cuts, hence the reef that can sink a ship. The Spanish word riesgo still designates both a reef and the danger it presents for seagoing vessels. The association of peril with the dangers of the seas was remembered in the Middle Ages in the name of the Mont Saint-Michel, au-péril-de-la-mer: the religious fortress and monastery had been built on a rock surrounded by shifting sands and galloping tides.

Our understanding of peril has thus always included a double-edged threat, that of a treacherous nature and that of risk-taking speculation. The quest for the Golden Fleece led Jason and the Argonauts through the most dangerous of sea voyages, and not even the securing of the prized fleece could save the hero from a terrible end: some versions of the tale suggest he killed himself, others that he was crushed to death by the stern of the ship. From the lure of the sirens to the melancholy Glaucus, whose horrible appearance distracted sailors—and whom Plato and Rousseau would see as the disfigured image of the human soul—the sea embodied at the same time the turbulence of the mind and the violence of the natural world.

Disaster has its own distinctive origin, associating misfortune with the loss of a protective star, with being abandoned by the stars and left to one’s miserable fate among countless perils and calamities. In French the form désastré (literally, disastered) came first; it was derived from the Italian dis-astrato, which designated the state of having been disowned by the stars that ensure a safe passage through life. The word is thus directly related to disorders of uncommon magnitude: the destruction, despair, and chaos resulting from the distant power of cosmic agencies.

MYTHOLOGIES

Comets and stars themselves were long perceived as a reminder of the ancient deities that reigned over the world: incensed at the outrage his priest had suffered from Agamemnon, Apollo strode down from Olympus’ peaks and let fly at the Achaean army poisoned arrows that carried a fatal plague.⁶ The plague came to represent the ultimate, the purest form of disaster. First described by Homer as sent from the sun-god, it would later be attributed to a fatal convergence of planets. The [signs] of future plagues can be found in the universal or particular movements of natural things, and are called prognostics. The first are found in the Heavens, following the Stars’ various positions and encounters, and those of some meteors. The others are sublunar, wrote a seventeenth-century physician. Astrologers say that Eclipses, of either the Sun or the Moon, taking place in the air or water triplicity, mostly in Scorpio, or in the tail of the lunar Dragon, under the unfavourable aspects of Mars and Neptune, easily signify severe and generalized Plagues.⁷ From the Paris Faculty of Medicine to countless astronomers throughout Europe, physicians and prophets alike blamed the combined influence of Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars for the spread of the deadly disease.

Once it reached Earth on the shafts of Apollo’s silver bow, or through a fateful stellar influence, the plague could not be contained. One of the most enduring beliefs about the disease suggested that it spread among humans through the gaze: "The disease manifests itself with all its strength and suddenly kills when the breath [spiritu] that emanates from the patients’ eyes contaminates the eyes of those who stand around them," noted a treatise published by the Montpellier Faculty of Medicine.⁸ We know of the fatal power of the gaze through another mythical figure, that of the terrifying Gorgon. Medusa, her head crowned with serpents, petrified all those who looked at her. She, too, has her place in astronomical discourse about the plague. Located in the Perseus constellation under the name of Algol, Medusa’s head was described by Ptolemy and his followers as the bearer of cruel and violent death. Giuntini Junctinus—the sixteenth-century theologian, mathematician, and astrologer who translated Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos—thought Algol the most evil star in the firmament.⁹

In 1623 Guy de la Brosse similarly warned his readers: Astrologers threaten Paris with numerous venomous diseases such as plagues, pleurisy and dysentery, which is confirmed by the presence of Medusa’s head very near the Zenith. While the snake is alive, it attracts all earthly venoms that are in conformity with its own, he added. The plague’s venom, once let free in the air, seems like a universal agent of corruption and destruction in Nature, similar to that of fire in Art.¹⁰ Medusa’s snakes thus rivaled Apollo’s arrows in their power to strike humans with disasters. But Apollo himself was associated from the beginning with the monstrousness of serpents: Tellus [Earth], against her will, produced a Serpent never known before, the huge Python, a terror to men’s new-made tribes . . . [Apollo] destroyed the monster with a thousand arrows.¹¹

For Apollo also healed. Snake venom was used in remedies against the plague, and an atropopaic Medusa adorned the shield of Agamemnon. With their destructive and healing powers, Apollo and Medusa represent the two faces of the sun; the darker side of the Greek God is echoed by Medusa’s face, an apocalyptic sun framed by a halo of serpents.¹² Apollo and Medusa reappear every time chaos threatens and epidemics destroy. They haunt medical treatises and the pages of the Encyclopédie dedicated to the plague. They permeate the iconography of the Terror as metaphors of might and evil, or as a distant hope for a cosmic reordering of causes and consequences.

DISASTERS IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

Two major disasters struck Europe in the eighteenth century: the plague that devastated Marseilles and the Provence region in 1720, causing fifty thousand deaths, and the earthquake that leveled the city of Lisbon in 1755, killing thirty thousand people. It is often argued that the Lisbon earthquake can be seen as the first modern disaster, prompting philosophy to provide a rational understanding of natural catastrophes. The Enlightenment repudiated the supernatural causes that had long attributed disasters to cosmic influences or the anger of a merciless God. Susan Neiman writes that taking intellectual reactions to Lisbon and Auschwitz as central poles of inquiry is a way of locating the beginning and end of the modern.¹³ Although many priests saw in the devastation of Lisbon a divine punishment for human sins, multiple voices throughout Europe decried the view that a vengeful God would kill innocent beings, and sought instead a scientific explanation for the disaster. Explaining the natural causes of catastrophes, trying to understand [them], is thus of crucial importance in humanity’s taking responsibility for its own history, write Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre and Chantal Thomas.¹⁴ But the philosophers who claimed to account for the Lisbon tragedy through the workings of the physical world did more than argue for the superiority of science and reason over superstitious beliefs: by shifting responsibility from the will of an indifferent God to the failings of humans—as Rousseau did when he blamed the number of deaths in Lisbon on the builders of the city—Enlightenment philosophers reframed the concept of natural disaster. They dismissed the supernatural forces that dwarfed all efforts to contain their fury. They argued instead that disasters were acts neither of God nor—entirely—of nature.

Long before the Lisbon earthquake, however, and in fact from the beginning of the use of the word disaster in modern European languages, the term associated the cosmic origin of disastrous events with the responsibility borne by humans for their own misfortunes. In King Lear, Shakespeare left it to Edmund, the treacherous bastard son of Gloucester, to tear open the etymology of the word:

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical pre-dominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc’d obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star. (I.2)

The history of disasters is thus also the history of humans wresting from the heavens the source and reason of their misfortunes: an enterprise, perhaps an exploit, as perilous as the crossing of seas.

If the Lisbon earthquake had a clear impact on philosophical reflections, the view that it radically transformed the way we think about disasters is, I would argue, a retrospective judgment that has much to do with the nature of the disaster itself. What is modern about Lisbon is not the ushering in of a rational discourse about disasters, nor the recognition that humans bear a responsibility in all forms of disasters—Shakespeare, among others, had already made that claim. Rather, what may strike us as modern stems from the fact that we have inherited from the culture of Enlightenment an anthropologically primitive fear and need to control rebellious nature—to use Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s terms—which is shattered anew by every physical disaster.¹⁵ Each natural disaster challenges both the mastery that was our goal and the political system that was put in place to serve such a purpose. By contrast, what may appear ancient about the plague that a few years before had caused many more deaths than the Lisbon earthquake is that the disease never returned and is now entirely curable, mastered. No doubt the shadow of the plague reemerges every time an epidemic threatens, but the Marseilles plague and the Lisbon earthquake need to be viewed from different perspectives. A close examination of the texts written at the time of these events shows no obvious difference in the sheer intensity of the philosophical battles they inspired, or in the anxiety caused by the sudden destruction of the two cities. The Encyclopédie devoted only a short paragraph to the Lisbon earthquake, but several long articles to the plague. It was a disease the philosophers fully expected to recur.

The selection of Lisbon as a modern disaster is thus also, and perhaps primarily, a judgment on the way we think of the time in which we live: an age when uncontrollable disasters always threaten the fragile order we have imposed on chaos. From Hurricane Katrina to the Haiti earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, we still battle the elements and our lack of foresight. As Anson Rabinbach asks, Was the dark side of modernity ultimately created by the Enlightenment dream of a ‘world without shadow, of everything bathed in the light of reason’?¹⁶ I would suggest that, instead, the dark side of Enlightenment itself yielded a world of shadows where dreams of controlling a rebellious nature gave rise to a scientific project itself fraught with perils and anxieties.

By making disasters a properly human concern, the Enlightenment may not have dealt a final blow to theology, but it certainly set the stage for the sense of emergency that would durably transform the post-Revolutionary age. Eighteenth-century philosophers made a lasting contribution to a modern understanding of disaster by sweeping away the divine explanation of human wreckage to seek among humans alone the cause of human ills and in nature alone the cause of physical chaos. But the resulting interpretation of disasters made the disorder they caused more profound and their burden at the same time more personal and more political.

POLITICAL ANXIETIES

In his examination of the history of the state of siege as gradual emancipation from the wartime situation to which it was originally bound in order to be used as extraordinary police measure to cope with internal sedition and disorder, Agamben describes the process that at the same time expands government powers and suspends all legally established constitutional laws. The resulting state of exception that has become the paradigm of government, Agamben argues, was first defined by the French Constituent Assembly decree of July 8, 1791, which envisioned the necessity for towns and ports in a state of siege to confer upon a single military command all the powers previously granted to civil governments. Agamben further notes that the modern state of exception is a creation of the democratic-revolutionary tradition and not the absolutist one.¹⁷ Certainly the state of siege had been imposed before—though not in legal terms—every time a disaster struck and exceptional measures were taken to restore order. But under an absolutist regime, these measures required no official definition and no legal sanctions other than the sovereign’s will. Thus when it was rumored that the Regent had ordered the burning of the entire city of Marseilles during the 1720 plague, no decree and no vote was needed to confirm or dispel the rumor: absolutism itself allowed for the most extreme measures in times of emergency.

There is nonetheless a strict parallel between the state of exception as suspension of the juridical order itself and the state of emergency brought on by disastrous events. Not just in the resulting conferral of all authority to an executive power that has force of law, but rather in the parallel separation—what Agamben calls the emancipation—from the norm that presides over both the legally defined social contract and the concept of natural order. The history of disaster since the Enlightenment is not simply, as has been argued, the history of the naturalization of disasters—that is, the dismissal of their supernatural causes and their reattribution to purely natural phenomena. It is also, and mostly, a history of the politicization of disaster, the emancipation of disasters from nature to the socius. Disaster, like the state of siege defined by the Constituent Assembly, suspends all accepted laws; it challenges the concept of natural order and reassigns in part the origin of natural disorder to the civil authority responsible for ensuring the well-being of citizens. To echo Agamben’s words, disaster is not a special kind of natural phenomenon; it is rather a suspension of the natural order that defines the workings of nature, opening the space for men’s failure to control their costs and consequences.

FRAGMENTATIONS

Part I of this book focuses on natural disasters and dis-astered bodies. It argues that the Enlightenment not only put an end to theological interpretations of disasters but also did away with the idea of a purely natural disaster. Rarely discussed commentaries on the 1720 Marseilles plague and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake illustrate the specific nature of the fear generated by disease and destruction in the Age of Reason. As the debate slowly shifted from the divine origin of disasters to their unpredictable unfolding, the responsibility for widespread destruction fell more on humans and less on nature. The discussion of disaster was reclaimed as an encounter between will and subjection, between human reason and what humans need to know but never will. Anticipating Antonin Artaud’s description of the plague as the eruption of body fluids furrowed like the earth struck by lightning, like lava kneaded by subterranean forces,¹⁸ the Encyclopédie viewed the epidemic as a mechanism of radical undoing that leaves nothing untouched—body, city, or state—breaking the strongest bonds of families and society.¹⁹ For the Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt, the disease combined all diseases; it was a disaster that subsumed all disasters. The plague’s symptoms were so varied and contradictory that they defied interpretation. The disease’s nature alone betrayed its identity, which was nothing but pure paradox: cold and fever, strength and exhaustion, delirium and deadly quiet. Larvatus prodeo. This masked threat is described as the site of the unknowable—that is, of the absolute limits of human power and reason.

The cholera epidemic of 1831–32 was widely seen as an administrative problem of medical and political control. Disasters always had posed a challenge to authorities, defying order and threatening established patterns of collective behavior. As the epidemic slowly progressed from the Gulf of Bengal to Europe and the United States, no disaster was ever more predictable. Yet no government managed to stop its advance. The impact of the epidemic was measured both in terms of an enormous number of fatalities and the inability of medical and political authorities to agree on a strategy to contain the outbreak. The particularly fierce debate that pitted the partisans of contagion against those who argued that the disease was propagated by atmospheric conditions set the stage for highly politicized measures that alternately condoned expulsions and internments. The cholera riots that added to the chaos caused by the disease prompted Heinrich Heine to observe that conservative politics itself became a casualty of the disease. The second part of the book examines the concept of political disaster that closely followed the Enlightenment’s reexamination of natural disasters. The idea of political disaster that stemmed from Rousseau’s preoccupation with the denaturalization of the human soul could not simply be limited to historical events, be they terror, coups d’état, or the corpselittered battlefields of senseless wars. From Rousseau to the Revolution and to Chateaubriand, the sense of living through disastrous circumstances became interiorized as a unique form of individual destiny. A divided subject confronted a new order. Rousseau stated early in his career that man’s estrangement from his original state had led to his repeated failures. The political state was doomed to remain imperfect, and the relations between the subject and the state would never reach a proper balance. Rousseau’s views on political authority and personal subjection led him to emphasize in his later writings a form of negativity that found a unique expression in the notion of anéantissement (literally, being subjected or reduced to nothingness), the result of a complex and intimate negotiation with the concept of disaster itself.

In the early days of the French Revolution, a message was sealed inside a bottle and buried in a grave located in the Auvergne region of France. This unusual call for help and the fate of Gilbert Romme, the man who had co-signed the message with a Russian aristocrat, illustrate the urgency of Revolutionary reform, seen as part of a desperate battle against time. It was Romme who presented to the Convention the first reform of the Revolutionary calendar and who made a daring proposal to adopt decimal timekeeping. He was later condemned to death, in part for having protested against the death penalty for political dissidence. His personal trajectory intersected that of a nation at war with the ghosts of its past and the fear for its own future. When he presented his calendar, a political economy of time, Romme read in the heavens an echo of the Revolution’s achievements. He dreamed of a historical time in accord with scientific calculations and an auspicious cosmos. Disasters would be exorcised. But the debates about calendar reform all bear witness to a form of political trauma that, if less dramatic than the spectacle of the guillotine and the violence of the Terror, testifies with dreadful accuracy to the danger of being abandoned by the stars.

On the other side of the political spectrum, Chateaubriand responded to the sense of urgency brought about by the French Revolution and the Empire by emphasizing the political nature of the earthly terror that replaced the dread of eternal fire. When he wrote about the Revolution and what he saw as its most tragic legacy—the end of the monarchy that had ruled France for nine hundred years—Chateaubriand saw himself as intimately associated with the fate of the dead king. He was the ghostly survivor called to witness an uneasy restoration followed by the coronation of an illegitimate successor to the throne. Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombe thus transformed the end of the legitimate monarchy into a personal tragedy. His was a deliberate step in the increasing interiorization of the concept of disaster. The tragedy that struck the monarchy became an integral part of Chateaubriand’s political self as an effect of both choice and personal destiny.

Part 3 is dedicated to the ways in which a changed culture reconsidered the oldest perils experienced by men: the mythical hazards of sea crossings. The view that human agency also played a role in natural disasters found a striking illustration in the 1816 wreck of the Medusa. The frigate had been put under the command of Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, a former émigré who had not sailed for over twenty years. The loss of the Medusa and the fate of the 150 men set adrift on a raft provoked a wave of protest and indignation across Europe. Théodore Géricault’s painting, the survivors’ dramatic accounts with their admission of cannibalism, and the various theatrical stagings of the disaster all sought to capture and control the terror of the last days at sea. The figure of the Gorgon haunted this disaster; but the most dangerous insight to be gained from the history of the wreck had to do with what is properly inhuman among humans themselves. When Géricault withdrew from his circle of friends to dedicate himself to painting the Raft of the Medusa (Le Radeau de la Méduse) he amply demonstrated that disaster occupies a distinct space in the process of creation: as radical undoing and as a form of shattering energy secretly contaminated by the thought of