In his assessment of the biopolitical implications of Hurricane Katrina, Giroux asserts that television image can be revelatory, insisting that the images of black suffering propagated throughout the mainstream media revealed the typically obscured, racist biopolitical machinery of the nation at large:
“The Hurricane Katrina disaster, like the Emmett Till Affair, revealed a vulnerable and destitute segment of the nation’s citizenry that conservatives not only refused to see, but had spent the better part of two decades demonizing…the black bodies of the dead and walking wounded in New Orleans in 2005 revealed a different image of the racial state, a different modality of state terrorism, marked less by an overt form of white racism than by a highly mediated displacement of race as a central concept for understanding both Katrina and its place in the broader history of U.S. racism.”
Here Giroux’s appeal to the Emmett Till affair, and to the rise of a new state racism harkens to Foucault’s biopolitical turn--whereby the power of the state to kill and to control the population through death is replaced by a new form of biopower where the state has the power to let some live while others suffer and parish. He seems to think that the images of dead black bodies on the national news revealed the normally concealed workings of a biopolitical apparatus that makes some members of the citizenry disposable.
Yet how powerful do we really think the television image can be? In her analysis of TV news coverage of catastrophe, Mary Ann Doane stresses that the TV device is perfectly compatible for expressing information constantly in the present tense. Unlike a filmic representation of the world (which can be seen as a past, already created art object to be critiqued in the present) television informs us of the way things are in a steady stream of now.
In her discussion of the liveness of TV, Doane speaks of the almost fetishistic quality of the medium: “the impression of a unity of ‘real time’ is preserved, covering over the extreme discontinuity which is in fact typical of television in the US at this historical moment”. Like the fetishized commodity—which appears natural and ahistorical to the consumer, and thus obscures the different forms of labor and exchange that went into it’s production—the television image appears always in the present tense, a perfect live window into another world. The realness of TV is aided by the presence of the television reporter, on the scene. In CNN coverage of Hurricane Katrina, Anderson Cooper’s presence in the middle of the storm gives legitimacy to the newscast. His normally perfect white hair is disheveled, and as he turns to face the wind he describes the pain of “pin pricks on his face”. We feel his momentary suffering as a sign of the realness of the information he is presenting, despite the fact that (like the humanitarian workers in Fassin) he can always hop in the van and leave when reporting on the news becomes too dangerous, too uncomfortable.
The question then remains how the fetishistic television image can be as powerful as Giroux suggests. How can information image seen on CNN explode the glossy coating that obscures the racist nature of a biopolitical state that would be willing to let some of its people die so that others might live in opulence? From there, does the film Trouble the Water potentially present us with a representation of Katrina with more liberatory potential than the information of a newscast? If so, why? Is the representation versus information distinction a good one? Do the autoethnographic techniques employed in the film bring us closer to the experience that we might experience a fuller presence within the catastrophe? Or is the documentary just another layer of unacknowledged mediation akin to the Anderson Cooper live-streaming newscast?
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