I will never forgive the english department at UW for losing Steven Shaviro (who now teaches at Wayne State in Detroit). Because he is gone (and will never come back—the department made almost no effort to keep him) our city is practically theoryless. UW, you suck!

Anyway, Shaviro’s recent comment about the spectacle of American poverty that dominated the world’s covers and screens three weeks ago must be read and reread by those who are wandering “what’s left” (to use an expression by Marxist thinker Nic Veroli—our city’s final theorist) at the dawn of the 21st century.

Leftist philosophers, theorists, and cultural critics have usually been worried about the seductive power of images: the way that they disarm criticism by making What Is seem self-evident, by reifying particular moments and isolating them from their contexts, by preventing any analysis that would seek to go beneath surface appearances. And indeed, it’s true that images shorn of context have often been used for the most hideous propagandistic purposes. But here, in televisual feed coming from New Orleans this past week, we seem to have the reverse situation: images that ‘speak’ starkly of the ugly facts of race and class in America today, that show how the Powers That Be of government and business have relegated large numbers of human beings to the status of non-persons, that demonstrate eloquently that, however `natural’ the disaster, the differential experience of the victims is entirely man-made; while a flood (if I can use that metaphor) of speech and discourse strives to decontextualize and normalize these people’s suffering, and to `explain’ how, even in the face of sadness and tragedy, life goes on and the USA continues to be the greatest nation on earth.