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‘Katrina and the waves: badorganization, natural evil or the StateRowland Curtis aa Manchester Business School , UKPublished online: 31 May 2008.

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Culture and OrganizationVol. 14, No. 2, June 2008, 113–133

ISSN 1475-9551 print/ISSN 1477-2760 online© 2008 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/14759550802079234http://www.informaworld.com

‘Katrina and the waves: bad organization, natural evil or the State

Rowland Curtis*

Manchester Business School, UKTaylor and Francis LtdGSCO_A_308089.sgm (Received December 2007; final version received February 2008)10.1080/14759550802079234Culture & Organization1475-9551 (print)/1477-2760 (online)Original Article2008Taylor & Francis142000000June 2008RowlandCurtisrowlandcurtis@yahoo.com

This paper considers Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of the smooth and the striated as abasis for rethinking the events of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans inSeptember 2005. It is argued here that popular narratives of Katrina, and perspectives ondisaster from the field of organization studies, have tended to be conditioned by a long-standing and restrictive dualism between ‘man’ (organization) and ‘nature’(disorganization), and an associated, anthropocentric moral framework. By contrast,Deleuze and Guattari are seen to offer a set of concepts relating to spatial and materialpatterns of organization which allow us to move beyond such a conceptual dualismtowards other ways of thinking the events of Katrina. Furthermore, they are alsounderstood to have provided the basis for some radical reflections on the role of the Statein the reproduction of a particular material and conceptual logic of disaster managementand planning. According to an application of their concepts of the smooth and thestriated, Katrina is described here, not according to notions of natural disorder, but as aDeleuzo-Guattarian ‘war machine’, operating according to an alien mode of organizationto that of the State. It is this encounter, between two irreducibly different modes oforganization, which is seen to account for both its extreme ‘catastrophic’ effects, and forsome of the unusual organizational phenomena occurring in its aftermath. In contrast tosome recent papers in the field of organization studies that have tended to treat Deleuzeand Guattari’s work in abstract and theoretical terms, this paper proposes to make adistinctive contribution to this Deleuzo-Guattarian ‘turn’ by situating, or putting to work,their thought in the context of Katrina as an empirical event.

Keywords: Deleuze and Guattari; Katrina; New Orleans; smooth; striated; war machine; TheState; evil; nature; organization; disaster; catastrophe

Introduction

Despite having been one of the most dramatic and large-scale instances of what has gener-ally been construed to be ‘chaos’ and ‘disorder’, and what some have subsequently called‘organizational failure’, this century to date, there has been a stark absence of response tothe events surrounding Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans from within theostensible field of organization studies. Contributions at the margins of this field havetended to take a policy studies or decision science approach to questions of organization,while academic writing on Katrina in general has tended to derive from orthodox socialscientific perspectives, be they sociological, anthropological, economic or political scien-tific (see papers in SSRC 2006). Such perspectives are argued here to produce accounts of‘natural disaster’ that reproduce a restrictive dichotomy between the ‘natural’ (disorganiza-tion) and the ‘social’ (organization), and that perpetuate a logic of thought and material

*Email: rowlandcurtis@yahoo.com

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organization that reproduces ‘disaster’ as an object of governmental concern. By contrast,this paper seeks to introduce Hurricane Katrina as a rich yet unsettling topic for consider-ation within the field of organization studies, seeking to provide a fresh perspectives on thesubject that move beyond this State-centric rationale.

A report by the American insurance consultancy firm Risk Management Solutionsprovides us with many examples of what has been called the ‘catastrophic’ destructioncaused by Katrina (RMS 2005).1,2 Most famously, following the breach of the leveesprotecting the city from the waters of Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi, up to 80% ofthe area of New Orleans was flooded, in depths of up to 20 feet of water (US House ofRepresentatives 2006, 90, 94). During the flood, toxic industrial and civic waste wasreleased into the floodwaters and sea, including the floating and cracking of oil and gasolinetanks, the flooding of sewage systems, and the leaking of two major landfills (ibid 2006,17). The extended duration of the presence of floodwaters led ‘to more structural decay, agreater degree of pollution and required clean-up, an increased possibility of mo[u]ld, andhigher claims … due to civilian exclusion’ (US House of Representatives 2006, 18) – evenwhen the floodwaters were fully drained, which was achieved in October 2005, a toxicsludge was left behind that has impeded the re-habitation of the city. Over thirty powerstations were taken out of service, there were six major oil spillages – with an estimated7million gallons of oil spilled, equivalent to two third of the spillage that occurred in thewreckage of the Exxon Valdez’ (ibid 2006, 19) – severe disruption to ports in the area,involving 5 of the top 12 US ports, including South Louisiana, the country’s top port bycargo volume (ibid.). Meanwhile, the agriculture industry was hit by damage to crops in thefield – sugar cane, cotton, soybeans and corn – and significant livestock and poultry losses(ibid.). Power outages caused significant losses for businesses, even those undamaged bythe storm itself, including long-term disruption to the massive tourism and gambling indus-tries in the region (ibid 2006, 20). Katrina is also estimated to have destroyed over 250,000private properties and homes and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, not to mentionthe crime and ‘lawlessness’ said to have followed in sections of the city of New Orleans(ibid 2006, 21). As described in some detail here, the destruction and displacement follow-ing Katrina was immense, leading to some witnesses comparing events to televised scenesfrom ‘third world countries’ (Dominguez 2006), and leading to the seemingly perverse situ-ation of nations such as Afghanistan offering disaster relief aid to one of the richest govern-ments in the world (Guardian 2005).

While the events of Katrina have so far led to many different explanations of these ‘cata-strophic’ events, it is argued here that several main accounts have tended to dominate,centring on different understandings of the relationship between ‘man’ and ‘nature’, and anassociated moral framework that has distinguishes between cases of ‘natural’ and ‘moral’evil. For example, some commentators have sought to allocate institutional responsibilityby describing the events of Katrina as the product of disorganization or incompetence in theface of ‘natural forces’ – the ‘return to nature’ – such as attribution of the failure by the USfederal government to fund and organize effective flood defences, or the argument that thereexisted a lack of proper planning by agencies such as FEMA to deal with the failure of suchdefences against ‘natural disaster’ (e.g. Perrow 2006; US House of Representatives 2006).3

Others have pointed, meanwhile, not towards disorganization, but instead to the the typesof organization that have taken place and contributed to the disaster, suggesting morecomplex relationships between ‘man’ and ‘nature’. Examples include not only the argumentthat State hydro-engineering works and ‘human-accelerated’ climate change may havecontributed to the risk of serious flooding events in and around New Orleans (e.g. Colten2004; Disasters 2006; Graham 2006; Manaugh and Twilley 2006), but also the notion that

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socio-economic inequalities contributed to the vulnerability of sections of the New Orleanspopulation to natural disaster (e.g. Oliver-Smith 2002, 2006; Lee 2007). What mightconventionally be considered a natural disaster could then, according to these arguments, beconsidered to have been, to some extent ‘man-made’. We will consider some of theseaccounts, before looking at the contributions to thinking on ‘disaster’ from two influentialorganization theorists, Charles Perrow (1984, 2004) and Karl Weick (1990, 1993, 2004),whose ‘systems theoretic’ accounts will be critiqued for the way in which they can be seento implicitly reproduce such a man-and-nature division, and hence thereby promotesimilarly anthropocentric perspectives on organization.

Finally, we will move on to consider the contribution of Deleuze and Guattari (1987),who can be seen to offer the basis for an account of the events of Katrina which avoidssuch shortcomings by giving account of Katrina as the meeting of different and compet-ing (‘nonsymmetrical’) logics of organization (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 480, hereafterabbreviated to MP). In their ‘Treatise on Nomadology’, Deleuze and Guattari argue thatthe state form has always been characterized by an internally coherent logic of composi-tion that ‘has always been in a relation with an outside and is inconceivable independentof that relationship’ (MP 1987, 360). This exterior is not seen by Deleuze and Guattari tobe disorderly, however, but is instead characterized by an irreducibly different, but coher-ent, logic of organization, based upon different uses of space or territory, and in relationto metrics or measurement, described as the smooth and the striated (e.g. MP 474–500).According to this conception, Katrina might then be understood as a ‘war machine’ thatis alien in its mode of organization to that of the State, based on its movement in condi-tions of smooth space and its vortical mode of composition, thus accounting for theextreme ‘catastrophic’ disruption it is understood to have caused (cf. Appleby 1998). Bycontrast to some recent, more abstract expositions of their work, this paper proposes tomake its own distinctive contribution to the recent Deleuzo-Guattarian ‘turn’ in organiza-tion theory by situating, or putting to work, the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari in thecontext of Katrina as an ‘empirical’ event. Deleuze and Guattari’s theoretical contribu-tions here can be seen to be particularly valuable to the fields of organization studies anddisaster studies, not only for its radical re-conceptualization of socio-material formations,or indeed for its sensitivity to what we might call the ‘geo-spatial’ aspects of organization(cf. Bonta and Protevi 2002), but for also offering us a tracing of the boundaries of adistinctive State-oriented logic and thought of organization, and a conceptualization ofwhat constitutes its irreducible ‘exterior’. We will also make the suggestion here thatDeleuze and Guattari point us towards a mode of thinking that takes us beyond theconventional moral(izing) distinctions between ‘natural’ and ‘moral’ evils that havetended to condition thinking on disaster and terror in the modern period to date (Neiman2002, 2005).

I. Popular narratives of Katrina

In an article entitled Beyond good and evil, an American Newsweek columnist noted the wayin which, unlike in the aftermath of September 11th, where the Bush administration invokedthe notion of a terrorist evil, in the aftermath of Katrina, events were instead given accountof in morally neutral terms (Dickey 2005; cf. Neiman 2002, 2006). President Bush’s firstspeech to the nation in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, delivered from New Orleans,made reference to its ‘awesome force’, and described it as ‘a tragedy that seems so blindand random’ (White House 2005a) – a tone that is in marked contrast to the infamous Axisof evil State of the Union address in January 2002, just over 4 months after 9/11, where

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American citizens were rallied to ‘overcome evil with greater good’ (White House 2002).In the case of Katrina, such a morally neutral assessment of the ‘natural forces’ of the hurri-cane would seem to have been reinforced by an official narrative of ‘organizational failure’by official State reports. The US Congress Committee on Katrina published their 363-pagereport soon after the events in Louisiana and Mississippi, followed quickly by a similarreport from the White House (White House 2006).4 Confirming popularly held opinion, thereport found there to be failures of both an ‘individual’ and ‘institutional’ nature at ‘alllevels of government’ (ibid., 1), concluding that ‘the failure of complete evacuations led topreventable deaths, great suffering, and further delays in relief’; that ‘critical elements ofthe National Response Plan were executed late, ineffectively, or not at all’; and, overall, that‘the DHS [Department of Homeland Security] and the states were not prepared for thiscatastrophic event’ (White House 2006, 2–3). This assessment of organizational failure inthe face of ‘natural forces’ by the report, and the interpretation of a resulting ‘state of nature’is confirmed by the final lines of the report:

Four and a half years after 9/11, Americans deserve more than the state of nature after disasterstrikes. With this report we have tried to identify where and why chaos ensued, so that even astorm the size of Katrina can be met with more order, more urgency, more coordination, andmore initiative (White House 2006, 362).

Aside from the moral distinction in our opening example between the supposedly neutral‘natural forces’ of Katrina, and the contrasting ‘evil’ of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, we alsosee here a categorical distinction between what are considered to be the ‘natural forces’ ofKatrina and the human organizational practices of the US State, and hence the attentionfollowing Katrina to the relevant formal lines of organizational responsibility. However, tocomplicate this interpretation of ‘organizational failure’ provided by Congress’ KatrinaReport somewhat, other, perhaps more marginal narratives, have instead recognized typesof human organization that have successfully taken place, but perversely, which may in facthave contributed to, rather than abated, the disastrous impact of the Hurricane. Such narra-tives can be seen to involve understandings of a more complex relationship between ‘man’and ‘nature’ than, broadly speaking, is accounted for by Congress’ Katrina Report – yet, stillmaintain a fundamental dualism between between the two. To take one example, geogra-pher Craig Colten suggests that New Orleans provides us with one of the clearest instancesof what has calls an Unnatural metropolis (Colten 2004). To quote here the opening wordsof his book on New Orleans, published in 2005, before the events of Katrina:

Strolling through the Vieux Carré, the historic French Quarter, or ambling beneath the live oaksin Audubon Park, one gets the impression that New Orleans is a city without relief. Only themassive levees that stand between the city and the river provide a discernible change in eleva-tion … Slopes of a few inches per mile make a tremendous difference in this low-lying city.What little relief there is directs the flow of water, of which there is an abundance in southernLouisiana: precipitation averages nearly 60 inches a year, while the river carries about 600,000cubic feet per second by the docks; the water table lies just below the land surface, and LakePont-char-train laps at the levees guarding the city’s northern shore … With little topographicassistance, massive engineered water-control devices help drain the city and keep the river andlake water at bay, and they have become key to New Orleans’s continued viability … Keepingthe city dry, or separating the human-made environment from its natural environment, has beenthe perpetual battle for New Orleans (Colten 2004, 1–2).5

In Colten’s description here, we can consider how human organizational activity can beunderstood to have intensified the destructive potential of the hurricane, where, bound upwith the particular site and situation of the city is the effect of a long history of US Corps

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of Engineers projects on the river and surrounding land (Protevi 2005, 3).6 The controllingof the Mississippi via an extensive levee system around New Orleans and upstream meansthat when the river does flood finally, it is on a much larger scale, and, in the event of abreach of one of the levees rather than ‘overtopping’, then flooding of, what Colten calls,New Orlean’s ‘accentuated … bowl-like features’, would be expected to occur with concen-trated force (Colten op cit., 2). This is exactly what is understood to have happened withKatrina, when the levees were overtopped and then fully breached, ending what has beenreferred to as ‘decades of anticipation’ (US House of Representatives 2006, 90, 94).7 Wesee a narrative here, therefore, that complicates the notion of a simple ‘man against nature’scenario with Katrina, to the extent that the disastrous consequences of the hurricane can beseen to some extent to be ‘manmade’.

Another example of a such a narrative suggesting human organization may have contrib-uted to the impact of Katrina, is the notion that human activity-related climate change mayhave increased the likelihood of – and increased the intensity of – the ‘force of nature’ thatNew Orleans experienced with Katrina. While on the one hand it is argued that the increasedfrequency of high-intensity Atlantic hurricanes in the post-1990 era can to some extent beput down to meteorologically cyclical events like the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation orAMO (Protevi 2005, 8), there is also scientific support for the increasingly predominantview that human activity-accelerated global warming may be just as significant for theincreasing incidence of such weather patterns, suggesting a more complex relationshipbetween man, and supposedly ‘random’ or ‘blind’ ‘forces of nature’ (see the collection ofessays in Disasters 2006).

Thirdly, and perhaps most defining of popular narratives of Katrina, we can consider thenotion of vulnerability, whereby, according to anthropologist Anthony Oliver-Smith, natu-ral disasters might be ‘more explainable in terms of the “normal” [social] order of things,that is, an interaction of “the conditions of inequality and subordination” with “the acciden-tal geophysical features of a place”’ (Oliver-Smith 2002, citing Hewitt 1983).8 FollowingKatrina, Oliver-Smith wrote on the notion of the differential vulnerability of sections of theNew Orleans population to Katrina:

Disaster risks and outcomes are socially produced at the intersection of a complex and dynamicrange of hazard and vulnerability patterns, associated with underlying social, economic, terri-torial and political processes operating in specific locales (Oliver-Smith 2006, 2).

With New Orleans, factors such as differential rates of car ownership, home insurance andpersonal savings among the population, affected the ability and willingness of certaingroups to evacuate the city, with more than 100,000 people reported to have been unable orunwilling to evacuate (RMS 2005, 3). As described by urbanist Mike Davis, economicfactors can also be understood to explain the differential location of sections of the NewOrleans population, according to areas that are more or less liable to flooding (Davis 2006,2). Meanwhile, the fact that the most disadvantaged section of the population was largelycomposed of impoverished African-Americans is a perspective that was graphically empha-sized in news broadcasts in the aftermath of the hurricane, and in film director Spike Lee’sfour-part documentary film When the levees broke (2007; see also Younge 2006). As JohnProtevi puts it, ‘money stays on high ground in New Orleans’ (2005, 9).9

In these examples then, following initial attributions of ‘organizational failure’ by theUS State, other arguably more marginal narratives have suggested a more complex relationbetween ‘man’ and ‘nature’ in understanding to Katrina, though still sustaining an under-standing based on these two opposing terms. In the next section, the paper will briefly

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consider the ‘systems theoretical’ approaches to the study of disaster that have arguablybeen predominant within the field of organization studies, to compare them with the popularnarratives that we have looked at in this section, before moving on to explore the distinctset of concepts offered by Deleuze and Guattari.

II. Organization studies and disaster

Arguably the most influential author writing on disaster within the field of organization stud-ies is Charles Perrow, whose seminal text Normal accidents (Perrow 1984) can be seen tohave influenced a range of other writers within the field (e.g. Vaughan 1996; Snook 2000;Weick 2004). Perrow writes specifically with respect to accidents that occur in relation towhat he calls ‘high risk technologies’ (Perrow 1984, 3), so, to use the language and schemaof the narratives explored in the last section, we might suggest that Perrow specificallyconcerns himself with ‘man-made’ rather than ‘natural’ disasters. Perrow’s main argumentin relation to ‘high risk technologies’ is that conventional explanations of accidents fail togive a good account of the causes of accidents by ‘only speak[ing] of problems that aremore or less inevitable, widespread and common to all systems’ (ibid, 63). Examples givenby Perrow of such explanations include: ‘operator error; faulty design or equipment; lack ofattention to safety features; lack of operating experience; inadequately trained personnel;failure to use the most advanced technology; systems that are too big, underfinanced orpoorly run’ (ibid.). By contrast, Perrow argues that, in addition to this, what is needed is‘an explanation based on system characteristics’ – ‘a first attempt at a ‘structural’ analysisof risky systems’ (ibid., italics added). For Perrow, whereas a regular accident involves a‘component failure’ of some kind – ‘say a valve or an operator error’ (ibid., 71), by contrast,what makes a normal accident, or system accident, is the complex, coupled interactionof multiple accidents or failures, which then lead to unanticipated consequences (ibid.).According to Perrow’s system-based definition, and with reference to his analyses of ‘Earth-bound Systems’ such as ‘dams, quakes, mines and lakes’ (1984, 232–255), we can say thatthe breach of the levees in New Orleans following Katrina would not be considered byPerrow to be a ‘system’ or ‘normal accident’. This is because, while the system would beconsidered to be tightly coupled – meaning that ‘there is no slack or buffer of give betweentwo items’ (1984, 90): the levees failing and the flood of New Orleans occurring – it isvery linear, lacking the complex interaction of elements within the system system thatwould result in outcomes that were unanticipated, unexpected or incomprehensible ‘to thepersons who designed the system, and [to] those who are adequately trained to operate it’(1984, 70–71). This judgement would seem to be supported by what was described by theCongress Commission as the ‘decades of anticipation’ that preceded the breaching of thelevees (US House of Representatives 2006, 94). More recently, in writing specifically onKatrina, Perrow did not explicitly confirm of deny the interpretation made here, but insteadexamined the history of the FEMA agency to try to understand and explain how ‘organiza-tion failures’ led to what he calls ‘massive underperformance’ and poor execution of thepreparedness and relief efforts before during and after Katrina (2006). Whether or not ourparticular interpretation of Perrow’s ideas with respect to Katrina would gain his assent, wecan say that this style of analysis of Perrow’s, despite perhaps greater theoretical sophisti-cation than the Congress Report on Katrina discussed above, can be seen to still uphold astyle of judgement that can be characterized as ‘organizational failure’, though with arguablydifferent approaches to the allocation of responsibility. As with the Congress Report, wecan say that both of these approaches base themselves on an implicit dichotomy between‘man’ and ‘nature’, whereby questions of disaster are conceived according to the efficacy

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of human organizational configurations in the face of ‘natural forces’. In the case ofPerrow’s work, his examples deal with the interaction of ‘human organizational features’with ‘technological components’, yet in doing so implies and sustains a ‘man-and-nature’dichotomy in its exclusive concern with ‘human’ organization. Furthermore, we can also saythat Perrow’s theorising displays an associated anthropocentric bias in its conception oforganization. To quote Perrow,

As our technology expands, as our wars multiply, and as we invade more and more of nature,we create systems – organizations, and the organization of organizations – that increase therisks for the operators, passengers, innocent bystanders, and for future generations (Perrow1984, 3).

In Perrow’s understanding of organization, we create systems, rather than, say, findingourselves involved in them, or even created by them, giving his perspective on organizationa distinctly ‘activist’, anthropocentric orientation. We also see that for Perrow, nature issomething we ‘invade’, reinforcing a sense of a self-contained space of human endeavour,separate from the natural forces we encounter ‘out there’.10 We can relate Perrow’s concep-tualizations of organization and disaster here to the work of another influential theorist ofdisaster from the field of organization studies, Karl Weick, perhaps best known for his stud-ies of the Tenerife air disaster (1990) and of the Mann Gulch forest fire disaster (1993). Interms of his relationship to the work of Perrow, Weick, while making it clear that he isappreciative of the studies of accidents that Perrow’s work has made possible (see Weick2004), elsewhere criticizes Perrow’s work for its ‘structural bias’, which for Weick, ‘kept[Perrow] from seeing clearly that, when you take people and their limitations into account,susceptibility to normal accidents can change within a relatively short space of time’ (Weick1990, 585). As Weick later concluded,

What Perrow attributes to technology and to structure at the macro level, I attribute to mind andto process at the micro level. But we use similar ideas that suggest to me that we jointly under-stand something of the genesis of accidents (Weick 2004).

While the argument can be made that Weick’s ‘process’ analyses show perspectives on suchtopics as ‘system vulnerability to crisis’, ‘role structure’ and ‘sensemaking’ in disasters inways that are more sophisticated than Perrow’s in accounting for system change, it can alsobe said that Weick’s analyses fail to move beyond the ‘organizational failure’ perspectivewe have attributed to Weick, describing an anthropocentric account of the domain relevantto organization and organization studies according to an implicit ‘man-and-nature’ dichot-omy. We thereby feel that the work of the two theorists does not provide us with thetheoretical resources to break us out of this mode of thinking towards an alternative concep-tion. Having considered some popular narratives on Katrina, and compared these to theorganization studies perspectives on disaster found in the work of Perrow and Weick, wewill now turn to the work of Deleuze and Guattari for the radically different ways in whichtheir concepts allow us to see, or understand, the (dis)organizational phenomena of Katrina.

III. Reading Katrina through Deleuze and Guattari

Deleuze and Guattari and organisation studies

In terms of the field of organization studies, there would appear to have been a minorDeleuzo-Guattarian ‘turn’ in recent years, based on the publication of a range of articlesexploring the value of their co-authored ideas for management and organization theory (e.g.

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Cooper 1998; Chia 1999; Linstead 2000; Sorensen 2003, 2005; Styhre and Sundgren 2003;Jackson and Carter 2004; Thanem 2004; Styhre 2005; Kornberger, Rhodes, and ten Bos2006; Thanem and Linstead 2006; Linstead and Thanem 2007). However, while in previousengagements Deleuze and Guattari have tended to be treated in abstract and theoreticalterms, this paper seeks to make a distinctive contribution by situating, or putting to work,the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari in the context of Katrina as an empirical event. Deleuzeand Guattari’s work has been selected here for its unusual approach to the study of what wemight provisionally call ‘social-material’ formations, in terms of it’s destabilisation orundermining of categories of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ in relation to questions of (‘human’)organization. This is an aspect of their work that has been most fully explored by such writersas Manuel De Landa (e.g. 1992, 1997), Brian Massumi (e.g. 2002) and Keith Ansell-Pearson(e.g. 1999), amongst others. Clearly there is not space in this paper to explore the full rangeof complex and interrelated concepts in A thousand plateaus relevant to this question, orindeed their their relation to other ideas in the cannon of Deleuze and Guattari and their other,individually authored works. Instead, in this paper we will be necessarily brief, in focusingon the value for thinking Katrina of their spatio-organizational concepts of the ‘smooth’ andthe ‘striated’ (Plateau 14, MP 474–500) and the relation of these to the notion of ‘nomadic’and ‘sedentary’ formations found in their ‘Treatise on nomadology’ (Plateau 12, MP 351–423).11 We will now describe these concepts, and explore their their value for rearticulatingand rethinking Katrina in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the State.

Smooth and striated – exteriority, spatiality, metrics

In A thousand plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari make a distinction between two fundamen-tally different and ‘nonsymmetrical’ principles of organization, which they call the smoothand the striated (MP 480). We can trace these notions back to Deleuze’s (1994/1968) workDifference and repetition, where he identifies the agrarian question as probably havingbeen crucial for the development of a distinctive form of distribution in space (e.g. ibid.,36). For Deleuze, this form of distribution corresponds with the sedentary life of the State,and involves what he calls ‘a dividing up of that which is distributed’ (ibid.). By contrast,for Deleuze, there is also ‘a completely other distribution which must be called nomadic’:

a nomad nomos, without property, enclosure or measure. Here there is no longer a division ofthat which is distributed but rather a division among those who distribute themselves in an openspace – a space which is unlimited, or at least without precise limits. Nothing pertains orbelongs to any person, but all persons are arrayed here and there in such a manner as to coverthe largest possible space. (ibid.)12

We hence are offered by Deleuze a fundamental distinction between two organizationalprinciples based upon different distributions in space, and in relation to metrics or measure-ment. These ideas are later taken up by Deleuze and Guattari and developed into a fullerthesis of abstract principles under the titles of the smooth and the striated:

It is the difference between a smooth (vectorial, projective, or topological) space and a striated(metric) space: in the first case ‘space is occupied without being counted,’ and in the secondcase ‘space is counted in order to be occupied’ (MP 361–362, quoting Pierre Boulez writingon space–time in music).

The point of distinction regarding ‘metrics’ here is that, for Deleuze and Guattari, a striatedspace is a homogenous space, ‘whose dimensions are independent of the situation and areexpressed with the aid of units or points’ (MP 370), whereas the nomos of smooth space

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consists of a space that has no homogeneity, only ‘nonmetric, acentred, rhizomatic multi-plicities that occupy space without counting it’ (MP 371). While Deleuze and Guattari giveexamples of various instantiations or ‘models’ of these concepts (MP 474–500), for theauthors – inspired by their readings of the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun’s The muqaddimah(Khaldun 2004) – the archetypal example of a confrontation between these two principlesof organization took place at the meeting of nomad tribes with the the sedentary States ofthe great Asiatic empires.13 Central to this thesis is their notion that ‘the State itself hasalways been in a relation with an outside and is inconceivable independent of that relation-ship’ (MP 360). This is the distinction that Deleuze and Guattari make between two spacesthey call, following Emmanuel Laroche, polis, or ‘the law’, which stands in opposition tonomos, ‘as the backcountry, a mountainside, or the vague expanse around the city’ (MP380). For Deleuze and Guattari, the sedentary space of the polis ‘is striated, by walls, enclo-sures, and roads between enclosures, while nomad space [nomos] is smooth, marked onlyby ‘traits’ that are effaced and displaced with the trajectory’ (MP 381).

Deleuze and Guattari – nonorganic life

It is argued here that these notions of ‘exteriority’ and ‘interiority’ with respect to the Stateform, and their relationship to the spatio-organizational notions of the smooth and the stri-ated can provide us with fresh understandings of the events of Katrina and their organiza-tional dynamics. As mentioned above, it is also argued that this ‘fresh understanding’ alsoprovides us with a mode of thinking that, unusually for the field of organization studies,doesn’t depend on a dualism between ‘man’ (or ‘the social’) and ‘nature’.14 To speak in alittle more detail about this lack of reliance on a ‘man-and-nature’ dichotomy, for Deleuzeand Guattari, according to their notion of ‘machinic’ formations, and the attendant notion ofnonorganic life (MP 411; De Landa 1992), we can say that both ‘natural’ and ‘manmade’organizational formations exist together, indistinguishably, on a material continuum -known by Deleuze and Guattari as the ‘machinic phylum’ (Plateau 3, MP 39–74; Ansell-Pearson 1999, 141) or ‘mechanosphere’ (e.g. MP 71, 514). As illuminated in the work ofManuel De Landa, among others (De Landa 1997, 2002), this ‘machinic’ (not ‘mechanic’)conception of material formations takes much of its derivation from the open-systems think-ing of complexity theory, whereby the nonlinear behaviour of open systems at states farfrom equilibrium involves what are known as ‘self-organizational’ properties, that for vari-ous reasons were broadly overlooked or misunderstood in earlier linear models of (thermo-dynamic) system behaviour (see Bertalanffy 1968; Prigogine and Stengers, 1984). One ofthe consequences of such nonlinear dynamics thinking is that principles of organizationbegan to be seen as ‘medium-independent’, or ‘universal’, meaning that they could be inter-preted as taking place, not only across different physical media, and having equal relevanceto all the natural sciences, creating new combined research initiatives and configurations,but also as having relevance for ‘social’ or ‘cultural’ problems such as population dynamicsand economic trends. Inspired by their readings of philosophers such as Henri Bergson andBaruch von Spinoza, this style of thinking was taken forward by Deleuze and Guattari inthe most radical way, developing a whole range of materialist concepts to understand suchemergent creativity in language, psychology, politics and so forth, in a way that did notobserve conventional distinctions between subject disciplines, or between the ‘natural’ and‘cultural’ domains. We should also note here that in disrupting the category of the ‘natural’,in the same move, Deleuze and Guattari’s theory also problematizes any simple category ofthe ‘human’ individual or the ‘social’ collective. To return to the question of the smooth andthe striated then, sedentary formations, for example, identified according to the spatial

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characteristics we have described, will hence involve elements of both what we might haveconventionally called ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. For example, in sedentary agricultural forma-tions, trees, crops, insects and hedgerows, are seen as composed in the same ‘machinic’formations as tools, machinery, irrigation works and human farming communities. This isthe material collectivity that Deleuze and Guattari are referring to when they speak of a ‘fullsocial body’ or ‘assemblage’, and can be seen to enable – and be enabled by – their unusualthinking of organization according to their concepts of the smooth and the striated.

State striations – hydraulic engineering

To return to our analysis of Katrina, for understanding these events, arguably one of themost useful associations we can draw is the relation between Deleuze and Guattari’sconcepts of the smooth and the striated, and their distinctive conception of the State. ForDeleuze and Guattari: ‘One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space overwhich it reigns, or to utilise smooth spaces as a means of communication in the service ofstriated space’ (MP 385). One of the examples that Deleuze and Guattari give of such a stri-ated utilisation of smooth space – and which gives us a good point of connection with ourinterest in Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans – is in the context of Statehydraulic engineering or hydroengineering. Here we can see the influence of the Germanhistorian Karl Wittfogel, and his major work, Oriental despotism (1957), in terms of the roleof State engineering projects in producing what Wittfogel calls ‘hydraulic societies’. ForDeleuze and Guattari:

The State needs to subordinate hydraulic force to conduits, pipes, embankments, which preventturbulence, which constrain movement from one point to another, and space itself to be striatedand measured, which makes the fluid dependent on the solid, and flows proceed by parallel,laminar layers (MP 363).15

According to this conception, the complex of engineering works rendering the ‘impos-sible city’ of New Orleans inhabitable, and the maintenance of the Mississippi as a navigablewater channel, can hence be understood, not as a struggle between ‘man’ and ‘nature’, butas a meeting of two different spatio-organizational orders. For instance, we can considerhere how the Mississippi once regularly overflowed its ‘natural’ channel and levees into thefloodplains surrounding the river, simultaneously eroding channels and creating land adja-cent to its courses, upon which the city of New Orleans was originally founded (Colten 2005,3). Since this time, State engineering projects have tried to restrict and control this floodingof the river, and to control its course, to make ‘the [North American] continent’s largest natu-ral draining system’ navigable for trade from New Orleans’ massive economic hinterland,and to protect the city itself from flooding (ibid, 5, 6). This engineered course includes theMississippi River Gulf Outlet, which is a deep channel ‘created close to New Orleans sothat ocean going ships would have a short, direct path from the Gulf to New Orleans’ (Protevi2005, 3).16 In this example then, we can recognize Deleuze and Guattari’s description that:

It is not at all that the State knows nothing of speed; but requires that the movement, even thefastest, cease to be the absolute state of a moving body occupying a smooth space, to becomethe relative characteristic of a ‘moved body’ going from one point to another in a striated space(MP 386).

Deleuze and Guattari consider this concern for moved bodies in striated space to be ‘theessence of the State’ (MP 386), referring to this characteristic as gravity, or gravitas (MP

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370).17 This gravitas relates back to the description above of striated space being homoge-neous in terms of its striation by metrics – ‘whose dimensions are independent of the situa-tion’, rather than the style of the nomad tribe, ‘occupying a space without counting it’ (MP370). In terms of conceiving the organizational dynamics of New Orleans prior to Katrina,then, we are offered a style of thinking which makes distinctions between between differentmodes of socio-material organization, without reverting to conventional ‘man-and-nature’thinking, and which also offers a sensitivity to spatio-organizational features of organizationwhich may be obscured in other descriptions of organization.

An extended confrontation

Having so far considered Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of the smooth and the striated intheir relation to the State, we will now look at the potentially conflictual consequences ofthe meeting of these two ‘nonsymmetrical’ modes of organization. To do this we will giveanother example here of relevance to our reading of Katrina: to the striated spaces of theconduits, pipes and embankments of State hydraulic engineering, Deleuze and Guattaricontrast the sea (MP 363–364), described as ‘perhaps principal among smooth spaces’ (387).The sea is described as being a ‘very special problem’ on the basis that it is ‘the smooth spacepar excellence, and yet was the first to encounter the demands of increasingly strict striation’– ‘to transform into a dependency of the land, with its fixed routes, constant directions, rela-tive movements, a whole counterhydraulic of channels and conduits’ (MP 479, 387). Distinctfrom the earlier example of inland hydraulic engineering, this striation did not arise in prox-imity to land, but was the result of navigation on the open water, though Deleuze andGuattari do not accept what they call ‘the Portuguese argument’ that this striation occurredthrough a turning point in 1440. They instead describe ‘[an] extended confrontation at seabetween the smooth and the striated during the course of which the striated gradually tookhold’ (MP 479, italics added), understood as being one instantiation of a more universalinteraction between the smooth and the striated. This is characterized by Deleuze andGuattari as consisting of ‘two nonsymmetrical movements’ (MP 480), such that,

smooth space is constantly being translated, traversed into a striated space; striated space isconstantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space. In the first case, one organizes even thedesert; in the second the desert gains and grows; the two can happen simultaneously (MP 474).18

In this light, perhaps we can identify such ‘nonsymmetrical movements’ in the example ofthe Mississippi river, between the flow of the river according to a smooth space, and the stri-ations of State engineering works such that, for Colten, ‘the engineering, social, andeconomic systems put in place to lure New Orleans from the mire must be modified regu-larly and maintained perpetually’ (2005, 192). As Protevi puts it, ‘you can’t stay ahead ofthe river all the time’, in that ‘river systems tend toward a state of self-organized criticality,producing a power law distribution regarding riverbank failures and flooding’ (Protevi2005, 2). While in this example, in general, State forces of striation will tend to have theupper hand, there will on occasion be turbulent episodes of smoothing, ‘experienced’ byState bodies as organizationally problematic.

The war machine – packs, swarms, catastrophes, epidemics

Keeping in mind this notion of an extended confrontation between the smooth and thestriated we can now turn to a concept at the heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s archetypal

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example of the meeting of the sedentary State and nomad tribes, taking place at the frontierbetween nomos and polis. In this context, for Deleuze and Guattari, the nomad tribe hasbeen the primary example and inventor of what they call the war machine: the most effec-tive mechanism for the inhibition of the emergence and extension of the State form (MP417). Deleuze and Guattari define the State as occurring when a separation between gover-nors and governed is created, leading to ‘the perpetuation or conservation of organs ofpower’ – the State implements vertical, hierarchical (arborescent) organs of power, whereaswar, ‘maintains the dispersal and segmentarity of groups’ (MP 359, MP 357). For Deleuzeand Guattari, the war machine can thereby be seen to have (been) ‘revived’ whenever thereis an operation against the State – such as ‘insubordination, rioting, guerrilla warfare, orrevolution as an act’ (MP 386). On this basis, war is not considered to be a reversion to astate of nature but in fact, ‘the mode of a social state that wards off and prevents the State’(MP 357).19 Furthermore, the nomad war machine is not seen to necessarily imply war inthe conventional sense: though it may be a feature of its operation, it is not the violence ofthe encounter that makes the war machine effective for staving off the State, but instead itis the contrasting logics of organization – according to the smooth and the striated – thatthey imply. The war machine is,

in essence the constitutive element of smooth space, the occupation of this space, displacementwithin this space, and the corresponding composition of people: this is its sole and veritablepositive object (nomos). Make the desert, the steppe, grow; do not depopulate it, quite thecontrary … from then on, the war machine has as its enemy the State, the city, the state andurban phenomenon, and adopts as its objective their annihilation. It is at this point that the warmachine becomes war: annihilate the forces of the State, destroy the State-form (MP 417).

For Deleuze and Guattari, it is for this reason that the State has no war machine of its ownbut ‘can only appropriate one in the form of a military institution, one that will continuallycause it problems’ because of its immanent form of organization and operation in smoothspace (MP 355).20 For our purposes here, in considering the possibility for conceptualisingthe events of Katrina, we should now shift our attention to some wider examples ofinstances of the war machine provided by Deleuze and Guattari, who describe the warmachine as ‘a physics of packs, turbulences, ‘catastrophes,’ and epidemics, correspondingto a geometry of war, of the art of war and its machines’ (MP 490). Deleuze and Guattariencourage us here to move our thinking beyond their archetypal model of States and nomadhordes to consider other ‘encounters’ that can be described according to the same principles.Regarding epidemics for example, consider a paper by John Appleby (1998), where, takingon Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas here, it is his thesis that locust swarms can be understoodto be a ‘limit case’ for nomadic formations in terms of the locust swarm’s behaviour andlogic of organization as constituting a war machine (ibid., 143). This definition is used byAppleby to explain why States, and ‘superstate’ organizations, have had so little success incombating the problem of locust swarms, due to its irreducibly different (‘nonsymmetrical’)mode of organization from that of the State.

Katrina as war machine

To take this notion forward to the Katrina example then, it is a contention of this paper then,that hurricanes exhibit spatio-organizational attributes such that hurricanes might also bedescribed as war machines in these terms. As Deleuze and Guattari explain, ‘if the nomadsformed the war machine, it was by inventing absolute speed in a smooth space, by being“synonymous” with speed’, in contrast to the relative movement of the striated space of the

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State (MP 386). Deleuze and Guattari describe the ‘simple [thermodynamic] passage’ fromturba to turbo: from ‘a multitude, a large population, confusion and tumult’ to ‘a round formin movement … a revolving cone or vortical spiral’ (MP 361, 553 n. 18, 19). This absolutemovement leads, via the smallest atomic deviation of the clinamen, to vortical formationsthat are alien to the laminar formations of State striations. Now let us consider Katrina andits formation at sea:

With the proper ocean temperatures (above 80 degrees [farenheit]) and wind speeds, we canget ‘tropical waves’, or groups of thunderstorms. At other singular points of wind speed andwater temperatures, a cyclonic heat engine will be actualised, spinning counter-clockwise inthe Northern Hemisphere, forming a hurricane. Ocean water evaporates and rises out of a‘chimney’, releasing energy as it condenses aloft, powering winds and forming bands of thun-derstorms. In effect, part of the ocean rises into the air and falls back as rain, while part of theocean is pushed along by the storm’s winds, the famous ‘storm surge’ (Protevi 2005, 8).

As we have just seen, for Deleuze and Guattari the two main attributes of the war machineare composition in a smooth space, and its vortical organization within that space.Hurricanes form at sea – the ‘smooth space par excellence’ according to Deleuze andGuattari – where certain critical thresholds are crossed whereas, on reaching land (‘land-fall’), according to Protevi, ‘a hurricane loses 3–8 inches of storm surge for every mile ofbarrier islands and coastal wetlands it crosses’ (Protevi 2005, 8).21 Furthermore, anothersmooth space referred to by Deleuze and Guattari is relevant here – the Earth’s atmospherein which the hurricane forms and moves (MP 387).22 Once formed, the hurricane takes upa vortical motion in an assemblage with the atmosphere, its movements influenced byclimactic variation and geothermal differences. We can hence understand the hurricane as‘using’ the smooth space of the sea and air to ‘make the outside a territory in space’(Appleby 1998, 147, citing MP 353). In addition to this, Deleuze and Guattari have a partic-ular understanding of the relationship of weaponry to force that mean that the surge of water(‘storm surge’) and debris hurled at great speeds and forces by the hurricane winds can, inthis context, be considered ‘weaponry’ without implying a human operator – the warmachine of the hurricane thus enters into a vortical assemblage with the solid objects it‘finds’ in the striated territory of the State and turns them into weaponry through the purespeed of its vortical movement (see MP 97–98; cf. Appleby 1998). In its encounter with thematerial organization of the State, as with nomad tribes, we should remember though that,according to this conception, war is not the defining characteristic of the hurricane, butrather its composition and movement within smooth space, and its subsequent (violent)smoothing action on encountering the striations of the sedentary State.

The smoothed spaces of New Orleans

As we have seen, due to its alien mode of composition, the hurricane can hence be seen totake up confrontation with the state from a position of exteriority to the State. The State, inencountering the smoothing action of the hurricane, responds by trying to striate space, andto reimpart relative and bounded movement (i.e. from within its own logic – which thehurricane does not observe). This is not to deny that the destructive power of hurricanesarises in part due to the immense forces and dimensions that are at play, but is instead to saythat it is the alien mode of composition that exacerbates the disruption to the sedentaryState, and makes it much more difficult for the State to prepare for, and to recover from suchan encounter. We might return here to the events of 9/11 in the US in 2001, referred to inthe opening sections of this paper, to make comparison with Katrina in explaining the

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disastrous quality of these events, not just according to the physical destruction of the TwinTowers, a section of the Pentagon, the hijacked airliners and those civilians caught up inthese moments, but as exacerbated by the violent encounter between two irreducibly alienmodes of organization – the encounter between the striations of the State form and thesmoothing operation of the terrorist ‘cell’ as nomad war machine. Returning to the exampleof Katrina in this light, we can also note the vulnerability of the striated mode of organiza-tion to exponential levels of disruption, by contrast to the ‘distributed’ logic and ‘flat’ modeof composition of the hurricane or terrorist network, where, in the nomadic formations,disruption tends to be arithmetic in contradistinction to the geometric levels of disruption‘experienced’ by the State. On this theme, the Risk Management Solutions report oninsurance losses designated Katrina as a Super Catastrophe, or ‘Super Cat’, based on the factthat losses become nonlinear, i.e. the unusually large scale of the event itself caused lossesto increase further:

As buildings disintegrate under wind or flood loads, they create debris that increases thedamage to buildings nearby; Damage to infrastructure prevents pumps from operating, limitswater availability for fire hoses, and compromises other vital equipment; failure of telecommu-nications means that timely information does not reach emergency managers; flooded roadsand evacuated personnel means that fires are left to burn; Faced with high levels of damage andpollution in the reconstruction process, decisions are made to demolish whole neighbourhoods,rather than to repair and save some of the less damaged properties (RMS 2005, 24).23

This conceptualization of a smoothed space can be extended by considering the relative easewith which different modes of organization composed themselves and operated within whatwe have argued are the smoothed spaces of New Orleans following the hurricane warmachine. As we saw in the opening sections, Katrina caused massive damage to infrastruc-ture, such that whole areas were without any kind of power, electricity, communicationslinks, and transport connections were generally flooded, ripped up or barricaded by debris.While this obviously had an impact on the ability of disaster recovery operations to operatesuccessfully, we can also say that it is the mode of organization of state disaster recoveryorganizations and provisions can be seen to have rendered them particularly vulnerable tosuch disruption. For example, many of the State organizational problems following Katrinain terms of disaster response related to problems with communications, infrastructure andcommand and control. In the section of Congress’ Katrina report on Command and Controlthey describe the hierarchically based notion of unity of command which is central to theprinciple of operation of the coordinated disaster relief agencies (US House of Representa-tives 2006, 183–198). While the ‘material’ basis of these hierarchical aspects of organiza-tion became apparent when emergency management and communications infrastructurewas in many places put completely out of action in many places by Katrina (ibid., 183–184,163–171), we can also see how this material basis involves a discrete linear or arborescentlogic, based upon clear lines of authority (cf. MP 3–25).24 This linear mode of organizationwas revealed to be vulnerable to elements of the chain of command being disrupted, andbringing serious problems with coordination for State recovery operations, whereas wemight suggest that alternative modes of human organization showed themselves to be muchbetter adapted.25

Band and pack phenomena

Much of the news media reported the operation of gangs in New Orleans after the hurricaneand in Congress’ Katrina report, many reported this along the lines of a Hobbesian ‘return

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to nature’ in the absence of the effective operation of State police forces (US House ofRepresentatives 2006, 362). However, in the view of John Protevi, among others, the forma-tion or operation of gangs needn’t necessarily indicate a ‘reversion’ to a ‘state of nature’:

for gang members prey on people in these ways in every city of the country and most cities ofhuman history. For gang predation is not some ‘natural’ state into which societies ‘fall,’ but asocial process that is part and parcel of civilization as we have known it (Protevi 2005, 10).

We can hence consider here the notion of the pack or gang as an example of a differentlogic or mode of organization to that of the State, rather than as a case of the chaotic disor-der associated with the return to a ‘state of nature’, and, with reference to the evaluationabove, is a mode of organization of which the approaches to disaster from the field oforganization studies, described above, could be seen to give insufficient account. Return-ing to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the nomad war machine then, we can considertheir argument of the importance they place on what they call the ‘collective mechanismsof inhibition’ seen in band or pack phenomena. In relation to the war machine, ‘war iswhat limits exchanges, maintains them in the framework of ‘alliances’; it is what preventsthem from being a State factor, from fusing groups’ (MP 357–358). According to themodel of smooth and striated spaces, we can hence understand the smoothing operation ofthe hurricane to have smoothed many of the civic State striations of space, leading to aspace where certain formations such as bands and packs operate with much more successthan State agencies, due to their immanent relations and non-reliance on centralized struc-tures, or stable powers of leadership.26 The point here, is that in the observation of packsand gangs, we are not just talking about ‘damage’ or ‘disorganization’ leading to chaoticdisorder – the mythical ‘return to nature’ – but instead differences in the composition andproliferation of different organizational forms under changing spatio-material conditions.27

In relation to the eventual evacuation of people from New Orleans and the establishmentof housing projects, we could consider this an attempt to bring band and pack configura-tions of people back under striation, to return as ‘moved bodies’, administratively codedand relocated.28 Interestingly, the presence and operation of the US military in NewOrleans after Katrina might serve to confirm rather than undermine this organizationalhypothesis. As referred to above, for Deleuze and Guattari the State has no war machineof its own but ‘can only appropriate one in the form of a military institution, one that willcontinually cause it problems’ (MP 355, see also relevant footnote above). According toits ‘nomadic’ tendencies, the military would, under Deleuze and Guattari’s model, exhibitorganizational characteristics that render it better equipped to operate under smooth condi-tions than civilian police forces. In this light, it is perhaps interesting to consider the longhistory of military involvement in State disaster recovery operations (Anderson 1969;Alexander 2002) and the blurring of military and civilian after Katrina. This included thebreaching of the 127-year-old law Posse Comitatus by the federal government afterKatrina – the law ‘that bars federal troops from assuming domestic law enforcementduties’ in the US (US House of Representatives 2006, 15–16)29 – and the widespreademployment of what is known in US law as the militia; otherwise known as the USNational Guard (US House of Representatives 2006, 201).30

In conclusion – disaster thinking

This paper has attempted to show the possibility of rearticulating the events of Katrinaaccording to the organizational concepts of Deleuze and Guattari. As we have seen,

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their notions of the smooth and the striated provide us with a way of conceiving the‘natural disaster’ of Katrina according principles which move us away from the main-stream ‘man’ against ‘nature’ narratives we have considered. In this light, it can be saidthat Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts demonstrate a way of thinking organization thatenables us to conceive ‘natural disasters’ such as Katrina as the meeting of two incom-patible logics or modes of organization, rather than a being a question of man-madeorder (organization) against natural disorder (disorganization). Furthermore, we can alsosee Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘post-human’ conception here as taking us beyond anymoral(istic) distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘moral’ evil towards a focus on encoun-ters between two coherent yet irreducibly different logics of organization – what wemight characterise as encounters with an organizational ‘other’ (cf. Serres 2007). In thislight, we might then refrain from making the categorical moral distinction made in ouropening example’s of US State descriptions of 9/11 (immoral) and Katrina (morallyneutral), but instead to focus upon the common organizational basis for their violentand disruptive encounters with the US State, beyond simple anthropocentric ascriptionsof good and evil.

To conclude here, we would like to consider how the notion of an irreducible exteriorityto the State form may be of value, not only for making reflections on ‘natural’ disaster, butalso for considering an associated mode of thinking on disaster in relation to the State.Though there is not space here for a thorough treatment, Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of‘State thought’ may give us some purchase in relation to the notion of a State-oriented prob-lematic or logic of disaster and emergency management and planning that can be seen toresult in particular organizational features or tendencies (see MP 361–380). Deleuze andGuattari describe here their notion of State thought:

Thought as such is already in conformity with a model that it borrows from the State apparatus,and which defines for it goals and paths, conduits, channels, organs, an entire organon. Thereis thus an image of thought covering all thought; it is the special object of ‘noology’ and is likethe State-form developed in thought (MP 374).

To make on application of this notion of ‘State thought’, we might then expect Statepractices of disaster management and planning to be mirrored by a complimentary modeof thought on disaster, such that Deleuze and Guattari then can be seen not only toprovide us with the possibility for a different thinking of disaster, but also to provide uswith the conceptual basis for understanding the ways in which the recurrence of ‘naturaldisaster’ and recurrent trends in thinking on ‘disaster’ and organization may be very muchbound up together in a self-perpetuating circuit, in the (p)recognition of events as ‘disas-ters’ or as ‘catastrophes’31. The point being made here is that disasters and emergencyplanning can be seen as examples of a ‘naturalized’ logic of organization which places theState as the natural overseer of the material and ‘existential’ well-being of populations, atthe expense of alternative socio-material configurations, and at the expense of the devel-opment of alternative conceptions of organization beyond (or ‘external’ to) the State (cf.Grey 2007; Klein 2007). This is one way in which we might account for the persistence ofa ‘man-and-nature’ dichotomy and associated moral framework in thinking on disasterevents, as the perpetuation of a distinctive State-oriented logic of thought. We might thenregard Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of a mode of organization exterior and irreducible tothat of the State – such as that we would argue is exhibited by Katrina – as providing uswith the basis for an alternative and radical orientation in thought on such questions ofdisaster and material organization.

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AcknowledgementsI would like to thank the editors of this special edition, Russell Dudley-Smith, my doctoral supervisorDr Damian O’Doherty and the other participants at the SCOS 2006 Conference in Nijmegen, Neth-erlands, for their invaluable comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes1. In this article, the terms ‘Katrina’ or ‘the events of Katrina’ will be used to refer to not only the

hurricane ‘itself’, but also to the organizational phenomena associated with it, including those orga-nizational factors which predate and follow the hurricane event(s) of September 2005. Furthermore,the ‘effects’ of Katrina or Hurricane Katrina, though focused on New Orleans and its nearest coast-line, can be seen to range further afield, to encompass not only the US States of Louisiana andMississippi, but the rest of the US and the wider world as a global media event (Sturken 2006).

2. As we will see, the term ‘catastrophic’ is placed in quotes here – as will in places be the term‘disaster’ – to indicate that the particular understandings of the relationship between order anddisorder implied by these terms will be among those themes brought into question in this paper.

3. FEMA stands for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and is the agency of the USgovernment tasked with ‘Disaster Mitigation, Preparedness, Response and Recovery planning’(http://www.fema.gov).

4. This swift publication was perhaps influenced by the popular success of the 9/11 Inquiry Report(US House of Representatives 2004), whose paperback edition quickly became a US bestsellerand its ‘official’ narrative the basis for a major Hollywood movie. See also Brown (2001) andLawson (2005) on ‘inquiry sensemaking’.

5. This led the Geographer Pierce Lewis to refer to new Orleans as an ‘impossible but inevitablecity’ due to the strange combination of its ‘suboptimal’ site with its ‘optimal’ situation ‘as atrading outlet for the extended hinterland of the Mississippi–Missouri basin’ (Colten 2005, 2; seealso Fra Paleo 2006).

6. See also Manaugh and Twilley (2006) on landscape and architecture in New Orleans in relationto this point.

7. In this context, Lavin and Russill (2006) make the argument that the notion of a ‘battleground’in a war between man and nature, as a way of understanding the relation between the city of NewOrleans and the Mississippi river, is a characterization that has contributed to, rather thanprevented, the destructive impact of Katrina.

8. Oliver-Smith considers disasters such as Katrina to be valuable objects of study as ‘a mode ofdisclosure of how the interpenetration and mutuality of nature and society …are worked out’(Oliver-Smith 2002, 26). For Oliver-Smith, ‘there are few contexts in which the mutualconstitutionality of the physical and the social are so starkly displayed as in a disaster’ (ibid.).

9. In the aftermath of Katrina, the property of the wealthy is also understood in many cases to havebeen protected from theft or damage by private security companies (Protevi 2005, 9; see alsoWilson 2005).

10. The particular systems perspective proposed by Perrow can be seen to contribute to this boundedseparation, in terms of what is know as a closed systems model, concerned with the relationsbetween rigid system components and in clear distinction from its ‘environment’, the two beingseparated according to a defined system boundary. This is in contrast to open systems perspec-tives, which theorise flows across permeable system boundaries and shifting system configura-tions that arguably produce more sophisticated accounts of socio-material organization andchange (Bertalanffy 1968; Prigogine and Stengers 1984), and of which it could be argued Deleuzeand Guattari have been the foremost theorists (see for example De Landa 2002).

11. While this can be seen to be potentially problematic in terms of the ‘rhizomatic’ manner in whichthose concepts are understood to be necessarily mutually supporting (see MP 1–25), aside fromconsiderations of space, this selective focus has been adopted, not only to bring to the fore somearguably undervalued concepts in their ‘toolbox’, but also to try to provide a distinctive point ofaccess to Deleuze and Guattari’s work, and the attendant vocabulary of their ideas, for those thatare broadly unfamiliar.

12. Deleuze references Emmanuel Laroche (1949) in describing a distinction between aspects ofdistribution and aspects of allocation, and how this particular form of distribution entails thenomos of a space without precise limits: ‘The pastoral sense of nemo (to pasture) only belatedlyimplied an allocation of the land. Homeric society had neither enclosures nor property in pastures:

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it was not a question of distributing the land among the beasts but, on the contrary, of distributingthe beasts themselves and dividing them up here and there across an unlimited space, forest ormountainside. The nomos designated first of all an occupied space, but one without precise limits(for example the expanse around a town) – whence too, the theme of the ‘nomad’’ (1994, 309n. 6; see also MP 557 n. 51 and MP 572 n. 12).

13. It is noted by Bonta and Protevi (2004, 118), however, that ‘the pure social formation of nomadsociety is an abstraction’: ‘the elements of nomadism … enter into de facto mixes with elementsof migration, itinerancy, and transhumance’ (citing Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 420). Bonta andProtevi also acknowledge here the work of Miller (1993, 1998) who is critical of Deleuze andGuattari’s use of anthropological sources regarding nomadism.

14. As Deleuze and Guattari say, and which we might relate to their use of the smooth and striatedhere: ‘We only invoke dualism in order to challenge another’ (MP 20).

15. On Deleuze and Guattari’s complex relation to the work of Wittfogel, see Bonta and Protevi(2004, 167, and MP 19, 63).

16. We might also note here the importance Deleuze and Guattari place on ‘The figure of the engineer(in particular the military engineer), with all its ambivalence’ in relation to the intersection ofwhat they call State and nomad science (MP 362) – with reference here to the role of the USArmy Corps of Engineers in the construction and maintenance of flood defences in New Orleans.

17. We might note a resonance or intersection here with notions of ‘regulating’ and ‘securing’ inMartin Heidegger’s description of the hydroelectric plant, in his ‘Question Concerning Technol-ogy’ (Heidegger 1993, 321).

18. It is important to note here that for Deleuze and Guattarri, ‘the two spaces in fact exist only inmixture: ‘smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a striated space; striatedspace is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space’ (MP 474). However, for Deleuzeand Guattari, ‘the de facto mixes to not preclude a de jure, or abstract, distinction between thetwo spaces’, and that ‘it is the de jure distinction that determines the forms assumed by a givende facto mix and the direction of meaning of the mix (is a smooth space captured, enveloped bya striating space, or does a striated space dissolve into a smooth space, allow a smooth space todevelop?)’ (MP 475).

19. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, ‘just as Hobbes saw clearly that the State was against war, sowar is against the State, and makes it impossible’ (ibid.). See also Reid (2003) and Newman(2001) for more on this relationship between the State and war in the thought of Deleuze andGuattari.

20. Hence: ‘What we call a military institution, or army, is not at all the war machine in itself, but theform under which it is appropriated by the State’ (MP 418, see also MP 358).

21. And indeed, we can consider such islands and wetlands as being effective in this, despite beingsome of the lesser-striated landforms when compared to, say, sedentary agricultural spaces ordense urban formations (MP 481).

22. In the Earth’s atmosphere, similar to the sea, there is also understood to have been an ‘extendedconfrontation’ between the smooth and the striated, to the extent that, since the advent of aircraft,the air has been striated by the state as ‘air space’, ‘the columnar territory of air ‘owned’ by anation state’, though importantly this is never a complete operation (Bonta and Protevi 2004, 51).In relation to Katrina we consider here the work of the US National Hurricane Centre to involveacts of striation, in terms of providing surveillance and mapping of atmospheric movementsaccording to metrics ‘whose dimensions are independent of the situation’ (MP 370, see descrip-tion on metrics in main body of text).

23. It is perhaps also interesting to consider the work of the insurance industry here in striating thesmooth space of the region with rapid striations of information and damage assessment.

24. Material is in ‘scare’ quotes here due to the fact that, as we have seen, for Deleuze and Guattari,hierarchical (‘arborescent’) organizational aspects of organization are no less material than thelevees that protected New Orleans.

25. Or, we might instead say that the creation of smooth spaces led to the expansion or emergence ofsuch modes. See Deleuze and Guattari (MP 341) on ‘reverse causalities’ and the idea that to wardoff the State is to anticipate it. On ‘the criminalisation of New Orlenians in Katrina’s wake’, seeKaufman (2006).

26. Furthermore, as Protevi argues, not all gangs were predatory, with many young armed gangmembers having been reported on occasions as having secured areas by force and supervised thedistribution of looted materials to the most needy (Protevi 2005, 11; see also US House ofRepresentatives 2006, 243).

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27. For a first-hand account of patterns of ‘spontaneous’ social cohesion and State intervention inNew Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, see Bradshaw and Slonsky (2005), or Clark (2006) onthe social as an emergent property with respect to Katrina and disaster. See also Harada (2000)for description of the spatio-martial aspects of survivor communities in a public shelter after the‘great earthquake’ in Japan in January 1995.

28. For reflections on the ‘coding of populations’ in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of thesmooth and the striated, see Genosko and Bryx (2005) on the struggle over processes of ‘infor-matic striation’ relating to the numbering of Inuit populations in Canada in the late 1960s. Seealso Oliver-Smith (2005) on disasters and ‘forced migration’.

29. We might add another dimension or ‘loop’ to this question of the relationship between the mili-tary and smooth spaces by considering the research of Eyal Weiszman (2007), who records theinfluence of Deleuze and Guattari on Israeli Defence Force policy, in terms of the idea of thecreation of ‘smooth spaces’ used by the Israeli military in urban warfare operations in the Pales-tinian territories.

30. In addition to these we might also note the use by wealthy civilians of private security firms suchas Blackwater to protect their homes and property, as further indication of the ambiguity existingbetween the civil State, and the appropriation of instances of war machines in the smoothedspaces of the immediate aftermath Katrina, for the advantages their mode of organization canoffer under these conditions (Wilson 2005).

31. See Irons (2005) on Katrina as a ‘predictable surprise’.

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