The half-life of disaster | Brian Massumi
▻http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/apr/15/half-life-of-disaster
The natural and the human are everywhere co-factors in disaster. They co-compose disaster in a way that can be fiendishly complex. But they are not simply in fusion or confusion. The media-borne affective conversion circuit upon which political power increasingly relies for its legitimation obscures the actual dynamics of this interlinkage. The return to the human personal level short-circuits any collective response that is not already either inscribed in the same logic of exploitative development that has brought the world to this juncture, or in complicity with the national/natural security apparatuses of full-spectrum force that move forcefully against those enacting alternate strategies of collective action in the name of alternate collective futures.
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As long as disaster capitalism reigns – which no doubt will be as long as capitalism itself reigns – the world will be caught in a vicious circle: that of responding by increasingly draconian and ill-advised means to a threat environment whose dangers the response only contributes to intensifying.