Heffernann Phd2013.Pdf
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
UCC Library and UCC researchers have made this item openly available. Please let us know how this has helped you. Thanks! Title Scientism and instrumentalism After the Bomb: Dr Strangelove, End Zone, Crash and The Wire Author(s) Heffernan, Niall Publication date 2013 Original citation Heffernan, N. 2013. Scientism and instrumentalism After the Bomb: Dr Strangelove, End Zone, Crash and The Wire. PhD Thesis, University College Cork. Type of publication Doctoral thesis Rights © 2013, Niall Heffernan http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Item downloaded http://hdl.handle.net/10468/1524 from Downloaded on 2021-09-29T05:07:57Z Scientism and Instrumentalism after the Bomb: Dr Strangelove, End Zone, Crash, and The Wire Niall Heffernan PhD Thesis National University of Ireland, Cork School of English September 2013 Department Head: Professor Claire Connolly Supervisors: Dr Gwenda Young & Dr Alan Gibbs 1 Table of Contents Page Acknowledgements: 4 Introduction: The Cold War, a Forge for Capitalist 5 Postnuclear Scientism and Rationality 9 Postnuclear Culture and the Chosen Texts 12 Game Theory: A Brief Background and History 21 Self-fulfilling Corruption 29 Critiques of Apocalyptic Rationality 35 Chapter 1 Dr Strangelove: The Secular Apocalypse and its Technical Imperative 40 Introduction: Strangelove and Techno-ideology 40 Kubrick and Technology 47 Dr Strangelove as Kahn and von Neumann: Through the Lens of Power, Paranoia and Psychosis 50 The De-libidinized Machine-men of the SAC Movies 63 The Bomb and American Utopianism 74 Ripper and Muffley: Miscegenation, Misogyny, and Homophobia 77 The Doomsday machine and the MADness of Moral Abdication 84 Postmodernity’s Grand Narrative of Apocalypse 87 Chapter II End Zone and Crash 90 Introduction 90 Apocalypse Still Looms: Sex and Religion in End Zone and Crash 93 Baudrillard and Perceptions of Postmodernity 99 End Zone’s Linguistic Satire 107 Patriarchal Priests, Masculine Logic, and the Nuclear Word as “Shit” in End Zone 120 The “Theology” of the Bomb in End Zone 129 Violence Without Regeneration in End Zone 134 2 American Football and Game Theory in End Zone 141 The Apocalypse Filmed, Photographed, Cut Up, Miniaturised and Multiplied in Crash 148 American Heat and Reagan’s Potlatch 174 Chapter III The Wire and Game Theory: ‘All in the Game’ 182 Introduction 182 From the Cold War to Here 186 Fated By Institutions 190 The Destruction of Social Narratives 192 Capitalism as Game: Unravelled Narratives and Unsustainable Myths 194 American Institutional Fiction in The Wire 196 More With Less: The Presiding Fiction of The Wire’s Fifth Season 207 Stringer Bell: Capitalism, Race and Class 219 Marlo Stanfield: The De-human Capitalist 232 The Game is Rigged 238 People, Police, Technology and Wars in The Wire 247 Conclusion: Imagination is Irrationality 256 Bibliography 268 3 Acknowledgements First and foremost I would like to thank my co-supervisors Dr Alan Gibbs and Dr Gwenda Young for demonstrating patience and diligence in overseeing what was, initially, an unwieldy project with an ostensibly odd topic. Patience in the long gestation of the subject, and in overworked sub-editing, and diligence in encouraging me to sharpen the focus of the topic and tighten the prose. Much debt of thanks is owed for their work and persistence on the project. Thanks also to Dr Lee Jenkins for help, support and early inspiration, department head Professor Claire Connolly, and all the department staff for their professionalism and camaraderie. I would also like to thank my Americanist PhD colleagues at University College, Cork, Miranda, Gwen, Kate and Katie in particular who helped with the editing and proofing process. Thanks to fellow wanderers on the winding PhD road in other disciplines, who have helped in support and encouragement, Marge Lysaght, Darragh Enright and thanks to Maryjane O’ Leary for reading a terribly sloppy early chapter draft and being kind about it. Finally thanks to my family and friends who make living possible and joyous. 4 Introduction: The Cold War, a Forge for Capitalist Technocracy The modern mind has become more and more a calculating one. The calculating exactness of practical life which has resulted from a money economy corresponds to the ideal of natural science, namely that of transforming the world into an arithmetical problem and of fixing every one of its parts in a mathematical formula. It has been the money economy which has thus filled the daily life of so many people with weighing, calculating, enumerating and the reduction of qualitative values to quantitative terms. Georg Simmel – The Metropolis and Mental Life, 177 Woe to those who, to the very end, insist on regulating the movement that exceeds them with the narrow mind of the mechanic who changes a tire. Georges Bataille – The Accursed Share, 26 This thesis examines aspects of the role of technology and technocracy in postnuclear society and culture in the United States through careful analysis of a selection of texts. The four works are arranged chronologically, beginning with Dr Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, on to Don DeLillo’s End Zone, then J.G. Ballard’s Crash and concluding with a consideration of the television series The Wire. The thesis focuses on the effects of an imperative towards mechanical and technical organisation of life in the developed world—the means of which were brought about in the United States by the coming into existence of the atomic bomb—through analysis of the four carefully chosen works. 5 It may seem that the rationality and material power of technology provides the only basis for a terra firma in the modern world. This technical utopian narrative, the metanarrative of scientism, however, has come at the price of the hollowing and unravelling of binding narratives and the dismissal of vital forces of social cohesion like altruism and empathy. The institutional ubiquity of statistics and game-based models seeks to make individual and collective human behaviour quantifiable, but in so doing, these models supplant linguistically derived concepts with the modular inflexibility of numbers. In essence, the use of these quantitative models in institutional life is an attempt to control what is essentially irrational with a technical rationality. Language is necessarily abstract, indeterminate and fluid, thus, in its infinitesimal expressions it is inherently more adapted to the complexities of individual and collective human life. In the institutional life of the Western world, however, the subtleties of linguistic communication have been exchanged for a technical language that can never describe, only quantify. No science fiction texts are analysed herein, as they tend to imagine technology that does not yet exist and posit human actions in a utopian or dystopian context within this imagined world.1 All of the texts chosen, however, are based on ubiquitous technology, most notably that of the Bomb, the car, the computer and the camera. These four technologies both literally and figuratively embody the essence of the period of postmodernity. The four texts chosen, therefore, in one aspect or another provide sharp and revelatory insights into postmodern culture and the effects of postnuclear technology and technocracy on the ways people live and organise their societies. 1 See David Seed’s American Science Fiction and the Cold War: Literature and Film for extensive coverage of Cold War Sci-fi. 6 The thesis is not critical of technology, no more than the texts it analyses, as technology is an inextricable part of human life. Between the polarised traditions of technophobia and naïve humanism, therefore, there is significant scope for an appraisal of works of art that engage the complex problem of the human tendency to defer to scientific means in what is an ancient pursuit of certitude. The need to simplify the chaos of life by modulating, classifying and quantifying the world our senses perceive has led human beings to create the various technological wonders that enhance the lives of very many. Keeping this in mind, all four works are chosen for their balance and clarity, understanding that our technology for all its benefits is also essentially human. Technology is necessarily limited by our senses, the shapes of our bodies and the boundaries of our cognition, and is often shaped by forces pursuing goals other than the general benefit of the human species. Thus there is the broad problem that technology is often utilised, and thus generally perceived, in a way that obscures the apparent fact that humans are incapable of exercising a collective will towards the improvement and survival of the species. Ironically, the solution to what is perceived as human fallibility, according to mechanical logic, is to organise our societies around the tenets of scientific and technological ‘objectivity.’ The Cold War is hugely significant in this regard for two reasons. Firstly, it was a war ‘fought’ on an industrial-technological front, which spelled the eventual ‘defeat’ of communism. According to its own mythology, the American victory was the result not only of its greater industrial-technological capabilities but also of its economic system, a vindication of its ideology as the correct one. What is significant in this regard is the fact that American Cold War strategy was based around the fundamental tenets of 7 capitalism’s self-interested view of human motivations. Game Theory, an economic theory of strategy calculation based upon an assumption that rationality equated to self- interest, became the framework for all of America’s nuclear stand-off strategies. America’s eventual so-called victory was to be ‘proof’ of Game Theory’s scientific veracity and ‘objectivity,’ and thus also a vindication of its supporting ideology. The Cold War is hugely significant from the American point of view, secondly, because the advent of the Bomb, by the very fact of its destructive power, called for a strict and unequivocal rationality.