PROLIFERATIONS OF INDISTINCTION: NUCLEAR SPECTACLE, SOVEREIGNTY AND THE SENSUOUS POLITICS OF NATIONAL SECURITY IN AMERICA

Marc Lafleur

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO

August 2012

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This dissertation considers the bodily politics of sovereignty from within the context of atomic and nuclear heritage efforts and touristic encounters in the United States. I begin with the assertion of a gap in the sovereign enterprise of power. This gap manifests as a zone of pure violence or as the philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls it, a “zone of indistinction.” I argue that through the ethnographic exploration of the ways in which bodies move through sites commemorating nuclear heritage a politics of indistinction can be deciphered in which nuclear spectacles act as sites of violent capture and easily reproduce and amplify the politics of nuclear fear in the face of an official narrative in which nuclear weapons are merely historical entities. I also demonstrate that nuclear indistinction is incomplete and waffles and decays in light of intense and affective bodily becomings. By exploring the affective body, this ethnography complicates the understanding of sovereignty by demonstrating the ways in which it is always in motion, between indistinction and its undoing, between presence and absence, between violence and hope. Ultimately, this ethnography challenges distinctions by which we have traditionally understood and compartmentalized, sovereignty, war, memory and the body by making an argument for their mutual entanglement and virtuality, their mobility across time, space and form. Finally, this ethnography attempts to resist re-presentational strategies in favour of forms of writing that participate in relationships of mimesis, amplification and unfolding with the cultural forms it addresses. Acknowledgements The credit for this work is multiple and diffused across time and space, folding in amongst family, friends, colleagues and teachers and occupying the spaces in between words, gestures, touches, sights and events. As the work is an accumulation of years and a collection of different place, the number of people implicated and enfolded in it has rippled outward with time and space.

To begin, I owe a debt of gratitude to all those who helped me undertake this research in the field, multiple as it was. People too numerous to enumerate were more than generous with their time and knowledge and, often, their passion. Great gifts all. Colleagues and friends were also instrumental to my own development as a scholar and played an enormous role in supporting me though a multitude of hurdles that, often, seemed too keen to present themselves. Specifically, the companionship and intellectual stimulation offered by my great friend Maria Belen Ordonez was invaluable and I cannot imagine or recollect this process without her presence. In the final stages of preparation the parallel experiences and mutual support offered by my good friend and neighbor, Nicola Spunt, were a vital bridge to envisioning completion.

The students that I have taught over the past ten years have also played an important role in shaping my own work and I must thank them for that. Undoubtedly, in various roles as teacher, I have learned as much or more as I have helped to impart and this, I think, is how it should be.

I must also acknowledge the generous financial support for this research provided by a Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Dissertation Fieldwork Award, The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, a Simons Centre for International Studies at UB C/Department of Foreign Affairs Doctoral Research Award and various grants provided by York University. These grants and scholarships, so necessary to the intellectual life, are inadequate to the need and I feel grateful to have received so generously.

I consider myself extraordinarily lucky to have been mentored by two wonderful scholars without whom this work would not exist in concept or execution. Kenneth Little and Daphne Winland have been the truest of advisors supporting my curiosity and experimentation while endowing it with rigor, clarity and a critical faculty that I can only aspire to. They will always be family to me.

My own family has offered me everything I needed for success. To say of my parents that they were always there seems inadequate to its enormity. Finally, to Lindsay, my light, my love, this could not have happened without you. I dedicate this to you, A and S and all that we are and will be together.

To account for and acknowledge the generosity of shared lessons taught and learned, the offerings of love, friendship and mentorship is both impossible and inadequate to itself. Nonetheless it is sometimes in the face of these impossibilities that attempts become worthy and meaningful. I hope that is the case here. TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. ABSTRACT ii

2. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii

3. INTRODUCTION: NUCLEAR EVERYDAYS 1 Everyday Disasters 1 War in the New Mexico Desert 5 Sovereignty and the Exception: “War Without War” 9 Bodily Proliferations 20 Proliferations of the Middle: Strategies, Methodologies, Culture, Writing 29 Chapter Summaries 38

4. CHAPTER 1 — ATOMIC HAUNTOLOGIES: SPECTRALITY AND AFFECT IN NUCLEAR MEMORIAL 41 Reagan crashes the Party 41 Spectral Grounds: Spirit Possessions as National Spectacles 45 The Bomb and the Bombshell 68 National Security and the Sensation(al): Nuclear Public Spheres 84

5. CHAPTER 2 — MONSTERS, REPLICAS, CYBORGS, IMPOSTORS AND DOUBLES: PROLIFERATIONS OF INDISTINCTION IN THE NUCLEAR PUBLIC SPHERE 94 Prologue—Replicants and Doubles in the Nuclear Public Sphere 94 Part 1—Sovereignty’s Exceptions: Indistinction as Outcome 97 1.1—Introduction: Virtual Proliferation/Proliferating the Virtual 97 1.2—Indistinction 103 1.3—The Monster 108 Part 2—Where’s Little Boy?: Replicas and Rebirths 112 2.1—Absence 112 2.2—Detailed Proliferations/proliferations in Detail 117 2.3—Mimetic (Nuclear) Proliferations 119 2.4—Little Boy Returns 121 2.5—Male, Machine and Techno-Births 127 Part 3—Aggregations of Indistinction: Monster/Victim/Impostor/Survivor 137 3.1—Blast from the Past 137 3.2—the Impostor/Survivor and the Uncanny 141 3.3—Too Late: negation, monstrosity and potential 149 Part 4—Conclusion 151 6. CHAPTER 3 — NUCLEAR (PUBLIC) SECRECY: THE SECRET’S SEDUCTIONS 155 Prologue—Front Page Secrets 155 Part 1—Introduction Telling the Secret 156 Part 2—Anthropology’s (Nuclear) Secrets 157 Part 3—Strategies of the Secret 164

3.1 —The Work of the Secret 164 3.2—Spectacular Secrecy 166 3.3—Tracking the Secret (at war) 168 Part 4—Nuclear (Secret) Leakages 172 4.1—Behind the Fence 172 4.2—“In the Name Of... The Fence and the Rocket 183 Part 5—The Secret’s Insurgencies 195 5.1 Trinity and the Secret 195 5.2 Floyd and Allen 198

7. CHAPTER 4 — TRACING THE ABSENCE AND PRESENCE OF HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI IN AMERICA AS SENSUOUS ENCOUNTER: NOTES ON (NUCLEAR) RUIN 204

8. CONCLUSION: NUCLEAR SEASONS 268 Nuclear Winters: Indistinction and Capture 1991 272

Summers 1945,2005,2025: endless sunny days 273

Autumn 2006: Necro-ethnographies 274 Spring 2004-2011: lively proliferations 275 LIST OF FIGURES

Fig 1.1 p.44

Fig 2.1 p.94 Fig 2.2 p.l 13 Fig 2.3 p. 122 Fig 2.4 p. 139

Fig 3.1 p. 178 Fig 3.2 p. 186 Fig 3.3 p. 190

Fig 4.1 p.205 Fig 4.2 p.206 Fig 4.3 p.239 Introduction: Nuclear Every days

Everyday Disasters

A sad fact, of course, of adult life is that you see the very things you ’I! never adapt to coming toward you on the horizon. You see them as the problems they are, you worry like hell about them, you make provisions, take precautions, fashion adjustments; you tell yourself you ’11 have to change your way o f doing things. Only you don't. You can't. Somehow it’s already too late. And maybe it’s even worse than that: maybe the thing you can see coming from far away is not the real thing, the thing that scares you, but its aftermath. And what you’ve feared will happen has already taken place. Richard Ford, Independence Day (1995: 5)

My summer afternoons in Los Alamos, New Mexico were marked with brief but sometimes violent outbursts from the sky. Clouds would gather up against the mesa’s blunt faces and roll up the sides of the Sangre de Cristo mountains in whose palm the town sits. The air, rapidly cooling as it rose formed thunderheads; the storms would cast their shadows and unleash where, a minute before, the sky had appeared unblemished.

Three or four angry minutes later it would be gone, almost as if it never happened, unless you caught a glimpse beneath you of the gleaming and steaming pavement, before the water seemed to recede into its cracks, retreating beneath the heat. Or, perhaps, you might look up and see the metal grey caboose of the storm chugging away towards the horizon.

I came to see these elusive interruptions of punctuated intensity as moments of potential that disturbed the otherwise smoothness of everyday life in the town, signs of alternative possibilities. But it was the sense of these storm’s uncanny (un)reality that struck me, as events that could only be experienced in the traces of their absence if one was quick enough or lucky enough to pay attention to the body’s margins above and

1 below. Each day’s storm approached with a sense of uncanny repetition, a strong inclination of deja vu, the already seen and been. Similarly it then passed with an equally unsettling speed, prompting an impossible response, a desire to capture or gather up the traces of what had just passed without leaving evidence of its passage except the lingering sense of having been missed or passed over by something momentous, its enormity elusive yet nonetheless threatening in its simultaneous prickliness and speciality.

Fig.0.1—Gathering storm over Los Alamos, New Mexico Photo by the Author

Otherwise, the sun seems to shine constantly in New Mexico. It is one of those places where visitor board or tourist authority pamphlets quote appealing solar statistics to retired RV’ers like “320 days of sun on average each year.” The sun must be taken as the taken-for-granted reality. The sunny state of New Mexico constructs itself as a spectacle1, and by this I mean a mythic construction of desire, a series of intentional exposures that mask violent underpinnings. The sun and the landscape in New Mexico become catalysts for this spectacle catching up the body in the warmth of its embrace and positioning it in wide panoramas steeped in the illusions of simultaneously empty land and territorial mastery. Tourists flock to the state for its weather, the landscape, its history, quaintly built in adobe, the charming otherness of the Pueblos and the funky spirituality of Santa Fe. But these postcard images of New Mexico as a magical destination for bodily and spiritual rejuvenation are only the privileged counter-images of its abject others. Sometimes the sun shines too bright and, if possible, too hard and seems to cover up something that lies beyond, shelter must be taken.

Nuclear weapons are also part of the everyday in New Mexico, ubiquitous, but also easy to forget and take-for-granted. But sometimes these nuclear everydays in New

Mexico pop out of the background, temporarily reframing the everyday as a space of crackling intensity. This is an everyday, to invoke Maurice Blanchot (1987), where both everything and nothing happens. Both confirming and contrary to the popular sense of the everyday as weighted down in its sometimes spectacular banality, Blanchot positions the everyday as a multivalent space-time whose primary feature is escape. In this

1 Here I am following Guy Debord’s notion of the spectacle as a set of social relations that orient us towards the visual in the place of the material world itself, an orientation that ultimately serves to dehumanize. Debord writes: “Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is an affirmation of appearances and an identification of all human social life with appearances. But a critique that grasps the spectacle's essential character reveals it to be a visible negation of life - a negation that has taken on a visible form” (1994: 9).

3 doubled sense the everyday is something so imperceptible in its ordinariness that it escapes and is lost to us before we can register its presence, in this way we know about its presence only through the rare perceptions of its vanishing. On the flip-side, the everyday, for Blanchot, is simultaneously a plateau or platform imminence, in which we ourselves can get lost, a potentializing disorientation, which makes possible moments of escape from forms of regularity, control and capture which mark the biopolitical present

(Blanchot 1987: 14-15). The two forms of escape which mark the everyday are not alien to each other but are co-dependent and co-indicative, Blanchot writes: “Always the two sides meet: the daily with its tedious side, painful and sordid (the amorphous and the stagnant) and the inexhaustible, irrecusable, always unfinished daily that escapes forms or structure” (Blanchot 1987: 13).

Is it any coincidence, then, that Blanchot (1995), the wanderer through the everyday, would also meditate on the nature of disaster, whose contours seem to warp in and out of the presence-absence of the everyday? The disaster too is imminent. It resides in those spaces of capture and escape, precisely the spaces of the everyday, where the disaster takes hold and eludes. These spaces, the traces of which this ethnography strives to hold on to, momentarily slowing them down, are marked by a violence that is both already passed and yet is always to come. In this sense the violence of the disaster is always lingering in the uncertain escapes of the everyday, both a precipice and a vanishing, a history and a promise of unanticipated return all at the same time. “When the disaster comes upon us,” Blanchot writes, “it does not come. The disaster is its imminence, but since the future, as we conceive of it in the order of lived time, belongs to the disaster, the disaster has always already withdrawn or dissuaded it” (1995: 1-2). Like the sun too, disasters envelope the body, hold it and penetrate it with a thousand different rays.

I came, with time, to recognize the signs of a coming storm, to anticipate its gathering force and eventual outburst, obscuring the sunny disposition of the sky and exposing the body to a totally different, albeit temporary, sensorial spectrum. In the

American nuclear public sphere, the uncanny lurks around every turn. Like the weather in Los Alamos, the epicenter of the American nuclear complex, the uncanny, too, flashes up in moments of great force and impact only to wither away and retreat in the next moment.

War in the New Mexico Desert In the New Mexico desert past wars merge with present threats and the nation’s military- industrial complex chugs along behind the mirror of itself as spectacle. There, the ongoing research and production of nuclear weapons at Los Alamos and Sandia National

Laboratories acts as backdrop against which the reels of other films continually loop.

Overlaid upon one another, their pictures and narratives are unclear, historical eras merge and depart from one another with seeming ease, memories mix and contradict, figures separated by time and distance appear together in the same frame. The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, seems both to have occurred and not.

They were justified or not or both. Nuclear weapons appear in the same instance as icons of fear and the insanity of war and as icons of the preservation of peace and freedom.2

2 For more on the ways that nuclear weapons are framed as guarantors of peace and security see Gusterson 1996 and Masco 2006.

5 More than all of this, however, the wars of the past and present have merged with the miasma of their own doubled spectacular forms, transformed via museums and tourist events, nuclear weapons and the nation’s nuclear history are stripped of their politics, aestheticized, made eerie materializations of Walter Benjamin’s (1968) warning at the end of his famous essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that the aestheticization of the political could only mean one thing: war. But not war as it had previously been known, understood and interpreted.

Modernity and the accompanying transformations of the subject—the link between aesthetics and anaesthetics—meant that war could now be waged as a spectacle, not unlike the visual hegemony promised by the panoramas and phenatikiscopes so popular in 19th Century exhibitions, something to be viewed for sensorial excitement (see

Mitchell 1988; Crary 1990; Buck-Morss 1992). So much so that war, Benjamin wrote, had become something so alienated from the realm of human experience that it was now possible to “watch our own destruction and enjoy it.” Benjamin’s elegiac warning mourns these future celebrations of nuclear ingenuity, already encoded in the inertia of culture, prior to the bomb. But Benjamin’s prescience points to something else, perhaps deeper, perhaps just parallel or alternative. First, he hints at the ways in which war and spectatorship would increasingly become intimate, entangled, not simply positioned more closely together but part of one another, our scopic regimes trained and produced to the needs of war and vice versa.3 This weaving of the visual technologies of war-making

(screens, scopes, missile-mounted cameras) with those of war-watching (television and

3 See further: Virilio (1984, 1994); Feldman (1994, 1997).

6 computer screens) to the point of indistinction4 gives rise to a second, perhaps more radical, avenue to explore embedded in Benjamin’s statement. By citing enjoyment rather than fear, shock, sadness or dismay as the possible or probable outcome of this form of spectatorship Benjamin anticipates the wholesale reorientation of the kinds of experience and affects that war, spectacularized, will produce in the future. In doing this

Benjamin suggests that the complex logics which tie bodies to war, and the effects and affects that these ties produce will be upended and reoriented. In its attention to war in out-of-the-way-places and the ways in which bodies move through the sites is, in part, an attempt to take Benjamin’s injunction seriously.

Consequently, in 2004 I went to New Mexico to research the ways in which sovereignty and the ends of war can be traced in the forms of spectacle, tourism, and memorialization surrounding the Cold War and atomic and nuclear weapons. There, because of the concentration of America’s nuclear complex in the state, a series of museums, memorial events and tourist destinations oriented around the nation’s nuclear narrative, have emerged in greater numbers than perhaps anywhere else in the United

States. Over a little more than a year of research spent at the National Atomic Museum in Albuquerque, the Bradbury Museum of Science in Los Alamos and various nuclear- themed memorial events and tourist excursions, I examined the strategies of nuclear spectacle and attempted to track the ethereal clues of bodily encounter with such forms of power. The transformation of the nation’s atomic and nuclear history and arsenal into a site of spectacle to be consumed on holiday also, I felt, presented a new and unique

4 Soldiers training on video games meant for home entertainment; children playing games that mimic combat; soldiers sitting in computer rooms operating remote control drones half a world away via joystick.

7 challenge to the discourse and practice of anti-nuclear activism by working to sever nuclear weapons from the sense of threat and fear which had always surrounded them.

And so, another branch of this fieldwork was spent interacting with activists in New

Mexico and elsewhere, trying to discern the ways in which nuclear spectacles—by normalizing nuclear weapons and attempting to dissipate their inherent violence—tested activist narratives and political models. Here too, I tried to pay attention to the bodily narratives that were simultaneously emergent and disappearing, to see the ways in which the circulation of political discourses sometimes lodged themselves in the body with the force of a smack, silently registering like a spreading bruise. While these activist narratives are present in various places throughout this work, this aspect of my research is not the specific focus of the current work and as such does not find its fullest expression here. The reasons for this go beyond limitations of space and time. Activist politics are emergent around sites of nuclear spectacle but only nascently so. In these engagements they rely upon and engage with a representational politics, based on modes of visibility— a demand that photographs of post-atomic Hiroshima and Nagasaki be included in museum displays, for example—upon which left-politics relies and that I wished to avoid. My assumption that the two worlds of public nuclear politics—nuclear tourism and nuclear activism—were naturally and easily conjoined turned out, of course, to be much more complicated and uneasy. It is my intention that they will achieve a proper elaboration in a future work.

8 Sovereignty and the Exception: “War Without War” I was most interested in identifying what aporias, moments of absence or intensity, denial, distractions and places of erasure could, paradoxically, reveal about the sovereign enterprise at work in the United States, especially in spaces and times of banal recreation like museums and tourist sites and what these off-the-beaten-track moments could tell us about the disappearance and consequent permanence of the war in everyday life. The concept of war’s permanence—which stems from the sovereign underpinnings of war, and the sticky relationship of sovereignty to its exception—is a much discussed yet tenaciously and purposely elusive concept.5 War’s permanence is most notably marked not by its overabundance and excess, by the way it blots out the sun. The trace of permanence, perhaps counter-intuitively, cannot be identified in all-consumingthereness, but must be understood as a form of disappearance, melting into the everyday; permanence is the triumph of the spectacle. Consequently—and counter to a representational logic—tracing aporias, hauntings, moments of erasure, disappearance, and affect, in their own impermanence, does more to mark out and track the elusive lines of the politics of sovereign nuclear spectacles than any other approach.

But the horizon of war presents some questions that need to be addressed. This is because if we hold on to the idea of nuclear weapons as the ultimate defensive weapons, weapons of security then, if nothing else, is war a legitimate, indeed the legitimate, state violence? It was predominantly war that Carl Schmitt had in mind as the circumstance of the exception when he wrote “Sovereign is he who decides the exception” (1985: 5).

5 See especially Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004).

9 Wars, according to the familiar Weberian narrative6, are the justifiable exception— undertaken as they are both in the “people’s” name and for their benefit—either in their defense or, offensively, to improve the fortune’s of the nation through conquest or plunder.

Since then, the legitimacy of the war as a sanctioned, exceptional form of state violence has been thoroughly interrogated and challenged. But more important are questions not of the exceptional nature of the exception, but, precisely its unexceptionality. Into what arena does the permanent state of exception throw war and with it the state’s use of violence and its relationship to it citizens? Foucault thought that the relationship between war and politics had fundamentally changed in the twentieth century and that Clausewitz’s formula—war is the continuation of politics by other means—would more accurately reflect the current state of affairs if reversed. Now,

Foucault argued,politics was the continuation of war by other means (2003: 15). Tilly

(1985) has argued that contrary to perception wars do not act as external irritants or threats to the organic relationship between a state and its citizens. Wars he argues, are an internal and integral mechanism in the very formation of this relationship. Using an analogy linking the state with organized crime gangs, Tilly argues both entities coerce co­ operation, offering “protection for a danger [wars, in the case of the state] they also provide” (1985: 171). Wars, then, are not instances of the exception, but specters of threat, which underlie and, in fact, help found, the relationship between the state and its subjects. In the space of the “exception become the rule” the meaning of categories war

6 It was Weber (1964: 154) who famously described the state as maintaining the monopoly on violence.

10 and peace, soldier and civilian begin to fall away, as Massumi writes: “war and non-war are getting harder and harder to tell apart” (1998: 41). Or as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it:

“sovereignty in the exception means we think sovereignty without sovereignty, thus we have war without war...” (1993: 51-2).7 Interrogating sovereignty and war in the space of the exception changes the conditions of inquiry significantly. Paradoxically, war fades from view in the space of the exception where wartime is the sole temporal-historical condition.

In her study of the systems of sovereignty that characterized the two competing superpowers of the Twentieth Century, Susan Buck-Morss (2000), describes the state of exception as a “wild zone of power”. Modem sovereignty maintains, she writes: “a blind spot, a zone in which power is above the law and thus, at least potentially, a terrain of terror. This wild zone of power, by its very structure impossible to domesticate, is intrinsic to mass-democratic regimes” (Buck-Morss 2000: 2-3).8 This unregulated space—frontier-like in the primacy of violent power—Buck-Morss argues, coagulates and begins to take logical shape when we begin to think of this wild zone as a “war zone”.

Sovereign power thus maintains simultaneous zones of interiority and exteriority intimately related to one another, dependent on one another in fact, which, at the same time, could not be further apart. The law and, in fact, the entire edifice of the State tacks

7 See also Rosalind Morris (2002). Morris discusses the relationship between the categories of “just” and “civilized” wars and the ways in which the latter is distinguished by its own distinction between war and not-war. Morris discusses the ways in which the contemporary “war on terrorism” has been cast as a just war that is not in fact a war at all, claiming a moral justification while at the same time dismissing its own existence 8 See also Weber and de Vries, this is what they refer to as the “zone of indetermination between violence and the law”(1998: 5).

11 back and forth between these zones, dwelling simultaneously in instances of propriety and order and untamed events of excess. So, the power of the sovereign to suspend the legal norms and rules by which it is constituted is actually an unqualified power. Schmitt calls this the power of the decision and writes of it: “the decision frees itself from all normative ties and becomes in the true sense absolute” (Schmitt 1985: 12).

The juridical power or ability invested in the sovereign to wage war, to order the citizens in whose name it rules to a certain death, is the foundation from which springs the sovereign’s (the State’s) monopoly of violence, its ability to exercise terror over or against those, in the state of exception, from which the sovereign’s legitimacy, at least officially, comes. This is the wild zone of power, and it leads Buck-Morss to conclude that the naming, the identification of an enemy, an adversary, an Other, “is the act of sovereignty, indeed the political act par excellence” (Buck Morss 2000: 9, author’s emphasis). Weber’s claim that declaring and waging war is the prime privilege of the sovereign begins to take on a different shape in this light. This claim no longer serves as

Weber intended it to—as the only way for an orderly and rational society to exist.

Instead, seen through the lens of the exception, the claiming of this privilege by the sovereign is an essential capture of society under the sign of absolute power wrapped in the veneer of rational and good government.

Before Foucault alerted us to the same thing, Schmitt noted that state and society had interpenetrated one another to such a degree that the political no longer made sense as a designation fit for the entity of the state as such. Since at least the nineteenth century and reaching its zenith in the twentieth, Schmitt noted that now, “everything is at least

12 potentially political” (1976: 22). Reaching for a method of defining the political in the era of what he called the [twentieth century] “total state”—in which the political could no longer be identified as that which has to do with the state—Schmitt argued that the political had been reduced to a moral judgment. In fact, since the political was no longer definable in the institutions of the social (the state, the economy, religion etc.), the political became a tool of the “the final distinction”: namely the distinction between friend and enemy (Schmitt 1976: 26). This distinction—the naming of the other or enemy—was transcendent of other distinctions—moral, economic, aesthetic—as Schmitt argued, the enemy need not appear as an enemy in any of these senses and yet still appears or is made to appear as an absolute foe or other. What made the enemy other independent of these distinctions was existential, and need not have to be quantified as it was the word of the sovereign. In other words, the naming of the enemy is the act which brings the collective—on which (democratic) sovereignty is said to be based—into being.

The problem, however, is that there is a gap, a temporal disjuncture between the naming of the enemy and the calling into being of the collective that disrupts the logic on which sovereignty rests. That is, it is only in naming the enemy by the sovereign that the collective is constituted, placing the sovereign prior to the collective which it represents and from which it is supposed to have emerged. To illustrate, Derrida (2002) notes this specific problem in relation the United States Declaration of Independence. The signers of the Declaration of Independence signed on behalf of the people, “We, the people” they wrote; they sign for the people from whom their authority to sign arises. However, “the people” did not come into existence as “a people” until the signers signed. Thus Derrida

13 identifies what he calls a “deferral” between the people and the signers, the latter having, in essence, assigned themselves a power that is outside the juridical order, the very order, in this case, that they were to call into being with their signatures (2002: 50). This powerfully illustrates the paradox of sovereignty, the state of exception, as well as points towards some of the troubling notions that haunt or mirror “democratic” modernity.

In naming an enemy then, the sovereign calls the collective, “the people”, into being.9 However, as identifying the Other is then the act of sovereignty, popular challenges of the sovereign can simply be labeled “enemy acts” (Buck-Morss 2000: 9).

In other words, because of the temporal and logical disjuncture by which the people are actually constituted by the sovereign and by which the state of exception actually founds juridical rule, the people find themselves unable to topple, to challenge even, the sovereign that exists or is constituted under the democratic legitimacy of the people. The conclusion we can draw from this, Buck-Morss decides, is that the legitimate claim to the monopoly of violence by the sovereign is not and can never be democratic, thus the paradox of democratic sovereignty’s ability “to claim as legitimate the non-democratic exercise of power” (2000: 10). Modernity then must be seen as characterized by the tension of subjects who face the “wild zone” of power over which they themselves have no sovereignty, but which, in naming itself the legitimate founder and guarantor of the juridical order and of “the people”, has absolute power over the life of its subjects.

The importance of the concept of the state of exception is that it exposes an essentially unqualified violence that lays at the very centre of the system of sovereignty

9 For more on the constitution of the people as “A People” see the section in Agamben (2000) entitled “People”.

14 which in turn claims, falsely as it turns out, the law as its basis for governance. Walter

Benjamin recognized the coexistence of violence and the law early in the Twentieth century, when in his Critique o f Violence, he wrote that its task was to explain how the two—law and violence—were related and how they interpenetrated and helped define one another (1978: 278). For Benjamin, violence performed two functions for the state or the sovereign, the first was “a law-making character” and the second was “a law- preserving character” (1978: 284). What Benjamin wanted to reveal was that the law was not—as it was posited—a regulatory system for the constraint of violence. Rather, it was the other way around, violence founded the law, which acted to alienate the means of violence from all but the powerful. In a similar fashion to the sovereign invoking the exception, the law uses violence to enforce itself. The institution of the police exemplifies this paradox, Benjamin argued. The police and their actions in a “spectral mixture” straddle both functions of the law—making and preserving—as such they are both inside (preserving) and outside (making) the law simultaneously. What Buck-Morss calls the “wild zone of power”, sovereign power in the state of exception, is encapsulated in police actions where “‘security’ becomes reason enough for police intervention where no legal situation exists, this marks the point where the state can no longer guarantee through the legal system the legal ends it desires” (Benjamin 1978: 287).10

10 In a striking example of the way in which the line between war and police actions have become blurred in the extreme, on the morning of November 21, 2003 on CBC Radiol a report described the way in which journalists were now becoming “embedded” within riot and “swat” police forces as they had been in the latest war in Iraq, only this time at the Miami meetings of the negotiations for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Describing this, the embedded journalist stated that the police with which she was reporting, “were police who were really trained for war”.

15 To reiterate, for Schmitt, sovereignty is essentially rooted or exposed in a moment of choice: the decision which the sovereign makes to invoke the exception. In the moment of emergency—for it is a moment, no matter how elongated it becomes, it is one perpetual present, an instance of temporal suspension—the sovereign exercises a power that verges on the absolute. For Schmitt, if we recall, the state of exception can only be invoked in a moment of extreme threat or danger to the existence of the sovereign.

Foucault also says that sovereignty hinges on a moment of selection—although he phrases it in altogether starker terms than Schmitt did. For Schmitt, the power of the sovereign was necessary and good, following Hobbes, his writing on the state of exception was meant as nothing more than to lay out the legalistic intricacies of the suspension of the law. For Foucault’s work the power of sovereignty can be reduced to the power over life and death (1984: 258; 2003: 241).

In his genealogies, sovereign power occupies a complex niche. On one level,

Foucault uses the term to describe the kind of power that belonged to the Prince; a power that is possessed and exercised in specific forms of repression (see 1984, pp. 258-272).11

Sovereign power existed in an era where the power of the prince was absolute, yet whose resources were limited; the repressive power it exercised was both harsh and fragile. Its ultimate decision is the power over life and death, weighted, Foucault writes, heavily in favour of death for “it is at the moment that the sovereign can kill that he exercises the right to life” (2003: 241). The hold of the sovereign over his subject’s body though was limited, exercised in a fairly crude way through torture and execution. This is why

11 In this way, Foucault is able to contrast sovereignty so startlingly to discipline and biopower, both productive forms o f power, power that produce and incite rather than repress, deny and prevent. Foucault finally characterizes sovereign power as the “right to take life or let live” (2003:

240).

As is well known, Foucault’s genealogy of power leaves behind the blunt repressive power of the sovereign in favour of discipline and eventually his biopolitical formulation. It is not that sovereignty disappears as such, but that it “implanted itself into the juridical code” (Foucault 2003: 37). What Foucault wishes to emphasize is that forms of power do not disappear as such, rather they are overtaken by more virulent, more pervasive forms. The scaffolding of sovereignty was not taken down but used instead as the basis for the formation and exercise of the new forms of power: “sovereignty’s old right to take life or let live was, although not replaced, but complemented by a new right which did not erase the old right but does penetrate it, permeate it” (Foucault 2003: 241).

This new right was a product of a focus on bodies, not as individuals but in terms of their significance as statistics, as populations; it was a product of a focus on habits, hygiene and the practices of living. This biopolitical blueprint of power was to “make live and let die”.

Connecting biopolitics to the concept of sovereignty takes place most notably in recent work by Agamben (1998), Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004) and others.12 They are able to do this—combine the concepts of sovereignty with biopower—in part through rectifying an ambiguousness alive in Foucault’s work on the subject. As is well known and as I have already written, Foucault was careful to reject successive models of power.

Rather, he sketches a diagrammatic, relational program wherein one form of power gives

12 See also Mbembe (2003) and Buck-Morss (2000) among others.

17 way to another as the dominant form of power, while nevertheless continuing to exist in their own right. For Foucault, forms of power overlapped one another. Nonetheless, the force of Foucault’s work seems to speak differently; as much as he is at pains to reject linear constructions of history neatly aligned with the passage of time, in leaving sovereignty out of his formulations of contemporary power he effects a collapse of sovereign power “the form” with sovereign power “the era”. For Agamben as well as

Hardt and Negri, the divorce of sovereign power from biopolitics is untenable and inaccurate, they are unable to ignore the ongoing force of Right, of power siphoned through politico-juridical apparatuses yet not contained or defined by them. Both point to this moment in Foucault’s work as a way of insisting upon the recuperation of sovereignty as a form of power.

In Homo Sacer (1998) Giorgio Agamben argues that the politicization of “naked” or “bare life”13—the event of the biopolitical—constitutes the critical event of modernity.

Taking up his argument from the idea of the abstraction of politics and power from the everyday Real, he contends: “It is even likely that if politics today seems to be passing through a lasting eclipse, this is because politics has failed to reckon with this foundational event of modernity” (Agamben 1998: 4). For Agamben, one of the basic mistakes of modem political theory has been to disengage or treat as separate the biopolitical and the “juridico-institutional” models of power. Rather the two threads hold

lj That is the, very act of living; “bare life” connotes simple biological life nothing more. It can be opposed to “political existence” or “citizenship”, in their broadest definitions, as that which “bare life” strips from the subject. The opposition between bare life and political existence can be extended to the following oppositional pairs: inhuman/human, living being/speaking being, vegetative life/conscious life, the Muselmann/the witness, (see Agamben 1998,2000).

18 the key to each other, their separation only leading to greater befuddlement. It is the production of the biopolitical body which, Agamben argues, constitutes the central activity of modem sovereign power.

In the postmodern society of control, Hardt and Negri argue, following Deleuze

(1992), that sovereignty becomes mapped to capitalism, and this marks both the apogee and the dissolution of transcendent sovereign power. Concomitant with the dissolution of demarcating boundaries and the generalization of disciplinary logics, is the merger of sovereign power with biopower. Its dissolution is not its disappearance; its dissolution is rather paradoxically its apogee. To be more specific, as sovereign power becomes one with biopower, it spreads out among the population, implanting and concerning itself with the maintenance and care of bodies. Foucault’s, by now well-known, descriptions express the techniques by which biopower works to “maintain averages, establish homeostasis, create a norm, regularize” (2003: 245). Consequently sovereign power can be understood as a sophisticated security mechanism—a productive machinery of power oriented towards the maintenance or order, stasis and balance. As such, spectacle becomes the main form of politics because it is controlled, politics is no longer the unknown, the possible, the potential, it is just another mechanism for the prevention of rupture, the maintenance of order. As Hardt and Negri write, the policing powers of biopolitical sovereignty: “...continually and extensively accomplish the miracle of the subsumption of singularities in the totality, of the will of all into the general will” (2000:

87). As sovereign power merges with the biopolitical to become what Empire’s authors refer to as the “imperial machine,” politics disappears, or enters, as Agamben writes into

19 an ever murkier “zone of indistinction” (Agamben 1998: 4). Societies of control then mark the beginning of sovereignty wherein the state of exception has become the rule, where to fulfill Walter Benjamin’s prophecy, the state of emergency has become permanent.

As the state of exception becomes the rule and politics departs the enclosures of disciplinary society and enters more and more into a “zone of indistinction” the biopolitical production of docile bodies continues apace. Indeed, the end of disciplinary enclosures and their replacement by the society of control, in Deleuze’s formulation, can be made parallel with the replacement of the juridico-political order with a generalized state of exception. In the society of control, then, wherein the traditional institutions and sites of the political have either disappeared or been made impotent as they are transformed into the simulacrum of spectacle, the biopolitical production of docile bodies not only continues but becomes the central endeavour of power. In other words, sovereign power becomes at once more diffuse—stripped as it is of the institutions of the political, which contain, mediate and structure it—and more specific in that it casts its eye directly upon the body, no longer considered as the citizen, the body of political existence but rather the biological body in its barest (and most violent) essence, as “naked life”.

Bodily Proliferations Sovereignty in the exception forms, I argue, the fundamental lens through which we must understand and situate nuclear spectacles, memorials and tourist encounters. While they appear benign and inconsequential instances of national memorialization, the inclination

20 towards disregard is the seduction machine of sovereign anaesthetics. Indeed, it is this peculiar and haunting status of in-betweeness—between politics and entertainment, between unlimited violence and absolute peace—that marks them out as such. And so it was that in these places I mostly encountered the shadow of war, or found clues to it in beauty queens, in tourists, at fashion shows and in science museums, everywhere, that is, except in places normally associated with war: battlefields and military installations or even war memorials and war museums. I sought to find an afterimage in everyday objects and spaces, in conversations and museum displays, something that might reveal what has increasingly come to be hidden, the pervasive intrusion of war into everyday life. I found, on the one hand, that the trace of war in the emergent complex of nuclear memorialization and display was largely absent. Instead, science, technology, history and tourism have come to take the place of the memory, interpretation and assessment of war.

On the other hand, however, I saw the hazy outlines and the dusty fragments of war, its ruined leftovers and tenaciously violent remnants almost everywhere. It is the elusive bodily experience of this tension between presence and absence, between immanence and transcendence—a tension that is always haunted by the phantom of its oscillating famine and abundance—that this dissertation seeks to address.

The twisting and elusive forms of war form one backdrop for this dissertation.

The de-linking of nuclear weapons and the nation’s nuclear history from the discourse and narrative of war in the United States is, I argue, one primary goal of nuclear spectacles. Contrary to this, I understand and situate these spectacles and events as moments and eruptions of war. I resist the urge to characterize these spectacles as

21 “central” to the new war enterprise on the premise that war itself has become an almost completely decentralized and dissipated force, spread out evenly throughout social space

(Hardt and Negri 2004). No more hierarchies of war’s appearances, only a set of singular eruptions that mark depressing equivalencies, the battlefield and the museum, the cockpit and the video game console (the game boy), the target and everyday. The suturing of the discourse and understanding of war and its violence to the series of nuclear memorial, exhibitionary and tourist excursions I studied form a central goal of this essay. A reconceptualization of the sites and sights of war must lead us to examine the sovereign biopolitics that define the new permanent war.

These places claim their status, of exalted memorialization, exhibition, celebration in the wake of the claimed success of the nuclear deterrent (in which the Hiroshima and

Nagasaki blasts are included and thereby permanently justified and simultaneously deferred). On the contrary, however, this project proceeds from the premise that these nuclear public spheres are the logical ruins of the nuclear experimentgoing haywire. I see these places as mired in the intensity of war based simultaneously on the imminence of fear and the promises of security, which together constitute the ongoing event of nuclear apocalypse, one that is ongoing; the paradoxical traces of a strategy that continues to wage nuclear war (less explosive but no less violent) through the spectre of threat, the ever-possible fear of complete effacement mated to the spectacle of power and the illusions of belonging, encasement and bunkered-citizenship that such spectacles disseminate. Only in the most marginal senses, then, can nuclear weapons be considered

22 strategic weapons of war.14 In other words they, no matter how well targeted or aimed, throw out all distinctions of soldier and civilian, military or otherwise. This logic is magnified by the geopolitical structure that demands that might be matched with similar might and so the nuclear arms race has proliferated15 to the point where nuclear weapons exist adequate to extinguish all life on earth many times over. Finally, the doctrine of

Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) guarantees—a logic which, again, persists despite the rhetoric which positions it as a Cold War relic—that nuclear weapons cannot ever be used strategically or in any contained manner. Hence, the simple existence of nuclear weapons, which ensures the ongoing potential of their use, holds human life in disdain.

Above all else then, and guaranteeing all other strategies and manipulations of power, nuclear weapons cast all human life into the category of “bare life” (Agamben 1998); that is, life stripped of all meaning except the very fact of its biological existence: survival.

This, then, forms the basis of the relationship between the State—which holds the keys and maintains the arsenal of nuclear weapons and carefully guards the knowledge around them—and the bodies of the multitudes, without prejudice citizens and non-citizens alike.

However, it is not simply nuclear weapons that position life as “bare life” but the proliferation of these weapons as cultural artifacts and recreational endeavours. Their symbolic proliferation, I argue, as items on display for public consumption, does not alter their fundamental purpose, which is to instil in the citizen’s body the docility and

14 President George W. Bush’s administration’s desire to develop just such a “strategic” nuclear weapon, such as the so-called “bunker-buster” or mini-nuke is not withstanding here. This new research represents the just hidden desire to employ nuclear weapons at all costs. “Strategic” nuclear weapons are only another way to sever the popular impression between these weapons and total destruction. 15 To argue that the arms race has come to an end, an end that has resulted in the conclusion of the Cold War in favour of the United States, is not supported by the facts of the simple existence and continued research and development of nuclear weapons in the United States and elsewhere.

23 malleability that emanates from the awareness, even vaguely, of the ultimate threat: annihilation. In other words, it is a kind of proliferation of death, a death in life, or a multiplicity of death’s in life and its enjoyments. Writing about the biopolitical nature of power to colonize all aspects of life and musing about the possibility of an externality to power, Deleuze provides a harrowing account of the limits of this capture:

And if we must attain a life that is the power of the outside, what tells us that this outside is not a terrifying void and that this life which seems to put upon a resistance, is not just the simple distribution within the void of ‘slow, partial and progressive’ deaths? We can no longer even say that death transforms life into a destiny, an ‘indivisible and decisive’ event, but rather that death becomes multiplied and differentiated in order to bestow on life the particular features, and consequently the truths, which life believes arise from the resistance of death. What remains, then, if not to pass through all these deaths preceding the great limit of death itself, deaths which even afterward continue? Life henceforth consists only of taking one’s place in the great cortege o f ‘One dies.’ (1988: 95).

Ultimately, there need not be nuclear weapons in order for there to exist and reproduce the nuclear threat. There need only be the representation of these weapons.

But therein lies the problem. In attempting to get bodies to interact with nuclear weapons as benign cultural artifacts it tries to do too much and reveals itself as incomplete and, I think, incompleteable. In this sense the designation of bare life is always rooted in the optimism of power which is by design always an overstatement.16 It both attempts to insert and maintain bodies in a state of exception, (holding them in a doubled exclusion, making them part of the system only through the status of their maintained and permanent exclusion—an exclusion that is effected in the name of the citizenry itself) while at the same time intimately caressing them with the enticing but ultimately empty promises of their inclusion (capture) as citizens. In other words nuclear spectacles both threaten and, simultaneously (try to) deny that threat with the promise or

16 For further elaboration or qualification o f Agamben’s work on bare life and the camp see Hardt and Dumm (2000).

24 illusion of the security those weapons produce. In the aporic space between these two objectives, the body is prone to wander and find gaps and moments of incompleteness where the body’s emergent potential strains the threads of capture.

Deleuze, writing about Foucault, explains the relationship of life to power is both uneven yet ultimately uncontrollable, notably because life and power belong to the same conditions of possibility. “When power becomes biopower resistance becomes the power of life, a vital power that cannot be confined within species, environment or the paths of a particular diagram” (Deleuze 1988: 92). To acknowledge this means seeing the body and seeing the body differently at that. Rather than a fully-formed and rooted organism moving through the world that acts and then reacts in turn, I understand the body as something always in a state of becoming, co-extensive with the world around it. Seen this way the body is always moving among and between multiple and shifting states, its fundamental condition is its uncertainty and potential; it can only ever located as “in­ transition”. It is never fully formed, captured or liberated, instead it is a cacophony of contradictions, simultaneities and unfoldings. In their well-known formulation, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe this body as the Body without Organs or BwO. How is the

BwO actualized they ask?

Dismantling the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body to connections that presupposes an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity, and territories and deterritorializations measured with the craft of a surveyor. Actually dismantling the organism is no more difficult than dismantling the other two strata, significance and subjectification. Significance clings to the soul just as the organism clings to the body... And how can we unhook ourselves from the points of subjectification that secure us, nail us down to a dominant reality? Tearing the conscious away from the subject in order to make it a means of exploration, tearing the unconscious away from significance and interpretation in order to make it a veritable production: this is assuredly no more or less difficult than tearing the body away from organism (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 160).

25 Tracking the body without organs means paying attention to affect.17 Affect is the process of emergence sliding from the edge of the virtual into the realm of the actual. It is the process of that movement and as such affect is the location of potential.18

Inherently undoing the architecture of structure in favour of the event it is the place of the new (Massumi 1995: 85 and 105). Working through Benjamin himself, Massumi argues that affect holds the key for a redefinition of postmodern power. To work through affect is to latch onto channels that flow freely and in every direction, its uncertainty is precisely what makes it perhaps the only way forward through an ever-encompassing biopolitical milieu. “At this point,” Massumi writes, “the impression may have grown that affect is being touted here as if the whole world could be packed into it. In a way it can, and is” (1995: 104).

Sovereignty and affect, then, play key roles in the dissertation, not apart or in opposition but in the key ways they can be read together, parallel, or more specifically, immanent to one another. Sovereignty, especially in the paradoxical articulations of the exception, delineates the horizon of bodily control and structure. Moments of intensity or affect should not be seen in opposition to sovereignty, as a source of resistance to its coding impulses, a true or pure source of uncoding. Rather, affect in its immanence to sovereignty, and in its inability to ever fully be contained by sovereign logics, acts as a

17 Scholarship on affect has itself proliferated in the last decade. While it is beyond the scope of this work to review it substantively, preliminary reading might include the following: Gregg and Seigworth (2010); Deleuze (1988); Deleuze and Guattari (1987); Massumi (2002); Manning (2006); Sedgwick (2003); Berlant (2000); Stewart (2007); Clough and Hailey (2007); Ahmed (2004). 18 While different “schools” of affect theory have emerged there is, to my mind, a convergence around the connection of affect to potential, although phrased differently. Berlant describes it thusly: “to talk about the senses is to involve oneself in a discussion of the optimism of attachment, the sociability of persons across things, spaces, and practices” (2004: 448).

26 potentializing force that always runs parallel to sovereignty, no matter how successful sovereignty is in colonizing affective impulses as they become felt, sensed and acted upon. In this way affect contains an unassimilable vein of possibility, in which every avenue—even or especially those as yet unimagined—remains theoretically open.

Tracking affect and eruptions of intensity, especially in the context of nuclear spectacles overcoded by sovereignty, mark the unfolding of bodies in ways that potentially, yet temporarily, disarticulate and deterritorialize sovereign and biopolitical norms. These are the politics of affect, a politics of becoming, which are both radical and frustratingly elusive. They are akin, in an intimate fashion, to the moments that Anna Tsing (2005) has termed “friction” in her book of the same name, where the smoothness that sovereign control always desires to produce is itched by the oscillation of bodies and the inadequacy/overdetermination of its efforts.

Fundamentally, then, it is these forces and movements that this ethnography attempts to track, not just the new sovereign machinations and iterations of nuclear weapons as nuclear spectacle, nor just the experience of these spectacles from the perspective of the everyday, but the space between these poles, their intersection and unfoldings, their remnants, feedback and, in the language of friction, resonations. This ethnography positions itself in the movement of bodies, and the friction they produce, as they circulate through the Nuclear Public Sphere and its attempts to buttress national forms through the deployment of images and emotions of citizenship that, while steeped in the rhetoric of liberation, act as subtle forms of capture and control and the moments of rhizomatic intensity where forms of capture are exploded in the energy of the body’s

27 exhilarations. It is through attention paid to these bodily movements that a sensuous politics of national security in America can begin to be articulated.

Brian Massumi (1998, 2010) has recently been engaged with exploring the ways in which national security is a sensuous affective encounter, or more specifically, an endless set of encounters and feedbacks, composing unending loops of affect and power between bodies, media, states and war machines. Massumi seamlessly knits together narratives of indistinction, permanence, and affect and argues that strategic military planners in their desire to create and maintain “full spectrum dominance” have foretold of the ways in which national security becomes something which integrates with the everyday. American military planners, particularly, have long sought to transform the military into a networked entity capable of making decisions and adapting to instantly changing circumstances through the creation of:

a military machinery capable of dipping into the inffa-conscious action potentials of bare activity in order to extract from it a surplus-value of force expressing itself emergently as a self-deciding military will performing itself in real-time, distributed across a self- adapting network of functions fused into operational solidarity through complex relations of mutual solidarity (Massumi 2010: 9, author’s emphasis).

Massumi’s argument here has important consequences for the current work. A military that is diffused and distributed across time and space, a military that has turned its attention and its structure away from the strategic and to the instantaneous; where in the interest of gathering intelligence of events as or before they happen the military stretches itself into an unidentifiable “military force-of-life” is one that does away with notions of war and peace in both spatial and temporal planes, making war the de facto potential condition of everywhere all-the-time. If we now exist in a space-time that is the

“everywhere cutting edge of a self-enacting will to power, one with the machinery of

28 war, on a full spectrum continuum with the non-battle field of peace” (Massumi 2010: 9).

What is fundamentally at risk here, Massumi argues, is the place of “human perception, cognition and intention” in the ever-expanding space-time of war in which we find ourselves. It is with this question of perception, I think, where we find the most crucial intersection between Massumi’s work and my own. For this is an ethnography of perception, the perception, in all of its elusive complexity, of war and violence as it simultaneously fades away from our grasp and becomes permanent all at the same moment. Perhaps nuclear spectacles can be productively understood as nodes in this distributed network space-time of power in the “civil end of the continuum of power, now full-spectrumed into a zone of indistinction with war” Massumi 2010: 10).

Proliferations of the Middle: strategies, methodologies, culture and writing For the first time he began to pay attention to the things he saw on his walks, so that when he returned to her, he had observations of the outside world to share. They were fleeting, they were middles without beginnings or ends, but they were diverting—-/orhim to witness, for her to hear. She soaked them up. They seemed just as much nourishment as whatever the doctors were providing. Joshua Ferris—The Unnamed (2010: 287-288, emphasis added)

For a long time there has been a structure to anthropological method. This structure has persisted even through the so-called years of the “crisis in anthropology”, a crisis generated by the change in the terrain and authority of the anthropological voice, and a dawning realization of the intricate imbrication of anthropology with colonialism in the

19th and 20th centuries, a growing awareness of the differential power relations between anthropologists and their subjects and marked by the turn to the textual and an incorporation of the insights of literary criticism and feminist scholarship to name only

29 two of the most prominent.19 Discourses on method have remained particularly stable, it seems to me, despite an increasing awareness of the instability of the very things— narratives, lives, discourses, ideas, objects—anthropologists purport to track. In essence methods have been thought of positively as things we do, actions we perform, interviews, participant observation, archival investigation, which then feed us, if not answers to our questions, then information about them, perspectives on them, “dialogics” and

“multivocalities”, to use what were once ubiquitous terms.

As anthropologists whose “field” can oftentimes be demarcated from home in ways both meaningful and artificial, our inclination is often to mark a line. This line begins on our arrival and spins out until our departure. We are faithful to what Deleuze would call “strata”, “historical formations, positivities, empiricities...made from things and words, from seeing and speaking, from the visible and the sayable, bands of visibility and fields of readability from contents and expressions” that mark moments, events, meetings and encounters, significances on this line and then we stand back to take it all in

(Deleuze 1988: 47). We do this in order to perform a kind of ethnographic alchemy wherein the chain of meanings and significations add up to something greater and more or less whole: a point, an argument, an insight. This is not to say that strata are meaningless or unimportant, rather it is to point towards the hegemony of strata in the making of cultural meanings. Consequently, there is an inertia to ethnography which, sometimes despite best intentions, pushes towards unitarity, a desire for completion and closure achieved through a cartographic rendering of thematic and explanatory territories,

19 A number of now classic texts mark this period of crisis. As a beginning, see: Asad (1973), Geertz (1973), Hymes (1972), Clifford and Marcus (1986), Marcus and Fischer (1986), Gupta and Ferguson (1994).

30 squared-off, measured and levelled by the writer in his guise as surveyor, mimicking the topographical mastery of the surveyor in a graphical landscape. The ball of string— whose taught and single-minded inertia, whose simple destination between two points— provides one kind of model for fieldwork and ethnographic writing which, to my mind can’t be separated.

If today a sense of the messiness of the fields we insert ourselves into is in some way recognized with a concurrent or complementary messiness of methodology, a spectrum of interrelated and overlapping approaches to our subjects and our fields of inquiry it is often, I think, a rote and stable kind of disorder. An ordered disorder. It does not take into account the ways in which bodies, forces, objects mix and mingle, interpenetrating one another through pasts and futures, which are both always simultaneously emergent and disappearing, surging with intensity one moment and receding into practical invisibility the next. Or if it does, it often spoils this work by writing these experiences in ways that undo them, retrofitting them into explanatory and positive strata.

What are the methods we can deploy to take this field into account? A field which, by the way, is continually recentering itself not on one topic, one place or one question but through the ethnographer’s body, which acts as a sluice gate through which all the ethnographic fields and plateaus are filtered, reacted to, pressurized, done and undone, refracted, deployed and redeployed. How do we take account of the vital yet most elusive of our fieldnotes which exist in memory and which change, evolve, fade away or flash up with sudden force and intensity?

31 Instead of always joining point to point to point, closing off hermeneutical squares and rectangles, I have sought to leave the strings unraveling before our eyes, strands going everywhichway including, at times, nowhere. Where possible, I have tried to ignore the string altogether, leaving aside what makes sense in favour of the path suggested by sensations which is far more difficult to map. Whether this is a skilled or lazy tactic in dismantling and salvage remains to be seen; but it is this essential tension, between movement and stasis, between control and flow, that marks out the experimental plateau—in terms of both writing and methodology—that is this ethnography. Thinking through Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of the “assemblage” is productive and important here, particularly so when the subjects and objects of this ethnography are conceptualized as transitory and ephemeral: ghosts and spectres, ruins, secrets and monsters, to name a few. In attempting to explain both the form and method of A

Thousand Plateaus (1987) Deleuze and Guattari offer a form that is essentially slippery and always in a state of immanence, in transition between points of arrival and departure.

It is not the case that the assemblage avoids the modes of descriptive and analytical argumentation that seeks to explain subjects, pushing inevitably, even if unconsciously, towards truth. It is impossible to ever fully escape theses inclinations. Rather, the assemblage—or the ethnography as assemblage—incorporates its own contradictions and paradoxes, moving in many directions at once. And so:

In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification. Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, o f acceleration and rupture. A ll this, lines and measurable speeds constitutes an assemblage. A book is an assemblage of this kind, and as such is unattributable. It is a multiplicity— but we don't know yet what the multiple entails when it is no longer attributed, that is, after it has been elevated to the status of the substantive.

32 One side of a machinic assemblage faces the strata, which doubtless make it a kind of organism, or signifying totality, or determination attributable to a subject; it also has a side facing a body without organs, which is continually dismantling the organism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities or circulate, and attributing to itself subjects what it leaves with nothing more than a name as the trace of an intensity (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 3-4).

The assemblage does not mean anything, it does not add up to anything. What it does do is potentialize, intensify and proliferate changes, metamorphoses in bodies and so in the world, moments, and affects that hook up to other moments and so engage and change them. An attention to the assemblage is not just retrospective, meaning that it is not simply a performance of the written that would itself be a return to the narcissism of the omniscient anthropological voice, no matter how diffused. The assemblage marks a methodology and an approach to writing that doesn’t seek to separate the field from the crafting of the ethnography but acknowledges the limitations and the opportunities inherent in both to amplify and highlight certain moments, of course allowing others to fade, but never transforming these moments into chains of transcendental signification.

Moreover, it has meant curbing my ingrained disciplinary and institutional tendencies towards negative critique and instead to cast an eye towards texts in ways that build and affirm. In doing so, I seek, in whatever small ways, not to deny, organize, redirect, speed­ up, individuate or atomize, but to grow, enhance and proliferate moments of attachment, intensity, possibility, collectivity and hope (without an attachment to predictive futurity).20 In this, just as much as in other more overt parts of this ethnography, a politics and an ethics should be visible. Where I have pointed towards gaps, paradoxes and inconsistencies I have tried to do so not in order to point out an inferiority or to reject

20 On “affirmation” see Berlant (2004). On “hope” see Zoumazi (2001).

33 or claim the power of right, but to identify moments that enhance a playbook of potentiality made possible by an assemblage of texts that swap bindings, pages, indices and ideas making the bibliography a rhizome of the multitude.

This project emerges out of a specific desire to write about nuclear weapons from their own multi-dimensional margins. In effect, the project seeks to have nuclear weapons as a haunting presence, always there, often seemingly absent but sometimes just out of reach and sometimes startlingly concrete. In doing so I write about nuclear weapons by paying attention to the emergent forms of life and death, the gaps, the presences and absences, the stories, the bodies, the intensities, the banalities and the anaesthetics that constantly proliferate—but are largely obscured by their enormity— around the edges and in the shadow of nuclear weapons. As Kathleen Stewart writes this is a kind of “ethnographic attention” but it is of a different nature, not oriented around an always already hardened and secure narrative of its desire (Stewart 2005: 1015). Nuclear weapons are particularly tenacious signs in this regard and it is not always easy to escape the focused narratives that are ascribed to them. This applies equally to the official narrative of nuclear weapons as guarantors of safety, security and the American way of life as well as to its opposite, the apocalyptic inevitability that opponents use to describe them. They demand an almost mythic attention, and discipline a kind of thinking—based in national security /geopolitical/strategic orientations—around them that allows for little digression. Yet it is possible and important to navigate the swirling and uncertain edges of nuclear weapons discourse and nuclear weapons themselves. Not only is it possible, it is mandatory to do this in order to begin to undo the naturalized and violent logics

34 associated with them. Elsewhere, Kathleen Stewart, in her work on Appalachia, has called attention to what she calls the “space on the side of the road,” doing this, she argues:

it stands as kind of “back talk” to America’s mythic claims to realism, progress, and order. But more fundamentally, and more critically, it opens a gap in the order of myth itself—the order of grand summarizing traits that claim to capture the “gist” of “things.” The “space on the side of the road” is both a moment in everyday stories in West Virginia and an allegory for possibilities of narrative itself to fashion a gap in the order of things— a gap in which there is “room to manoeuvre.” (1996: 3).

In writing, I have tried to imagine this ethnography not a destination but as a kind of “resonance machine”, an expression coined by William Connolly to explain, somewhat counter intuitively, the relationship between evangelism, the right-wing media and

“cowboy capitalism” in the United States (2005). While Connolly’s example works to demonstrate how disparate but aligned elements of American conservatism work together, his example is also operative more broadly. For Connolly, a resonance machine brings together elements related by factors more complicated and informal than cause and effect:

Here causality, as relations of dependence between separate factors, morphs into energized complexities of mutual imbrication and interinvolvement, in which heretofore unconnected or loosely associated elements fold, bend, blend, emulsify, and dissolve into each other, forging a qualitative assemblage resistant to classical models o f explanation (2005: 870).

What is important here is not simply the ways in which a resonance machine takes seemingly unrelated elements and places them into a relationship. It is the ways in which these elements working together produce an amplification that is greater than the sum of its parts. The importance of the idea of the resonance machine radiates in many directions at once. It can be deployed as a productive way in which to understand culture and at the same time exists as a useful trope around which to model writing culture as well. Of

35 course the two are never separate and together form their own kind of resonance machine, amplifying assemblages, plateaus and lines of flight that are not always clearly visible or present in dominant modes of representation.

The products of resonance machines are felt as proliferations of intensity. And so this ethnography consists of a constellation of encounters, surges, passages, transitions, intensities, becomings and moments of closure. It is decidedly an ethnography in transition, attempting to write the moments in-between points of arrival or destination, endeavouring to eschew the calcifying temporal freeze-frame of the ethnographic portrait.

This attention to movement and passage means, necessarily but sometimes difficultly, eschewing beginnings and ends in favour of the permanent middle. For Deleuze and

Guattari, the middle characterizes not the privileged space of the rhizome, but the rhizome itself (1987: 21). Taking this into account, I have tried to write from the rhizome outward, a practice that entails beginning and ending in the middle; a proliferation of middles outward from which it “grows and overspills” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 21).

Moments of intensity, then, play a central organizing role in the ethnography. Whenever these moments appear in chapters—be it beginning, middle or end—they are always middles in the sense of rhizomatic plateaus, points of haemorrhage that, instead of staunching, I try to elongate and catalyze. In doing so, the hope is that ethnographic writing becomes something which recognizes moments of intensity and fosters them by attaching itself to rhizomatic dimensions which spill and leak in unanticipated and uncontainable directions, collecting itself not into a narrative but rather an assemblage of encounters, scenes and felt moments.

36 This can seem at times to unmoor narratives, upending neat formations of meaning, setting them adrift and provoking more questions than it seems to answer. The intent and the opportunity here is double. It is to craft an ethnographic politics and an ethical stance that does not stand apart from the politics it claims as its subject matter. To write from the margins entails writing the margins in all their messy, fleeting singularity.

Ultimately to write about a politics of life, of potentiality, a politics that mobilizes counter-images, memories and affects means also crafting a form which allows these moments to proliferate and amplify. To explain them, to fit them into an ordered structure oriented around the rules and controls of a mythic reality is to fundamentally undermine this politics. Anthropology, particularly, has struggled with this alongside of its efforts to reflexively re-examine the way it writes its encounters and subjects. In an interview Michael Taussig explains it in plainly:

...it was too easy and too quick to put the burden on the people you were writing about, rather than install it in the way you were writing. The crucial political and hopeful point of all this is that if the writing itself isn’t challenging conventions of how words work— the mischievous, unexpected, rethinking image and text and so forth— if the message was different but the way of telling it was the same, nothing was gained. So instead of putting the politics on someone else, in another place and in another time, the politics had to be there in the writing itself, and that is how matters of taste, of discrimination and so forth actually emerge in one’s work. That is where the struggle should be. And of course it doesn’t happen (2001: 52).

Chapter Summaries The four following chapters are transitory and unstable scenes that attempt to mine those inside-out spaces between and amongst the logical folds of the official nuclear narratives at work in the nuclear spectacles in America. They sometimes begin and end abruptly,

37 eschewing, as I have said, the constraining yet comforting artificiality of beginnings and endings in favour of the permanent middle from which culture and the writing of culture can never escape. Some chapters meander, beginning with one subject and ending with others, while others circle their subject both fascinated and fearful, never quite walking in step with it. I have tried not to edit this wandering, letting the subjects find their own course or not as the case may be. There is value in this as well as a kind of ineffable and slippery fidelity to the experience of fieldwork.

Chapter One tracks the unfolding of a nuclear memorial event: the Oppenheimer

Centennial, held in Los Alamos New Mexico in 2004 via a series of unlikely encounters.

Starting with the death of former President Ronald Reagan, I trace the ways in which this nuclear memorial event intentionally and unintentionally mobilized ghosts in the service of national spectacle. Tracking the strategy of state haunting, an analysis indebted to the work of Avery Gordon (1997), the chapter argues that atomic hauntologies attempt to potentialize and activate certain emotions and avenues of inquiry and affective experience while attempting to close down others. Weaving through encounters with the ghosts of

Reagan and J. Robert Oppenheimer, as well as the presence of a local beauty queen, this chapter navigates a line between sense and sensation. Investigating the ways in which these ghosts and beauty queens “make sense” for nuclear spectacles enabling coded and static forms of state capture through the promotion of sentiments of national belonging, greatness and nuclear-based security runs head-long into the way these encounters produce, in excess of coded forms of sensible bodily meanings, bodily sensation; affects which run counter to the coded and enclosed nature of national sentiment. Finally, this

38 chapter introduces the concept of the nuclear public sphere as a way to track the emergent network of nuclear memorials and museums, not as a stable place for the activation of democratic citizenship but as a traumatic and haunted space that testifies to the ways in which sovereignty is both actualized and countered in memorial and recreational spaces.

Chapter Two investigates the proliferation of sovereign indistinction in the nuclear public sphere. Tracking the proliferation of monsters, doubles, cyborgs and replicants, I argue that the nuclear public sphere uses such figures as ways undermine and render meaningless the distinctions between life and death. Moving between a birth ceremony for the atomic bomb and the reception of a Hiroshima survivor at a memorial event for the atomic bomb, I argue that while nuclear memorials strive to reproduce sovereign indistinction with the aim of erasing the distinctions between life and death and producing a sort of death in life that Deleuze hinted at above, they fall far short of complete. I argue that, contrary to the intentions of sovereignty, the proliferation of monsters, doubles and cyborgs works often to broaden conceptions and dimensions of life rather than closing them down.

Chapter Three examines at paradoxical relationship between spectacle and secrecy in the nuclear public sphere. I argue that nuclear spectacles work in conjunction with the top-secrecy that marks the official nuclear weapons complex, as revelatory mechanisms not of nuclear information as such but of nuclear secrecy itself. Nuclear spectacles function then as places where secrecy and national security—as kinds of

“magic of the state”—are placed on display. Spectacles of secrecy work to seduce visitors into thinking and feeling the embrace of the state, producing a kind of intimate

39 citizenship fashioned around the feeling of privileged access to proprietary sovereign secrets anchored in the discourse of the state’s benevolent protection of its citizens. Yet the integrity of the secret, as the chapter reveals is as secure as it would claim. The secret, as a form over and above the information it claims to cocoon, is not inert but unstable.

Contrary to its claims, the secret inevitably leaks, or as Deleuze and Guattari claim, “the secret secretes” (1987: 287). These secretions, I argue, register and endure as affects.

Ultimately, this chapter examines the ways in which the transitory and affective nature of

(nuclear) secrecy can undermine the very claims secrecy and the state make on behalf of one another. Instead of shoring up discourses of state sovereignty and the necessity of nuclear secrecy on behalf of the citizenry, nuclear secrets end up migrating into affective arenas where they proliferate as forms of doubt, fear and paranoia.

Chapter Four, the last chapter, offers reflections on nuclear ruins. I argue for a re­ orientation of the nature and locale of the ruin. Instead of a crumbling edifice or fossilized remnant, I argue that nuclear ruins, in the era of the nuclear public sphere, can be productively thought of as bodily affiliations and transitory and mobile states of bodily intensity. I trace an affective notion of nuclear ruin through a number of events, both archival and ethnographic, in the nuclear public sphere. Ultimately, I argue that ruin deployed as a bodily affiliation can also be responsible for a redeployed notion of grief and mourning, an awareness of the common fragility of human bodies that can mobilize ruin as a politically radical and potentializing force.

40 Chapter 1 Atomic “Hauntologies”: Spectralitv and Affect in Nuclear Memorial

“...everything begins by the apparition of a specter” Jacques Derrida (1994: 2)

Reason crashes the party In June of 2004, I was in Los Alamos to attend an event called the ‘Oppenheimer

Centennial,’ a symposium and memorial celebration dedicated to J. Robert Oppenheimer on what would have been his centennial year. That wasn’t my first time in Los Alamos, I had been there once before and stood underneath the street signs that read like headstones: Oppenheimer Dr., Bikini Atoll Rd., Trinity Ave. I had marvelled at the signs that pointed explosive trucks in certain directions and gawked at the fence, trying to divine what lay beyond. But the weekend of the Centennial was the first time I had spent any real time there. A memory that sticks out for me from the second day of the centennial. I had taken the afternoon to walk around town, the events for the day were pretty much over by that time and some people were heading down the hill to dinner in

Santa Fe. Walking around, I came across a government building of some sort, a post office maybe.

On a pole outside the building was an American flag and from the angle I stood it fluttered cinematically, almost in slow motion against the backdrop of a perfect blue sky, so perfect it was suspect. There was something entrancing and seemingly transparent about the way this flag fluttered in the breeze, revealing itself so nakedly and proudly.

But there was something about this flag that I had not noticed at first and when I did I was a little taken aback. The flag was flying at half-mast.

41 I was unsure about why this was so. My first thought of course, attending, as I was, a memorial service for a dead man, I assumed it must be for him. That the flag would be flying at half-mast in Los Alamos for Oppenheimer is entirely appropriate. He is single-handedly responsible for its existence as a town. But Oppenheimer’s significance to Los Alamos is much more than that. Later, when I was spending much more time there people would tell me strange things about Oppenheimer and Los

Alamos. Like the fact that many people in Los Alamos consider Oppenheimer like a father and still to this day trace complex lines of kinship and proximity between themselves and Oppenheimer in order to establish their Los Alamos legitimacy and authority. In any case that a flag would be flying at half-mast for Oppenheimer on this particular weekend seemed to make some sense, even though it had been forty years since his actual death. In many ways Oppenheimer never died and continues to haunt not only

Los Alamos but the United States.

But the flag was not flying at half-mast for Oppenheimer, instead it stood in a position of mourning for another father-figure. When I got back to my hotel room later that afternoon I heard the news that I had missed that morning. Ronald Reagan had died.

Why did Reagan choose that weekend to reappear? Almost immediately it was as if he never left.

Reagan had died. But had he? It now seemed that Reagan was everywhere, saturating the airwaves and the narrow spaces of small-talk alike, his body beamed onto every surface—television sets everywhere switched to pre-fab “best o f’ (archival?) montages of the “great communicator” smiling, waving. It is as if he died and was

42 immediately reanimated, a suitable cinematic rebirth. Again Reagan is killed and gets up and walks away. But the bullets weren’t blanks. Reagan’s death paradoxically reanimated his body and brought it to bear on Oppenheimer, the sovereign stooge—convinced to build the weapon that would defeat the foreign despot only to realize that he had forever guaranteed despotism, the sovereign exception. Reagan’s body—now having achieved the eternal immanence bestowed upon the despot’s body—became a potent reminder, a flash of realization, that the weekend dedicated to remember and celebrate the life of Oppenheimer was really not about Oppenheimer at all.

Rather, it was a part of the State apparatus of endocolonization, the drive towards unity that the sovereign, resting in the exception, always strives toward (Massumi and Dean

1992: 161).

43 Fig. 1.1. Los Alamos, New Mexico. The ghost of Ronald Reagan enters the picture. Photo by the author.

The ghostly return of Reagan while celebrated/mourned in other circles, served for me at least, as a talisman of horror. Like the beauty queen, whom I describe below,

Reagan’s body became a reminder of the worst kind: the B-movie actor with his finger on the nuclear button. It is this synthesis—momentarily embedded in the haunting return of

Reagan—of the mechanisms of spectacle with the forces of linearity and dualism, control and capture that reside in permanent sovereign exception that I examine here.

Spectral Grounds: Spirit Possessions as National Spectacles Ghosts are not strangers to State capture—they are routinely harnessed as centerpieces of national spectacles and called upon as idols to wholeness in sanctioned spirit possessions.

They endow everyday life with the magic that the State needs to conceal itself as a nation—an organic entity premised upon fundamental likeness. Think of money and memorials, think of national kitsch and the cults of past statesmen constantly stoked by their contemporary descendants. Think, yes again, of Reagan and of how each of the

2008 and 2012 Republican presidential candidates jockey to possess and be possessed by his spirit, the great communicator, in death still so much more alive than they are. States conjure ghosts in spirit possessions of maleficent magic always intended to deepen the controlling equilibrium by reworking the terrain of reality via regulated outbursts of fantasy and violence (Gordon 1997: 126).

Momentarily and in the interest of good etiquette, however, let us put aside the appearance of Reagan at the Oppenheimer Centennial for he was, after all, an uninvited, though nonetheless crucial, guest at the weekend’s events. We will return to Reagan, or perhaps he will return to us. In the meantime, however, it was Oppenheimer that we were there to celebrate, to conjure, to be possessed by. Avery Gordon writes about the use of disappearance as an example of haunting as State strategy. In Argentina, where

45 disappearance perhaps reached its apotheosis as it increasingly became ever more central to the ruling junta’s strategy of counter-insurgency, haunting via disappearance functioned to “break down the distinctions between visibility, certainty and doubt, life and death that we use to sustain an ongoing and more or less dependable existence”

(Gordon 1997: 126). Disappearance worked as a form of State haunting, she rightly notes, only because it maintained the line between visibility and invisibility, the corpse and the living body and the known and the unknown in rigid tension.

In Argentina, where the State was openly at war with its citizens, disappearance tended to be the preferred form of State phantasmatics, a form of haunting premised upon corporeal erasure. In the United States, war has begun to take on new forms, not replacing the old forms so much as supplanting and overlaying them and coming to prominence in new and important ways. Rather than proceed in an orderly progression from one to the other, the new forms of war have begun to appear in a similar fashion to the ways in which Foucault’s articulation of the ways that the forms of power—sovereign to disciplinary to biopolitical—did not so much replace each other as were placed upon one another fashioning new axiomatics of control. In the United States the condition of permanent war is played out not so much via erasure as it is by bodily capture. This control plays itself out not in disappearance so much as hyper forms of visibility such as spectacle and through the circulation of positive images and emotions.

At the Oppenheimer Centennial, haunting was evoked in a similar logic to disappearance, but in contradistinction to it. By this I mean that there, the state, rather than move from visibility to invisibility, reversed the equation and opted instead to bring

46 a ghost out of the background, to render it hypervisible in the spotlight of the spectacle.

How is it that these logics operate in similar and contradictory ways simultaneously?

Simply put, both strategies similarly operate as violent, repressive tactics, and aside from the difference of polarities, which is simply a matter of the origin of direction, both are no less material than each other but again in somewhat different fashions. The materiality of disappearance as a state strategy of power is not so much the violence unleashed upon the bodies of the disappeared—although this is by no means insignificant—so much as it is the ongoing state of panic, insecurity and the unknown in which it holds the surrounding population. The spectral impact of Oppenheimer’s ghost sought a similar goal, to hold the body permanently between the ultimate security and the ultimate threat of the State— the materiality of haunting is always measured as the intensity of affect, simultaneously concrete and elusive.

But the ability to maintain that fine line of the spectral in-between and not have it fall over into excess or lack is difficult to maintain. National spectacles based upon recall and embodiment of the ghosts of the past are inherently unstable and dangerous grounds that require constant interventions that attempt to code and recode space in an arboreal or binary fashion (Gordon 1997: 127). The problem with ghosts is they cannot always be trusted to appear or to disappear when or where requested. Herein lies the radical ethical potential of ghosts that Derrida talks about, the ability of the ghost or the revenant, these

“certain others who are not present, nor presently living, either to us, in us, or outside us”

(1994: xix, author’s emphasis). Because ghosts must always by necessity appear as an excess or what Kyo Maclear (2003) calls an “unnameable remainder” they require,

47 almost force, a consideration, a taking into account of that which cannot be accounted for

(2003: 246). The ghosts or specters engender a consideration of the impossible. This is what Derrida terms justice (1994).

Moreover, spirit possessions and the materializations of ghosts require and unleash massive amounts of energy. The State tries to harness the power of spirit possessions and translate it into literal forms of containment and order. But no matter how much the state tries to maintain its grip on spirit possessions, the quantity of the energy discharged, the elusive speciality of ghosts and the portals by which we access them are such that they inevitably poke holes and render porous the membranes which surround them. Consider the following passage by Taussig:

This leap from nowhere with the sword that is a wand is the leap that combines with holiness, spasmodically recharging the circulation of power between the dead and the living, the state and the people. Here where the body becomes the stage of nothingness upon which the great drama of stately forms can parade alongside rampant impulse and aborted signification, where disembodiment gives way to other embodiments secreting magical force, here is the scene of the “gateway,” the portal, serene in the necessity of the mission impossible. And this is why danger cannot be named. Instead it leaks. As into these very words. It can neither be contained nor structured no matter how severe the dualisms, no matter how formalized the law. And this is why the last gasp effort, the portal exists, and is beautiful and powerful. For the portal is the effort of containment, of repeated and glorious failure, intimation of containment where constellations of imagery figuring and refiguring the state of the whole pass through slow release wave impulses of ritual to cross the threshold separating the living from the dead (1997: 39-40, emphasis added).

It is the portal that is important here—the link or the passageway connecting past and present, spirit and the body of the possessed, phantom and memorial. These portals, set up by the State as national spectacles, contain their own paradox, on which the State does not plan, for they are at once the means by which to call upon spirits but by their very nature are, as Taussig says: “a gateway, always open, a wound, never a resolution”

48 (1997: 39). This inability, in the end, of the State to control the terms of its ghostly petitions marks out these spectacles of spirit possession as spaces of trauma, where a

“resolution,” a final assignment of meaning is endlessly deferred, haunted by the conditions of its own existence.

* * *

Never mind Reagan and the Beauty Queen for a few moments. Instead, let us examine the man in whose name we had gathered in Los Alamos, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and his status as national icon. To be an icon, the body of Oppenheimer had to be moulded to and unified with the national body, with what Massumi and Dean call “the substance of unity” (1992). In order to accomplish this, the heterogeneities, the ambiguities and differences of Oppenheimer’s individuality had to be wiped out—he had to become homogeneous with the national body, simplified, part of the uninterrupted smoothness sovereign forms of control seek. Simulacral sovereignty, while steeped in the rhetoric of individual responsibility, abhors the absolute singularity of the individual who stands apart, even though it sometimes requires them for their needs, such as A-bombs it always eventually seeks to recuperate that tangent and bring it back into line.

The weekend dedicated to Oppenheimer was an attempt to weave the memory of

Oppenheimer back into the national story and by doing so have Oppenheimer’s body stand as exemplary of the national body and the State drive towards unity. It was a grand example of state sponsored spirit possession through the erection of a portal that would conjure Oppenheimer’s ghost. But as we shall see things did not work out so smoothly.

49 The events that weekend were staged by the ‘Atomic Heritage Foundation’ a

Washington D.C. based organization dedicated to the preservation of Manhattan Project- era sites and history. The preservation of “heritage” is always a search for an absolute narrative usually oriented with the search for national self-definition and justification.

Two signature events were planned and staged in the attempt to make the body of

Oppenheimer a concrete signifier of national unity and glory. The first was the celebration of the purchase—by the Los Alamos Historical Society and facilitated by the

Atomic Heritage Foundation—of the house where Oppenheimer and his wife had resided during his two years in Los Alamos. The house, located on a street nicknamed “Bathtub

Row” because during the Manhattan Project they were the only official residences to be equipped with the luxury of their own bathtubs, and as a result were reserved for the most senior staff, is near the centre of town, and has been owned and lived in by other families since the Oppenheimers left in 1945. A tour of the house, in which a future museum would be located, was supposed to be one of the highlights of the weekend. The second event was a scholarly symposium on Oppenheimer and his legacy attended by the pre­ eminent Oppenheimer and Manhattan project scholars in the United States. However, both events failed to accomplish what they were meant to, which was to solidify the image of Oppenheimer as national icon or hero. These failures, in turn, prompted other responses.

The house tour failed because it emphasized the very thing that it was supposed to create—an intimate, magical yet material connection to the body of the great man himself through immersion in his domestic space. However, the house did not present

50 any opportunities or moments of contact. Instead the emphasis fell upon lack and an absence, unburdened by an often equal sense of presence, of Oppenheimer from the space in which his presence was supposed to have been most strongly felt. Perhaps, out of a sense of duty to the current house owners, the tour-guides repeatedly emphasized that none of the furnishings or objects we saw had belonged to Oppenheimer or his wife.

Instead of leaving our imaginations’ to themselves—as they were already poised and tautly ready at the starting line of fantasy—the tour expressly prevented the magic of copy and contact to occur (Taussig 1993). Rumours that flared up in the line as it snaked through the house—“I know Oppenheimer played the piano, do you think that piano was his?”—were quickly extinguished. Instead of promoting the illusion of intimacy with the body of Oppenheimer by circulating through his private space, the house tour only served to emphasize Oppenheimer’s absence and the inability to become part of the national body through the lubrication and mediation of Oppenheimer’s ghost. In other words, the visitor’s alienation from Oppenheimer fostered and propelled a sense of alienation from the national body which, because it operates in contradistinction to the lines of intensity that compose the affective body, needs to maintain continuous points of contact against the body’s own inertia.

The state of the house was perceived by some as a lack of historical accuracy, or even as the indication of something being held back from view, and, as frustration with the inability to access Oppenheimer grew, so did stories of discontent. But these stories grew disproportionate to the context. It became a moment in which visitors began to narrate other felt frustrations and absences in the national narrative. In other words, the

51 lack of moments of contact with the Oppenheimer became symptomatic, rather than restorative, of intimate traumas and fragmentation that reflected back on the national body and its drive for unity. In front of me a woman turned, exasperated, and explained to me that she had been a history teacher in the Albuquerque public school system for fifteen years up until the year before.

I wanted to see where he lived, you know, but this doesn’t look like much. Last year I got fired, you see...they say I retired, but really I got fired for talking about things they didn’t want to hear about. I’ve been a history teacher for thirty years, in Colorado before here. They don’t want to leam what really happened - sometimes it’s ugly what happened. Anyway, some of the parents didn’t like what I was saying and they reported me to the principal...Our school system is going down the drain, you know. I’ve never seen it so bad as the last few years. Kids can’t even read in high school...

This emergent heritage space’s inability to conjure the ghost of Oppenheimer, the spectre which was required to lend authenticity and authority to the narrative of

Oppenheimer as national hero, fostered other suspicions. The teacher’s disappointment with the spectacle of the house on Bathtub Row, in which she sought reassurance, began, virally, to infect and cast doubt on the numerous other intertwined narratives that connected Oppenheimer up with her own body, the body of a citizen. Here affects of doubt and misgiving move into the space of slippage that national spectacles are continuously hedging against. These moments, where a wary and suspicious feeling took hold of people in the moments where the spectacle slipped or revealed a gap and created a sense of haunting, paranoia, the uncanny and a tension between presence and absence— a feeling that not everything was being revealed but was just beyond the next horizon— arose again and again during my fieldwork.

52 Whereas the house tour failed because of its inability to produce glimpses and moments of contact with Oppenheimer’s spirit (standing in for the national body) with those of the visitors to his house, the Oppenheimer symposium, held on the following day, followed a different trajectory. It too failed to secure Oppenheimer as a portal into an emblematic patriotic citizenship, but not for reasons related to the absence of

Oppenheimer, but rather for an unwanted excess. Over and over again that day the figure and the memory of Oppenheimer were invoked.

A strong argument can be made that without Oppenheimer the Manhattan Project would not have succeeded as it did and the atomic bomb would not have been developed with such incredible speed and the war might not have ended as soon as it did.21

However, despite this considerable achievement Oppenheimer remains an ambiguous figure in American history—someone exceedingly difficult to pin down. Biographies variously describe Oppenheimer as brilliant, complex, sophisticated, erudite, charming, ethical, arrogant, selfish, unknowable, and disloyal.22

As a target of national hagiography Oppenheimer presents distinct challenges.

Indeed, while his famous statement upon witnessing the first atomic blast, a quote from the Hindu spiritual text, theBhagavad Gita : “Now I am death... shatter er of worlds” ably reflects the overwhelming awe felt by those who first witnessed the atomic blast, it is certainly not an exclamation of patriotic triumph. It remains Oppenheimer's opposition to

21 This last point is very contentious. The role of the atomic bomb in ending the war has been the subject of much debate and controversy (see Alperovitz 1996). I do not wish to enter that debate here, I emphasize only that a vigorous argument can and, indeed, was articulated that day along those lines. 22 The canon of biographies and monographs examining aspects of Oppenheimer's life and work is very large. Three examples that have been of assistance to this work are as follows: Goodchild (1985), Herken (2002), Polenberg (2002).

53 nuclear proliferation, however, an issue on which he worked diligently throughout the later years of his life and, most importantly, the 1953-54 review by the Atomic Energy

Commission (AEC) which concluded with the revocation of Oppenheimer's government security clearance, which continue to cloud the official memory of him. The suggestion of treason on which these hearings were based, themselves founded on rumour, innuendo and youthful experimentations with socialist ideology, must be understood within the hyperactive conspiratorial imagination of America at that the time. The threat of the

Soviet Union was thought to be infiltrating through the intellectuals and cultural workers of the nation. Figures like J. Edgar Hoover, Senator Eugene McCarthy and, in the

Oppenheimer case, Lewis Strauss the head the AEC, were instrumental in drawing together the meagre entrails and forgotten leftovers of Oppenheimer's life into the taint of treason. This taint still exists as a negative relationship to Oppenheimer's memory.

Today, Oppenheimer is widely considered to have been seriously misjudged and, to a person, speakers at the Oppenheimer Centennial events, scholars, a United States

Senator, stood up and declared Oppenheimer to have been wrongly accused and to be a genuine national hero. However, this status as hero is now constantly asserted in relation to the events of 1953-54. As I sat in the auditorium of the Los Alamos High School listening to these thoughtful praises of the man, I was struck by the repetition of his alleged wrongdoing if only to emphasize and deny its validity. The excess of it, of the repetition of his fictional transgressions, began to overtake and erode the heroic imprint of the man which was the object of desire for all the speakers that day. The attempt to suture the wounds of the past and create the image of Oppenheimer as a definite and

54 continuously patriotic figure, to fix the image in the past in order to ensure its contemporary functioning, positions Oppenheimer as what Ivy has termed an “elegiac resource” (1995: 10). And so, as the excess of this negative relation grew, with each speaker's pronouncement of the unfair and shabby treatment of Oppenheimer, so did the desire for continuity, and the two relationships proceeded inextricably in symbiotic fashion. Like the Japanese culture industries Ivy describes, that seek to stem the sense of loss that accompanies modernity through the preservation of the past, a past that would not need these curatorial interventions without, paradoxically, the realization that loss is indeed what is at issue, the speakers at the Oppenheimer symposium were both faced with and produced a similar conundrum. In seeking to reassure and secure the heroic memory of Oppenheimer in the public, they needed to invoke the very things that threatened to destabilize it and each time they did so cast the memory of Oppenheimer into a further realm of circulation from which they could not ultimately recover him. It was in this context then, of the failure to conjure Oppenheimer adequately in house tour and of the doomed success of conjuring Oppenheimer too well at the symposium that I began to see the interventions of the Beauty Queen and of Ronald Reagan in a new light.

The State’s drive toward unity, the mechanics of which were on display in the

Oppenheimer Centennial, always produces a tension or a friction between the desired object (everything is rendered object-like) and its subjective qualities which, in their insistence to be recognized, always crop up. This friction rubs raw and frays the edges of the image by which unity is sought, making it either too adequate or less than adequate for the State’s purposes. This does not mean that it does not achieve, to some degree at

55 least, the violence of consolidation. Nonetheless it points to an incompleteness or a deterritorialization that shows up in the moments of uncanny or haunting potential.

These gaps become visible when the body inadvertently wanders from the grand narrative, when the spectacle wanes or falters enough for another encounter to take place, for a moment of what Kathleen Stewart has recently called “everyday affect” to rise above the white noise and make an impact (2007). Oppenheimer’s inadequate and too- adequate appearances at the Centennial event called for a hurried response from the very forces it sought to reinforce and solidify.

* * *

Defer your craving for the reappearance of Reagan and the Beauty Queen once more.

Moreover, a desire to dismiss this spectacle as minor, regional, insignificant and parochial creeps in here. Dismiss the desire to dismiss—which is a desire to regulate and hierarchize—and let the moment unfold a little longer. Linger. Indeed, the Oppenheimer

Centennial could be described in any of the above ways accurately. However, to explain the Oppenheimer Centennial by slotting it into a taxonomy of parallel but perhaps more elaborate national spectacles of this kind throughout the United States is to miss much about the event. Instead of pointing to the failure of the event from the State’s viewpoint—its inability to adequately manage the “ghostly matters” it had unleashed— allow a momentary shift of perspective (Gordon 1997). To reside in the haunting impulse—rather than the trajectory of State desire—is to see that haunting has its own logic and its own inertia. To latch onto the excess of Oppenheimer’s ghost, its excessive

56 adequacy or inadequacy, rather than simply observing that fact, is to open up new dimensions of the story that reside in the rich borderspaces of such spectacles.

To become aware of the excessive nature of ghosts is to register the trace of an affective impact viscerally and concretely. For affectivity is the means by which the body materializes the haunting encounter. In the moment of haunting materialization the traces of what was previously invisible flare up. This is particularly true of the overcoded spectacles by which the State produces and reproduces itself. As Gordon says, referring to the desaparacidos of the Argentinean Dirty War:

Although the disappeared are only supposed to intimate this menacing state power, the ghost cannot be so completely managed.Because making contact with the disappeared means encountering the specter of what the state has tried to repress, means encountering it in the affective mode in which haunting traffics (1997: 127, author’s emphasis).

But it is not just the ghost that is difficult to manage or contain. For if haunting depends on the affective intensity of the bodily encounter, the ghost and the body cannot, in the end,be separated. Therefore, what proves impossible to manage is not the ghosts so much as it is the encounter, the virtual conjunction of body and ghost where impact explodes and is sometimes discharged as potential. Two points of reference are key here.

The first is Massumi’s description of affect as always being part of a feedback loop, by which he means that affect, to be affect, resides in the oscillation between bodies and/or things, in the ever shifting synaesthetic encounter of bodies with their surroundings. On this he writes: “Intensity would seem to be associated with nonlinear processes: resonation and feedback that momentarily suspend the linear progress the narrative present from past to future.. .it resonates to the exact degree to which it is in excess of any

57 narrative o functional line” (Massumi 2002: 26). The second point of reference that is relevant here is the idea of traumatic return.

Remember Taussig’s assertion here that the portals of spirit possession “are always a wound.” The ghostly encounter is traumatic precisely to the degree that it can never be fully assimilated, unpacked or understood, instead it lingers at the edges, in an intensification of the uncanny. The trauma then is virtual. More than this, however, is that understood through the lens of the affective encounter, the trauma is virtual and the virtual is traumatic and, together, they activate perception of ghostly matters large and small. Consider these definitions of the virtual and the traumatic in order to note their own uncanny correspondence. Caruth notes that trauma is “the breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, world—is not like the wound of body, a simple, healable event, but rather the event.. .is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor” (1996: 4). And then this, “something that happens too quickly to have happened,” says Massumi, “is, actually, virtual, the body is as immediately virtual as it is actual. The virtual, the pressing crowd of incipiencies and tendencies, is a realm of potential. In potential is where futurity combines unmediated with pastness, where outsides are infolded and sadness is happy (happy because the press to action and expression is life)” (2002: 31, author’s emphasis).

Through the affective encounter, can we say that trauma is virtual and the virtual is traumatic and, together, they too activate perception of ghostly matters large and small. The traumatic then is always virtual precisely to the point that it is delayed to consciousness, unassimilated, it has happened too fast. But this is also what marks out trauma as a moment of intensity. Because of its lack of assimilation, trauma returns, tacking back and forth between the shock of bodily impact and the moments of everyday circulation where everything seems clear. Ghostliness is a form of traumatic repetition but it is only combined with the affective body and its circuitry of virtual feedback that we have the haunting encounter. So in the combination of virtual feedback (affect) and traumatic repetition (ghostliness) we have a glimpse into the zigzag structure of a haunting which is inherently unstable, always returning, catching itself up, intensifying, ebbing away and then returning with a vengeance. This is a somewhat complicated way of saying that in any haunting encounter, there is never just one kind or one level of haunting. To unleash or to encounter haunting is to release a flood of energy that always exceeds the goals and needs of itself, it is always subject to the fold, by which it comes back on itself in expected ways.. Ghosts of ghosts appear, haunting is itself haunted.

And so at the Oppenheimer Centennial haunting reverberated out and back, sometimes catching one off-guard like a riptide. The consequence here is that Oppenheimer’s ghost both haunted and was itself haunted, the appeal to or summons of Oppenheimer’s ghost also had the effect of calling up other invited ghosts and forging new encounters. Those attending the events in Los Alamos that weekend were caught not just in a unidirectional haunting but in a complex matrix of spectral encounters, which were always corporeal.

Consider what Bill, a tourist at the Oppenheimer Centennial, said to me on the afternoon of the final day when things were wrapping up:

59 Well, I thought I would like it, I did like it...But there was something, like something weird about it too. I don’t know, do you know what I mean? I don’t know what it was about this weekend. I mean, there was something missing from the whole thing. I came here to learn more about Oppenheimer, I’m a big Cold War history buff, but, I don’t know...Even though I learned a lot, I guess I have more questions about it now more than ever. Do you know what I mean?

At the time we spoke I had little idea of what he meant beyond a literal interpretation that nevertheless rung hollow; was he dissatisfied with the quality of the presentations, in what ways could there have been more Oppenheimer? In retrospect, I think that if Bill had been able to be possessed fully and unambiguously by the ghost of

Oppenheimer, an outcome he was more than receptive to seeing as that had been the reason he had come, he would not have said what he did. While the completeness of possessions are always in doubt, something made that possession particularly impossible and treacherous, leaving Bill unsatisfied and unsettled not just because of the fractured nature of his body, which had become a battleground for a haunting collective of contradictory encounters, but more importantly, for the faint trace—Bill’s repeated utterances of “I don’t know” and “do you know what I mean?”—of awareness that registered this kaleidoscopic state.

It was not just Reagan’s ghost that Bill was acknowledging but the myriad ghosts of the undead dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that haunt all American nuclear commemorations. The victims of the A-Bombs in Japan are rendered ghostly precisely because the question of whether the dropping of the bombs was the right thing to do— strategically and ethically—remains an open wound in America, an unresolved question

60 still hotly contested.23 The response to this trauma is denial and repression, and in the

American nuclear public sphere Hiroshima and Nagasaki are absent yet certainly not empty signifiers. As this enforced amnesia settles down around the memory of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the only way they can come back and assert their presence is through haunting, the felt presence of the uncanny, a bodily twitch or a sense of doubt that something is not quite right, what Kathleen Stewart notes as a scanning of the horizon for something not present but felt (1999a).

But these ghosts are themselves not alone. It is not just these ghosts who were jostling in the increasingly crowded space for attention. Our ghosts too mingled in this space, fading in and out like a fizzing and crackling neon sign. Together these ghosts make up what Elias Canetti calls the “invisible crowds” that buttress and shadow all aspects of daily life (1962: 42). These are the ghosts of the interim living, the living dead, the dead held in reserve, a reserve that in this case is called life, ready to assume the foreground at a moment’s notice. These are our provisional others, traumatized in the awareness that the nuclear complex renders us up in the endless present of bare life24 (but the very quality of the ghost points to more than bare life, beyond bare life).

That it is the ghosts of present and future American citizens that are at once the subject of the heaviest repression and inevitably called forth here is not unknown to the

23 The Enola Gay controversy at the Smithsonian Museum in 1995 was one, particularly intense, flare up of this debate. Published works addressing the subject continue unabated, see in particular, Bird and Lifshcuz (1998) and Alperovitz (1996). 241 am using the term bare life in a way that while referencing Agamben (1998) is looser than his conception. I clearly am not using bare life as the end product of modem sovereignty. While maintaining the category of bare life as a descriptive term for the relationship of exclusion to sovereignty, while at the same time I agree with Hardt and Negri in terms of seeing modem sovereignty as having been replaced by a new conception of sovereignty, which they call imperial sovereignty. See Hardt and Dumm 2000.

61 State. However, the conundrum for the State is a case of careful management, to let threat seep up and haunt without spilling over into paranoia and the paralysis of ultimate fear. Witness the carefully twisted displays of the atomic bombs in the National Atomic

Museum in Albuquerque and the Bradbury Museum of Science at Los Alamos. There, the bombs exist as technological achievements divorced from the circumstances and after-effects of their use.

Ironically it was Oppenheimer himself, who called attention to the fact that the trauma for Americans was not Hiroshima and Nagasaki but their own relationship to the nuclear future; a spectacle of trauma that serves to absence a more difficult inaccessible trauma. Late in his life he was asked in an interview if he felt responsible for the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He replied: “My own feelings about responsibility and guilt have always had to do with the present, and so far in this life that has been more than enough to occupy me” (quoted in Herken 2002: 331).

Oppenheimer’s comments point towards a present and a future, instead of a past, that is heavy with the burden of guilt, a guilt oriented towards the catastrophes already perpetrated on the future, for the invention of the A-bomb. It is not that Oppenheimer dismissed the suffering of the victims of the bombings in Japan, only that he realized that while the interminable debates about the past cover over the catastrophes of their present, nuclear weapons held human life under the umbrella of imminent death. This peculiar aspect of nuclear violence, the fact that it is always already completed before having empirically taken place, or at least having been recognized as doing so, is not actually so peculiar at all. It conforms perfectly to the nature of State violence generally. State

62 violence, Deleuze and Guattari write, “is very difficult to pinpoint [...] because it always presents itself as preaccomplished [...] it is a violence that presents itself as preaccomplished even though it is reactivated every day. This is the place to say it if there ever was one: the mutilation is prior, pre-established” (1987: 447). This is a point I will emphasize throughout this dissertation: nuclear weapons need not be launched or, indeed, explode to accomplish or carry out their violence. Their brutality is embedded and unleashed in their existence, and in their very potential. The violence of atomic and nuclear weapons is, as Deleuze and Guattari say, is preaccomplished.

To say that state violence is preaccomplished, not held in reserve, but always already unleashed, is to bind the epistemological divide between violence and threat, and to declare that they can be one and the same thing. It is to declare the warning of “never again”—a warning pervasive in the nuclear public sphere—a fiction that conceals its own status as a border continuously breached. However, it isnot to say that the violence is total or that the capture is complete, that, in other words, the conversion and maintenance of life into bare life is whole. Paradoxically, it is the category and impact of the ghost that makes us aware of the tenacity of life.

Canetti, in outlining the qualities of the invisible crowds, opens up the category of the ghost, sensing the presence-absence of the spectral in the limitlessness of the future as much as of the past, in the unborn, in the potential of life as in the materiality of death

(1962: 46). Canetti’s insight into the invisible crowd liberates us from the discipline of linear time in ways similar to that of the affective body. Both engage in a field of immanence that is virtual, simultaneously located in the future-past but never the present.

63 This similitude is not so coincidental. As I have argued, haunting registers affectively.

The affective moments of intensity that jolt the body, but are gone before they are captured are, I believe, the very actual but virtual sensations of the spectral (Massumi

2002: 30). They are the temporary awareness of states beyond the reach of rational- explanatory language, they are the embodiment of Bill’s repeated “I don’t know...” But if ghosts are productive of affective moments of intensity, moments which anthropologist

Todd Ramon Ochoa has recently described as “actualized in fluttering turns of the stomach, in goosebumps behind my arms, and in barely perceptible sensations in my chest...” then they point to a beyond, a potential that in its perpetual indefinability escapes or exceeds the categorical stasis of “bare life” (2007: 482). So the ghosts of the nuclear public sphere, past and future, American or otherwise, point to a violent destiny pre-achieved and simultaneously dispel it, insistently keeping bare life immanent.

The ghosts in Ramon Ochoa’s account, an exploration of the Cuban-Kongo ritual form of communicating with the dead known as Palo, demand, he argues, the formation of what Deleuze and Guattari call a “minor language.” Ethnography’s traditional modes and tropes of representation are neither adequate nor appropriate to Kalunga’s, the dead’s, evasive and slippery spectrality. It is for this reason, Ramon Ochoa argues, that these ghosts are both important and have so seldom been written about in anthropology, a discipline whose writing still adheres to modem forms of representation—a form in which the materiality of ghosts could only be written as superstition (2007: 479). Palo, he asserts, challenges the ethnographic conventions of language and representation in

64 anthropology and in doing so questions the fundamental premises of authority on which the discipline rests. He writes:

The stakes then involved in creating this foreign language for Palo within our own English-language social science are the same as those involved in the primary questions of discourse and power, of the generation (or preservation) of authority in and through representation, which are simultaneously the stakes involved in the profoundly ethical questions regarding the continued existence, or not, of content in its encounter with form, which is to say of fieldwork in its encounter with the genre (disciplinary) precedents of ethnography (Ramon Ochoa 2007: 481).

Like Ramon Ochoa’s Cuban-Kongo, the spaces of the nuclear public sphere are

saturated with ghosts and like in Palo, these ghosts demand a new orientation of language

away from the dominant modes of ethnographic representation and witnessing that have

defined the discipline for so long. For Ramon Ochoa this demand, which is not lightly

dismissed, contains the radical potential embedded in the dead. I want, however, to draw

out the implications, largely left implicit in Ramon Ochoa’s work, between haunting and

the affective body, for it is my contention that embedded in this virtual encounter is an

insurgent politics that envelopes and then surpasses the contingencies of ethnographic

writing. Located precisely in the movement between capture and becoming, between

control and line-of-flight, or to re-invoke the language I have been using, between bare

life and the recognition of the body as an assemblage of intensities, desires and affective

events, an in-between actualized by haunting, is an emergent politics of potential. For it

seems to me that what haunting registers and what I am calling affect is an ethics. The

encounter, between haunting and the body, then, assumes great significance here for the encounter is the actualization of potentiality itself. Contained within it is an ethics based on the endless possibilities of life instead of the foreclosure of threat and death. At the

65 same time it is an ethics that, as we have seen, escapes before it can be captured, and this means before it can be represented too. Our only option here is to borrow a concept from nuclear history itself and deploy a proliferation of sorts. A serial repetition of, and loitering in, the always fading slipstreams of these haunting encounters. Herein lies a methodology of sorts, albeit a methodology always on the move and always playing catch-up with the traces of its object.

The bomb and the bombshell Reagan erupted onto the scene amidst a spectacle going awry and a haunting encounter spinning out of control in all the wrong ways. But he was not the only visitor on the scene trying to keep it all together. The Oppenheimer Centennial had been, from the beginning, the Beauty Queen’s show. The beauty queen was, to be precise, Miss

Albuquerque 2004 who the conference organizers had hired, along with her mother who wore a sash that read: “Mother of Miss Albuquerque”, to act as the hostess for the two- day event. Oppenheimer was supposed to be the star of the show, of course, but it was the Beauty Queen who I came away thinking of. There she was taking down names for the afternoon bus tours or sitting on the dais with Governor Richardson, always wearing her crown and sporting a new outfit each time, as he spoke of the dedication of the house the Oppenheimer’s had occupied in Los Alamos as a newly designated heritage site. And there she was posing for pictures with the atomic bomb nicknamed Fat Man. The Bomb and the bombshell.25

25 In what follows I track the ways in which the beauty queen’s body both made sense and produced sensation. My intention is not to further objectify her, nor take intellectual advantage of her objectification, but to follow the ripples and reverberations of the objectification that has already taken place. These things, I submit, are of a different order both theoretically and politically. Nonetheless, it would be irresponsible not to acknowledge the representational politics that swirl around the beauty queen.

66 The beauty queen became a kind of promise or horizon for me, somehow tangible and simultaneously remote and receding, and as I was to learn some time later, for others too, stealing Oppenheimer’s thunder at each turn. As I sat there listening to others relate what Oppenheimer meant to American history my thoughts ran adrift, I daydreamed,

“how does her crown stay on?” and perhaps more importantly, “what is she doing here?”

Sometime later I came to realize that it was precisely this kind of distraction that she was meant to produce. Oppenheimer, it seems, was never adequate to his memorialization. It was in fact the Beauty Queen, that icon of the American way of life, that we were there to celebrate. In this context the beauty queen’s presence was not so foreign or so shocking.

The beauty queen represented the continuity of the American way of life that, in the logic of power, was guaranteed by the victory that the bomb afforded. In this way her presence reinforced the weekend’s turn away from war as a difficult and unpleasant site of memory and replaced it with wholesome and legitimated feelings of desire and patriotism redirected towards her body. In this way the silent bombshell both represents and reinforces the loss of memory on which the smooth functioning of the event as a celebration depends upon.

The Beauty Queen embodies the distraction that lies at the heart of the spectacle as a system of power—and as a distraction she was first rate, charming, gracious, pretty, but most of all anomalous. In a way not unlike a car wreck she was something that commanded the attentive and fascinated gaze. Or was it distraction? For Debord the heart of the spectacle lay in the erasure or destruction of historical awareness.

“Spectacular domination's first priority was to make historical knowledge in general

67 disappear; beginning with just about all rational information and commentary on the most recent past” (Debord 1988). The Beauty Queen must be seen in this context, as a central aspect of the spectacle’s amnesiac desires. She does so by providing a new locus for attention, by acting as a distraction both from the fragility of Oppenheimer’s ghost to act as a normative and disciplined signifier of the nation as well as from the horrors of the atomic and nuclear bombs from Japan onwards, that produced and maintained this fragility.

Attention and its rebellious partner, distraction, first became a cause for concern in the context of spectacle and capitalism in the late nineteenth century. At the time the desire to harness disciplined bodies appropriate to work in the factories of industrial capitalism then sweeping Europe was a key priority. However, just at the time when attention was finding its way to the top of the list in terms of social priorities, it was at the same time seen to be the victim of a reorganization of knowledge about and a reformulation of the thinking, seeing subject. As Crary notes in his book Suspensions of

Perception, attention emerged as a topic for study as a result of two related breakdowns:

“the collapse of classical models of vision and the stable punctual subject those models presupposed and the untenability of a priori solutions to epistemological subjects which entailed the loss of any permanent or unconditional guarantees of mental unity and synthesis” (2000: 20). However, at the same time as industrial capitalism was demanding a new kind of productive attention from worker’s bodies, an ever accelerating regime of capitalism aligned with a new kind of disciplinary govemmentality meant the creation and maintenance of what Foucault called “docility” through an array of distracting

68 mechanisms such as new forms of spectacles like exhibitions and world fairs and a new array of consumptive pleasures upon which to focus (Crary 2000: 29-30).26 The problem of attention became considerably more complex at this point, transformed as it was into a complex management of just the right amounts of attention and distraction, sometimes simultaneously.

Now, surveillance and spectacle, along with a number of other strategies of power, occupy similar and co-functioning footholds on the subject. Deleuze (1992) came to articulate the diversified and dispersed mediums of postmodern mechanisms of power as “control”, a system of power that, without a central locus, travels along and uses the multiple and sticky networks of everyday life. Attention and distraction, in this context, work simultaneously upon the body, constructing multifaceted matrices of sensual awareness and anaesthesia that maintain the body in various states of easy compliance.

Control, as Crary implicitly notes when he says that attention has remained a constant concern for modes of power even as they themselves have transformed, does not rely on attention and distraction as consistent and stable opposites which may be mechanically deployed (2000: 72). Instead, control offers a fluid micro-organization of attention and

26 This combination of Foucauldian displinarity and Debordian spectacle may seem contradictory. Crary, however, argues for a perspective that recognizes the similarities despite Foucault’s famous dismissal of spectacle as an important factor in the operation of power. He writes: Debord’s accountt of spectacle as multiple strategies of isolation parallels those outlined by Foucault in Discipline and Punish as the production of docile bodies, or the reduction of the political force of bodies....Both Debord and Foucault outline diffuse mechanisms of power, through which imperatives of normalization or conformity permeate most layers of social activity and become subjectively internalized. It is in this sense that the management of attention, whether through early nineteenth century mass media forms or later through the television set or computer monitor has little to do with the visual contents of the screens and far more with a larger strategy of the individual. Spectacle not primarily concerned withlooking a images t but rather with the construction of conditions that individualize, immobilize and separate subjects even within a world in which mobility and circulation are ubiquitous. In this way attention becomes key to operation of non- coercive forms of power. This is why it is not inappropriate to conflate seemingly different optical or technological objects: they are similarly about arrangements of bodies in space, techniques of isolation, cellularization and above all separation (Crary 2000: 74).

69 distraction, organized not along a static foundation, but, attaching itself to the zigzagging technologies that temporalize daily life.

But we are getting ahead of the Beauty Queen and the Oppenheimer Centennial.

Here attention and distraction were supposed to operate much more simply, flitting without pause and as if from another era, between Oppenheimer and the Beauty Queen.

As we have seen, the fragile balance between attention and distraction always threatens to become a slippery slope feeding upon its internal dynamic. The system cannot, as the

Centennial organizers had assumed or hoped, remain a stable binary, switching, as needs be, between dualities of the gaze and the averted, the felt and the impactless. This is what the organizers missed when installing the Beauty Queen as Oppenheimer’s official distraction; distraction breeds other kinds of attention and vice versa. What was missing in this equation was an awareness, which Massumi (2002) has recently called attention to, of the affective body in movement. Yet as far back as the nineteenth century when various and competing theories of attention were at the forefront of scientific and philosophical inquiry, Crary observes that, “in almost all the various ways it was theorized, attention was inseparable from physical effort, movement, action” (2000: 42).

At the Oppenheimer Centennial, the Beauty Queen was the distraction that would make up for the inadequacy of Oppenheimer. The Beauty Queen was necessary to the event precisely because the figure of Oppenheimer was himself inadequate to it, inadequate to the heroism in which he was being retrospectively wrapped. Despite the recuperation of Oppenheimer in the national memory he remains too ambiguous, too guarded and too complex a figure around which to rally the national future. In other

70 words, not quite American enough. But if Oppenheimer provided an inadequate object of attention, the Beauty Queen too was an inadequate object of distraction. Or, put another way, attention and distraction are always inadequate to themselves. This has less to do with the qualities of the Beauty Queen herself, of course, than with the fundamentally kinetic nature of the body of the spectator which wanders somewhere between the binary poles of attention and distraction, renders them dynamic and gets caught up in a circular and endless play of these states, moving, and producing new attentive states as with the lines of flight on which the body travels.

But embedded in the figure of the Beauty Queen as the target of theattentive gaze are entire worlds and it is to these that I now turn. I have already stated that as the object of the attentive gaze the Oppenheimer beauty queen was simultaneously a catalyst for amnesia and distraction (of nuclear horror) and a persistent reminder of what nuclear weapons had accomplished and preserved (the American domestic homefront gendered female). Beauty queens too, of course, have played a longer role in nuclear history than I initially imagined. Constandina Titus (2004) describes how in the 1950’s and 60’s beauty queens often wore sashes depicting the now-iconic mushroom cloud, at the time, a near-sublime symbol of American power, progress and ingenuity.27 The Oppenheimer beauty queen is in many ways a throwback to this era, a symbol of the steadying and

27 The mushroom cloud as a symbol has undergone considerable transformation since the heady days of the 1950’s and 60’s when above ground nuclear tests were still popular broadcasts on television. Roger Chapman (2007) notes that the mushroom cloud is now a countercultural symbol more than a triumphant one. My own view is that the mushroom cloud as a symbol is more akin to a free-floating signifier, in other words, it can function as a symbol of national triumph and national doom at the same time.

71 enduring female domestic sphere that was secured or protected through nuclear weapons.

The iconic status of the female domestic sphere is simultaneously revealed as an unstable construction for, as others have pointed out the need to protect the homefront was rooted in both a desire to shield and maintain it as much as a sense that it was a dangerous sphere that needed to be controlled and refined through greater and greater pursuits of technology.

Much has been written about the ways in which the cultural understandings and vernaculars of nuclear weapons in the United States have both appropriated and manipulated female sexuality and gender roles, especially the cooptation of birth metaphors in the making of the atomic bomb (Easlea 1983; Cohn 1987; Keller 1990;

Gusterson 1996). In her seminal article, “Sex and death in the rational world of defense intellectuals” Carol Cohn (1987) notes the hyper-sexualized imagery of nuclear weapons that she came across in the world of defense and nuclear-planning professionals. This imagery paints nuclear weapons as seemingly explicit extensions of male sexual anatomy and prowess albeit through making apparently oblivious reference to technical items such as “penetration-aids”, “thrust capability” and describing nuclear explosions as “boiling in a white fury of creamy foam” (Cohn 1987: 87; Laurence quoted in Cohn 1987: 87).

However, for Cohn, the sexualized vocabulary, while disturbing, “seemed to fit easily into the masculine world of nuclear war planning” (89). What did not fit, she felt, was another linguistic strategy that could only be called “domestic.” This was a vocabulary of terms that used domestic euphemisms for the technical specifications of nuclear weapons launch, delivery and payload characteristics.

72 Elaborating on this theme of domesticity, Elaine Tyler May (1989) describes how during the Cold War era, the anxieties of nuclear war were allayed in part through an attempt to re-secure rigid gender roles after the fluidity and relative flexibility of the interwar and World War Two years. Here the public fears of apocalypse were awkwardly mapped onto the private domestic arenas of everyday life (May 1989: 155). The wildly out of control and unthinkable proportions of nuclear proliferation and weapon yield were matched with an equally violent desire to control to homefront. Women’s bodies and women’s sexuality, so often seen as the root of the problem, were again identified by a host of emergent social experts (social workers,, psychologists, clergy, home economists) and targeted in a new Cold war biopolitics of proper homemaking. This was accomplished in part through various attempts to “revitalize” the domestic sphere and endow it with “a sense of national purpose” for women, who were encouraged to pursue such activities as bomb-shelter maintenance and housekeeping and the acquisition of basic nursing and medical skills to be employed in the case of nuclear attack (May 1989:

159).

Considered this way, the beauty queen’s presence at the Oppenheimer Centennial events makes good sense. She acts as a nostalgic throwback to an earlier era when things were more transparent. The beauty queen also re-secures the events of the Oppenheimer

Centennial with her body by demonstrating what nuclear weapons were able to protect and maintain—a homefront rooted in clearly maintained gender divide and a nostalgic

73 American way of life. 9ft Filling in for the inadequacy of Oppenheimer, the beauty queen was able to fill in as the rational element that enabled everything to fit together. As a part of a trio, along with Reagan and Oppenheimer, the beauty queen was able to project the image of a world preserved and made safe by atomic and nuclear weapons. But to fit the

Beauty Queen exclusively into such a narrative would be flatten and disregard the production of sensation and affect which she ignited. Securing a rationalized, sensible narrative for the events is what her body strives and aspires to achieve. But inevitably it does both more and less than this. And so the Beauty Queen is important not just for what she tried to do but for the lines of intensity and potential that she initiated, in spite of herself.

Ethnographic writing always lags behind its subjects and events, playing catch-up and, at the same time, getting caught-up both literally and figuratively in the effervescent traces of the anthropological here-and-now. The literal lag between fieldwork and writing-up means we are always returning to the events of the field retrospectively, notes-in-hand and memories-in-mind, attempting, with the seeming benefits of time and reflection, to make sense of them. In this game of catch-up, the act of getting caught-up in the events that take place in the field are often lost, written out in the attempt to explain, make meaning and add depth. But what happens if we force ourselves to loiter at the surface and refuse the invitation to explanation? In other words, what happens when we do not

28 While I recognize the inherent violence of such a nostalgia I want to move on without considering it in depth because what I want to get at is both another kind of violence and the instability of bodies.The point is that events are not unstable, bodies are, and thus because events only exist through bodily representation they are always unstable. This represents both a difficulty and an opportunity.

74 write out of the state of being caught-up but remain there at the intersection of the paradox?

Symbolically, epistemologically, the beauty queen is a powerful symbol of all that was preserved and maintained through nuclear weapons. She represents not just the strategic victory of one nuclear arsenal over another but, more importantly, the supremacy of one culture, one way of life over another. But these explanations of the ways in which the beauty queen exists as the rational element that makes everything fit together works only if I choose to retroactively erase the expectant intensity—her spark and sparkle—of the paradox-filled moment of first encounter; the moment within which I was bodily caught-up. The event is expressed in the confusion of the question: what is a beauty queen doing here?

The beauty queen represents a moment of aporia for this study. Despite the forcefulness and seeming clarity of her signifiers, she, upon reflection, moves us back into a prolonged moment of intense indistinction. However, the aporia is productive, unfolding rather than enfolding, engendering multiple strands of circulation, lines of desire and potential that enables us to glimpse or to be able to track the productive and repressive logics at work in American nuclear commemoration. These logics are the synthesis of war and capitalism, a synthesis long ago initiated but increasingly refined.

The Oppenheimer beauty queen is a paradox not because of the simple fact of her presence at the Oppenheimer Centennial event. This is, don't get me wrong, a serious conundrum, but it is her presence thatproduces the paradox rather than simply locating it.

The paradox of her body is this: the Beauty Queen, as I have already argued, makes

75 sense in her presence at the Oppenheimer centennial events. However, we must also recognize that at the same time as she makes sense, she also makes sensation. And sensation, to be sure, is not the same as sense. These sensations would not let go.

In The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze urges us to eschew depth for the surface which is where, he argues, the paradox of the event “inheres” (1990: 5, 9). The events he refers to are “incorporeal entities.” They are incorporeal precisely because they do not submerge into the depths of bodies but play themselves out in flashes of intensity between and along the body’s edges and surfaces: the skin (Deleuze 1990: 9-10). For

Deleuze the paradox is not something that must be resolved but something to dwell within and, if possible, to set in motion as a proliferating agent. Paying attention to the logic of the paradox points us, I hope, in the direction of a concrete and bodily methodology that simultaneously helps us to articulate an ethics.

Let me elaborate. Sensation, Deleuze argues, is always a paradox.29 Paradox is always “opposed” to common or good sense, which Deleuze terms doxa, in their desire to group and order distributively and unidirectionally (Deleuze 1990: 75). Common or good sense seeks to organize information, rationalize it and apply it to something or somewhere that can be targeted: an explanation, a meaning, an articulated feeling, an ideology. This has a wholly dismal effect upon the way in which we understand and deal with difference. For good sense always seeks to demolish the spontaneous architectures on which difference thrives and bring it back into line, literally. Deleuze describes the technique of good sense towards difference as engaging “it in a controlled movement

29 Deleuze uses the term “sense” to refer to what I am calling “sensation”. I am doing so in an attempt to clarify the distinction between “sense” as a rational or logical inclination,what Deleuze refers to as doxa or “common” and “good” sense, (see Deleuze 1990: 75)

76 which is supposed to saturate, equalize, annul, and compensate it” (1990: 75-76). In other words, “good sense is altogether combustive and digestive” (Deleuze 1990: 76). In this manner, good sense and nuclear weapons are not unalike, to wit, the state-sponsored ideology of “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD) which defined institutional nuclear policy for much of the Cold War.

Sensation is the pure production of difference, and difference always marks the horizon of possibility. It is a singularity that is not oriented towards nor compelled to any direction but radiates out in all directions at once. As such, difference/sensation is subject to the injunctions and recuperative mechanisms—which are by definition violent—of good sense. But good sense, just like the ethnographic impulse so long rooted in it, is always catching up. Like the White Rabbit in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in

Wonderland, good and common sense are always (too) late for an important date. This means that sensation has always preceded the inclination towards rationalization or explanation, and that these tendencies, embodied in good sense, must try and eradicate retrospectively something which has always already passed. That my previous attempt to explain and locate the beauty queen kept getting tripped up in the power of her sensation is more understandable here. This means that good sense is always haunted by the traces of sensation still rippling across the body’s surfaces and avoiding the “enclosure” of explanation. Notice how here again we are returned to the sticky and persistent conjunction of haunting and affect, such that even Deleuze acknowledges that only in the logic of sense might we “produce a phantom at the limit of a lengthened or unfolded experience” (1990: 20). Sensation, then, is the felt bodily trace of intensity, the registration of the affective event (Massumi 2002: 14). Whereas sense seems to produce meaning, sensation eludes meaning in the singularity of the affective event. Sensation or intensity, even if it feeds back into sovereign logics always exceeds them and so provides a zone that inevitably escapes coded structuring by keeping potential in reserve. Manning puts it this way:

What is uncommon is realizing that even those Bodies without Organs that seek to organize their intensities around concepts such as reason are themselves continually destratified in sensual relations to nonsense. You can never really escape sense.30 Even making sense senses (2007: 153).

Paying attention to the sensations as well as the sense that the beauty queen provokes and produces is noteworthy but nonetheless challenging. It is challenging in the sense that it leads us astray from the normative protocols, the roots and routes of practiced social scientific thought and yet this is precisely what makes it important. The intensity of the encounter with the beauty queen opens us up to the complexity of the event that coalesces, or flashes up in a moment of almost delirious paradox that is as much virtual as it is actual. It is this quality of being virtual that marks this moment of sensational encounter as one loaded with the exciting instabilities of potential (Massumi

2002: 30).

In the case of my encounter with Miss Albuquerque paying attention to sensation marks potential by calling attention to, if only momentarily before the gap is in-filled with sense, the absences, the hauntings, and the traumas that spectacle attempts to deny.

For no matter how much Miss Albuquerque’s presence at the event can, retrospectively,

30 Note where I have used “sensation” to refer to the affective moment of intensity, and “sense” to refer to those thoughts and feelings aligned with reason or logic. Manning uses the term “sense” for both.

78 be made to fit into the rational flow of things, she also interrupted this flow. Her presence as an icon of America undefeated was too much, and exceeded the very thing it was supposed to cement. Instead, the beauty queen became a reminder of the worst kind.

The bombshell, inevitably exceeding her role as a distraction, pointed simultaneously and more fervently to the absent horror of the bombing. The beauty queen’s presence at the event then served to remind—with traumatic repetition—of all the things that had been left out of the picture: war, the victims of the atomic bomb, and all of the catastrophic legacies of the nuclear age. The sensations produced by the beauty queen were significant because they simultaneously provoked or called to the surface the uncanny or the feeling of being “out of place”, feelings that were only intensified by the paradoxical simultaneity of longing— longing for the national body—that the figure of the beauty queen was meant to provoke. In other words, the body points to potential by marking out or signalling the spectacle as a spectacle, posing counter-images and memories to it at the same time as it is enveloped by the violent inertias of common sense and order.

Incidentally, I cannot think of a better example of the intertwined nature of bodies and power or a better argument justifying the centrality of the body in discussions of contemporary spectacle and sovereignty such as this.

This is much more than another abstract call for a recognition of body politics in the spectacular social sphere. Nor is it an instance of the utopian-spirited but “regressive appeals” that claim to the body as rescue from the dissolve into pure simulation (Seltzer

1998: 60). That the politics are embedded in emergent possibilities, contingencies and in the haunting traces of bodily movement and sensation, what Stewart (2005) calls

79 “vitalities”, makes them no less concrete, what it recognizes however is their status as what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) would call “immanent.” The immanent quality of these politics, their elusiveness, is both the source of their power and, perhaps, what makes them harder to take into account. This is because the politics of the immanent are not oriented vertically or calibrated by height or depth, but, like sensations, play across and upon surfaces or planes. Planes of immanence.

This is not, as Deleuze points out, because surface lacks depth, “but rather that height and depth lack surface” (1990: 72). As sensations accumulate and gather themselves into moments of intensity, forces of system and order disassemble and crumble, counter-images and memories flash up and into the body’s orbit like Walter

Benjamin’s (1968)31 concept of nineteenth-century industrial city as a place marked by the sudden unexpected shocks of railways and trams, car accidents, the clanging brutality of factory-work and the newly ordinary hustle-bustle of urban life. In these moments the body spreads itself out, becoming thin and porous, dissolving the hard and fast connections between its organs, tossing them up in the air like a deck of cards and watching as they fall into new assemblages each time, asserting itself as an uncapturable entity; a singularity posed against the thickness of identity and society. In this instant, life as we know it is loosened, deterritorialized, and power appears denaturalized. These are the radical politics embedded in the transitory instants of sensation or a sensitivity to the sensations of dissipation. Deleuze describes it like this:

It suffices that we dissipate ourselves a little, that we be able to be at the surface, that we stretch our skin like a drum, in order that the “great politics” begin. An empty square for neither man nor god; singularities which are neither general nor individual, neither

31 See in particular “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”

80 personal nor universal. All of this is traversed by circulations, echoes and events which produce more sense, more freedom and more strength than man has ever dreamed of or God conceived. Today’s task is to make the empty square circulate and to make pre­ individual and nonpersonal singularities speak - in short to produce sense (1990: 72-73).

*** One of the uncanny things about the Beauty Queen is the way in which she muddies the distinctions by which we have traditionally understood war. Among the most important of these distinctions is that between public and private. War has always been a public endeavor—full, of course, of private moments of despair, grief, heroism, and struggle—but as an institution, public. Here her body serves as the link that clearly enforces the idea of war as the protection of the private sphere as the preservation of that elusive mythology known as the “American way of life.” Nonetheless, the Beauty

Queen's body straddles the divide between the domestic and the state, the public and the private, both linking each to the other and fragmenting these links at the same time. In this way she is positioned not simply as that trust which is protected by the means, weapons and commemorations of war, but as the appropriate receptacle for masculine military power, rendered in all its phallic potency. But to read the Beauty Queen simply as a body that—to the exclusion of all else—rigidly enforces the gendered lines of

American cultural militarism would be, in my opinion, a mistake. It is too easy to assume that the Beauty Queen’s body can only be read singularly—as a dominant or normative intervention. There is, as we have already seen, enormous multiplicity there.

While the Beauty Queen represents an idealized corporeal version of the American domestic sphere that is preserved by the means of war, and also reinforces the gendered lines of a conservative vision of America, wherein military power is the domain of men, she does so in order to conceal another way in which she can be read. The readings that

81 focus on the Beauty Queen as a highly gendered body do not preclude the fact that she is also the body of the public or the citizenry at large. She represents not just the divide between the female-domestic-private and the male-militarized-public, but the divide between the multitude and imperial sovereignty.

This reading can only stand up if the Beauty Queen's body provides some moment or potential for radical emergence at the same time as she acts as a normative controlling force—an extreme instance of what Berlant (2000) identifies as the deployment of sentimental images and icons by conservative forces as a way of creating and maintaining an “intimate public sphere.” The beauty queen does provide some of these moments.

Fleeting and transitory (perhaps more so than most) and most definitely elusive, these moments have not really been recognized (as a legitimate analytical line-item) in cultural theory until recently.32 These events of emergence are those that she produced in me and others in the very role she was meant to play, these moments of inadvertent emergence are perhaps all the more important and potentializing because they are produced via the fulfillments of normative or controlling strategies. This is the body boiling over in the encounter with the beauty queen, the rush of uncanny strangeness she provokes that cannot be explained.

Berlant's concept of “Diva Citizenship” provides an interesting way to discuss what I mean here (1997). It appears initially incontrovertible that the Miss Albuquerque does not even come close to satisfying the terms of diva citizenship that Berlant sets out.

Berlant uses the term to refer to the acts of subaltern women who have—through radical

32 See Hemmings (2005).

82 and courageous speech acts—intervened and disrupted the dominant discourses of

American national culture. Diva citizenship, according to Berlant, “occurs when a person stages a dramatic coup in the public sphere in which she does not have privilege.

Flashing up and startling the public, “she puts the dominant story into suspended animation...she challenges her audience to identify with the enormity of the suffering she has narrated....calling on people to change the social and institutional practices of citizenship to which they currently consent” (1997: 223).

The Beauty Queen does none of this! Nevertheless, I suggest that she achieves a kind of diva citizenship through the backdoor and, though unintentional and smaller in scale and impact than the examples Berlant cites, nonetheless important. Miss

Albuquerque appears to be as far away from this mode of engagement with the state as it is possible to be: a mute, hegemonic, icon. However, there is perhaps more room than

Berlant allows here for the flash of the diva's emergence. First, Berlant's reliance on literate and forceful speech acts as the ways in which to activate diva citizenship limit them to a category of woman who, while subaltern, have also had access to levels and standards of education not universally available. Moreover, the condition of the speech act unintentionally severs mind from body and renders Berlant unable to recognize the ways in which affect can serve as the activating agent, an agent, that by its viral operation touches and encompasses other bodies in its feedback loop. What I have been describing as the Beauty Queen's sensation, the bodily impact of the affective networks activated by her excessive spectacle, destabilizes the normative national citizenship that she endeavors to embody.

83 The convergence of citizenship and spectacle comes with its own pitfalls, these moments of public life transformed into spectacle are uneasy and unstable Berlant acknowledges. There is always danger that in adopting the spectacle as means to fight power, the performance can be mistaken as “sustained social change itself’ (1997: 223).

This is an important point. It also serves to confirm the analysis above. For what Berlant is implicitly acknowledging here is that the field of power and spectacle as it interacts with the body is inherently unstable. It can gobble up the performative interventions, no matter how forceful in the friction or dissonance they generate, of the body. However, the instability of this field of power as it intersects with the body (and this is a point less commonly cited) is not, cannot be, unidirectional, and can lead to ruptures and leaks as much as it leads to incorporations and co-optations. To recognize this is to make the first important points of this dissertation and the first in a series of liberatory political gestures. It is what Benjamin (1968) would have termed a moment of “awakening”

National Security and the Sensation(al): Nuclear Public Spheres This returns us the concept of the public sphere. The Beauty Queen’s sense and sensation compose and simultaneously produce an image of a normative public sphere that is in effect a materialization of the stasis of security. At the same time, it produces counter­ publics. These counter-publics may only emerge partially and fleetingly but they are multiply and continuously produced (Warner 2002). Her body composes these counterpublics in the affective flash of her excess. In other words these counter-publics are achieved not directly but by the uncanny that inevitably haunts the affective excess of her spectacular body.

84 In Los Alamos that weekend in the summer of 2004, retired and current nuclear scientists, military men, bureaucrats, academics, relatives and just plain Oppenheimer enthusiasts gathered together in a remarkable moment of postmodern spectacle. David, an artist and playwright from White Plains, New York, explained to me that he had come to “learn more about Oppenheimer’s life...and to be close to some of the people and places that Oppenheimer had [known].” David’s trip to Los Alamos was focused around research for a musical he planned to write based on Oppenheimer’s life. While

“Oppenheimer: the musical” has not yet been produced, in 2005 an opera, named “Doctor

Atomic”, based on Oppenheimer’s life had its debut in San Francisco to favourable reviews and has since moved on to play in New York and other cities.33 Musicals and operas are not out of place here. Rather, memorial events like the Oppenheimer

Centennial, in which the beauty queen played her role, are part of an emergent nexus of events, museums, memorials and tourist sites organized around America's atomic and nuclear history and their legacy that are more akin to aesthetic spectacles stripped of their politics.

These places constitute the gathering places that, in tense relationship with the remaining traditional sites of anti-nuclear activism, I am calling the “nuclear public sphere” in the United States. I invoke this decidedly contested phrase not in the optimistic positivism of clarity but precisely because of the aporias, opacities, and contradictions which it forces me to address and reside within. To begin, then, I do not believe that any such thing as an ideal public sphere, in the sense Habermas (1962)

33 http://www.doctor-atomic.com/

85 articulated inThe Structural Transformation o f the Public Sphere, as the zone in liberal

Western societies where politics and law operate, exists. In this I follow a long line of critical scholarship on the notion of the public sphere (see Hardt 1995; Berlant 1997;

Robbins 1993; Warner 1994, 2002). For Hardt (1995) and Hardt and Negri (2000) the public sphere has been sublimated into to the “non-place” of spectacle, a virtual place stripped of any notion of politics, despite its claims to the contrary. They write:

The place of modem liberal politics has disappeared (the public sphere) and thus from this perspective our postmodern and imperial society is characterized by a deficit of the political. In effect, the place of politics has been de-actualized. In this regard Debord’s analysis of the society of the spectacle seems ever more apt and urgent. In the imperial society, the spectacle is a virtual place, or more accurately, a non-place of politics. The spectacle is at once unified and diffuse in such way it is impossible to distinguish any outside from inside - the natural from the social, the private from the public. The liberal notion of the public, the place outside where we act in the presence of others, has been both universalized and sublimated or de-actualized. The end of the outside is the end of liberal politics. (Hardt and Negri 2000: 188)

What then do I mean by invoking the public sphere in this scenario only to repudiate it? The tension between the immaculate notion of the public sphere and the uncanny, traumatic and haunted versions we actually encounter allow us some insight into a spectacle that has always already vanished by the time we become aware of it as such. While atomic and nuclear museums and commemorative sites may not be formally linked (although affiliations of greater and lesser degrees do exist), I am arguing that, together, they are a kind of cultural assemblage that make public and largely similar interventions by packaging together information, affects and emotions that capture the body, to greater or lesser degrees, in ways beneficial to or parallel with the state.

But events in the nuclear public sphere, like the Oppenheimer Centennial, disturb even received, albeit critical, academic notions of the public sphere. Namely this is

86 because the nuclear public sphere is fundamentally organized around a denial of its own trauma. These traumas, to numerous too list—but which include the legacy of war and suffering in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the perilous environmental consequences of nuclear waste storage over an infinite future, as well as the less concrete but no less important legacy of fear and threat bom over the decades of atomic and nuclear weapons existence—are increasingly factored out of memorializations and displays of the history of the era. This negative relationship, this profound absence that lies at the centre of the nuclear public sphere endows it with a haunted, uncanny and fundamentally excessive nature. This means that the nuclear public sphere does not just act or react in relation to the traumatic, as many critical public sphere theories would have it. But that it resides precisely in the non-place or the in-between of the traumatic. This makes the nuclear public sphere a profoundly elusive cultural form to track. Let me elaborate.

Lauren Berlant, for example, rightly notes that the public sphere, such as it is, is saturated with narratives of pain and wound. The sheer weight of individual stories of trauma, coupled with the exponentializing and spectacular effects of new media technologies to (re)broadcast these tales bubble up and crowd out long-standing and deeply-rooted forms of hierarchizing difference and violence (Berlant 1997: 2). Buckling under the mass of these stories, all competing for attention in the public sphere, a malaise or ennui begins to beset the people. Power34 and its interests relies on this malaise and takes it up like a beacon or a thermometer that indicates the sickness of contemporary

U.S. culture. This mass anxiety is seized upon as an excuse by those who feel they have

34 These are ideals that Berlant labels conservative but I believe that while they may be allied with a conservative brand o f liberal politics in social democracies they are not actually rooted there but perhaps can be better understood as aspects of sovereign power itself.

87 lost their privilege, their “iconicity” as Berlant says, as a reason to institute a politics of return. Variously branded as a return to the “traditional” or the “moral” it is inevitably an attempt to return to a politics of privilege for the elite. In its place they offer the perception of a return to a so-called “American way of life.” It is, to be clear, a nostalgic myth-making enterprise, this intimate public sphere, reaching into a refashioned, imagined cinematic past to provide counter-memories and counter-images rooted in spectacle in the project of a dreamworld future. It is also a project oriented around normative, disciplinary and controlling ideals. The intimacy of Berlant’s public sphere relies on the crossing of private pain with public outlets and is rooted in the idea that the salve for American trauma lies in the control and regulation of certain bodily desires and practices such as homosexuality and abortion.

For Michael Warner (1994) and others (see for example: Seltzer 1998; Foster

1996a, 1996b) these scenes of private trauma, injury and wound themselves constitute new public spheres based upon the dehumanizing pleasure of witnessing the pain of others, prompting feelings of escape, superiority, and the othering impulse rooted in the relief and enjoyment of the disasters we avoid but which others do not. These nodes of spectacular private pain, Warner argues, constitute the new points around which public spheres gather. Mark Seltzer (1998) calls this phenomenon the “pathological public sphere” a kind of “wound culture” where in alienation of the collapse of the ideal of the public sphere, publics form and gather in the spectacular but distanced glow of the airplane crash, the car accident, or the overseas war.

88 The beauty queen as the face of the nuclear public sphere seems, at once, to fulfill both of these notions of the public sphere, however fractured and striated they may be.

The nuclear public sphere, of which the Beauty Queen is a desired body and face, is one emergent instance of the rectifying image-making of what Berlant calls the intimate public sphere in America. Covering over the traumas of the past with dream-images of a desired future-past, the Beauty Queen seems to stand in as the desired face of America.

At the same time, the Oppenheimer Centennial seems to provide a similar space for a pathology to appear, a gathering around the wound and nightmare of others. However both depend on a relationship to the traumatic, in Berlant’s case, a promotion of the trauma as a way of strategically leveraging an intensely conservative agenda of governance. Similarly the notion of the pathological public sphere depends on access to the traumatic as a spectacular panorama.

To be sure, both of these theories of the public sphere do have much to offer the understanding of the nuclear spectacle in America, much of which is addressed in future chapters. Nonetheless, I am arguing that to make either model smoothly function in the context at hand depends on a gloss35 on the nature of the traumatic in the American nuclear landscape. The nuclear public sphere does not acknowledge or have access to the traumas that haunt it. Instead it holds the trauma in a double-negative, first denying it access to the American nuclear narrative and second working to deny the horror of the event itself. Take these remarkably unexceptional comments of one nuclear museum docent:

35 My own gloss on the bodies of work represented above is fully acknowledged.

89 Very few people in Japan died as a result of radiation. We exploded that bomb thousands of feet above the city. Also there is no evidence that any babies bom, to women who were in Hiroshima, no evidence of any problems with women who were pregnant during the bombing. ...Well the newspapers and television...they make a big deal of it...sensationalize everything...to sell papers. In fact there are some books in there [here he points to the gift shop] that say how horrible it was.It wasn 7.

In this it conforms more closely to traditional definitions of the traumatic as that which cannot be accessed in the normal unfolding of time and which only arrives in sudden eruptions that themselves escape too quickly to be fully unpacked. The nuclear public sphere is not a response to the overwhelming and potent narratives of individual trauma bubbling up in multiple American locations. That said, it does try, at times, to initiate a nostalgic politics of return—and the Oppenheimer Centennial steeped as it is in narratives of American scientific and industrial ingenuity is a potent example of this—it does so as part of a range of strategies meant to fashion a linear and controlled brand of citizenship based on patriotism and faith in state benevolence. Nor, however, is the nuclear public sphere, a pathological public sphere as such. It is decidedly not oriented around the consumption of trauma (Yaeger 2002). Or at least not directly, because it can be argued that it is a public that is oriented not around the consumption but a traumatic consumption of traumas. Which is to say a consumption that is delayed, too late and simultaneously has already occurred but is not yet known. The traumas that haunt the nuclear public sphere are never on the surface where they might be probed and palliated.

But they are not exclusively subterranean either, rather they are in motion, elusive yet suddenly and unexpectedly emergent. They are something that pass by, here and then gone, like a cloud over the sun on a windy day, momentarily darkening what just an instant before was illuminated and shining. Which is to say that even the traumas of the

90 nuclear public sphere are specters, fading in and out, sometimes visible but just out of reach, sometimes absent but with the density of persistence.

The questions of traumas’ presences and absences becomes more complicated for the nuclear public sphere, more aporic, more contradictory, when in denying the traumas of the past we are confronted with Miss Albuquerque. For the beauty queen, it seems clear, is meant to suture and heal the idea of a normative public sphere, to recreate it via the optimistic promise of her body. She is meant to be a figure that sutures or reconstitutes the national public sphere after the pain and the fragmentation that marked the late decades of twentieth century America. She is a confusing and muddying figure, neither decidedly public or private but simultaneously both. She is, then, a figure of indistinction. And if she is able to unify anything it is not an optimistic public sphere constituted for the multitude, but a coded and repressive public sphere that Kathleen

Stewart describes as “hunker[ed] down like a claustrophobic glass ceiling on the submerged pains and possibilities of an everyday life beaten down into the cracks” (2000:

245).

The beauty queen, in the context of the nuclear public sphere, is always a haunted and haunting figure. Simultaneously creating and undermining herself and the normative public sphere to which she aspires at every turn. This spectral nature of the beauty queen, her constant becoming and undoing, assemblage and deconstruction speak to the circulation of the violence in the nuclear public sphere as well, a violence that the beauty queen attempts to douse and then only seems to constantly re-ignite. The photographic image of the Beauty Queen speaks to this. At the Oppenheimer Centennial the Beauty

91 Queen patiently posed while dozens of people lined up to have their picture taken with her. In doing so, she sought to unify the image of America with her body. The success and the failure of this strategy was only brought back to me in retrospect, when a year after the event I received a postcard from a friend who had also attended the event. The postcard was a digitally manipulated image of the original that he and the Beauty Queen had posed for. The image reinforced the ways in which the unifying desires that the body of the Beauty Queen labours under were fragmented, broken-up and re-composed by the affect circulations of her encounters. Here again, I am reminded of the sovereign contradictions in which Massumi and Dean (1992) ascribe to Ronald Reagan’s body trapped in an unending dialectic of immanence and transcendence. The Beauty Queen’s body, like that of Reagan’s, attains a spectral ethereal status and, “The unification drive leads only to disappearance and fragmentation: the physicality of the unifying body disappears leaving only the image, which is then relayed to infinity, composed, decomposed, re-membered and dismembered.”

The Beauty Queen serves to point us to a number of themes extant in this project.

The Beauty Queen was productive of both sense and sensation, both (radical) becoming and representation became, an important event in this study. More than this actually. In many ways the oscillation of her body between spectacle and intensity actually became the form that this research has taken on. In the event of her body, a singularity that is constantly in motion, emerge the themes at play in American nuclear commemoration and celebration. The call and response between presence and absence—the presence that

36 http://www.anu.edu.au/hrc/first and last/chapter 3/stumped.htm (accessed October 12, 2010).

92 (paradoxically) in its excess calls out to the very absence it wishes to exclude and which haunts it. She is not herself a ghost or apparition, of course, but her body seems to act as a kind of spirit medium that calls attention to what Gordon describes as a “seething presence” just under the surface of taken-for-granted reality (1997: 8). In this she literally embodies the public secret—that which is known but not articulated—of the bomb in America (Taussig 1999). Her body seems to act as a case or a shell from which to conceal the secret of the bomb and replace it with the narratives of America victorious, of the normative American way of life as utopia. However, rather than fulfilling this function as beautiful concealer, like a jewellery box she only calls attention to the secret and puts it on display. It is this circulation between the known and the unknown, the present and the absent, the acknowledged and the denied, the hidden and the secret, which the Beauty Queen initiates into circulation through an affective encounter. While it is true that, as Butler (2004) argues, the spectrality of the Beauty Queen, and Reagan for that matter, initiates a violence that is foreboding in its interminability, she also sets off moments of intensity that in their excess embolden moments of becoming and potential that may provide interruptions or avenues of negation for violence’s interminability.

93 Chapter 2 Monsters. Replicas, Cyborgs, Impostors and Doubles: Proliferations of Indistinction in the Nuclear Public Sphere

Prologue—Replica(nt)s and Doubles in the Nuclear Public Sphere In through the back door, a secret unmarked entrance I present myself at the registration desk to receive my credentials. I am handed my orders in an envelope marked “Top

Secret.” Inside I find my official identification. I am Enrico Fermi. Other famous personalities of the Manhattan Project mingle, drinking wine from wine bottles with specialty corks in the shape of miniature Enola Gays, the plane that dropped the bomb n

Hiroshima. There is Edward Teller, and Hans Bethe and General Leslie Groves and over there is Tokyo Rose talking to Robert Oppenheimer.37 Outside, military and civilian vehicles from the 1940’s are parked neatly side-by-side. This is the ‘Blast from the Past’, an event commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the Trinity Test, the first atomic explosion, which took place in the summer of 2005.

Fig. 2.1—The author’s ID badge for “Blast from the Past.”

37 Edward Teller, Hans Bethe were key scientific members of the Manhattan Project while Robert Oppenheimer was the project’s scientific director. General Leslie Groves was the military commander in charge of the Manhattan Project, Tokyo Rose was the generic name given to almost a dozen female Japanese English-speaking broadcasters, Japanese radio, of propaganda. While a generic term, the name Tokyo Rose was most closely associated with Iva Toguri D ’Aquino, and that is whose picture was usedfor the event’s customized identification badges.

94 The simulacrum with 1945 is both poor and surprisingly uncanny. Of course it is not a faithful re-enactment of anything, it is both something old and something new at the same time. It is a blend of nostalgic touchstones that hint at a glorious past without the tension, fear and hardships of that wartime era. But what exactly it is, is impossible to determine. The identities we inhabit that night are nothing but projections of the participants’ desire. But the past is not simply incidental here. Rather we are caught up in a virtual mix of past and future, nostalgia and desire, gathered up and projected forward into a re-creation of the perception of past national greatness. But what exactly that is and what we are doing here is decidedly harder to grasp. History, war, and science are all present here, but politics is not. Here again the ghosts of the past are harnessed towards the production of sovereignty that works itself out in moments of profound exception. The spectacle of ‘Blast from the Past’ was, in some ways, the production of nothing, or of something impossible to define, delineate, give shape and meaning to. It was a moment of indistinction. * * *

Doubles and doppelgangers, replicants and lookalikes have constantly made simultaneously uncanny and banal appearances in everyday life throughout western culture. The double, or doppelganger is of particular interest here. For the double is not just a materialization of the uncanny though resemblance, but is doubled in the expectations which accompany it. For the most part, the double is a harbinger of death.

In Scotland the Double is referred to as the Fetch, as in, he or she who comes to fetch one to their death. As such doubles and doppelgangers have long had associations with evil

95 and with ghostliness. But, as with the speciality of the ghost, there is more than just death that beckons with the double, but a kind of opening up to life that comes with the imminence and the immanence of death. An opportunity to redefine life or live it in different forms. Freud, in his discussion of the double in relation to the uncanny, is quick to make this point, remarking upon the ways in which the double transitions between marking death and immortality. The doubleness of the double is not just spectral either but historical. For, unlike its Scottish or German connotation, “for the Jews the apparition of the Double was not a foreshadowing of death but rather proof that the person to whom it appeared had achieved the rank of prophet” (Borges 2005: 63).

The spectral uncanniness of the Double was brought home to me on the occasion the Oppenheimer Centennial, an event commemorating what would have been Robert

Oppenheimer’s one-hundredth birthday held in Los Alamos New Mexico in the summer of 2004. There, among the dignitaries and honoured guests, a Doppelganger of

Oppenheimer materialized; a vivid and unnerving living replica of the famous physicist right down to the high forehead, the narrow eyes and the stark almost severe nose. But it was the trademark fedora worn, as well by the Double, that was most striking. And indeed this striking resemblance was lent or endowed with an authority that was, I would later learn, based on little more than likeness.

Introduced as Andy Oppenheimer during the ceremonies, a close relative of

Robert J., and indeed a consultant, writer and critic working in the nuclear weapons field, the Double was given a prominence that exceeded that of Oppenheimer’s grandchildren who were also in attendance. I was to speak at length with the double sometime later

96 wherein it was revealed that his relationship to Oppenheimer was hazy and difficult to trace, distant at best, despite the resemblance and that his status as a consultant in the nuclear industry was based on his strident and longstanding criticism of the existence of nuclear weapons. The Double in this case did not simply point backward to the dead

Oppenheimer, referring always to the already captured body. This Oppenheimer, referred backwards and forwards and every which way at the same time, opening up virtual spaces between the past and the future. Here the imminence of the Double is not that of disaster or death, but it is the imminence of immanence, of potential, of an opening up to the world.

Part 1 - Sovereignty's Exceptions: indistinction as outcome

1.1 Introduction: Virtual Proliferation/ProliferatingmM J d the—, Virtual ,,, As Hugh Gusterson has recently noted (2004: 166) nuclear weapons are, since at least the

United States signing of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (1996), a virtual world.38

Nuclear weapons are no longer tested and nuclear scientists in the United States has embarked upon a highly sophisticated program of virtual testing that strives to simulate the conditions under which the nuclear stockpile ages and maintain the weapons in working order through simulated tests using powerful supercomputers. While the stockpile stewardship program seeks to replicate real tests with simulated ones, no doubt blurring the lines between the actual and the virtual, the line between these two remains clearly delimited by the absence of a physical explosion with all of its geological,

38 The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is an international treaty that is not yet in force. The United States signed the treaty in 1996 but has not yet ratified it. Nonetheless, the last United States nuclear test was in 1992 and the country now tests and maintains its nuclear weapons under a program called Science Based Stockpile Stewardship, whose aim is to ensure the good maintenance and working order of the nuclear stockpile without the use test explosions.

97 material and affective reverberations. In atomic and nuclear heritage sites and museums

this line between the real and the simulation is much harder to identify. Indeed the virtual proliferates to such a degree in the space of the nuclear museum or tourist site that war

merges with and fades into the everyday life becoming just one more moment of intensity

in an otherwise anaesthetized day. Past and present merge and mingle in a virtual mix that is increasingly hard to navigate and disentangle, and so it is little wonder that life and

death themselves lose their mooring and get confused, lost, juggled and re-oriented. This

chapter addresses such re-orderings and reconceptions of notions of life and death in the nuclear publics of museums, tourist sites and memorials. I argue that the commemorative displays, events and sites do much more than simply replay an infinitely repeatable and

frozen past.

This chapter tracks the ways in which sovereign biopolitics work themselves in and through the nuclear public sphere. Specifically, this chapter engages a paradox, it seeks to reveal the proliferation o f indistinction, the expansion of its absencing force, its persistent and encompassing opacity which, I argue is the pre-eminent product of this brand of sovereignty. Indistinction works through many levels of nuclear heritage.

Fundamentally, it works to strip nuclear weapons away from the categories of the political, repositioning them in more banal yet accessible forms of spectacle, recreation, holidaying and museum-based science learning. This depoliticization of nuclear weapons is, of course, the preeminent political move of sovereignty, for nuclear weapons more than being machines of death and destruction, are more importantly (bio)political and social tools of control, manipulating dosages of desire for community and fantasies of power in equal amounts to fear, hopelessness and paranoia. This stripping of the political away from nuclear weapons, what Agamben (1998) calls this “lasting eclipse” of politics, does not distance nuclear weapons from us but makes them categories to be contemplated, experienced and even enjoyed in the everyday. In becoming everyday, the loss of the political manifests itself as indistinction, an absence that pervades the space between life and death, a prolonged but imperceptible moment of emergency.

The concept of indistinction stems from Giorgio Agamben’s work on sovereignty but it is equally, though perhaps differently, applicable here. Indistinction refers to the permanence of the sovereign exception and exists between violence and law, between what Agamben calls “bare life”—which is life stripped of the qualities which we associate with its potentiality and good life. Within the exception, indistinction proliferates in ways both anticipated and unexpected.

This chapter seeks to articulate and open up indistinction ethnographically. What are the implications of these proliferations and more specifically what shape or form do these proliferations take? Moreover, how do we experience these forms of potential and capture affectively and what, specifically, are the modalities and qualities of these affects? What kinds of bodies are initiated and curtailed as a result? These questions swirl around a larger conversation, like protons and neutrons around a nucleus, of sovereignty, biopolitics and permanent war. Ultimately, this chapter is concerned with how nuclear spectacle contributes to a creeping outward of the logics of a war not in which lives and deaths are the currency of victory but in which the values with which we

99 endow, experience and understand life and death themselves have become the fundamental battleground.

* * * In New Mexico, where the heart of the Manhattan Project was located, the summer of

2005 marked a temporal moment when the underlying cultural politics of indistinction seemed to flicker and reveal themselves. That summer was, of course, the sixtieth anniversary of both the development and employment of atomic weapons in New

Mexico39 and Japan, respectively. In the central sites of nuclear heritage in New Mexico that summer’s commemorative events focused upon the bomb as scientific and technological accomplishment rather than as a weapon of war with a distinct and highly contested historical significance. In what follows, I describe two events from that anniversary summer of 2005 to examine the ways in which the commemorative impulse in America around atomic and nuclear weapons reveals something about the broader cultural politics of war and trauma in the public sphere. In the two events that I describe, it is the bomb itself that was celebrated, a technological fetishism, an example of what

Anna Tsing (2005) calls America’s “technofrontier,” steeped in the fantasies of the victorious and righteous nation. The first story focuses on a ceremony held at the

Bradbury Museum of Science in July of that year. The museum is part of the Los

Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the place where Robert Oppenheimer and the team of scientists and engineers that made up the Manhattan Project first invented the atomic bomb and where much of the nation’s most advanced nuclear weapons research

39 While the centre of the project to build the bomb was located in New Mexico, the Manhattan project actually had many sites throughout the United States among the most important of which were: Hanford, Washington and Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Chalk River in Northern Ontario, Canada, where a small nuclear reactor was built, was also a key site of the project.

100 and development continues to this day. The second anecdote I use in this chapter comes from an event, also from July 2005, held at the National Atomic Museum, a Smithsonian affiliated museum located in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

That the trauma of the bomb had returned to haunt America once again was not new or particularly surprising. The unresolved nature of America’s relationship with atomic and nuclear weapons, due in large part to the veil of secrecy under which these weapons have been produced and the patina of national security and moral certainty in which they have been justified, virtually guarantees a periodic traumatic eruption

(Gusterson 1996a, Masco 1999, Lifton and Mitchell 1995). Anniversaries, over-endowed with memorial fervour, are particularly susceptible to such outbreaks, as we saw in 1995 with the controversy over the display of the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian.

The Enola Gay controversy at the Smithsonian provided a temporary opening in the arena of the public sphere for the trauma of America’s destruction of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki to be addressed. And while this arena was just as hurriedly shut down, the anniversary was marked not by the exaltation of victory but by multiple lines of fracture and distrust. At that time, the intensity of the debate made it clear that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still far from achieving the status as unambiguous signifiers of morally just acts of war that the military, veteran’s groups and succeeding Presidential administrations would like (Bird and Lifschuz 1998, Linenthal and Englehardt 1996). This seems less clear in the present day. In the decade plus that has passed since the fiftieth anniversary in 1995 the context for the memorializations of war and weaponry have shifted from the euphoria of the immediate Cold War period, where talk of a “peace dividend” trumped that of increased military spending, to the post

9/11 era that finds the United States in the midst of a so—called “global war on terror.”

And so, whereas during the Smithsonian controversy duelling critics debated the need to drop the bomb at all, the whitewashing of history, in terms both pro and con the impact of the bomb, and issues surrounding the politics of displaying machineries of war, the environment just ten years later has significantly changed. The context, tenor, impact and significance of the sixtieth anniversary memorial events I will discuss below both encompasses and meaningfully exceeds those governing the fiftieth anniversary in 1995.

I argue that events illustrate the ongoing merging of war and the everyday, the society of the spectacle with the permanent state of exception. This chapter attempts to track, through an analysis of these commemorative events, the intersection of biopolitics and the condition of permanent war. It is an attempt to examine the ways in which war, sovereignty, trauma and affect intersect and co—articulate one another. But also to recognize the moments of aporia and paradox that they reveal or produce in their intersection. Specifically, I argue that these commemorative events foster a new biopolitical understanding of war and its weapons as technologies productive of life. In doing so, I contend, all the known axioms and tonalities of war have become largely irrelevant. As they merge with, and disappear into, the ether of the permanent sovereign exception, wars and their atrocities, their catastrophes, become obscured and disappear, relegated to fleeting pit-stops of the spectacular around which to gather and make-believe politics and community. And yet in promoting life, the biopolitical forces at work behind

102 these commemorative events, do not produce life so much as cast it into what Giorgio

Agamben has termed “a profound zone of indistinction” (1998).

Finally, this chapter is also an attempt to broaden the conversations on war and violence so that they begin to encompass the everyday and the banal; the unspectacular spectacles of everyday life, in tourism, recreation and memorialization. And so it is ultimately a chapter about the multiply encoded and overlapping plateaus of violence embedded in the permanent state of war and the state of exception that is the everyday; an attempt to bring the hidden and camouflaged into relief so as to better formulate the shape and tenor of a politics of potential and hope.

1.2 Indistinction The concept of indistinction rests or emerges out of a redeployed notion of sovereignty and the sovereign exception that has emerged in the last two decades, which aligns it with biopower and biopolitical concerns and effects rather than the more traditional scholarship on sovereignty which has tended to align it with the territorial and legal integrity of the nation-state (see particularly Foucault 2003; Agamben 1998, 2004; Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004; Mbembe 2003, Buck-Morss 2000; Edkins 2000; Edkins, Pin-Fat and Shapiro 2004; Connolly 2004).

These discussions on the relationship between biopolitics and sovereignty have tended to focus on the new terrains of sovereign violence, an extension of life or death decisions beyond all normative territorial and legal realms. As such they have sought out new highs and lows (depending on one’s interpretation) in the control or management of forms and opportunities of life and the proliferation and instrumentalization of death.

This scholarship has focused almost exclusively on limit figures and limit situations of

103 biopolitical sovereignty: the concentration camp, the musselman, the “neomort” or the permanently comatose, the refugee camp, Gaza and the West Bank, just to name a few.

The focus on limit figures and situations as a means of demonstrating the production of bare life in biopolitical sovereignty is where this chapter diverges,

somewhat, from some of the prominent literature on the subject. Rather than see

indistinction as at work on the limits of the exception I posit that indistinction—being the very thing that sovereignty produces—is incompatible with a hermeneutics of limits and

frontiers. Instead, I seek to articulate indistinction from within the everyday, or better yet

from the non-place of sovereignty. This chapter endeavors to delineate neither a new politics of life or of death, -but rather to interrogate the ways in which life and death are

brought together, merged and subjected to the opacity of the forces of indistinction,

subsequently losing the contours by which we have traditionally made sense of them.

For Agamben indistinction marks what he calls a “threshold” between law and violence, inside and outside, between the good life and bare life, bios and zoe (1998: 9,

32). But while the term “threshold” initially implies a space of passage or transience between one state or place and another, Agamben implies that the threshold has been

stripped of all qualities of mobility and instead stands as the permanent locale of sovereignty, an in-between non-place, perpetually stuck, between all these things—the threshold of sovereignty is the place of indistinction. Indistinction is not nothingness or emptiness or simulacral infinitude, then, but profound in-betweeness. If the pre-eminent quality of biopolitical sovereignty is indistinction then all life within its purview exists in uncertain, unclassifiable, and unpredictable conditions—ironically the permanence of

104 indistinction speaks to a profound impermanence of life. Bodies are caught perpetually between law and the exception, which operate not in opposition but in concert, between

“chaos and the normal situation” (Agamben 1998: 19). Indistinction then, more than marking the non-place of sovereignty is the very location and matter of sovereign violence, it is the space that allows law to bleed into violence and violence into law without any demarcation between the two (Agamben 1998: 32). It is this unlocalizable indistinction and the means by which it is produced and undermined, not in limits or margins or in extremes, but in the everyday that I explore here. For, if indistinction is the fundamental condition of contemporary biopolitical sovereignty, and if, as Agamben says, indistinction “has transgressed its spatiotemporal boundaries and now, overflowing outside of them, is starting to coincide with the normal order, in which everything becomes possible” then indistinction and the production of bare life no longer adhere to limits of any kind and spread unchecked (1998: 38).

By insisting upon and dwelling within indistinction, by refusing to seek distinction within indistinction, whatever the motive, means treading through the murkiness of the sovereign exception and allowing it to envelop us. In doing this I believe we achieve two things. First an acknowledgement that bare life exists everywhere in various states of emergence, intensity, presence and absence. Second, I believe that it is only within the conditions of indistinction, and all that they entail, that new avenues of becoming and potential, new potentialities for life and new possibilities for hope can be articulated. Agamben says as much at the conclusion ofHomo Sacer when he writes: “It is only on the basis of these uncertain and nameless terrains, these

105 difficult zones of indistinction that the ways and forms of a new politics must be thought”

(1998: 187). Only by recognizing indistinction as such, by naming the emergency, can we become aware that it is not static, immobile, or monolithic in its completion. The rhetoric of the permanence of the exception, and the state of permanent war that accompanies it do not preclude and, in fact, often initiate, I believe, the movements, passages and emergences—affective and intensive—that occur parallel with such a system. These movements point to the incompletion of indistinction and demonstrate that indistinction is more of an aspiration for totality than evidence of it.

In nuclear spectacles indistinction takes on seemingly banal and inconsequential forms, eroding the space between life and death, not in sweeping gestures and massive chunks, but intimately, microscopically, even pleasurably, playing on desire and spectacles of inclusion and community as just as easily as it draws on shock, fear, and instrumentalization (Berlant 1991, 1997; Massumi 1993; Stewart 2007). In doing this I seek, specifically, to move away from the orientation, which often hardens into a fixation, with the horizon of death that is the focus of much of the work on indistinction. This orientation, which found the name “necropolitics” in the work of Achille Mbembe

(2003), frames the contemporary political subject’s existence as a struggle with death or the living death of bare life. In this conversation, a doubled relationship between life and death, one encompassed within the other, is put forward, neither of which is adequate to the politics that I am describing. On one level, life and death harden into a pair of limit- figures, one for the other. This binary relationship, however, gets swallowed by a second relationship in which death becomes the transcendent prospect and tableau of possibility

106 for life and life, such as it is, then, only exists in the marginal interstices of death; life becomes an exclusionary space precisely through its monolithic inclusion in death. As

Rosi Braidotti has written: “I find this overemphasis on the horizons of mortality and perishability inadequate to the vital politics of our era” (2007).

Throughout this work, then, I try to temper the orientation and the momentum towards death, so close to the surface in any consideration of nuclear weapons. Instead, I take refuge, both emotionally and politically, in moments of life which may manifest as intensities, affects, doubts, outbursts, affirmations, endurances, doggedness in the face of denial and moments of uncanniness and haunting, among others. These moments, transitory and fleeting though they may be, provide us with a rhizome that emboldens a rethinking of the politics of sovereignty and indistinction as not just a set of mechanisms of capture, enclosure, violent reduction and, ultimately, death. Rather, indistinction may be thought of as potentializing in the sense that it allows for new formations of life, new moments of becoming and new articulations of hope to emerge that were previously suppressed.

Central to this chapter, then, is a consideration and a working out of what an ethnography of indistinction might look like, which is something that must remain opaque by its very definition. The very nature of indistinction makes it virtually impossible to describe, identify or explain. Instead, to track indistinction is to identify the ways in which it sometimes erupts onto the surface of things. These eruptions, as moments of intensity, but not clarity, are felt rather than understood and, as such are not superficial but manifest as affects on the surface of bodies. In this chapter I track such

107 eruptions in a succession of events, moments and examples of replicas, doubles, impostors and cyborgs in and around the nuclear public sphere that produce new orientations and modalities of life and death. I explore these moments as manifestations of everyday indistinction but also for the possibility of new, unintended configurations of life and death that, rather than structuring closures of different sorts, present opportunities for openness, potential and becoming. These kinds of minority (or what Deleuze and

Guattari might call minoritarian) emergences are important because they reveal that, despite the rhetoric of permanence, immobility and totality, movement, passages and becomings occur ungathered, in the cracks, shadows and interstitial spaces of indistinction. The point here is that indistinction is always in the process of attempting to accomplish, complete and close itself down, but inevitably it remains more of an aspiration for totality rather than its outcome. Indistinction does not correspond to the concept of smooth space in the Deleuze and Guattari sense, in many ways indistinction is the most striated space there is, the grand striation (1987). Efforts of striation paradoxically and unexpectedly open up opportunities for smoothness (creativity, emergence, free flow) that are not transcendent of the striae but immanent and troubling to them.

1.3 The Monster The figure of the monster seems to beckon forth in this discussion somehow, haunting it, fading in and out as it is, alternatively, engulfed by, or emerges from, indistinction. For, the double, the impostor or the cyborg are themselves forms of monsters. As Puar and

Rai (2002) have reminded us, Foucault located the figure of “the monster”—defined as beings that included half humans and those with double-individualities—as central to the

108 making of disciplinary forms of sovereignty. For Foucault the monster is one of the main figures around which Nineteenth century definitions of abnormality coalesce spawning new institutions and technologies of intervention and management of the body. For our purposes, the social definition of the monster is of central relevance along with its position in defining the contours and frontiers of the sovereign spheres of normality and exception. The monster, Foucault says, is a form or a concept that pushes natural and social systems of law beyond their limits to the point of suspension. In other words, monsters are exceptions to law, sovereign exceptions, and exceptions to nature—freaks, mistakes, deformities, impossibilities—by their very existence. As such the monster is a juridical and a natural or biological entity that “combines the impossible with the forbidden” (2004: 56). The monster is a product or a result of its transgression of boundaries and forms deemed natural and immutable. Mixtures and doubles are the most common kinds of monster. Specifically, Foucault identifies the following as monsters who perpetrate the double transgression of law and nature: the mixture of two individuals

(one head with two bodies or two heads with one body, Siamese twins), the mixture of two sexes (hermaphrodites), the mixture of two forms (most notably human and animal), and finally, and perhaps the most relevant for our purposes, the mixture of life and death

(2004: 63).40

For Foucault as for Puar and Rai, the figure of the monster defines the abnormal body which in turn defines, produces and disciplines the normal. The monster, or the monstrous body is at the limit of the abnormal, a body that if it cannot be disciplined and

40 The zombie, as the most popular manifestation of the mixture of life and death, has recently gained some critical attention, especially in relation to the work of Agamben. See, for example, Andrew Norris’ essay “Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead” (2000).

109 normalized must be excluded. The monster, as Puar and Rai explain, has come to be central to the ways in which terrorist bodies are produced and defined by the west, which in turn is equally productive of the patriotic body in the west, a hyper-masculinized heterosexual body (Puar and Rai 2002: 118-119). But this impulse to classify and divide, categorize and explain, belongs, it strikes me, more to the kind of sovereignty that corresponds to the disciplines than it does to the sovereignty of deterritorialized biopolitics with which we must currently contend. Indeed, Foucault’s discussion of the monster tracks and makes possible the development of the disciplinary institutions and their technologies. To be sure disciplinary and biopolitical forms , of sovereignty run concurrently with each other, and Puar and Rai’s point about the production of the terrorist/patriotic body by way of the figure of the monster is no doubt well-founded. As

Foucault’s discussion of monsters in the late 18th and early 19th centuries makes clear, they have always been central to formation and shoring up of sovereignty because, as

Braidotti points out, difference has always been oriented negatively (2002: 175). Indeed the western imagination has for some time depended on the monstrous other to demarcate the borders of the normal and abnormal. What happens, however, if we begin to see monsters differently? What happens when sovereignty begins to bring monsters inside of itself, incorporating them into everyday life? Then the mixtures that define the monster, the doubled identities and forms, become not forms of abnormality and borders that mark exclusion, but take hold and mark the space of sovereign territory itself, making the distinctions between forms, individuals, bodies, and life and death ebb and dissipate. In other words, monsters can shed their status as demarcators, and give rise to forms life,

110 techniques of embodiment and subjectivity and, perhaps, a material form of ethics from within indistinction.

Drawing on examples like feminist science-fiction, Rosi Braidotti (2002) remarks upon the return of the monster to mainstream culture, especially, she says, in light of the

“post-nuclear predicament”, referring to the unthinkability of the future that nuclear weapons engender.41 For Braidotti, the return of the monster is the product of the intensity of the collision between bodies and technologies, especially what she terms the

“maternal body” (2002: 191). This encounter, Braidotti argues, in its intensity and its alienating and sometimes violent terms, erases the lines between body and technology, flesh and machine and renders useless the binary conceptual lines by which we have previously understood, and maintained as separate, technology. For Braidotti, the popularity of monsters in western culture speaks to the ways in which they have become privileged sites for inscribing and palliating the trauma of late postmodemity. Monsters are material embodiments of the accident or the disaster that is both imminent and immanent (Braidotti 2002: 188). Marking not an inside and outside, monsters exhibit the superfluousness of those categories. Through their ability to metamorphose and through qualities such as hybridity, lack, excess, incompleteness, detachability, endurance and resilience they illustrate that the disaster is not an ending but an opportunity to renew, recreate and rejuggle our bodies, our orientations, our possibilities (Braidotti 2002: 202).

As such, for Braidotti, monsters while residing in indistinction, are not harbingers of death, but mirror-images of a future replete with potential—their post-nuclear,

41 On the post-nuclear predicament, the famous 1984 issue ofD iacritics devoted to “nuclear criticism” is foundational.

Ill hodgepodge, techno-bodies pointing to alternative subjectivities, modes of embodiment and political aggregations. In this sense, then, Braidotti, alerts us to the ethical potential that emerges from a consideration of the monster, especially once the monster is no longer seen as a limit-figure but instead, from within, activates the terrain of indistinction, contaminating it and the bodies around it virally, triggering a non-linear set of sensations, affirmations and options.

As the examples that I explore in this chapter demonstrate, the deployment of the monster as a figure that exists on the limits and defines them, that demarcates the lines between inside and outside can run parallel with monsters of a very different kind, those that distort, blur and efface the line between human and non-human, normal and abnormal, life and death. In other words, the monster, in addition to being a figure of distinction can also serve its opposite, indistinction.

Part 2: Where’s Little Boy?: Replicas and Rebirths

2.1 Absence If you visited the Bradbury Museum between 2001 and the summer of 2005 you might have noticed that one of the museum’s most prominent displays was missing (see Figure

2 .2 ).

112 Fig. 2.2—“Where’s Little Boy?” sign at the Bradbury Museum, Los Alamos, New Mexico. Photo by the ■ author.

The empty space was maintained, however, like a shrine, with railings enclosing the space where it should have been and a small sign explaining why it was missing. The item in question was a version of the Little Boy bomb, the bomb that had been dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, leading to the immediate deaths of approximately 150,000 people on August 6, 1945. The reason it was missing was “security.” After September 11,

2001, the laboratory reassessed all of its security procedures and protocols and one day lab security personnel entered the museum and told museum staff that the Little Boy bombshell that they had on display and which is consistently ranked by visitors as one of the primary reasons they come to the museum was a security risk and had to be removed.

The lab’s security staff had determined that since the Little Boy on display was in fact a real bombshell, whose internal mechanics had simply been stripped prior to its being turned over to the museum, terrorists could enter the museum with an x-ray machine and discover the basic structures of an atomic bomb. The fact that the entire plans, in detail, for the Little Boy had been available in books and on the internet for some decades didn’t seem to matter.

113 A display of what is missing—not an absence of display but a display of absence

—is a curious and uncanny phenomenon, what Freud called the “secretly familiar.” The seeming popularity of this absence, which was clearly more than that, intrigued and confused me. It calls to mind Georges Didi-Huberman’s meditation on the Shroud of

Turin and the crowds of people who turn out to see it when it is on public display or in procession. There, Didi-Huberman writes, spectators speak to a contradiction, they could see nothing, but in seeing nothing they saw something, “One actually saw then, something else, simply in the looking forward to it and the desiring of it” (1984: 65). In gazing upon the shroud spectators are drawn to the “doubly-absent” body of Christ, in similar ways it seems to me that they were attracted to the doubly-absent shell of the

Little Boy bomb whose two bodies—original and replica—were missing. The trace of the body of Christ is not present but is in-filled by the desire for the trace by the bodies who seek it and in not seeing it, see it (Didi-Huberman 1984: 72). There was something unregulating, deterritorializing, threatening even, about the display of absence at the

Bradbury Museum. This instability was communicated to me numerous times by museum staff expressing concern about that section of the museum, their anxiety around the bomb’s absence, or the “incompleteness of the museum’s exhibitionary mandate,” as one curator put it.

In July 2005 the museum was to receive a new Little Boy replica that they had had built specially for them. The new replica was not a security threat. In fact it was cause for some excitement around the museum. The optimism and relief expressed by museum staff at the return of the object draws on the authority that museums inherently

114 place on objects42, the authority of their “thingness” which appears—although, of course, it does not—to speak for itself, communicating its essential truth to a viewer. In this case the curators’ anxiety narrated the loss of authority they perceived to accompany the absence of the display. The absence of Little Boy from the A-bomb display meant, for them, the loss of control over the narrative of the bombs, a narrative which the museum sought to keep under tight control. In light of these concerns, it is curious that the museum actively highlighted the absent display rather than concealing it. Specifically at issue, it seems to me, is the museum’s decision to place the sign “Where’s Little Boy” adjacent to the empty display area. The sign highlights the absence and endows it with desire, a longing for its return—a return that is supposed to signal a completion.

But the sign speaks uncannily to the subject of absence, opening up more questions than it answers. Perhaps most uncannily, the sign suggests that Little Boy is missing we must await his return. Note, that the sign does not indicate that Little Boy and Fat Man are replicas, it simply refers to them by the names given to the original, and now exploded, bombs. In doing this the sign seems to peel back and fold time and space, suggesting somehow that the bomb does not linger in the memories and molecules of

Hiroshima, but elsewhere, safe and preparing for a triumphant comeback. The sign alters the physical and historical trajectory of the bomb, not just hinting at or implying a mythical or symbolic return but categorically stating it and making it banal and everyday—after “renovations to enhance the exhibit”. The sign excises the bomb from its troubled past, positioning it not as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, nor indeed a

42 The literature on museums, the politics of display and the qualities with which we endow objects is appropriately large. See, as a start, Karp, ed. (2006), Karp and Lavine (1991), Bennett (1995), Macdonald, ed. (1998).

115 weapon of war, but simply as an artifact undergoing renovation, an experience even a casual museum visitor can understand and relate to.

But the source of fascination with the absent display seemed to exceed the explanatory frame in which the museum desired the display be situated: ‘Where’s Little

Boy?’ in red block letters and the answer in small print, is inadequate. The questions sets off a flurry of deferrals, a series of linked gaps which are filled with the affective proliferations of the body’s confrontations with paradox, what Didi-Huberman called: “ a dizzying spiral that is precise, as dialectic, and overwhelming as unending baptism of sight” (1984: 64). ‘Where’s Little Boy?’ slides too easily, too quickly into the phrase

“where’s my little boy”, a question that is weighed down with the threat and the fear of loss. Indeed in an effortless, almost unconscious jump it is simple to imagine that it was just such a question which mothers and fathers uttered in vain in the aftermath of the bomb. These uncanny returns mix and proliferate, intersect, shut down and return again.

‘Where’s Little Boy?’ with its mix of intense banality and banal intensity sparks an affective unfolding and refolding. The explanatory fails to stabilize the essential slipperiness of the way in which the sign and the body collide.

But what of indistinction here? The messiness, the rhizomatic nature of this encounter speaks nicely to the ways in which indistinction works. For it would be a mistake to imagine that indistinction seeks order or binary fidelity. The ‘Where’s Little

Boy?’ sign places the body in an almost untenable position: between the bomb as scientific or museological artifact disconnected from war and the haunting possibilities of the bomb’s past, between the bomb as a vague gesture toward scientific ingenuity and

116 inventiveness and the incinerated bodies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This simultaneity of anaesthesia and fear is, it seems to me, a hallmark of the ways in which indistinction plays through the nuclear public sphere. Nonetheless, we would do well to hasten along traumatic repetition by continuing to ask our selves “Where's Little Boy?” To continue to ask the question “Where's Little Boy” is to call up the ghosts of the past in a prolonged moment of the explosive traumatic event which runs parallel, but counter, to the very structures of virtuality sovereignty employs to alienate Little Boy from its past, and to cast an uncertain and un-navigable indistinction around it.

2.2 Detailed Proliferations/Proliferations in Detail I began hearing about the coming Little Boy replacement in the two weeks leading up to its arrival at the museum. There was an excitement that marked the sense of anticipation around the museum as something more than simply a new or returned artifact. By then I knew the story of the previous Little Boy’s removal from the museum and how it had left a blank space, but more like a scar than an erasure, on the museum floor and had in one sense deprived the museum of one of its most popular attractions. But it was not simply relief at the return of this important exhibit and the chance, finally, to remove the

“Where’s Little Boy?” sign. The heightened sense of anticipation accompanying the replacement of Little Boy’s arrival at the museum manifested itself in much talk and speculation upstairs in the museum offices. How would it look?

What made the new Little Boy so enticing as an exhibit was related to the accuracy of its depiction. It was being handcrafted in Texas to resemble the original in every detail. Everything about the original Little Boy from the dimensions, the placement of weld seams, the different metal flanges and aerodynamic rudders, right

117 down to the number, location and appearance of the rivets had been meticulously researched and mimicked in this new copy. But particular attention had been paid to the colour. I was told about the colour on at least three occasions, about the difficulties in determining the exact shade of the bomb in black and white photographs and then in tracking down a source of paint once the colour—a dark mossy green—had been established. This constant narrative and index of details did not have the effect, though, of reinforcing and clarifying the object as a whole but rather its opposite. The continual stream of detail after detail, had a decontextualizing effect, one that separated out the parts of Little Boy from one another, taking it and its history apart in a constellation of nuts and bolts. This is rather like the effect an extreme close-up or magnification has upon everyday objects, leaving them strange and foreign to our eyes, revealing textures, colours and patterns that we have never before noticed. It was Gaston Bachelard who best articulated the ways in which a focus on detail unravels reality instead of revealing it, writing that to evaluate a detail:

...you have to judge material disturbances beneath the surface. And then, conclusions fluctuate. The first conclusion [from a distance] was correct; it was qualitative, it developed in the discontinuity of numerous predicates.... [Detail] is richness, but also uncertainty. Along with its subtle nuances occur profoundly irrational disturbances. ... At the level of detail, Thought and Reality appear to be set adrift from one another so that as Reality is distanced from the scale at which our thinking normally takes place, it loses its solidity in a certain way, its constancy, its substance. Finally, Reality and Thought are engulfed in the same nothingness (1927: 253).

So, from the very beginning of the return of Little Boy, its context and history were being dismantled, in favour of an artisanal and machinic approach to bomb appreciation. This fits right in with the ways in which nuclear museums generally and the Bradbury Museum specifically have tried to shift the narrative of the Manhattan

118 Project and the atomic bombs away from their effects on bodies and buildings. Instead the focus is redirected to scientists and engineers as heroes, forging new paths and devices in science that ultimately contributed to American power and prosperity in the

Twentieth Centuiy. Detail and indistinction, however, are also curiously related. Detail is not anathema to indistinction but instead is, in certain ways, productive of it.

Indistinction, in the form of a proliferation of detail, is a kind of bodily modality in which politics, history, power get drowned in the pleasures of microscopy.

2.3 Mimetic (Nuclear) Proliferations Placed side-by-side, I was told, the new Little Boy would be indistinguishable from the original. Leaving aside for the moment the ways in which this comment defers the destruction of the original, and its effects, I want to explore the dynamic between the replica and the original in the return of Little Boy to the museum. Between originals and copies a peculiar kind of magic is harboured. While curators were hopeful of the ways in which a faithful copy could stand in for the original and refer only backwards to it, I suggest that the mimetic proclivity here could not be contained in this singular retroactivity. Instead the new Little Boy seemed to initiate a proliferation all its own.

I was struck by this mimetic zeal to establish to copy as indistinguishable from the original. The simulacral relationship between the copy and the original is a troublesome feature of museums generally. Museums rely, of course, on the authenticity of the object on display and strive to make this relationship “normative” and “regularizing” so to maintain the distinctions, always hierarchical, between original and copy (Massumi

1987). Copies, of course, present museums with distinct challenges The power of the copy to refer to the original is always deferred or at least uneasy. The copy is unable,

119 usually, to refer simply to the original, to maintain an enclosed one-to-one relationship to it, rather the copy always exceeds this relationship, brims with its own potential and its own power. The object's tendency to move beyond that fixing, Massumi calls this “force transductions,”

...transduction is the transmission of a force of potential that cannot but be felt, simultaneously doubling, enabling and ultimately counteracting the limitative selections of apparatuses of actualization and implantation. This amounts to an analog theory of image based power: images as the conveyors of forces of emergence (2002: 42—43).

In other words, the attempt to fix the object or the image does not, in the end, close down mimesis but, paradoxically, opens it up, referring instead to greater and greater simulacral potential; mimetic proliferation, denying any such notion of “the end” to exist. It becomes, then, more than simply a historical object re-presented for pedagogical edification, but a platform from which to launch multiple and proliferating fantasies.

It is this opening up of potential and endless referral that is relevant here. The, bomb, which in its return to the museum became a icon not of past atrocity or violence but of the potential embedded in life to reinvent and re-imagine itself, for life to proliferate beyond the original, to proliferate in the copy. The proliferation of the copy, the opening up of endless referral denies an ending, a closure to the narrative of Little

Boy. It urges Little Boy to move beyond the past and skip to the future, lodging it in the body ready to make new linkages and open up new narratives for itself. In this sense it throws everything into flux, nothing can be interpreted, both everything and nothing can be felt, because everything remains open, constantly emergent. This mimetic referral denies or downplays the bomb's horrific past-future. Instead it refers to possibilities,

120 potentialities of the bomb's future. This is a future that is married to preservation,

however, the preservation of the artifact and the preservation of the American way of life

and so this referral also works virtually as it tacks back and forth between past and future.

In its zeal to preserve, however, it tries and sometimes manages to skip over the ultimate

horizon of preservation, that of life itself. The point here is that the new bomb seemed

almost to vibrate with an intensity all its own, catching up the viewer in fantasy,

dreamwork and a magic all its own. The point is that the stability promised by the return

of the artifact failed to materialize. Instead, the replica took on a life all its own, pointing

to a future seemingly disconnected and indistinct from its past. But in failing to shore up

the object, the replica pointed to its own absences and conjured its own ghosts. These

uncanny and phantasmatic returns of Little Boy re-materialized in a birth ceremony, a

new origin story for the bomb.

2.4 Little Boy Returns That summer I received an invitation to the event that announced on its front cover: “It’s

a Boy!” The “boy” in question was, of course, “Little Boy”. The invitation was to a

' ceremony being held at the Bradbury Museum of Science, in Los Alamos, New Mexico,

to mark the unveiling of their new Little Boy replica.

Framed in shades of blue, the invitation requested the pleasure of my company to

celebrate their new additi

gathered at the museum after hours for the unveiling. The bomb, over which was draped

a large sheet, was back in its place on the museum floor. The museum director gave a

short introduction and pointed to some dignitaries in the crowd including the man who

had been the flight navigator on the Nagasaki bombing run. The sheet was drawn off to

121 applause and exclaim. The mood was celebratory and jubilant. Many in the crowd gathered around the bomb in momentary awe. One person placed his baby atop the bomb and moved it as if it was dancing. No mention of Hiroshima was ever made.

Fig. 2.3— Cover of invitation to the Bradbury Museum’s “It’s a Boy” event.

It has been argued that in America sites of disaster and wound constitute a

“pathological” public sphere which encompasses the new nodes around which private desire and public space intersect (Warner 1992; Foster 1996b; Seltzer 1998). These sites also constitute the fleeting and emptied out moments of politics siphoned through shock, sympathy and schadenfreude. Most often these sites are organized around a collision between bodies and machinic technologies—of war, transportation, industry—and speak

122 to a set of interrelated anxieties about modernity: technoscientific dominance over everyday sociality, individual powerlessness to effect change, and excessively mediatized affective regimes to name just a few. As Seltzer describes:

...the pathological public sphere takes the form o f a fascination with the shock of contact between bodies and technologies: a shock of contact that encodes, in turn, a breakdown in the distinction between the individual and the mass, between private and public registers...One discovers again and again the excitations in the opening of private and bodily and psychic interiors: the exhibition and witnessing, the endlessly reproducible display of wounded bodies and wounded minds in public (1998: 253).

Viewpoints wherein disaster, wounds and catastrophes to human bodies are placed on spectacular display then come to act as one of the few nodes of striation in an otherwise smooth and eviscerated social-political sphere (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987).

They are gathering points in the new public sphere, sites where a “we” can form, however temporarily, in the bloody haze of one more disaster your body has averted. This “mass witness”, as Michael Warner (1992) calls it, constitutes itself in the momentary and shocking pleasure garnered from witnessing injury and disaster—the bigger the better.

Traumatic witnessing lubricates the mass witness into a single politicized body, as Foster explains:

Here again in its guise as witness the mass subject reveals its sadomasochistic aspect for this subject is often split in relation to a disaster: even as he or she may mourn the victims, even identify with them masochistically, he or she may also be thrilled, sadistically, that there are victims of whom he or she is not one. (There is a triumphalism of the survivor that the trauma of the witness does not cancel out). Paradoxically, perhaps, this sadomasochistic aspect helps the mass subject cohere as a collectivity (Foster 1996b: 53).

But the trauma witnessed is also the trauma experienced and the “we” that is formed constitutes itself in and through the negative, spectral spaces of the “not us.”

Traumatic witnessing constitutes a mass body only by erasing its own, the body returns

123 only in the gory collision of flesh and machines. “The transitive pleasure of witnessing/injuring makes available our translation into the disembodied publicity of the mass subject. By injuring a mass body—preferably a really mass body, somewhere—we constitute ourselves as noncorporeal mass witness” (Warner 1992: 250). It is this abstraction embedded within this kind of spectatorship, the bodily loss that it necessarily entails, that is important for us to remember.

So let us return for a few moments to ceremony surrounding Little Boy. That the bomb constitutes such a site of wound and catastrophe is in some ways clear. To stand in the shadow of the bomb is to be caught in a moment of stasis, where the proliferating circulation of everyday narratives of consumption, inadequacy and utopian hope, among others, stop short and are briefly dispelled. It is an ambiguous icon, and must be situated and understood in such a way as to maintain and reproduce the circulation of spectacle— which as a system needs to be continually (re)produced and shored up—rather than mimic over and over again its own devastating impact. This is the opposite to the replayed scene of the planes hitting the World Trade Center. In that case the disaster needed to be continually shown in order to produce itself as a coalescing spectacle, an instance of mass witnessing if there ever was one. So this is, in part, the task of the Little

Boy ceremony, to maintain the circulation of the spectacle, a lubricant of its machinery.

The social bond of victory, exhibited by the intact bodies of the audience, fosters a shallow yet nonetheless gripping sense of fraternity. The exhibited A-bomb catches the spectator in the simultaneous impact of fear and awe, sympathy and righteousness, between the sovereign’s ability to secure and protect its citizens and its ultimate power to destroy them.

But nonetheless, as a site of catastrophe and wound, it is, despite the evidence, decidedly ambiguous. For although Little Boy inevitably refers, if only hauntingly, to the destruction that it wrought, here it was returned intact, re-bom, as if resurrected. The disaster that it implies is wholly absent from the ceremony of its return and the context of its display, almost as if it didn’t occur. Almost. Little Boy represents a site of catastrophe, but catastrophe almost entirely deferred, distanced and effaced by the dazzling spectacle of crossed technolgical frontiers and the ardent sense of a national

“we” that bubbles up. But this doesn’t mean that the simultaneously traumatic and pleasurable elements embedded in witnessing the Little Boy ceremony are wholly absent either. Rather they are both present and absent simultaneously or, in other words, virtual, but no less actual. The virtual, “where futurity combines, unmediated, with pastness, where outsides are infolded and sadness is happy” marks the speciality of traumatic witnessing, in this case demonstrating not just the maintenance of a connection to the past but of a traumatic that is productive or indicative of a possible future as well (Massumi

2002: 30-31).

It is this quality of virtuality that prevents the Little Boy ceremony from slipping completely into the dreamworld of spectacular sovereignty. For it is this virtual element, which bridges past and the future, which paradoxically marks and catalyzes the zone of indistinction, that won’t allow Little Boy to ever be completely severed from its history, from the tens of thousands of dead and wounded. This inbuilt virtuality can be

125 understood as a haunting, a traumatic reminder never fully revealed or understood, yet nonetheless persistent. Paradoxically, it is also this element—the haunting traces of past catastrophe—which maintains the attention of the mass witness, no matter how deferred.

So the traumatic return of Little Boy as exhibit compounds the trauma of the Hiroshima bombing itself, each doubling up and spilling over onto the other. The exhibit of the bomb’s replica, in the virtuality of its relation to the original event, builds upon and adds to this trauma, pushing it to excess, it itself refers to the absent original Little Boy, pointing to the catastrophe of the original only now in its doubled absence.

A further complication: the characteristics of death and wound which accompany

Little Boy, if only as a deferred or virtual presence-absence, are in this ceremony the subject of a further and particularly disturbing distancing mechanism. The ceremony introduces us to the bomb via a metaphor of birth. Here Little Boy returns anew, whole and perfect. Even the creepy playfulness of naming the original bomb after President

Roosevelt (Fat Man, the Nagasaki bomb, was named after English Prime Minister

Winston Churchill) is dispelled in favour of a fully anthropomorphized death-machine, masking as the arrival of a new life. To produce a birth announcement for an atomic bomb is much more than to wage war in the name of preserving life, a paradoxical rationalization that has always been used by militaries. This bomb’s circuitry—despite its magnificent, almost artisanal, attention to detail—is not wired for war or, more specifically, for death at all, at least not in the ways in which we have previously experienced and known them. So it is a death machine, or at least a replica (the differences between the two quickly recede into indistinction at this point), presented

126 under the banner of life. Not just in the name or service of life but as life itself. Little

Boy, reborn, represents the aspired to and well-disciplined life, the product of hard work and dedication to life lived in the service and obedience of the nation and an enjoyment taken in these national accomplishments. The bomb returns intact and sutures the wound/trauma that arose with the controversy over its use. But now it reconvenes, completes and heals the fragmented national body. Now the bomb returns in its proper memorial form—divorced from its use and now ensconced as a national symbol around which it is possible to gather and unite and celebrate the nation—a symbol of technological and scientific innovation and achievement.

2.5 Male, Machine and Techno-Births The literature on birth demonstrates that it is a liminal and volatile event, associated in many cultures with the possible contamination or corruption by evil phantoms and spirits

(see MacCormack 1994, esp. McGilvray 15-63). Birth ethnography also reveals that the body of the pregnant woman and, particularly, the woman in labour is a threatening and dangerous body; a body that must be controlled, isolated, and managed. In the Little Boy event we see these logics placed on display with birth literally re-routed through a techno-male birth. This is the replacement of the body with an anthropomorphized technology, specifically it is the replacement of the female body, a female event, with a male rationalized and highly technologized replacement, that reproduces without the messiness of the body itself.

Both Gusterson (1996b) and Masco (2006) draw attention to the preponderance of birth metaphors on the world of nuclear weapons research and testing. In Gusterson's study of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) he argues that birth

127 metaphors are a means by which weapons scientists are able to linguistically recast their work in a positive light. “In metaphorically assimilating weapons and components to a world of babies, births and breeding, weapons scientists use the connotative power of words to produce—and be produced by—a cosmological world where nuclear weapons tests symbolize not despair, destruction and death, but hope, renewal and life” (Gusterson

1996b: 145). Gusterson also attributes these discursive moves—nuclear weapons as nurturer to the nation—to the vocabulary predominant among laboratory scientists that interchanges humans and machines, confusing them, and producing a link between nuclear weapons and the concept of the “natural”. By doing this, Gusterson argues, the social and political relationships and decisions that underlie the production and use of nuclear weapons are obscured and these technologies then adopt a momentum that is independent of human will. In other words a “natural” momentum.

Masco, in his-overview of the “technoaesthetics” of the bomb within his larger study of the multiple legacies of the Manhattan Project in New Mexico focuses on the gendered nature of these metaphors mitigates the violent reality of the bombs. He argues that these metaphors do not simply produce new meanings and associations via which to understand and relate to the bomb, but that these gendered, procreative metaphors work

“to contain linguistically the destructive reality of the event” (Masco 2006: 82-83).

Speaking of the Manhattan Project scientist Edward Teller's telegram back to the Los

Alamos Laboratory after the successful MIKE test in the Marshall Islands in the South

Pacific, which (not coincidentally) also read: “It's a Boy”, Masco points to the desired identification between bomb and the male body. Not only did statements such as Teller's

128 promote a logic of the male body as (explosively) powerful it also fostered the entirely paradoxical idea of the bomb “as invulnerable body” (Masco 2006: 83). For Masco, however, this issue is now largely irrelevant because, as he points out, the logic of post-

Cold nuclear stewardship has flipped the association of bomb “as invulnerable body” on its head: the bomb as unpredictable, malfunctioning geriatric. This association is meant to impress, both within the labs and outside of them, the needs and challenges of 'Science

Based Stockpile Stewardship' (SBSS), the program charged with maintaining working nuclear weapons well into the future without the benefits of testing.

Gusterson's and Masco's observations are obviously relevant here and I would like to take some space to address them. Both anthropologists look at the ways in which life and birth metaphors reorient understandings of nuclear weapons away from death, violence and destruction. However, as both Masco and Gusterson describe, they do this largely in order that nuclear weapons scientists themselves can justify continuing their work. What is missing in both their analyses in this case, and more generally, are how the effects of these discursive manoeuvres reverberate outward and lodge themselves in various public domains. Masco's remonstration that this metaphor no longer has any force because the technical qualities of nuclear weapons has fundamentally changed illustrates my point nicely. It is the ways in which nuclear weapons are understood and mediated outside the secretive enclaves of the laboratories that is important and that has been largely ignored (by anthropologists). And, as we have seen with the Little Boy ceremony at the Bradbury Museum, the metaphor has clearly not lost its force of meaning or currency.

129 However, my intent here is not simply to revive an issue within a sphere that I believe has been left out of the analysis. Rather, I think the analysis itself remains inadequate to the issue. Simply stated, I am not convinced that these deployments of linguistic metaphor, nor the strategy of active/explicit confusion of bodies and machines produce only the intended outcomes that Gusterson or Masco point out. In Gusterson's analysis, birth metaphors are a way that nuclear weapons scientists re-organize the value system associated with nuclear weapons by linking them with the positive notions

(affects) of birth and the renewal of life. Masco adds that these deployments do not simply produce new “banalized” understandings of the bomb but that they work to contain the actual violence of the bomb while reinforcing gendered ideas of the male body as powerful, potentially explosive but simultaneously technoaesthetically admirable. They are certainly this. But is that all? Gusterson does not elaborate, and I am not convinced that Masco's additional argument differs substantially from Gusterson's original point. Regardless, both arguments strike me as artificially foreshortened. So I would argue that one has to make clear what is produced when one turns the weapons into positive signifiers—not simply that a shift from negative to positive has taken place.

This shift both enables weapons scientists to justify going on with their work, but it also feeds into the making of pliable docile citizens who do not question the need for (and by extension the use of) nuclear weapons, an implication, if intended by these authors, not adequately addressed.

But there is more. By linking the weapons into the discourse of life, nuclear weapons scientists, I argue, are not simply shifting nuclear weapons from a negative to a

130 positive register. By associating the weapons with life, the weapons themselves become biopolitical tools, tools that urge towards and produce life. In other words, the switch does not just enable scientists to go on with their work, morally satisfied on the question of its bona fides, but in effecting the switch between positive and negative, life and death, the scientists enable a wholesale reorganization of the principles and values that underwrite human understanding of nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons, newly oriented towards life, become guarantors of human preservation, prosperity, of human life itself.

Instead of weapons of last resort, weapons of desperation, nuclear weapons come to be understood as central to the enterprise of human life itself. It remains, however, that this is a conception of life that is mired under the umbrella of fear and/or the illusion of patriotic greatness—both of which are symmetrical forms of capture. That these weapons then become mechanisms of control and indistinction is present here with an intensity that is almost palpable.

But there is even more. The re-ordering of the values associated with nuclear weapons, by linking them with birth, is simply that, a re-ordering, a differential coding, a binary flip from negative to positive. These two anthropologists' analyses make the assumption (or, at best, refrain from comment) that this kind of directed intention is possible without leaks and ruptures, without rhizomes flying off the edges and lodging somewhere, anywhere, and producing their own meanings. What Gusterson and Masco miss, are precisely the processes and movements of emergence, fold, and intensification that occur in the interstices of the intentions, desires and logics of nuclear weapons scientists.

131 I propose that we examine the consequences of these strategies to impose the negative on the positive, life in place of death, not just as attempts to rotate meanings

180°, to the flip the binary. Instead, it is more productive, I argue, to see these as attempts to impose a profound murkiness and confusion on the meanings and implications we assign to nuclear weapons. The effects of these strategies are not just

(even?) to redefine nuclear weapons in more palatable ways but to cast such a resolute fog of indistinction around nuclear weapons—by which I mean human life in and around nuclear weapons—that they elude all definition and meaning-making. As Gusterson points out, and as was mentioned earlier, the scientist's strategic confusion of bodies and machines ends up de-linking the progression of these weapons from human will, and the weapons, he argues, attain a momentum that is “natural”—a symbolic logic that inevitably ends up bleeding into political thought. Again, we have a confusion which seems to produce a clarity; a blob that reshapes itself into a line. A confusion of the bodily and the technological which then produces an understanding of nuclear weapons as possessing a natural momentum in time and space akin to evolution. In other words, they are placed outside the purview and control of humans and the socio-political. Here we have a confusion of bodies and machines intended to produce an ontology of nuclear weapons, a way to understand and relate to them. By linking them to birth and to life

Gusterson argues that nuclear weapons attain an inertia—within the weapons science community—that is self-defined and outside human intervention, a so-called natural imperative. The paradox is that this natural or independent imperative—outside of

132 human hands—is achieved by decidedly human means and then is retroactively billed natural via language, itself a decidedly cultural construction.

Does the confusion of humans and machines push towards the “natural” or towards the machinic? Gusterson says this confusion in the context of the labs is deployed in order to apply the veneer of “the natural” or natural momentum (1996a: 101).

I agree that this is the intention, but is it the only effect? Moreover, it begs the question of what understanding of the natural is being deployed? If indeed it is a concept of the

“natural”, then it is one that is machinic or technological. I think it is more productively thought of as a double or a proliferative confusion, a proliferation that is strategic but that also exceeds the boundaries of strategic intent. The first confusion deployed by the scientists, according to Gusterson and Masco and those who have pursued ethnographic fieldwork in the labs is between the natural and the machinic.43 But according to

Gusterson this confusion produces a unilinear outcome, a bias toward the natural in the guise of the body. This is where Gusterson leaves it. However, that bias towards the so- called natural is itself machinic and technological in every way. Moreover, it confuses the concept of the body with the concept of the natural. The architecture of the binary between nature and technology, so assiduously imposed by the scientists, collapses under the weight of its paradox.

This is a productive collapse, I think, since it forces us to think outside or beyond binary logics; between the technological, the machinic, the body and nature. In other words, the confusion of bodies and machines effected by the scientists as a

43 See also Hill (1995).

133 straightforward strategy to justify their continued work on these weapons of mass death possess more than just straightforward affects and effects especially as this confusion migrates out of the labs and into everyday culture. But this strategy of confusion of bodies and machines is inadequate to itself, and, at the same time, more than adequate, the confusion it produces is profound, proliferative and violent. The confusion of bodies and machines is at the same time a collision of bodies and encompasses the violence embedded in such an event. Let me explain what I mean.

The Little Boy “birth” ceremony is an interesting way to think about this confusion of the machinic and the natural or rather the machinic and the bodily. Seltzer

(1998) puts it as a collision between bodies and machines, and while I find Seltzer's analysis useful and I agree that the interaction between bodies and machines is no doubt violent in the extreme, the metaphor of collision, which naturally calls to mind automobiles, poses body and machine as independent entities prior to the crash, whereas, bodies and machines can more productively be thought of as already highly entwined, interdependent, and mutually-prosthetic. Both resolutely in-between.

The use of birth metaphors to introduce the bomb, finally, alerts us to fantasies of male or monstrous extra-uterine birth. These fantasies have an extremely long genesis in western culture, making such diverse appearances as in the myth of the homunculus, the miniature person in the service of its maker composed of soil and clay or other alchemical means, Mary Shelley’s story of Frankenstein’s monster, to more contemporary means to usurp or render obsolete the female reproductive function through technological intervention and manipulation. Drawing from Squier's (1994) work Braidotti (2002)

134 points to the extra-uterine fetus and male-birth as examples of male attempts to consolidate the power of cyborgs and technobodies. These instances of “self- engendering” are good examples of the ways technology is responsible for a profound blurring of the distinctions between body and machine (Braidotti 2002: 217). But, the powerful effects of these blurrings are not confined to the exclusion or marginalization of one gender over another, although this is an important effect that should not be ignored.

Rather, I am arguing that despite male attempts to harness the collision of bodies and machines and the resulting indistinction this causes, the indistinction envelopes all humans and subordinates them under a banner of life that is substantially compromised by the state of exception in which it rests.

The politico-cultural symbolic which frames and contextualizes the bomb is one of life rather than death. And so the bomb is revealed less as a material weapon of war than as a biopolitical tool that, perhaps paradoxically, urges toward life. Little Boy re- emerges on the museum floor apparently cleansed of its catastrophe; a blank slate. This cleansing is itself a product of the regularization and normalization tendencies intrinsic to the biopolitical (Foucault 2003: 245). Restored, re-aggregated, re-assembled, it is the body of the bomb, Little Boy, that has become the focus of biopolitical concern—that intimate intrusion of power—and the sympathetic relationship between the museum audience and the bomb encompasses their body in that biopolitical concern as well. But it does not shed its deathly past completely; instead it is held in reserve, inevitably hinting at this potential all the while seducing its audience. And so the bomb ingratiates itself, embedding itself in the body—a life form—as an ambiguous icon of control, security,

135 national membership, but also as a persistent kernel of fear. In the aftermath of the ceremony the crowd that day gathered around the bomb, celebrated its return and appeared to subscribe to the promises embedded within it. In this case the sacrifice of

Little Boy is recognized, life itself is promoted in the name of the bomb, yet what kind of life may be lived under the promises and threats embedded within?

To address this question, let us return for the moment to the concept of indistinction and the overlapping and contradicting traumas of the Little Boy event. Here the distinctions between life and death, between war and peace are relegated into meaninglessness, and so with them those between soldier and civilian, battlefield and sanctuary and, finally, between violence and harmony. The Little Boy unveiling from this perspective emerges as one of the banal yet essential nodes that both produces and maintains indistinction which is necessarily a zone defined by the permanence of violence, by the permanence of war. Not only has war become a permanent feature of everyday life, slipping into and out of tangibility, it lubricates and fosters a dysfunctional and, in and of itself, violent foundation for human interaction such as the traumatic mass witnessing discussed earlier. As Hardt and Negri lament: “Today, however, war tends to extend even farther, becoming a permanent social relation” (2004: 12).

However, to note and deconstruct the paradoxes and deferrals at work here is not adequate. Neither is a suggestion that the indistinctions produced lend themselvesjust to dreadful closures and denials of what then comes close to appearing as a romanticized notion of humanity. In any discussion of paradox and symbolic reversals we must also be aware of the emergences and intensities that unfold between the “poles of our

136 concepts]”, as Deleuze and Guattari put it (1987: 287). For what is at work here is a proliferation of indistinctions, some of which inevitably are as potentializing as others are territorializing. The impacts and the collisions described here might easily be aggregated in different forms that imagine new ways of being human in the face of war. This is where the monster emerges as a figure of some potency and importance, reminding us that it is possible and necessary to go beyond cultural critique and to explore the modalities of life in forms of augmentation, affirmation and endurance. Little Boy’s monstrosity, formed in a kind mobile post-human stitching of itself to the bodies that surround and interact with it, does more than simply point to negation or death, nor does it simply symbolize. Monstrosity potentializes and activates new and creative imaginings and plateaus of being human in the face of threat.

Part 3 — Aggregations of Indistinction: monster/victim/impostor/survivor

3.1 Blast from the Past On July 16, 1945 the scientists and the engineers of the Manhattan Project detonated what they called the “gadget” in the desert of southern New Mexico at a place called the

Trinity Site. It was the world’s first nuclear explosion. Three weeks later, the gadget, now re-named Fat Man, was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan instantaneously killing approximately 75,000 people and leading to the deaths of many more in subsequent weeks, months and years. The summer weekend of July 15 and 16, 2005, The National

Atomic Museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico held an event called “The Blast from the

Past” to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Trinity, the original nuclear test. Blast from the Past was a two-day affair consisting of a gala event at the museum on the Friday night and then a group trip to the Trinity Site early the next morning.

137 Anti-nuclear activists, alerted to “Blast from the Past”, protested outside the

Friday evening event, calling attention to what they felt was being ignored inside the museum by setting up pictures of the dead and wounded from Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the sidewalks surrounding the museum. One group managed even to get tickets to the event and invited a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing, Shigeko Sasamori, to accompany them. The activist group felt very strongly that a misleading historical narrative was being promoted by the event, one which celebrated the bomb as a technological and industrial marvel while erasing its role as a military weapon and the death and destruction it ultimately caused.

In a newspaper article published on July 16, 2005, the director of the National

Atomic Museum was quoted as saying that protesters had misinterpreted the “Blast from the Past” event by calling it a “celebration.” It was, he argued, not a celebration but a sober commemoration and contemplation of the Trinity Test and the Manhattan Project.44

Protesters could be forgiven their misinterpretation, however. The next day dozens of participants of “Blast from the Past” had toured the Trinity Site wearing matching backpacks emblazoned—part of the museum’s loot bag for the event’s participants—with a stylized cartoon-like mushroom cloud. The previous evening’s events at the National

Atomic Museum had included a vintage military vehicle display as well as a 1940’s inspired fashion show to “recreate a sense of the times.”45 Wine bottles scattered on tables throughout the event had been corked with specially made “Fat Man” and “Enola

44 Journal Santa Fe, Sunday, July 17, 2005, P4 45 National Atomic Museum, “Blast from the Past” information sheet.

138 Gay” pewter corks. Moreover, in the spirit of recreating the intense “urgency”

Fig. 2.4— Participants in Blast from the Past received these customized backpacks. Photo bv the author. and “secrecy” that marked the Manhattan Project all attendees were ushered into the event through the back door of the museum and issued with a dossier labeled “Top

139 Secret” within which was contained a replica Manhattan Project ID badge as well as documents outlining the guest’s “mission” for the evening. While that night’s program at the museum concluded with a discussion panel that briefly addressed the Second World

War, the tone of the evening remained a euphoric look back into a highly manipulated yet nevertheless perceived golden-era of the American past.

During the panel discussion that concluded the gala evening at the museum, Ms.

Sasamori rose and addressed the assembled crowd and spoke of her experience of the bombing and her wishes for peace. At the moment of her declaration of identity there was a shiver of unease. The debate over Hiroshima changes when it cannot just be waged in the abstract, between citizens of the righteous/guilty nation. Trauma returned pushing aside the easy sentimentality that framed the evening up to that point and the sudden quietness of the room was evidence of how it was playing across the bodies of those present; the topic no longer just intellectual, historical but also now tense and immediate.

Nonetheless, it is difficult to assess the impact of Shigeko Sasamori’s comments that night, but it seemed as though they were not what participants in the midst of the museum’s party really wanted to hear or contemplate. By the next morning it seemed the threat had been assimilated, the rupture recuperated, or to put it more accurately, an answer has been formulated, a recuperation had been mounted. It didn’t matter that it was destined to fail, it held for a while, maintaining stasis until something else came along.

140 3.2 The Impostor/Survivor and the Uncanny Shigeko Sasamori was thirteen when the bomb exploded over her hometown of

Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. She is thought to be the person closest to the epicenter of the blast who survived. That morning, as she tells it, school had been cancelled and instead students were assigned to municipal work groups. She was with her friend, on their way to work that morning, when a solitary plane flew over the city. In the explosion moments later her friend was killed immediately. Ms. Sasamori’s body was taken to a park with other dead and wounded and was left there to die. She was unrecognizable, her arms were fused to her body and she had bums to eighty percent of her body. She did not, of course, die. Some days later her parents found her in the park and, although she was physically unrecognizable, were able to identify her through her cries for help.

Eventually she was selected as one of the “Hiroshima Maidens”, the group of badly injured women taken to the United States for advanced treatment and therapy under the sponsorship of Norman Cousins.46 Today, Shigeko Sasamori’s body still visibly bears the scars of that day’s events. Her hands are contorted and permanently contracted in such a way that prevents her from achieving full dexterity. Her face bears the signs of multiple and uneven skin grafts and surgeries and is characterized by the tightness that is the result of being badly burned.

The next day as “Blast from the Past” participants wandered the grounds that make up the Trinity Site I began to ask people how they felt about Ms. Sasamori or what she had said the night before. My interviews that day proved disappointing and were not

46 Norman Cousins was a journalist, editor and peace advocate who played a central role in bringing twenty-five female survivors of the atomic bombings of Japan to the United States for medical treatment. These women were subsequently known as the “Hiroshima Maidens”.

141 eliciting enthusiastic or even thoughtful response. This was the case until I was told that perhaps the reason why I wasn’t getting the responses I thought I might was because my question was invalid. I was talking to two women from California. They were there with their husbands and “Blast from the Past” was a part of their holiday. I asked them what they meant and here is what they said to me. My question wasn’t valid, they said, because she wasn’t real. They must have seen the confusion on my face: “She wasn’t really a Hiroshima survivor. She was a fake, an imposter, an actor, a stunt put on for effect by the activists.”

When circulation comes to a jarring halt we are left hanging in the sudden absence of meaning and an excess of the bodily sensation of paradox. And then just as abruptly meaning floods back in to fill the gap, threatened by the potentiality embedded in the feelings the paradox left lingering. It was her skin, they told me, which tipped them off. “Seventy-three year-olds don’t have skin that smooth.” This is, of course, a shocking comment. But it is also a curious one. The women assert their knowledge on the basis of an aesthetic evaluation. “Seventy three year olds don't have skin that smooth.” It is not at all clear from this statement, however, what kind of imposter they mean Ms. Sasamori to be. The women negatively identify Ms. Sasamori as a fake or an impostor based on the evidence of her body, they claim to know what she is not, but they fail or neglect or decline to positively identify her and continue to identify her only in a space of negation and shadow, she is not a survivor she is a fake an impostor.

While it is plainly clear, from the patchwork of overlapping lines on her face, that the “smoothness” of Ms. Sasamori's face is the result of the horrific bums, it is best to put

142 aside competing truth claims placed upon Ms. Sasamori’s body lest the totality of this binary code engulf her body reducing it to one status or another. Sasamori's body, in its cyborg monstrosity, a new kind of body forged somewhere between genes, radiation and fire, was too much for these ‘Blast from the Past’ participants to bear, it could not be incorporated except through denial. The negation of Sasamori, her inclusion in the event of “Blast from the Past’ through exclusion clearly demarcates her body as belonging to the category of Agamben’s homo sacer, or bare life, the body whose inclusion in sovereignty is effected through a permanent relationship of exclusion (1998). This disturbing spectre of monstrosity, incorporated into the real only by being held in the threshold between inside and outside, real and unreal, haunts the proper memories of the bomb being manufactured and fashioned at ‘Blast from the Past’ and on display at the nuclear museums. These are the fetish of the bomb as technological achievement and if pushed outside the boundaries of the nation, these become a screen memory, of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki's rebuilt futures. The excess of the survivor's body marks it out as something that can only be incorporated through an exclusion, hence the denial.

What seems clear is that through the denial the women construct or demarcate a shared space of intimacy, one that seeks to extend, via virtual prostheses, to the mass body of America (Warner 1992). This is an intimacy that recreates and reinforces the intimacy that the Trinity Site itself fosters: the nation-state’s embrace. Intimacy and fantasy, as Berlant writes, are bedfellows, relying upon each other to maintain normalcy or what she calls the “unproblematic.” (2000: 6). It is only when a perceived or imagined sense of intimacy comes under scrutiny,

143 when states, populations, or persons sense that their definition o f the real is under threat; when the normative relays between personal and collective ethics become frayed and exposed; and when the traditional sites of pleasure and profit seem to get “taken away” by the political actions of subordinated groups, a sense of anxiety will be pervasively felt about how to determine responsibility for the disruption of hegemonic comfort (Berlant 2000: 7).

Ms. Sasamori did not just call into question the suitability of the “Blast from the

Past” event, but cast its underlying project, the buttressing of American identity itself, into a state of unease and panic. Deftly, and with one stroke of denial and an emphatic re-embrace of fantasy the two women had explained away the trauma of the real that had momentarily interrupted not just the smooth unfolding of their holiday but the very illusion of the good life to which they subscribed themselves with such effort.

Again, as we saw with Little Boy, it is an intimacy which is cast not simply in the common experience of the spectacle of the catastrophe, but the catastrophe which is then deferred, parried and denied. The seeming paradox of this intimacy is that instead of opening up the body to the affective trace of trauma, a trace which according to Berlant

(2000) is always sensual, it functions by reinforcing the shell of anaesthesia that chokes off the senses from the world around it. Instead of jolting the senses, and jump—starting the body, however artificially, this intimacy tries to shore up the (mass) body by deadening its senses in ever greater attempts to elude the haunting knocks of the traumatic real. This is what Walter Benjamin was afraid of when he formulated his theories of shock and the aestheticization of the political (1968, 1978). In the modem world with its infinite possibilities of both physical and psychic trauma, the synaesthetic system—the human nervous system and the environment to which it responds—becomes transformed, changing its machinery from the sensory to the protective. No longer is the

144 apparatus of human perception open to world. The gateways of the body close, shielding itself from the excesses of the modem world perceived as a series of threats and hazards.

The circuitry of the body’s senses reverse course in such a situation, attempting to

“deaden” or mute themselves from the outside world.

Modem anaesthesia removes the subject from a position of judgment and decision by immersion into a apparently limitless ether of the image and the commodity. The aestheticization of the political results in the anaesthetizing of the body. Biopolitical sovereignty controls through reducing the subject to the present tense in which desire plays off against disaster, with consumption acting as the fleeting narcotic easing the fear that haunts sovereignty’s ersatz management—that which is unknown, unstable, unpredictable and beyond one’s control (Massumi 1993: 12). In transforming the unknown into a source of fear rather than excitement or anticipation, biopolitics as a mobile system of sovereignty based upon stasis and enclosed management reveals its genius, for it is at this moment that power’s almost complete implantation or location within the body is demonstrated. So it is through the production of anaesthetized bodies that sovereignty—through an untempered violence embedded within it—pushes the state of exception into permanence and maintains it there. Anaesthesia and the state of exception rely upon one another, there cannot be one without the other.

The technoaesthetics of these compensatory realities foster social relationships, communal action and interaction and communication via sophisticated yet thoroughly de­ politicized simulations that diminish or reduce the need or desire for human engagement.

Anaesthesia is accomplished via a concurrent starvation and deluge of the senses. “The

145 dialectical reversal, whereby aesthetics changes from a cognitive mode of being in touch with reality to a way of blocking out reality destroys the human organism’s power to respond politically even when self-preservation is at stake: so someone who is past experiencing is no longer capable of telling... proven friend. ..from mortal enemy (Buck

Morss 1992: 18). And so “Blast from the Past” and the Trinity Site become extensions of this kind of virtual reality, an almost static “presence-effect,” highly aestheticized and anaesthetizing. The perception of intimacy created between the two women, and perhaps more broadly between many of the participants, is revealed as a function of marshalled forces of patriotic, always amnesiac, affect. A negative solidarity that slips right into the maintenance of the foundations of the fantasy that is America.

But it is not just the anaesthesia of modem life lived under the umbrella of spectacle and simulation that frames the women’s denial of the experience of Ms.

Sasamori. A radical new calculus of life and death bubbles to the surface, revealing its hidden structure—as it did during the “birth ceremony” for Little Boy—for just a moment. This is the life/death of Agamben’s zone of indistinction. Not just the unfeelingness of anaesthesia, or the excessive spectacles of victorious war waged in the name of saving lives, Ms. Sasamori becomes something both more and less than what

Agamben has called “bare life” (1998). In other words, Ms. Sasamori is only included in the political order of reality through exclusion or ban from that order, she exists only in the negative relation of her prohibition. She is the embodiment of Agamben’s revision of

Foucault’s equation of the sovereign decision as resting between the making live and the letting die, he insists, rather, that sovereign power is now oriented towards the “making

146 survive” (1999: 156). And yet Sasamori, already reduced and defined by her simply having survived the unsurvivable, understood not as fully human but simply as biologically tenacious, is denied even this status by the tourist’s rejection. In this sense she is no longer that which survives but something—if it possible—even less, no longer that which just survives, no longer bare life even! The material trace of her body descends in some ways past indistinction into nothingness. But it is a nothingness that, strangely, brims with affects of fear, amazement, fascination, all the qualities of the fetish, an unstable articulation of neither presence nor absence, an affront to reason. This is the body rendered as monstrous. By denying the troublesome trace of the event, its living victims, the event cannot sustain itself. Without victims, without a trace, without history, then, the atomic bombing of Japan and its victims, alive and dead, disappear into the ether of indistinction.

The survivor's/impostor's body became a further eruption of the uncanny into the surface of'Blast from the Past'. It is the denial of the authenticity of her claim to survival that indicates the trace of this eruption. In his essay “The Uncanny” Freud, in describing the work of Jentsch, writes that one of the most powerful instances of the uncanny is one in which one doubts whether a seemingly animate being is actually alive or, conversely, whether a seemingly inanimate being or object is actually dead (1953: 223). The relationship of this example of the uncanny to the survivor/impostor's body is appropriately multiple and sticky. For although Sasamori's body is no doubt “alive”, it is not, according to the two women, living or, more specifically, “surviving” in the way and with the authenticity that it claims. In other words, its claims to life are suspect and as

147 such it becomes frightful, destabilizing and uncanny. As Marilyn Ivy argues, the uncanny is particularly frightening precisely because it reveals “an inability to control representation” (1995: 165). That which representation cannot tame then must be cast out of representation altogether.

But again the question then becomes if she is an impostor of a survivor what does that mean? She is the double of the survivor, albeit an inadequate and flawed one, the mimetic proliferation of the anchored signifier of the legitimate scarred, monstrous body—a body that exists in theory but does not intrude on the ‘Blast from the Past’ narrative. Again, Freud's work on elucidating the uncanny provides some direction. The double—and for the moment we will leave to one side the relationship of the double to shadows, as shadows have come to be the acceptably moving yet entirely sanitized representations of the A-bomb's victims—provides a guarantee of the preservation of the body, it enacts, he quotes Rank (1914) “an energetic denial of the power of death” (1953:

241). And here I think the meaning we can draw out of this is likewise doubled. The women are both buffering or distancing the uncanny or traumatic return of fear (of death) that is embedded in 'Blast from the Past's' own narrative, the knowledge that the sovereign exception and the nuclear weapons which serve in part to guarantee it, envelopes American citizens as much or more than it empowers them, at the same time as they deny the body of the survivor and in doing so deny the deaths of the A-bomb victims that sullies the memory of moral victory and technological supremacy. So the denial of death, which lies at the root of the accusation of imposture, is itself uncanny in that it

148 returns unbidden, or as Freud says are subject to “unintended recurrence” to encompass the women themselves in their own accusation (1953: 245).

But the two women’s erasure of Ms. Sasamori and of the entire history she represents does not come immediately or without considerable effort. Every erasure leaves its mark. While she is cast into the status of bare life, she also greatly exceeds that condition, she is permanently caught between those forces which would attempt to maintain her as nothing more than that which survives and her own body which testifies to the contrary. There is something else as well. There is inevitably a strange blowback effect, in that by denying that death haunts the event in which they are participating and in denying the status of victim to Ms. Sasamori, the two women cast aside much of what makes them alive, their sensual attachment to the world, their ability to empathize and feel compassion, their willingness to recognize and go with the lines of intensity-ffom which an ethics can constructed—in-forming their bodies. Instead they rationalize and they explain, they deny and sink further into the logics of the spectacle. Bare life, the status into which they have doubly cast Ms. Sasamori, returns, as in a feedback loop, to encompass them as well.

3.3 Too Late: negation, monstrosity and potential But what cannot be denied is the ripple of trauma that played through the crowd, the night before, when Ms. Sasamori stood up to speak. It is this that represents the more important rupture for our purposes, over and above even the bombing itself. The crack that was opened up by the trace of the traumatic which the two women, perhaps more acutely than others, but perhaps not, worked so hard to sooth and knit back together via their exclusion of her from their cognitive-political order must necessarily return. As

149 with all traumas it cannot ever be fully assimilated and so returns to haunt its subject repeatedly (Caruth 1996). This haunting return of the traumatic can be read as potential.

And so can an alternative reading of the monstrosity of Sasamori’s body.

Theories of monstrosity have traditionally been written from the perspective of the radical otherness of the monstrous body. However, monstrosity can simultaneously be thought not as alter in the extreme but, as Braidotti has written, as “mirror-images” that reflect the disasters, accidents, fear and anxieties that marshal common contemporary subjectivity (2002: 201). For Braidotti, the monster, as a body that illuminates the possibilities of life—not just plain survival but a life marked by vitality—demonstrates the “unfolding of virtual possibilities that point to positive developments and alternatives” (2002: 213). In other words the monster always exceeds the monstrosity with which it is endowed. It does so productively so as not to fit into the negative categories ascribed to it, overfilling them or leaving them strangely lacking. In doing so, the monstrous body unsettles those it comes into contact with, scrambling long-held assumptions and means of making sense of life. These moments are brief and must be sustained and cultivated if they are to endure, but they contain a power of affirmation and potential, pointing or gesturing to moments of becoming not normally available.

Ms. Sasamori’s body, positioned as it is, between machine and flesh, mineral and animal, organic and inorganic, as mutant, demonstrates this ability, contained in the hybridity of the monster to gesture towards potential. The monstrous body in this case having survived and emerged from the worst military-technological excess in history demonstrates the tenacity of the body to embrace new bodily forms and possibilities. The

150 vitality of Sasamori’s body—forged in indistinction and genetically woven and wired with the bomb itself—is simultaneously empowering and threatening in the extreme. Her plea for peace between nations at the ‘Blast for the Past’ gala then stands as evidence for the ways in which monstrous bodies can be sources for emergent political possibilities.

But in articulating these potentials, from a site of survivor-monstrosity she also destabilizes already cemented categories of subjectivity and citizenship that blanket and buttress everyday life. By the next morning, the women’s negation of Sasamori as impostor demonstrates that the gaps and spaces that she had opened up the previous evening had sutured themselves shut, recovered and recuperated.

As Taussig reminds us, and as I have tried to point out here, there is a “plenitude that arises from negation” (1999: 141). And yet, it strikes me here that the negation is perhaps the wrong moment to fixate upon in this effort to highlight plenitude. The negation or the denial is too late, it is the afterimage of plenitude in this case, rather than simply its precursor. While the moment of the negation, too, can be opened up and read for potential, it is the night before that I return to over and over again. Not the negation but the affirmation of Sasamori, of her appeal to peace without malice or force or the power to impose, of forgiveness rendered without the offer of apology, of an openness to bodies and politics without form. This is the moment of import, when the affective shiver prickled across the room, a moment wherein, to paraphrase Massumi, affect contains the whole world (1995: 104).

Part 4—Conclusion The virtual public spheres that have begun to form around sites of atomic nostalgia in

America momentarily concentrate and provide fleeting glimpses of the ways in which

151 modernity’s ghosts have begun to capture and refashion the body. The traumas of the bodily impact with machinic technologies of war are made all the more complicated by the re-presentation of these impacts as banal and emptied out tourist experiences or museum visits. This is the new landscape of the bomb in which time and place become slippery and bodies mingle openly with the haunting phantoms of modernity. Here the weight of historical traumas add up and spill into the present day as if they just happened.

Present day traumas reach out and needily haul those in the past out of retirement.

Technologies of spectacle in conjunction with the proliferation of the permanent war and the total violence of the sovereign state of exception, which become visible here, conspire to defer, to numb to deaden. These forces permeate the body and are articulated as forms of memory, experience, belonging, emotion and ethics. In such a context life and death, as we think of them, are cast into disarray; no longer tethered concretely they drift, are subject to capture and release, interpretation and reinterpretation. Life, it seems, is increasingly forced to live in the space of death, while death itself is forcibly erased from the sphere of life.. Most importantly the fundamental link between life and death and conceptions of ethics and justice are progressively eroded. As war progressively disappears into the no-place of permanence and the forces of indistinction swallow any attempts to mark out or measure resistance, the political horizon seems increasingly bleak.

Yet, embedded in these forms exist moments of potential that can and must be articulated and expanded upon. At times it seems as though the work of indistinction in nuclear public spheres is wholly negative, and it is too easy to slide into this pessimism,

152 embrace it and make it permanent. However, while much of this chapter delineates the spaces of indistinction that point towards death and capture, it is misleading to end there, pessimistic too and unfaithful or lacking in generosity of belief in the tenacity of life, its multiplicity.

Affective and traumatic eruptions into the public sphere of sympathy, relief, pleasure or horror in response to the death and wounding of the Other, while demarcating contemporary cultural politics as an arena marked by violence, also serve another important function. Embedded within these ruptures is a source of potential. Traumas, when they erupt onto the surface of things, alert us not to the new but to what is always already there. Traumatic moments, if recognized as such, act to puncture the veneers of the “society of the spectacle.” They illuminate a particular cast of features and a terrain.

The Bradbury museum’s ceremony in honour of the return of Little Boy and “Blast from the Past” act as signals or alarms by placing the zone of indistinction on display.

What trauma taps into before it is deferred is an autonomous streak in the body

(Massumi 2002). This is an insurgent force in the body which defies attempts to regulate and dampen it. In contrast to capture this streak—which we can call vitality, intensity, affect—points toward emergence, potentiality and change. Emergence signals its own ethics and justice, one that eludes the forces of system and control, by refusing to replicate their forms. The two stories I have told today speak to the ways in which life and death and have come to articulate one another in new and complex ways. The contemporary shadows of World War Two reveal the confusion of death with life, and the increasing prevalence of bare life and of bodies anaesthetized to the world around

153 them. But on the edges of this encompassing virtuality are always moments of potential and it is only by latching on to them, pushing them to excess, and to ever greater levels of intensification, that this potential may cultivated.

War has already exceeded the boundaries of meaning by which we have understood it, and consequently so has so much of war’s violence, that which could not be calculated in traditional charts of war’s truths. It is imperative now that we compose a new vocabulary of war, one which mimics and can thus highlight the very terrain war occupies: the everyday, the virtual, the banal, the immanent. The events narrated in this chapter can, in one sense, be understood as on the edges of the edges of war, so peripheral they seem to be to the so-called realities of war. But there is another way that they can be read and understood. As marginal events which barely register in the grand scheme of importance they can instead understood as singular centers of war, not connected in a hierarchy of war’s effects but rather connected relationally, via process, which necessitates an awareness of metamorphosis. The difference is that, understood this way, they are harder to dismiss and instead of fighting against the boundary-less, permanence of war by imposing ill-fitting architectures of hierarchy, the horizons of war begin to reveal themselves to us episodically and in all their multiplicity. Rather than disappearing under the radar, they begin to stand out.

154 Chapter 3 Nuclear (Public) Secrecy: the secret's seductions

Secrecy lies at the very core o f power. -Elias Canetti, (1962: 290).

Prologue—Front— . .g______.. ... Page o ______Secrets On June 6, 2005 a sensational story played across the front pages of Santa Fe’s newspapers that seemed to hold within it explosive potential. Tommy Ray Hook, an employee of Los Alamos National Laboratory—and a man described as a “whistle­ blower” who had been scheduled to meet with Congressional investigators the next day regarding an investigation into corruption at the lab—had been badly beaten in the parking lot of a Santa Fe strip club, Cheeks, and lay in the hospital, bruised, broken and almost unrecognizable. As the story unfolded claims and counter-claims of anonymous phone calls and of a clandestine meeting arranged for the club, spread out on newspaper pages and via local television stations, Hook claimed he had been set up by those in power who were afraid of the secrets he was about to share with Congress.

By the afternoon of June 7 the story had appeared in newspapers across the country and was in regular rotation on CNN. In this story the secret took centre stage and became the spectacular hub of speculation, confusion, paranoia and threat. The content of the secret was less important than the secret itself which attached itself to old and new circuits of popular sentiment and resentment. The beating of Tommy Ray Hook, his wife claimed, was intended to keep him from divulging his secrets, to keep the secrets secret, but instead the secret itself was splashed across various forms of media, the content of the secret was unimportant really, or was superfluous, irrelevant, always already known.

And then just as suddenly as the story appeared, it disappeared along with Tommy

Ray Hook. Vague murmurings could be heard for a day or two after the event, Tommy

Ray Hook had been lying to his wife and the media about why he was at Cheeks that night, it didn’t have anything to do with his job at Los Alamos or his nuclear secrets at all. While Hook receded from popular attention and memory, the secret and its attachments to the nuclear industry only intensified and gathered force, finding new footholds in a nuclear public sphere already riddled with the pockmarks of the secret’s labours.

Part 1 — Introduction: Telling the Secret In 1943 the Manhattan District project chose a remote boys boarding school Northern

New Mexico as the central site of its top secret project to develop and build an atomic bomb. Los Alamos, as it is now known, was thus officially bom into secrecy and is still sometimes known as a “secret city.” Until the early 1950’s Los Alamos did not officially exist, it did not appear on any maps and the men and women who went to work there disappeared into a state sponsored nether world of denials and disclaimers. Today Los

Alamos, specifically the Los Alamos National Laboratory, is still one of the two centres of the American nuclear weapons complex and remains steeped and to some degrees governed by the logics of the secret.

This chapter examines the nervous politics of the secret. Actively avoiding the desire to penetrate the secret, the chapter circles around it, orbiting both toward it and away, moving alongside it and, on occasion, hitching a ride with it. It does so precisely

156 within the cultural-political spaces to which it, the secret, seems most unsuited: the hyper- visible spectacles of twenty-first century nuclear public culture. Normatively, the secret has been understood to possess a hardened shell, its promises of concealment have been taken for granted. It is akin in this form, as Bratich (2006) has described, to a box or an envelope, in which clearly demarcated or discerned interiors and exteriors can be identified, with the interaction limited to the protection of the interior by the concealment provided by the exterior. As a mechanism of hiding, concealment, and protection it has found its most powerful alignment with power and the state. In other words, secrecy has long been seen as a repressive power, a denial or a negation. It is in this sense that nuclear secrecy has largely—but with some notable exceptions—functioned. In the

United States the nuclear secrets of the state were deemed to be of the highest priority and were concealed under an umbrella of mechanisms, technologies, practices and structures designed to contain the secret within the arenas and to the people deemed (by a further set of security protocols) to be appropriate.

Part 2 —Anthropology's (Nuclear) Secrets Anthropologists have long been interested in the idea of secrecy and specifically in the ways secret societies function culturally. Indeed the secret has long been an object of curious fascination.47 Ethnographers of nuclear America have devoted much attention to the role that secrecy has played in erecting sets of internal and external barriers to knowledge of the country's nuclear secrets. It may be argued that nuclear secrets are of a different order or species, an altogether new entity. At the very least one can say that the scale of secrecy was forever changed in its marriage with the scientific state and, more

47 See, for example, Goffman (1959).

157 particularly, nuclear weapons. Anthropologists Hugh Gusterson (1996, 2004) and Joseph

Masco (2006), in their extensive respective work on the post-Cold War nuclear landscapes of America, argue that secrecy was central to ushering in America’s nuclear complex. Indeed, Masco describes secrecy itself as “constitutive” of the American nuclear arms infrastructure such that: “since 1943 a whole industrial infrastructure—a nearly $6 trillion national project and one of the largest industrial enterprises in U.S. history—has been shielded from public discourse” (2004: 267). What is emergent in

Masco and Gusterson’s and to some extent Taylor’s (2007) work as well, are the ways in which secrecy becomes married to the state as a key part of the national security apparatus. Secrecy and the state seem to have become synonymous. Secrecy in the nuclear weapons complex exists as a prohibitive element, an institution of concealment, in clear opposition to openness (Taylor 2007: 2).

Gusterson's work on secrecy, in particular, explains to us the grids of nuclear laboratory secrecy and the micro-practices by which it becomes implanted (1996: 68-

100). Secrecy around the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the two national laboratories where nuclear weapons work is conducted and where Gusterson carried out his fieldwork, denoting differential access to classified material and information, is made operational via a complex system of colour-coded and letter- indexed badges. A corollary of the ways in which the practices of secrecy organizes the right to access differently coded streams of information are the ways in which this in turn demarcates space, bodily interactions and personal relationships within the laboratory itself (Gusterson 1996a: 70-71). Thus the exercise of nuclear secrecy in the laboratory

158 organizes not just which information a nuclear scientist has access to but where he or she is allowed to go and what and where they are allowed to share information with laboratory colleagues.

Masco's work goes beyond this to look at the ways in which secrecy envelopes the lab and the people around it. The reverberations and ripples of secrecy and its implications are central to Masco’s description of nuclear secrecy. Masco's work does begin to address the political work of the secret. For example, Masco demonstrates how nuclear secrecy barricades the nuclear weapons complex from criticism and frustrates activist mobilization by privileging nuclear knowledge and preventing nuclear expertise from migrating outside the controlled arenas of national security classifications. If the public has no access to the details of nuclear weapons work it cannot develop the technical expertise necessary to evaluate that work and its implications. Thus activist organizations cobble together declassified information of the past with current public disclosure as well as a subtle and sophisticated sense of prognostication and guess-work.

Both Gusterson and Masco clearly link the formation of national secrecy—a system intended to protect the country’s nuclear secrets from the threats of espionage—to the production and maintenance of power (Gusterson 1996a: 87; Masco 2004: 224-5).

But power in these formulations is envisaged as a force exercised unidirectionally, via secrecy from the labs, or from the nuclear weapons complex, outward. While this is certainly the case, to some degree it underestimates the work of secrecy, in general, and nuclear secrecy, in particular. It treats secrecy as a thing that can be un-problematically possessed, implemented or removed, that either works to conceal or fails to do so. The

159 ways in which secrecy has been treated and understood in relation to national security and, in particular, within the nuclear weapons complex is related to some degree, I believe, to the fact that both Masco and Gusterson, as the preeminent ethnographers of

American nuclear culture have largely located themselves within the laboratories and the official spaces of the nuclear secret. There, the enormity of the regulations and taxonomic technologies of the secret might seem to indicate the secret as a material tool of power, to be turned on and off like a light switch. And, as it applies to specific kinds of nuclear techno-scientific information, the secret can productively be understood this way. But it would be wrong, I think, to characterize nuclear secrecy as just something that regulates the flow and access of specific kinds of highly technical information.

Indeed, in more recent work, Masco acknowledges that the nuclear complex extends far beyond the weapons laboratory (2008).48 The United States, far from hiding the bomb away in secret establishments, made it a central aspect of American culture, “[T]he bomb became an intimate part of U.S. popular and political culture, a set of ideas, images, and institutions, installed in the 1950s that soon functioned outside the direct control of the national security state” (Masco 2008: 383). Nuclear secrecy, then, does not appear so clear-cut, with the secret constantly traversing the lines between public and private, between lab and popular culture. More than this, however, it also seems clear to me that this, in fact, is the very nature of the nuclear secret, it could not exist without some spillover or release, it depended on some knowledge of the secret leaking into the public

48 Masco’s work on secrecy struggles, I think, with the location of the secret as it applies to nuclear weapons technology. It is both located exclusively in the labs and is a broad-based cultural phenomenon that permeates American life. Recent work quoted above contrasts with other work that seems to enforce strict lines of demarcation between the spaces of the secret and its exclusion, see for example Masco (2006: 37).

160 sphere. It needed and demanded an audience, without which nuclear supremacy and nuclear fear could not exist.

As it is traditionally understood and described nuclear secrecy labours under strict assumptions of inside and outside that do not always function so rigidly. I want to suggest that the nuclear weapons complex, then, traditionally understood as the official, intensely privatized spaces, of nuclear weapons research, production, maintenance, and stockpiling, can be more profitably understood as all spaces into which the culture of nuclear weapons penetrates, private, public, imaginary and bodily. While nuclear secrets were always meant to prevent the leakage of nuclear knowledge out of the nuclear weapons complex (and even to certain people and places within it), understood .as a privatized and enclosed space, paradoxically the nuclear weapons complex does not include the nuclear public (the citizenry). So again we see, in this formulation, the inclusion of the public through an exclusion, a ban. However, this is a ban that is already comprised by the necessity of the secret itself. The secret recognizes that which it excludes. It recognizes its own possibility or tendency even to leak.

This work, which remains outside the classified locales of the secret, the space which is, by definition, under the secret's injunction, would seem to labour under the blackout of the secret's veil. This research indicates that the secret is perhaps itself more secretive than it lets on and as a result does not operate within the dialectic of the binary by which it defines itself. This chapter seeks to expand the ontologies in which secrecy is produced and proliferates as a cultural form, emanating out of the laboratories and the official nuclear world into the public/private intersections of everyday life and to the

161 ways in which it reverberates back, like an echo. I investigate how secrecy is animated, buzzed into intensity and then escapes from the cultural domain of its production into the everyday. What, paradoxically, does the secret reveal about sovereignty, about the technologies of power in which citizens are emboldened and instrumentalized, about itself as one of these technologies?

A different picture of nuclear secrecy is hinted at in Kathleen Stewart’s article

(1995) “Bitter Faiths”, where the debate around nuclear waste disposal in Las Vegas strays beyond the boundaries of scientific narrative and proliferates as a form of antagonistic connection bonding the state to its citizens. There secrecy manifests and lodges bodily as suspicion and mistrust, secrecy becomes the very bridge between the state and the citizenry rather than the substance of the chasm. “Bitter Faiths” narrates the paradoxical simultaneity of people’s desire to trust the state and put their faith in the rational narratives and technological solutions of scientists, engineers and state representatives and the sense that they are being misled, betrayed and taken advantage of.

Secrecy here is not just the substance of absence, of information withheld, it is the form of the suspicion, it is productive, it fills in the space between the state and the populace.

Stewart’s work suggests that secrecy is not just an absence, a negation or denial, but hovers, labile, somewhere between absence and presence, negation and production, denial and affirmation.

Seeing the secret as essentially in-between, is to see it in motion, always in transition and at work. Taussig’s (1999) work on the “public secret” best captures these qualities of the secret and begins to map out a picture of the secret that offers the clearest

162 picture of the ways in which the secret weaves in and out of concealment and revelation.

Using the trope of defacement, Taussig explores the uncanny paradoxes of the secret, as it moves from a pure state into a cultural one where it becomes public. There, the public secret—“that which is generally known but cannot be spoken”—becomes a fetish object, enhancing, rather than closing down upon, reality (Taussig 1999: 56-58). The very act of secrecy, its form, argues Taussig, is the secretive movement between states of concealment and revelation, often with seemingly contradictory results. It is public secrecy, rather than secrecy itself, that best encapsulates the ways in which the nuclear weapons complex engages with the public. Public secrecy, as Taussig says, acts as a

“buffer” between the state and its citizens and it is the particular and uncanny magic of the cloaking qualities secret that it can usher something into sudden visibility or the revelation of the secret that has the effect of enhancing its mysteriousness and power

(1999: 62, 104).

These contradictions of the secret, these paradoxes that play between presence and absence, surface and depth are particularly apt to the ways in which nuclear spectacle harnesses the secret and bends it to the will of the state. They do away with what has essentially been a largely functionalist approach to the secret—one that problematically re-imagines the modernist notion of govemmentality that is more often the target of critique. Government shields its secrets from the public, demarcating a concrete line between the state and the public. But, to be clear, this is indeed a harnessing that requires force and constant vigilance, for it is not in the nature of the secret to operate in one direction or in one way exclusively. Secrecy simultaneously enforces a line and obscures

163 it, both promotes and shatters it. What the nuclear public sphere demonstrates so well

(and which has also been so ignored in state-centred political thinking) are the ways in which the secret needs to be created as a border and transgressed all at the same time.

This transgression of the border is then taken up into spectacle and conspiracy, control and paranoia. That the secret is ultimately unstable and, as we shall see, attempts to deny the secret’s initiations to becoming or to confine the secret to the binary conditions of its appearance—either concealment or revelation—sometimes causes the public secret to shimmer with instability and to emerge oddly and out of control upon the surface of things, harnessing the intensities and tensions of the built-up uncanny and unresolved contradiction to create zones of affective force, emergence and augmentation.

Part 3—Strategies of the Secret

3.1— The Work of the Secret The nuclear public sphere is an uncanny construction, cast between the “Top” secrecy of the United States nuclear weapons complex and the marketing of disclosure and revelation to citizens. The nuclear heritage industry is built on the paradoxes of the secret and its simultaneously empty and excessive revelations. This chapter explores and mimics the uncanny, unstable and uncontainable intensities of the secret. I argue that the secret orients and informs a politics of sovereign control in America called national security and also works through nuclear spectacles in new ways of operationalizing national security through bodily capture. But inevitably it does not just do this. The uncontainability of the secret makes it volatile and unstable at the best of times, meaning the state’s capture and control of the secret is never complete and thus even while the secret works in the interest of power, it works simultaneously to undermine it. So a

164 discussion of the secret and its relationship to nuclear spectacle and nuclear heritage reveals the jumpy logics of such cultural forms, the ways in which they are always both means of capture and means of becoming. Secrets, I argue, far from being forms of containment and concealment have an equal affinity for, or kinship with, spectacle and revelation. It is between these forms that the secret finds its true calling—a fact long ignored in nuclear analysis.

We can assume the integrity of the secret only at our own peril. Any discussion of secrets can, or at least should, not ignore the form of the secret itself. Any desire to get beyond the shell of the secret, to reveal the content of the secret leaves the secret itself intact. This section begins with a discussion of the secret in which I trace the ways in which the secret so stealthily inhabits multiple plateaus of paradox. I then move back to explore the work of the secret, its productions and its corruptions, and in doing so I try and elaborate upon these paradoxes without the desire to eliminate them but simply to elongate them, to hold onto them as they drift.

So, for the moment, put aside nuclear secrets and consider secrecy itself. Perhaps we know or claim to know the secret too quickly, taking it for granted, assuming it has no content of its own above and beyond the information that makes it so. Instead of claiming the secret as a hollowed-out vessel that simply conveys or regulates information, endeavour to begin to think of the secret as something with a form, a vitality and a magic all its own. Most of all, let’s begin to think of the secret as something intrinsically corporeal; it is between and amongst bodies that the secret exists, it is affectively where the secret is felt with any intensity. It is the body that the secret ultimately mobilizes and

165 captures and attempts to harness the secret can be productively understood as attempts to control bodies too.

3.2 Spectacular Secrecy What then of the secret? In what ways does the secret exist in a culture that seemingly privileges forms of hypervisibility, and pledges openness and accountability as a hallmark of its democracy? The contradictions of the secret, and the magical forces mobilized by them, have, as I have already noted, been compellingly described by

Taussig. For him the preeminent form of secrecy, the public secret, is the secret which is common knowledge but which everyone pretends not to know. But it is the paradoxes of the public secret, as described by Taussig, that prove valuable here, for public secrets do not act as we might think. Most important is the symbiotic, rather than adversarial, relationship between secrecy and revelation. Revelation plays a key role in not just the maintenance but, strangely perhaps, in the enhancement and intensification of the power of the secret. Revelation and concealment work together then to produce, protect and mobilize the secret, enhancing it. The particular alchemy of the secret is then not one of

“skilled concealment” but “the skilled revelation of skilled concealment” (Taussig 2003a:

305).

This kinship embodied in the secret between revelation and concealment finds a fertile space for proliferation in the society of the spectacle according to Debord (1988).

In his Comments on the Society of the Spectacle Debord calls “generalized secrecy” one of the elements of the “principal features” of the “integrated spectacular.” He writes:

“Generalised secrecy stands behind the spectacle, as the decisive complement of all it displays and, in the last analysis, as its most important operation” (1988: 4). In a recent

166 article Jack Bratich (2006) makes it clear that, regarding Debord’s collusion of secrecy and spectacle, his point is not simply that the spectacle distracts from the ongoing and ubiquitous operation of secrecy at the core of society and politics. It is that secrecy—as something to be discovered, uncovered and revealed—is at the core of the spectacle. He explains: “[...Jsecrecy as a box to be opened is itself part of the spectacle, a distraction from the myriad ways generalized secrecy permeates the political body” (Bratich 2006:

494). Secrecy and spectacle do more than simply work together, then, they are embedded within one another and must be understood to work in and through the mechanisms provided by their integration.

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) make a similar set of points albeit in a somewhat different manner. They investigate the secret in its relation to perceptibility and imperceptibility. In everyday life the secret exists as something to enclose its content.

But it is the concept of the secret that is more important than its function of enclosure.

From the perspective of the concept the secret and its perception are not opposed but intertwined and necessary to one another. Indeed perception of the secret is necessary to the secret’s existence and its function of becoming imperceptible. To produce imperceptibility there must be a movement toward the perceptible (Deleuze and Guattari

1987: 287). The content, too, of the secret is not immune from this movement between imperception and perception. The power or force of the secret means it must move into public places, into bodies and be seen as a secret in order to exercise itself. In short, as

Deleuze and Guattari write, “The secret as secretion...something must ooze from the box” (1987: 287). While these leakages may be perceived as accidental, something to be

167 contained and cleaned up, prevented in the future, the point that Deleuze and Guattari emphasize here is that the perception of the secret, its publicness, its spectacle, is the secret key to the functioning of the secret.

3.3 Tracking the secret (at war) So let me tell you a secret. In these words are contained the first aporia of the secret.

The secret hangs on a paradox. The secret, to be known as a secret, to exist as a secret, must be revealed. The question of the secret then is not just one of concealment, but also and simultaneously a question of revelation. As everybody from Deleuze and Guattari

(1987) to Taussig (1999), to Debord (1988) and more recently Bratich (2006) argue, the very structure of the secret exists somewhere in the in-between. Not a vessel of pure or ultimate containment, the secret leaks. The secret, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, secretes. This leakage of the secret is not necessarily a flaw in the secret that it must then work to re-contain, or to plug up, but rather part of the operation and function of the secret itself. As fundamental to the secret as containment and concealment. Like a double-helix containment and leakage, concealment and revelation make up the twin, intertwined and interdependent strands of the secret. For these reasons the secret and the spectacle are not diametrically opposed, as would appear logical, but allied. Operating in a complex oscillation between concealment and revelation the secret and the spectacle work together, each reinforcing the other.

Allied with spectacle, the secret becomes a subtle mechanism of control, dispensing and withholding information in carefully calculated algorhythms. But the secretion—paradoxically because of its very relation to the secret—can never be totally absorbed and channelled into the spectacle. In other words, it is impossible to totally

168 make the secretion secret (or fully public for that matter), the secretion, then, as well as the secret, leaks. A double leakage, at least! Leakage of leakages. The leakage of the secret cannot contain itself, because either the rumour of the leakage or the intensity of the leakage already supersedes the leakage itself. And so the leakage is self-proliferating.

But at the same time as the leakage proliferates, so does the secret. The leakage depends on the secret and vice versa, and so the leakage of the secret maintains and reinforces the secret itself.

Yes, the secret secretes, and that secretion is taken up into proliferating the force and strength of the secret itself. But what about the remainder, the excess of the leakage?

The excess of the secret’s leakage is that which escapes the controlled release of spectacle and finds its way into an arena of potential that manifests as forms of intensity, speculation, imagination, the uncanny, the absurd and paranoia. In the excess of the secret’s secretion the secret rediscovers its “origin in the war machine” (Deleuze and

Guattari 1987: 287). These spaces and forms are the plateaus of potential, they are the entryways, or better yet, thresholds, to a counter-politics of the secret; ones that don’t position the secret as opposed to revelation, that don’t situate the secret in a binary politics of the hidden and the visible, the known and the unknown, but one that rides the zigzag movement of the secret itself between these poles. Bratich argues that secrecy, so long left to or considered exclusive to the state, can be adopted by forces mobilizing to counter or oppose repressive state and sovereign power. Secrecy, as Bratich argues, is strategic and the negative powers accorded to it thus far as simply one half of its potential

(2006: 498). By recognizing the affirmative powers of secrecy, forces formulating a

169 politics of becoming in opposition to the capture of the state, can use secrecy to their

advantage. This would be, as Derrida has written, to “cultivate a taste for the secret”

(2001)49

The importance of this cultivation is more than abstract or intellectual. If we are

to understand the secret’s only function as concealment, then museums and other nuclear

public culture are simply irrelevant concessions to state openness but not important in the

grand scheme. However, if we see secrets as caught between concealment and revelation

then these nuclear public spheres take on a greater importance. This is key. A

reconceptualization of the secret as allied, and in conjunction with spectacle, positions

nuclear spectacles in a different light. In doing so it also recasts the ways in which we

see war as well. All of a sudden, it seems, with this undoing of the secret, we are able to

see spectacles differently. As spectacles become sites and ciphers for the secret and vice

versa, the hierarchies of the secret’s priorities and access crumble. Nuclear spectacles

can then be understood, I think, not as places where secrets are divulged to visitors, but as

places where we are let in on and given access to the work of the secret, to secrecy itself.

The two things are fundamentally different but sometimes feel the same. Visitors to

49 It is precisely this “taste for the secret” in the recent work on the public secret that concerns Gilbert (2007). Gilbert sees any mobilization of the secret as contrary to the needs to foster publics and a 'public domain' that, he argues, forms the basis for any democratic emergence. He writes: “So the 'secret' here seems to be the very space of separation which keeps apart the individual from the collective, from anything to which they might belong...from any belonging whatsoever” (Gilbert 2007: 27). Gilbert argues that this “taste for the secret” cultivated in the work of Levinas and Derrida, and picked up in the work of Simon Critchley fails to properly address or decouple a problematic attachment between privacy and the secret. It is this which leads to a prioritization of the individual above all else that, Gilbert argues, precludes the public forms of belonging so crucial to the formation of democratic projects founded in justice. While Gilbert does not make the association of secrecy as tool of state power exclusively, he does associate secrecy with a negative power. Gilbert seems to deny the possibility that secrets can mobilize new forms of attachment. Instead he insists that secrets always form attachments that stand in opposition to the democratizing forms of publicity that we must strive to create.

170 nuclear museums and previously Top Secret nuclear sites, through the invocation of still commanding traces of past secrets, feel as if they are the recipients of actual nuclear secrets, that is part of the powerful seduction of nuclear tourism, the feeling of an intimate and privileged citizenship.

The molecularization of the secret also points again to a redefinition of the boundaries and territories of war. Understanding spectacle allied to the secret and not antagonistic to it, positions these spectacles as sites of war, or at least where the logics of war are gathered, corralled and organized. The difference between sites of war and nuclear spectacle, mirroring the play of the secret is not one of authenticity versus spectacle, or of inside versus outside, but, “a play of degrees and intensities, of hybridity and artificiality” (Hardt and Negri 2000: 187). Whether war has become more spectacular or spectacle more akin to war is impossible to say. More important than this semantic puzzle, is to recognize that the merging of spectacle and war has the effect of stripping the politics from the most political of events: war. This “de-actualization” of the politics from war, an effacement that secrecy plays an active and desiring role in, speaks profoundly to the condition of permanence in which war is so often recently framed (Hardt and Negri 2000: 188). One final point to end this section. With war operating via cultural logics such as secrecy and appearing and disappearing in different metrics and with different vitalities, here and there, in forms ranging from outright conflict to forms of commemoration and recreation that appear to have nothing whatsoever in common with the traditional contours of war, stripped of politics, the logic of war seems to reach its nadir. War’s permanence and its non-localized quality of being

171 everywhere also means that the ability to define war and peace is eroded and lost.

Permanent war is, in fact, no war at all. Such is the state of nuclear weapons spectacles and museums, hoveringly, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes blissfully, between history, science and industry but never ever war. Caught in the sticky folds of the public secret and the spectacle, war becomes both the subject of their seduction and, consequently, disappears within them becoming a (mostly) silent partner in contrast to their loud declarations of what to see and what to know.

Part 4—Nuclear (Secret) Leakages

4.1 Behind the Fence Driving the long, snaky, switchback road up the mountainside edges of northern New

Mexico from Santa Fe or Albuquerque into Los Alamos one expects—after having peeled one’s fingers from the steering-wheel—to emerge into a world unlike any other.

Even today, the geographical situation—its isolation atop a mesa—of Los Alamos breeds anticipation for the unexpected, the unknown. It is the proximity to the secret that any visitor to Los Alamos desires, a glimpse at least of what goes on there. An ability to decide for oneself, to get the evidence, to nail down that rumour once and for all. Signs of the everyday uncanny are abundant in Los Alamos, from the streets called

Oppenheimer or Bikini Atoll Road to the sign on the way out of town towards Bandelier

National Park that reads “Explosive Trucks But for these glimpses of otherness, Los

Alamos is achingly normative, dull even, so much so that the sense of the uncanny, of being shocked out of the everyday is even stronger when it happens. Was that sound thunder or an explosion somewhere? Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is there

172 but absent, an implied presence behind the high walls and fences one periodically sees behind a curtain of trees.

While the lab will not unfurl itself to a visitor’s curiosity its museum is just that, a place in which the public secret of the lab and its history are revealed. The secret revealed in the museum is seductive and enticing, it draws the tourist’s body into its intimacy. The museum simulates a visit “Behind the Fence” where “secrecy and security are paramount”.

The “fence” is the wall that encloses and protects Los Alamos National

Laboratory (LANL) from the public. It physically demarcates the boundary of national security and the “top secret”. This boundary is constructed in the public discourse of security as a double protection. The fence protects the lab from the public for and in the name of the public. And so the fence embodies that contradictory and highly uncomfortable paradox of the sovereignty itself, the exclusion it effects is carried out in the very name and service of those it excludes. And so the fence captures the citizen in a relation of exclusion and then defines the citizen via that exclusion as having the rights and privileges of exclusion in their name (Agamben 1998; Derrida 2002).

But let us go behind the fence, into the heart of the secret, the belly of the whale.

At the Bradbury Museum, the public face of the very private lab we are afforded such an opportunity. We are not just afforded the opportunity, we are coaxed and enticed to cross the boundary of the fence—at least virtually—and become initiated into the secrets of the lab. But these are not just the lab’s secrets, these secrets belong to the citizens, they are made secret in the name of the citizen. The museum stands in for the lab, as Masco

173 writes it “is the most public space in LANL” (2006: 231). Note his phrasing here, “the most public” as if even the museum, the only Lab space designed for the public, conceals something. In the museum the visitor is supposed to be able to get the same feeling to that of visiting the lab. Only virtually. What is paramount is to impress upon the visitor the qualitative change between the different sides of the fence, on the one side where secrets are so paramount and where secrecy and security merge in an uneasy partnership.

This is accomplished by fetishizing the point of transmission: the gate in the fence. And so to cross the fence, in the museum, as in the lab, you place your hand into a scanner which reads your fingerprints which unlocks the gate just sufficiently for one person to pass through the barred entrance. And then you are in. What is the secret that is revealed? It less that the contents of a secret is revealed than that the revelation is simply that there are secrets and that these secrets are your secrets and are being held in trust for you. But these are revelations thatfeel like secret disclosures and that helps to dampen and satisfy one’s curiosity. Dangerous and threatening things like payloads, technical details like range and arsenal inventories. Public secrets.

On display “behind the fence” in the museum are the array of nuclear secrets held in the lab. Or at least there are hints at the secrets. Or maybe it is simply the revelation, the disclosure that there are secrets behind the fence. The disclosure of the existence of the secret—just as much as the secret’s content—is inimical to the secret, since the very fact that there are secrets is supposed to be a secret. Every secret is, at least in theory, an exposed double secret. Yet this would be to understand the secret only as an agent of containment and concealment, of camouflage and protection. Past and contemporary secrets play off each other here. The illusion of the revelation of past secrets—an illusion museum’s play a central role in maintaining—serves to legitimize the state apparatus and discourse that “guards” secrets both for and from the public until such time they can be revealed. At the same time this process manages and intensifies the process of secrecy itself, allowing the unfolding of secrets to continue apace. This process is central to the production and maintenance of the biopolitics of national security itself, enfolding the citizens body into the folds of the secret, allowing the release of what appear to be secrets with the intensities and satisfactions that follow. Parallel to this is the production of a ideal and admirable citizens’ body that, in the glow of the feeling of the release of past secrets, understands and accepts the production of secrecy generally. This does not just tacitly sanction the production of the next generation of secrets but activates the body, authorizing it as part of the process of making and protecting secrets.

In many ways, then, the spectacle of nuclear museums turns out to be the secret itself. This represents a further aporia embedded within the concept of the secret. This refinement of the aporia reveals to us that the secret—as a secret—does not abhor the spotlight, the intense visibility of the spectacle, but in fact can not only knit itself into the machineries of the spectacle but reveal itself, the secret, as the secret of the spectacle.

Bratich, commenting on Debord writes: “The spectacle has brought secrecy to victory, his point is that secrecy as a box to be opened is itself part of the spectacle, a distraction from the myriad ways generalized secrecy permeates the political body” (2006: 494). In other words, the secret must be understood as the secret form of the spectacle itself.

175 How can this be? The analysis of the secret ushers us into a terrain where nothing but contradictions pile up upon each other like so much junk. It works in that the spectacle reveals only to further obscure, in other words, its disclosure, the intensity of its visibility works in the service of its own desire for concealment; this is the concealment of power, control, but it is also a negative concealment the concealment of its very self which would be revealed as a nothingness. As Taussig writes: “the revelation of the public secret reveals facticity’s reliance on an illusion...” and later “the fetish owes its power to something a good deal more than its function of revealing or concealing. For what it both reveals and conceals is a nothingness, an absence” (1999: 54, 68). This production of obscurity and indistinction would seem to place an enormous demand on the subject of the secret if it were not in-filled with the affects of presence and “facticity”.

Still, as we will see, these presence-effects only go so far and sometimes and, inevitably, slip, to reveal the dizzying losses embedded in moments of elongated stoppage.

The bombs and missile shapes at nuclear museums feel illicit, it matters less or not at all that these objects, by virtue of their very appearance in a museum are public objects. It is important to remember that by illicit I don’t mean taboo, but forbidden by dint of a “still and present” danger to the spectator. In other words their illicitness is a product of “for your own good-safety” sensibility. What endows these objects with this sense of the illicit? What really matters is the weight of a sixty year project of national secrecy which envelopes these objects, lends them special qualities, endows them as fetish objects with powers far beyond the utilitarian. The aura of the illicit and the exotic—of being let in on a secret—in which these objects exist is what most people cite

176 as the reason for their visit to nuclear museums or other places associated with nuclear heritage.

As I have already argued, the revelation of secrecy as the appearance of the revelation, is a potent tool for the capture of citizens’ bodies—by appealing to the intimacy to which the secret alludes, intimacy and thus secrecy too is always experienced as a bodily sensation above and in advance of as a rational realization. The revelation of secrets, or the disclosure of the existence of secrets is an act of trust, of good will, these museums act as transfer points where feeling of mutual trust and admiration between state and citizen can be exchanged. But, as we have seen, the line demarcating the secret is flexible and arbitrary. What once was secret can become public, of course, as with the de-classification of old government documents.

But, paradoxically, what once was public can be made secret. How so and to what aims? In the American nuclear weapons complex these lines between secrecy and the everyday can sometimes border on the absurd. In his book The Nuclear Borderlands

(2006), Masco relates a story told to him by a nuclear scientist at Los Alamos who almost caused a security calamity by leaving an orange left over from his lunch out on his desk.

The scientist returned to his office to find lab security in a state of heightened panic and threatening to report him to the FBI for revealing state secrets. As the scientist quickly learned any spherical object that crosses the threshold of the lab then automatically must be taken as a model of a plutonium “pit”—the essence of a nuclear warhead. It is illegal to leave any sphere—oranges included— unattended inside the lab. But what about in the

177 public sphere where the demarcations between secret and public are not so highly regulated?

In the autumn of 2001 a new push to (re)evaluate security in the lab was underway in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. One day that autumn, lab security agents entered the museum and declared that one of the most popular of the museum’s exhibits, its replica of Little Boy—the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima—was a security risk and would be removed to a secure location immediately. The bomb, it turned out, was not simply a replica but an actual decommissioned bomb whose inner machineries had been stripped and was then placed on display. Lab security agents surmised that terrorists could enter the museum and then and there X-ray the bomb and glean more information than they were comfortable eliciting. As museum employees later told me it did not seem to matter to these security personnel that the entire technical plans for the two bombs designed in Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project had been widely available in the public sphere—in books and on the internet—for years.

Fig. 3.1—A widely reproduced schematic for Little Boy. Drawing by John Coster-Mullen, used with permission.

" A tm Bwafci Tht Tap S k iK fauUt tta«y Ltttta Bay w d Fat M n ." 20 0 3. p 112 M i C iitn -U d M k iiifcg m ad twtfc panMtria*

178 But this is less a story about the almost comical excesses of the post-September 11 national security mindset than it is about the nature of secrecy itself. It narrates an index of the secret’s malleability, of its oscillation between the poles of its “concept” (Deleuze andGuattari: 1987: 287).

This story also reveals something about the nature of the secret caught between disclosure and concealment. Here the threat was not the leakage of the secret, the secret had already leaked and leaked and leaked many times over, including, most famously to the Soviet Union in 1948. So why the move to re-conceal, to re-secretize? The secret, whether or not revealed or disclosed, or more likely at some point between the two, represents something that ultimately cannot be contained, thus the excessive efforts always to do just that, and so the secret is always a threat, always an element beyond the ultimate control of the State, beyond the ultimate control of control itself. The display of the Little Boy bomb in the Bradbury museum is a potent demonstration of the ways in which secrets are uncontainable, one of the icons of global American military dominance was perceived as a threat against the very state to which it was entrusted to protect. Little

Boy turned against itself.

As Deleuze and Guattari point out the “secret has its origins in the war machine”

(1987: 287). And so just as the capture or channelling of the rhizomatic impulse of the war machine is always fragmented and never total, thus leading to the perpetual undercurrent of unease and distrust that characterizes the relationship between governments and their militaries, so the harnessing of the secret itself is always troubled and inexact. The secret captured and deployed in the service of the state is sometimes

179 subject to recapture. In the case of the removal of Little Boy, the secret momentarily reveals its nervous, almost schizophrenic, form; by jumping between spectacle and secret, threat and ally. By occupying both simultaneously, but ambiguously, potentials for resistance are also revealed.50

But in the context of the museum and the post 9-11 hysteria over homeland security—what Dick Cheney famously referred to as the “new normal”—the security agents’ action to remove of Little Boy from the museum floor has consequences beyond simply the denial of access to tourist-terrorists of the X-rayed interior of a museum exhibit. The removal of the exhibit, newly recognized as threat, implicitly serves to recognize the role of spectacles in power. But this is not all. The removal of Little Boy did not simply leave an absent or empty space on the museum floor. Although it was indeed physically empty it was in many other ways overfilled with the haunting of this absence.

In other words, the removal of the Little Boy exhibit does not mark an end to the work of the secret-spectacle in the museum but instead embarks it upon a new set of proliferative paradoxes. By invoking secrecy in the removal of the exhibit the security men in effect reanimate the secret. But in buttressing and building up the secret they also, paradoxically, reanimate the spectacle, as the two cannot be considered in exclusion from one another. This is seemingly contradictory in itself but it takes at least one more step that is just as counterintuitive: the spectacle is buttressed and intensified by the

50 See Julian Reid’s article “Deleuze’s War Machine: Nomadism Against the State” (2003) for an excellent explanation and discussion of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the war machine and its appropriation by the state. He offers an explanation of the ways in which this capture of the nomadic impulses and potentialities of the war machine can also be turned against the appropriating impulse of the state as a form of what he calls “resistance” (58).

180 removal of the exhibit, by the absence of the display. Severing the link between the spectacle and the ocular leaves only one thing and that is the body, spectacle and secrecy are affective.

This is because the spectacle is not the bomb on display or even the empty space of the now absent bomb, it is national security itself. The removal of Little Boy on the grounds that it represents a security threat, or even better an opportunity for terrorists, is to be a witness to the operation of national security itself. The absent display allows all the intensities that are caught up with secrecy as a measure of control to flood in, the simultaneous sense of being caught up and protected in the state’s embrace and that little charge of risk—now heightened due to a real live security threat—that animates the tourist visit. This is not the shock of momentary realization, the flash that reveals what

Taussig calls the illusion (1999: 54). Rather, it is the opposite. That is why the spectacle is compelling and catches the body up in layers of control that smooth or tamp down the desire to prod the inconsistencies of the paradoxes produced. Instead, as I often saw, tourists stood admiring the empty space of the once present, now absent bomb. It is not the presence or the absence, the real or the illusion, that is operative here but the perpetual indistinction between the two, an in-between which is affective.

But look at it long enough and that is also why the spectacle can be disturbing, because the national security discourse is uncomfortably caught between the protection of citizenry by the State and the protection of the State from its citizenry. There is more.

One can admire the impulse to make secret and appreciate the sentiment of protection for the citizenry that is imposed upon the secrecy as its veneer, but the absent bomb cannot

181 be contained in just that shell. In talking to museum visitors around the absent Little Boy display I began to notice a curious phenomenon. It was around this display much more than around the Fat Man display, where the object on display was physically present, that visitors asked about or articulated some unease over the lack of a museum display addressing the consequences of the use of the bomb in Japan. Around Fat Man the presence of the bomb seemed somehow to anchor the narrative and to close-off speculation and further questioning. Fat Man was adequate. Something about Little Boy was not. The empty space was destabilizing and its absence lodged in the body and seemed to proliferate. Tourists looking at the empty space would often stand there for long periods of time, perhaps hoping that something more would reveal itself, or would wander around the display looking for more. The virtuality of the display, its present- absence, unnerves the narrative project of the nuclear public sphere in which the museum collaborates. The display, in a mimetic relationship of copy and contact with the bodies who viewed it became jumpy and nervous and could not hold on to itself. It slipped. The absence called attention to itself, it proliferated, calling attention to all else that is absent in that display. And this is only the removal of Little Boy. The sign indicates a coming return, a Little Boy to be.

And here, if I haven't already, is where I begin to speak in circles. In the summer of 2005 Little Boy returned to the museum. As I have related elsewhere, this Little Boy, was different from the one it replaced, both more and less similar to the original. Which original? That is a good question. From presence to absence I have described the spectacle as adapting and even manipulating the appearance and then disappearance of

182 Little Boy towards its own ends. And from absence to return, of course, the spectacle

returns to its former mechanisms, the display of public secrets. But before it went on

display the new Little Boy, as I have described elsewhere, became the centerpiece of an

elaborate unveiling ceremony. This too is not unrelated and unimportant to the secret.

These unveilings, these elaborate usherings into the realm of the visible are what Taussig

has called the “theatrical unmasking” of the secret. It is “as if beauty and truth not only

converge in that unmasking but truth lies as much in this act as in the eventual product of

an ideal form drawn out from the obscurity within” (Taussig 2003a: 450). What Taussig

is describing is that the actions of secrecy, and especially the appearance of the revelation

of the secret itself are much more powerful than the secret itself—be it an object or a

piece of information. The truth of the secret lies not in some essence of the secret itself

but in the process of its unveiling; the theatricality of this truth testifies to two things.

First, to the ways in which the secret is a process, a process of seduction whose intensities

operate through forms of contact and inclusion, a production of sovereign intimacy

around the secret. Second, the theatricality of this truth of the secret cannot fully eschew

or eliminate its inherent excess and herein this excess is the what Taussig calls the

“hidden factor, the secret within the secret that allows justice to be done” (Taussig 2003a:

451). The secret then opens the doors not just to sovereign capture but also to the

possibilities of forms of becoming and lines of flight that undermine sovereignty’s static

desires.

4.2“In the Name Of... The Fence & the Rocket Among their main reasons for existence, atomic and nuclear museums cite things like the

fact they promote history and science education and that they act as public service to the

183

1 American populace, exposing, to the degree allowable, the secret work of the government that is carried out in their, the citizen's, name. Like the fence at the Los Alamos National

Laboratory which protects the Lab from the citizen in the name of that very citizen, however, the public service of exposure, of bringing to light, that the museums claim as their own is not so straightforward. This appropriation of the authority of the citizen, the deferral of the authorship always to the citizen, is, of course, a central performative

gesture of (American) democracy: the state acts only in the name of and with the

(constitutional) consent of the people. This constitutional act, the original act of

American democracy is of course also compromised. As Derrida explains, “the people”, the population for whom the signers of the declaration of independence sign on behalf of

and with the authority of, do not actually come into being as “a people”—a political body—until after the document is signed. And so the people always exist within an

aporia in relation to sovereignty (Derrida 2002: 49). The fence and the museum come, then, to be places wherein the central relationships of sovereign power are managed and reaffirmed.

In one sense, the laboratory fence defines citizens in what Agamben (1998) calls the sovereign relationship of the ban. For Agamben this is the relationship that the

sovereign state of exception maintains with “bare life”—life which can neither be

sacrificed nor is subject to the sanction of murder—in other words, life which is neither within the realm of ritual or law. This is life reduced to its barest animal components, zoe versus bios, life reduced to the existence on the threshold of survival. Bare life is included in the political, according to Agamben, only in the relationship of the ban. This

184 is, as he describes it, a inclusion only by exclusion. The relationship of the ban maintains bare life within the vortex of a paradox, bare life is maintained in a relationship to sovereign power only by the active maintenance of a relationship of exclusion.

The fence operates along a similar logic but with a different trajectory; it denies citizens access to state information but it does so in their name, both in the name of their protection and in the name of their authority. This is an exclusion effected by way of an apparent inclusion. It is the apparent inclusion that is key here. The mechanisms operationalizing the inclusion must be seductive and sophisticated to operate without suspicion or friction (which of course is never completely absent). The nuclear public sphere, nuclear museums, and the dynamics of museum secrecy especially, can be understood in this way, as lubricants of the sovereign exception that holds and maintains citizens in a relationship of ban. Atomic and nuclear museums appear to mitigate the perception of exclusion, hold it at bay. The museums as the public face of secrecy appear to “let citizens inside”. Indeed in talking to museum visitors throughout my fieldwork, the opportunity to see or witness what was (once) top-secret was among the most popular or oft-cited reasons for visiting nuclear museums. However, as I have thus far argued, these museums function to promote the idea, through spectacular means, that they reveal the secrets of the state, secrets that they make clear belong to the citizen. Come inside, beyond the fence, they coax. Once inside the secret is not revealed, as we have seen, rather it is simply put on display and into motion. The museums, the public faces of the nuclear weapons complex, of national security itself, provide the terrain wherein the body of the citizen is captured in the proliferative spectacle of secrecy itself rather than the secret's content.

Fig. 3.2— The Bradbury Museum’s recreation of the fence and security perimeter that surrounds the Lab. Photo by the author.

But there is something missing in this formulation. It proceeds from the point of thought wherein the state/the sovereign exception and the body of the citizen are fully

186 formed entities, a model of thought wherein one could be captured and one could be the capturer. But as we have seen with the secret, in its secret alliance with the war machine, the secret always leaks. The capture is never complete. If we shift the perspective and the body of the museum visitor and the state, of which the museum is its spectacular component, become entities in motion, formed and re-formed in each new moment, depending on the variables of the event; if we recognize that these entities, like secrets, never exist as inert, fully-realized objects but as dynamic and fluid, excessive, ultimately in-between and in-progress accumulations, another picture emerges.

If the museum seeks to capture the citizen's body in the appearance of an intimate fraternity, the seduction of the revelation of the secret, only then to position that body in the negative-space of the exceptional ban, it is not necessarily as clear what the body seeks or achieves in its encounter with museum objects and with museologically enhanced secrecy. I think it can be said that the capture of the body in this negative relationship, this ultimately infinitely violent relationship is always at least partly sought and achieved. But I think it is important also to recognize that the encounter between the body of the citizen and the museum object—be it the bomb, the missile, the history wall or the historical film—is not simply productive of a negative or fully channelled affect

(affect channelled into the passive pleasures of patriotic citizenship). Rather, because of what Buck-Morss calls the senses' “uncivilizable trace” each encounter brings with it an infinite and changing set of variables—a set of variables that is itself always in motion— some predictable like capture and others wholly unpredictable and new (1992: 378). So the interaction of the museum-goer with an exhibit, no matter whether it is enthusiastic or

187 bored, no matter whether it produces a thrill, a shock, a seduction, a pleasure, a sadness, a scare, or a moment of pride, always exceeds the channelling and dissipating capabilities of the circuitries of spectacle. If the spectacle of secrecy—a mechanism of control— leaks to such a degree that it can undermine the very goals it seeks to achieve, then the body, too, cannot only be oriented as a passive object of control. It too exists somewhere between controlled capture and infinite becoming. So while the fence and the museum appear as instances or eruptions of the permanent exception, as manifestations of the desire to formulate the ban, the body, which they seek to capture is always inadequate to this task, or perhaps better put, the body is always more than adequate to this task, the capture may be effected, but it is never tight or contained; like the secret the body secretes.

Let me provide what might seem a somewhat counterintuitive but ultimately, I believe, powerful example. Outside the National Atomic Museum in Albuquerque, New

Mexico stands a very tall, iconic and, in Albuquerque's Old Town neighbourhood at least, infamous landmark: the Redstone Rocket. The rocket was one of America's first intercontinental nuclear missiles. It sits on the comer of Mountain and 25th St, soaring at least sixty feet into the air and surrounded at its base by a wrought-iron fence. The

Redstone was designed with the help of Nazi scientists who had defected from Germany after World War Two and brought with them an expertise and experience in rocket- building with no American domestic equivalent at that time. In the closing stages of that war, Germany's V2 rocket was far and away the most technologically sophisticated weapon of war. The Redstone, although it was a somewhat short-lived resident of the

188 American nuclear arsenal was a much more active player in the American space program launching satellites into space. The missile, repainted from its original dark green in a patriotic red, white and blue colour scheme, is the focus of periodic, on-again, off-again efforts by Old Town inhabitants as well as anti-nuclear activists who agitate for its removal on grounds varying between it being an eyesore and it promoting militarism. In the Winter and Spring of 2005 one such effort unfolded in the form of a proposed amendment to the city of Albuquerque's by-laws. It would have eliminated the Redstone

Rocket by imposing a height limitation on outdoor sculptures and other outdoor objects that did not fall under the zoning codes. As this effort wended its way through city council, ultimately to fail because the city councillor who had proposed the amendment was too ill to shepherd it through to completion, I began to ask visitors to the museum what they thought about the missile, as a way of gauging the sensibilities that accompanied it and to see how it was interpreted by museum visitors.

189 Fig. 3.3— The Redstone Rocket outside the National Atomic Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico Visitors to a museum of atomic science will undoubtedly have a different perspective on a missile than local residents who daily see the long and narrow shadow of the missile creep across the facade of their houses—an eerie reminder of the ways in which missiles like this deliver weapons that render bodies into nothing but the trace of their shadows. Anyway, to the missile ranged from the surprise at the question because they “had never thought about it before”, to the missiles usefulness as a “landmark” for tourists looking for the museum, to a sense of appropriateness—the missile “belonged” there because of the subject nature of the museum. One day I happened to ask this question to Mike, who was just on his way out of the museum, after visiting with his wife. Mike knew something about the controversy of the missile, but whether that was because he had read the information sheet inside the museum about the Redstone and the efforts to remove it or because, as he revealed, that he was a frequent visitor to the museum, I was never sure. In any case he “loved this place” and seemed happy to stop and talk to me about the missile.

He began by articulating a particular sense of pride and patriotism, which he felt the missile embodied and symbolized. It also, for him, symbolized a sense of strength and national power which he felt the United States shouldn't “apologize for.” But the more he spoke the more his feelings got away from him. He became worked up and angrier, the words spilling from him seemed a surprise to him, in some ways but only spurred him on. He continued:

I can’t understand all these jack-offs complaining about that missile...I spent thirty-five years in the US Special Forces and if it weren’t for that [pointing at the missile] they’d all be speaking Arabian or...or bum-fucking Egyptian. I’m sorry, but them all complaining it doesn’t look right...well buy a dildo and I’ll buy you a jar of Vaseline and move to Egypt...all those faggots can speak Egyptian if they don’t like it... I’m sorry.

191 His well-ordered and state-approved narrative of affection for the missile had moved into something else entirely. Affection had become affect intensified by the body beyond order, beyond containment. Mike's body had started off narrating a “common- sense”51 understanding of the missile, one which feeds into state rationalities, one which demonstrates the success of such museums in creating a structure of feeling around “the bomb” in which citizens categorize and make sense of nuclear arms by packaging them within veneers of American strength and security and the preservation of the American way of life.

It is not that his narrative begins to undermine itself in what it says, his narrative is in fact very logical in following the striations, fractures, lines of hierarchy of the normative American way of life white, heterosexual which nuclear weapons are supposed to guarantee. No, his body exceeds the well-ordered narrative of state capture by proliferating the mechanisms and feelings of capture itself far beyond the boundaries which are useful to the state in managing a body-politic. My point is that the body exceeds capture in many ways, it does so always by excess, but not always by denying the forms of capture, or instituting forms of friction (for example doubt) between capture and the body's intensity, but sometimes by the proliferation of the mechanisms and structures of feeling of capture itself. Excess patriotism, then, also perhaps as much as excessive antagonism towards the state, sabotage the aim of the production of docile bodies and citizens.

51 See Erin Manning (2003). Here Manning links common-sense with the impulse to assume knowledge on behalf of citizens and in doing so links narratives of common-sense to discourses of sovereignty which acts “in the name of...”. 52 See Lauren Berlant (1997).

192 His patriotism had spilled over into a kind of passion that one usually reserves for other people. His outburst reiterated the basic and fairly common argument that these missiles were the guarantor of American freedom for close to half a century. The intensity of his expression of patriotism, in this context, speaks to the success of the mechanisms of power in shaping citizens. However, his declaration gets away from him and goes too far, but he can’t stop himself. The intensity of the event carries him forward past rational arguments. Rather than making an unambiguous statement of patriotic support for the role the missile played in American history, his sputtering condemnation of critics drifts into a mire of racist and homophobic denunciations that not only fracture and weaken the very intent of his statement but catch him up in a dizzying set of questions and implications that undermine his intent. His body literally vibrates with a tense passion that complicates, layers, weaves and mashes-up the codings of state rationality, discarding the carefully maintained logics that separate inside from outside, us from them, male from female, heterosexual and homosexual, body and machine. Instead his body (unintentionally) becomes the excess of the secretion, wandering off in all directions, a body essentially in motion. These excessive eruptions are, perhaps unavoidable. As Taussig says, the work of the subject in a system of public secrecy is knowing what not to know (1999: 50). This kind of work is difficult and surely pressurizes it leading to excessive eruptions and blow-outs. As such he became an albeit counterintuitive example of what Erin Manning calls “fleshy democracy” (2006), a messy assemblage of desires and organs, that runs counter to the security apparatus of the state which relies on a bland stasis and conformity. The two are inimical, “If you cannot have

193 a State without security, you cannot have a sensing body in movement and a State”

(Manning 2006: xxii).

But before I know it he is back, recovered, stilled, and he drifts off with a casual,

“See you later, brother”. His departure and his easy inclusion of me into a kind of fraternal community marks the moment where the event of intensity has been captured and sifted through the mechanisms of control, the moment where affect has become affection. Here the apology is not an opening to dialogue, or a sincere expression of regret but a signal of capture, closure and bodily recuperation; a return to the circulation of “common sense” from the disarticulation of a moment of impact, stoppage and intensity. It is not one state or the other—affect or affection—but the shifting, the oscillation between the two that is notable here. It is this movement between and back and forth that is indicative of the public secret and the ways it plays through the bodies of the nuclear public sphere, as both assertion and denial, concealment and revelation, as something both contained and simultaneously explosive.

This is the uncontrollable nature of the secret, especially, the public secret or the secret unleashed into the mechanisms of spectacle—which the state, fearing the slippage of its totality, the universality of its control over the secret, seeks as a new avenue for the secret’s sovereignty—its tendencies to secrete regardless of channels of desire which attempts to regulate its flows. The assemblages of the secret always spill over into the interstitial places where capture and becoming, death and life, common sense and possibility, mix and mingle. These are the moments when the secret tumbles over into

194 excess revealing sovereignty as a haunted, spectral and thoroughly incomplete edifice which emerges and manifests most in moments of doubt, uncertainty, fear and paranoia.

Part 5 — The Secret’s Insurgencies

5.1 Trinity and the Secret There is something about the play of shock and anaesthesia and its unique interplay with everyday dreams that wander between fantasies of utopia, the scar tissue of repeated ruin and the utterly banal at work in sites commemorating the Cold War. In the northern comer of White Sands Missile Range near Las Cruces, New Mexico stands the Trinity

Site. It was here where on July 16, 1945, that the scientists, technicians and military personnel of the Manhattan Project observed the world’s first detonation of an atomic bomb.53 Today, the Trinity Site is an increasingly popular site of pilgrimage where in

2003, on the two days that year that it was open to the public, more than six thousand people visited.54 The terrain of White Sands marks—like many other aspects of Cold

War tourism—an extraordinary marriage of the apocalyptic with the utterly banal, wherein the everyday is both endlessly confirmed and constantly threatening to boil over into some eruption. Like the story of how the scientists at Los Alamos transported the plutonium core from their laboratory in northern New Mexico to the testing ground in the south, placing it in the back seat of a 1942 Plymouth and driving it there themselves.

Slowly.

The atomic tourists arrive either singly or come in vast caravans organized by the nearby Alamogordo Chamber of Commerce or from National Atomic Museum in

53 See Masco (2007). 54 White Sands Missile Range. http://www.wsmr.army.mil/PAO/Trinity/Pages/default.aspx

195 Albuquerque. Scanning the horizon there is nothing but desert and sky. The site itself is relatively bare; the blast crater has largely been filled in save for a small portion and can now only be imagined by tracking the fencing around the site with the imagined borders of an atomic crater. A monument made from the volcanic rock common in the area marks the epicenter of the blast while off to one side stands a reproduction of the casing of the Trinity bomb called “Fat Man” like its cousin barely three weeks later on

Nagasaki, Japan. Mounted around the perimeter fence are black and white photos of the explosion as well as scenes of everyday life at Trinity in the 1940’s—the staff, the residence—as if this was an everyday place. Yet it is evident that visitors to the Trinity

Site are also scanning other horizons on the lookout for signs of the explosion.

There is something uncanny about visiting a site in which there is in fact very little to see. It calls to mind, as Taussig reminds us, Robert Musil’s comment that the most notable thing about monuments is their “lack of strikingness” (Taussig 1999: 51).

But the emptiness of the Trinity Site almost paradoxically brims with potential fullness and an excess of meaning—the nothingness one is witness to somehow reinforces the power of the secret. The secret hangs heavily over the Trinity Site, and it is easy to imagine that we are among the privileged few being let in on it. As if the state were whispering in our ear alone: “I’m going to let you in on something...” At Trinity the emptiness of the sovereign exception is literally on display. And it is here in this empty space that the power of the spectacle to fill in the empty spaces of the zone of indistinction of sovereignty impresses itself upon one. The emptiness is gobbled up in the desire to see and feel something. People scan the horizon as well as the ground at

196 their feet, especially the ground at their feet. Looking for something. Scuffing the dirt with the toes of their shoes, visitors half-expect to uncover something previously hidden and perhaps dangerous. But that is what excites. At Trinity, the secret mingles with the perception of possible threat. It is this sense of the possible, in particular of possible danger, of something overlooked, forgotten, potential, that lends a sense of adventure, even heroism, to the tourist’s visit.

Bob is the public affairs director of the White Sands Missile Range and is in charge of organizing the open days at the Trinity Site. He tries his best to dispel the persistent rumours that pursue the Trinity Site. Rumours tend to take on a life of their own and as much as we don’t buy into them we don’t quite let them die either. Using a combination of humour and authority Jim doggedly denies that the site remains dangerously radioactive or that film in cameras becomes fogged by radioactive particles in the ground around the site. This is perpetuated by the information booths set up by the

White Sands staff one of which advocates Radiological Health and the large sign that marks the entrance to Trinity’s Ground Zero: “Removal of Trinitite Prohibited.” Trinitite is the material produced when the heat of the blast forged sand into a form of radioactive glass. Until 1999 there was a sign warning against eating large amounts of dirt at the

Trinity site but in 1999 “it was deemed unnecessary and removed.”

All of these avowals of safety maintain the site as a space of potential risk.

In flocking to it, visitors place themselves at the junction of that which is central to Cold

War tourism, that is simultaneously reaffirming their faith in the technologies and actions of the State to keep them safe, both bodily and geopolitically, all the while indulging in

197 the fantasies of risk that remove them, for a moment, and make them tremble with intensities of life.

The seduction of the power of enclosure and of explanation is palpable. But something slips as well and that is what is important about Trinity. Even the fencing surrounding the site seems to be inadequate, too porous to be effective, the fiction of enclosure, but what if we were to test and prod that fiction? What then? Like the wind, the grains of sand, the grass, the seeds, the centipedes, ants, snakes and mice, we too would find openings and moments of departure, plateaus that propelled us from places of interiority to places of exteriority, and in-between and back again.

5.2 Flovd & Alan ‘There was a yellow cake everywhere in the air on the ground, like dust... ’.

We are at the Trinity Site, slowly walking the perimeter, and Floyd is telling me the story of how he and his Dad by chance witnessed the explosion back in 1945. With its unique play of presence and absence, emptiness and excess, spectacle and secrecy, the Trinity

Site is a place well positioned to explore the contradictions and aporias of the secret. But more than this, Trinity is important for its imperfections and its failings, the site, built-up with the architectures of spectacle and secrecy, is inadequate to this task and it was often here that the secret as a normative, regulative and coding impulse began to crack and dissolve. Two encounters that demonstrate the secret’s insurgent heart, its origin, as

Deleuze and Guattari contend, in the “war machine” (1987: 287) show, ultimately, the uncontrollable nature of the secret, its tendency to secrete regardless of the attempts to regulate its flow; These were moments when the rational flow of histories and explanations that for the most part easily accompany and envelope state secrets and

198 spectacles were caught short and began to crumble into something else. I came to see these moments which emerged as expressions of doubt, uncertainty, fear, scepticism, paranoia, conspiracy or even prolonged moments of silence, as expressions of emergence, potential becomings that haunt and undermine sovereignty.

I lived in Roswell, but my father and I was headed this way, and we were up on top o f a mountain right over here (he points) when it went off, til daylight, it’s really something, well I thought the world was coming to an end, as a kid that’s all I could think about, the world was coming to an end [My dad] he didn’t say too much. I ’d say “is the world coming to an end, is the world coming to an end? ” he “I don’t know son, I don’t know ” but it was terrifying, it was awesome.

We were on top o f the mountain at Riverside... We were headed for...Carrizozo, we had to make a lot o f stops, this was just before daylight... and all o f a sudden, it was still dark and all o f a sudden in this direction, there was a piercing, piercing light. Very, very piercing. And I ’m looking through the windshield and I ask my Dad what is that light? And the light was coming towards us, but as it got closer it got bigger and bigger and finally this orange, orange light just engulfed us. Everything was orange...orange, orange, orange...and you could... the fence lines was a couple hundred feet from the edge o f the road and you couldn’t see them in the dark but when there was this orange light surrounding us, then you could see them fence lines way out there. But the light went away as quick as it came, just all o f a sudden it was there and we were in a yellow light, and then it just went away. In fact it went back into itself, it just went away. You could see it going away.

199 And in fact when we got closer, the closer we got to Carrizozo, the stories intensified. People were knocked down outside, knocked down in the house, quite a day, but there was yellow, yellow cake, just dust, everywhere and that still to this day is kinda frightening. Yellow dust everywhere, buildings were covered with yellow, a yellow dust...

I ’ve often wondered, since Dad died o f cancer, he was there with me, and I had that big tumour, and I've often wondered if it wasn't that dust because that morning there was dust all over in this area this whole area,

I was just a kid fifteen years old, I thought the world was coming to an end, it was awesome. It’s like a movie in your mind. I don't think there's very many of us left, that saw it, most of us are dead...But I still think that that tumour that I had to have removed... and Dad had cancer, and I...think that that dust had something to do with it.

Because, when I had it removed, he [the doctor/surgeon] 7says never seen anything like that in my life. ’

I said ‘well what do you mean? ’ He said, he said that ‘tumour was in your lower intestines— that’s where it was (lie points,) ‘weirdest thing, I picked it out like a marble, ’ he said ‘weird, weird, weird tumour. It wasn’t attached to anything. First thing I thought of whenever he told me that, was this, this right here. It was quite an experience. ’’

Notice the moment when Floyd’s narrative begins to skip and elude his grasp. All of a sudden what was a story of awe at the spectacle of the explosion—a privileged yet distanced witnessing of the secret—becomes something else. The distance is no longer there and now the uncontainability of the secret is lodged in his body. Floyd’s body has

200 become the uncertain locus of the Trinity secret. Floyd’s tumour becomes a monstrous apparition of the State, the subcutaneous uncontrollable growth of the great modernist project, it is simultaneously the grotesque abject, and yet it is spectral, both that and potentially something else, something more or less significant. It is the secret implanted right in his body and yet even now, long after its absence has been made manifest by surgical removal it remains, lodged, present in the very excess of its absence, re-formed in part as memory fragments of his own and his father’s tumours.

Relocated from—as if in a flash—a story of state spectacles and the making of awestruck citizens to a narrative of personal-public catastrophe, the secret demonstrates its unwillingness and inability to be harnessed to one kind of knowing. Instead, it skips back and forth, sometimes with a stunning voraciousness, between the public and the intimate lodging in the body, where it exists, interrupts and disrupts, and in doing so opens up new ways to think old stories like Trinity and casts doubt on sovereignty’s singular nodes of history, politics, and citizenship by refracting them in multiplicity.

Floyd’s story exceeds or ruptures the official rendering of the Trinity Site, interrupting the flow of affect channelled as patriotic togetherness with a visceral bodily narrative of trauma and personal disaster. Floyd’s narrative activates the bridge between the intimate and the public sphere yet this time tracks it negatively, dissolving, momentarily, the architecture of spectacle encapsulating the tourist event.

This cracking open of what was once closed is evident too in my encounter with

Alan. He and his wife, participants in the National Atomic Museum’s “Blast From the

Past’ memorial event, are chatting to Phil and me about the previous night’s events when

201 Shigeko Sasamori, a survivor of Hiroshima, and other activists, Phil included, intervened in the gala event held at the museum. Alan is getting worked up and you can tell he has spent the night contemplating what happened.

I listened to what you were saying last night and I ’ve been thinking about it....and

I...well I, I guess I appreciate what you [here he is referring the Phil, the activist, and I as if we were part of the same organization] were are saying...ya...But, here’s the thing right...I mean...Let’s say that you knew what Hitler was going to do before he had begun and you had the chance to kill him, are you saying that they wouldn’t do it? Or, okay, let’s say that that an intruder has come into your house and is going to kill your wife, and you have the chance to kill him, it’s him or your wife, are you telling me that you wouldn’t do it? You would do it right ...there is only one thing to do...right? Are you telling me that killing is always wrong? Because, and here’s the thing, I would describe myself as a conservative Texas Republican. But, I ’ve been thinking a lot about what you all said...about peace and such...My wife and I, we’ve been trying to get healthier, lose some weight, eat better food. You know...

Alan let this spill out of him displaying a nervous energy that made his limbs and body shake perceptibly. I came to think of Alan’s body as emblematic of the work of the secret. Like the secret, Alan’s body was wavering between containment and release, a normative status quo and an undefined something new. Equally his body pulsed and shuddered with the effects of each of these states, the security and of the narrative of national security and the intensity of discovering and becoming something else. In both of these encounters we see the ultimately voracious rhizomatic tendencies of the secret as

202 emergent. With Floyd the release of the secret is slowly dawning as he narrates a corporeal cartography that maps the disaster of Trinity in the shadow of its triumph. For

Alan the secret’s containment is a foundation upon which his identity has been hung and its sudden disarticulation the night before has shocked and surprised to such a point that he is actively unbuilding and rebuilding himself around the secret and its release as he spoke to us that morning n the bus. Over and over again, Alan seeks to bring his thinking and more importantly his alarmingly vibrant and vibrating body under control, to normalize and contain it only to let loose again, only to lose the thread of his narrative in the promise of a vaguely improved future based on a re-vitalized body. In the case of both men, we see the moments where the patterns and mechanisms of containment of the secret are literally bowled over, blown apart by the insurgent war machine at the heart of the secret.

By tracking the marshalling of affects and intensities, secrets reveal events of citizenship in the flash of the arresting image (Stewart 2003). Paradoxically, seeking out the traces of affect and the mechanisms by which it activates and enlivens to mobilize categories like citizenship for a multiplicity of purposes all with different implications, means abandoning the search for citizenship as something. Zigzagging, first this way then that, secrecy and citizenship, in dialogue, emerge both embedded within the dominant logics of tourist pleasure but also exceeding it, erupting onto its sanitized surface in banal and shocking moments of back-talk, violence, uncertainty and personal- public narratives of catastrophe and endurance.

203 Chapter 4 Tracins the presence and absence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in America as sensuous encounter: Notes on (Nuclear) Ruins

1. There were those guys at the hostel I stayed in occasionally on my fieldwork trips before I found somewhere more permanent. Those guys for whom the hostel became a refuge when their dreams of New Mexico’s promise didn’t work out. Their stories were remarkably similar, something or another had not worked out up North or further East,

California, Illinois, Texas, a lost job, a break-up, depression, accompanied by an overheard rumour or a just a sense that New Mexico promised something new, something better, unencumbered by the past. “I came down from Oregon about ten months ago,”

Dave told me, “I got laid off up there and my friend told me that he could use some help with carpentry down here.. .but that work dried up after about six weeks.” Many of them had come to Santa Fe to try their hand as artists, lured by the folky-crafty art scene that still permeates the city. It was this or it was something else, an attempt to get away, to escape and rebuild. Mostly it didn’t work out and here they were, attending to the hostel which provided them with a cheap place to stay in exchange for working the front desk, mopping the floors and laundering the sheets. These men and sometimes a few women, too, composed the background of a place that mostly hosted young backpackers and older budget tourists. The hostel was sometimes tense with these two distinct groups of people, uneasy with the stasis of the group that never seemed to move on, despite the overbearing impermanence of the place. Sometimes this tension bubbled up and signs of ruin appeared that belied the tropes of escape and beauty in which New Mexico seems to

204 constantly bask. “I haven’t seen my son in six years,” Dave said to me one day out of the blue, “his mother won’t let me, and now...well now I don’t even know what he looks like.” We had, up to this point, been quietly watching the ever-changing New Mexico sky, perhaps looking for some sign, some meaning, but the only thing that arrived was this awful disclosure that just hung there because I could not find any response.

2. There was recently a time when the threat of ruin literally bore down on the New

Mexico nuclear complex in Los Alamos. The Cerro Grande fire raged on the mountainsides that ring the town in 2000 and still the evidence of that time lingers.

Today, it is as if the town is surrounded by an undulating belt of black spikes—so ominous do the trees now seem that they lend an even greater sense of the uncanny to the already heady mood of unease that blankets the place. One cannot help but think dialectically of those pictures of the charred landscapes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Fig. 4.1—Nagasaki after the Atomic Blast. Public domain photo.

205 Fig.4.2—Los Alamos after the Cerro Grande. Photo: Los Alamos National Laboratory. “The fire came right down to those trees over there,” Dick pointed out to me five years

later. “I was up on the roof with my hose trying to keep it from getting the house. I’ve

never been so scared.” I asked him if he felt that the LANL (Los Alamos National

Laboratory) was the priority, “Ya, I blame the lab—all the firefighters were down there

protecting it and here I was all by myself...I mean we’re people up here—down there it’s

just buildings and science experiments... we’re people.” Ed, a lab employee, told me

about having to leave his house to go and stay in an emergency shelter with his family

one night when the fire was getting perilously close. He remembers all kinds of talk—

telling me, he jerks his arms this way and that to demonstrate the anxious enforced stasis

of the scene, the thwarted desire to do something—that night about the fire being some

sort of cosmic payback for the kind of work that went on there. He also told me that one

206 I of the most prominent nuclear scientists from the lab was there that night with his family and that, fearing for his house, he was able to get the Secretary of Defense on the phone and ask him to send in the military. It was the strange congruity of these kinds of speech which positioned the lab somewhere in-between the nature and science, between the mythical and the military that Ed couldn’t forget and that set him thinking in a way he hadn’t before. It stayed with him. Some time later, we were walking back from the local

Starbucks, Ed brought up the fire again. “Ever since then,” he said, “I sometimes get bogged down in all this.. .1 mean, I never thought that I would spend my life, you know, doing this."

Nowadays one can drive the road through Los Alamos and see precisely where the fire stopped. Just a few meters up one side of the road the hillside opens up into a bramble of dead trees buffered by a row of healthy pines, on the other side are the glimpsed rooftops of the laboratory buildings. While the Cerro Grande fire destroyed dozens of homes and some outbuildings on lab territory, most people agree that Los

Alamos escaped the worst of it. The fire never managed to jump the road in the most vulnerable and populated areas and the town and the Laboratory remained, for the most part, surprisingly unscathed. But the potential and the threat of ruin still persists as a bodily state of indistinction. For Ed and for Dick, the fire awakened a sense that the nuclear complex was both something more and something less than it was cracked up to be. It also forced them to re-imagine their place within it with unnerving consequences, for both Dick and Ed were unable to come to some new terms that seemed to address or put to rest their reservations. But neither had they changed anything and it was as this

207 feeling of being in-between, as both an excess and lack, that, I believe, they felt the lingering tide of ruin overtake them. It was as if in the ashes of the fire that a new reality had been revealed to them and yet they had never been able to clear away those ashes and see the potential of the new growing underneath them.

3. Unlike the museums at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the contemplation of nuclear ruins constitutes the basic motivating desire to visit, nuclear museums in the United

States and, in particular, New Mexico are marked by the profound and sometimes disconcerting absence of nuclear ruins as it pertains to these places. This is significant in that the two nuclear-themed museums in New Mexico are largely oriented towards the display and narration of the stories of Little Boy and Fat Man, the Los Alamos, New

Mexico built bombs that were responsible for the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Recently, Joseph Masco (2008) has asserted that the production and consumption of spectacular nuclear ruins—the result of a complex web of televised nuclear tests, dramatized movie-of-the-week apocalypses, and civil defense strategies such as the urge toward the building and upkeep of domestic bomb-shelters—was and remains central to the production of compliant and disciplined citizens in the United States. Given this, what does it mean that the central nuclear ruins of our time, the only ones marked by the large-scale destruction of life and property, seem to be glaringly absent from the very places it would seem appropriate in which to consider them? In addressing this question,

I am not interested in specifically accounting for the lost spaces of contemplation of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the United States. Nor do I wish to speak directly to a discussion of the national trauma that Hiroshima and Nagasaki constitute for the United

208 States; a trauma that in its unresolved status for America would seem to explain the effort to purge the nation of any opportunity to examine it while at the same time returning again and again to it in indirect and oblique ways. Rather, I wish to linger here on the question of ruins somewhere between all these questions and these terms. Somewhere between the signifier and the signified, between the repressed and its inevitable return, between the dreamworld and the nightmare, between the archive and the remnant.

This chapter examines nuclear ruins brought on by the absence of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki in American nuclear museums. To be clear, Hiroshima and Nagasaki themselves do not exactly constitute the ruins I speak of, although without a doubt they qualify as ruins of some kind or another. Nor do I locate ruins in the proving grounds of

Nevada or even of the South Pacific atolls of the Marshall Islands. The ruins here are more elusive and not readily apparent. This chapter argues that the ruins that nuclear museums embody and encapsulate are the interconnected webs of vitality and liveliness, potential and emergence that demarcate the edges of human life itself. Let me elaborate.

I begin and continually return to the issue of ruin’s absence—particularly in the context of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—from the spaces of American nuclear contemplation. By locating ruin in absence I do not mean to imply that it simply is not there. Instead, I wish to make a case for a notion of ruin that, while remaining intensely material, both exists in a state of continuous deferral and can only be understood as a cultural form that is deeply corporeal. In other words, I argue that nuclear ruins in America must be understood as a force lodged in the body and comprehensible only by the body’s affective rhythms and immanent qualities. To locate ruin in the space of absence is to simultaneously deny and

209 affirm the paradox it implies by drawing out the proliferation of productive paradoxes that spill from the gentlest of pokes. In doing so this chapter asks what it means to witness the absence of ruin, what are the implications of this act of witnessing and, because absences themselves are never complete and always leave traces of presence—in fact, what more are absences than traces of presence?—how do we experience and narrate these absences?

The complex interplay between presence and absence is itself not a new concern in philosophy and cultural theory. It is Derrida (1976) who perhaps most notably opened up the relationship between presence and absence and placed it in motion. In applying deconstruction to what he called the “metaphysics of presence”—by which he meant its enduring and seemingly transcendent connection to the production of knowledge, meaning and truth—Derrida sought, through an analysis of language, to highlight the ways in which presence and absence, far from acting as a binary pair, are co-indicative of one another. Simplified, Derrida’s critique here takes the form of a deconstruction of logocentrism, meaning the priority of speech over the written word, a precedence which places speech closer or “internal” to truth and reason. The written word, in the logocentric view is then “external” to truth and therefore an inferior or lesser gauge of true meaning. In this binary logic—one that encompasses language and knowledge— speech is the eternally signified while writing is the signifier, always one step removed from the precedence of speech. Speech, according to logocentrism is always present, while writing is the absent that is always engaged in the failed attempt to restore the presence of speech.

210 Derrida’s critique of logocentrism emphasizes that speech and writing interact in the formation of language, slipping indistinguishably between presence and absence, signifier and signified so much that “internal” and “external” cease to have analytical meaning. Rather the origin of speech can only be located in the notion of differance, a term which not only indicates difference but also deferral. Presence and absence, by turn, can only be understood together, fading into and out of the other, each always gesturing to other. Finally, it is from differance that the concept of the trace emerges. It is only via the trace that any meaning or knowledge can be articulated and examined because of the profound implications of locating an origin that is always in a space of deferral and between states of presence and absence.

The present chapter seeks to engage with the essential slipperiness of presence and absence in an ethnographic sense. Particularly how and when does the absence of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki morph into a lingering presence, what is the trace of Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s presence in America and how is that trace experienced? But instead of confronting a metaphysics of presence as Derrida does, the chapter engages with its flipside, a metaphysics of absence, or at least the sovereign aspiration for such a state, an aspiration that, given the qualities of presence and absence is always being exceeded and undermined. On what account can we pin this desire for absence to? And how is this absence-presence experienced, and manifested? Nuclear museums are places suffused with an almost unbearable potential; potentials realized and unrealized, accepted and denied, visible and invisible, the tensions of these potentials force conceptual gaps to open in the exhibits multiplying and diffracting in many directions the intended

211 unidirectional leap between the signifiers (objects and images) and the meanings they produce. These gaps open up unregulated spaces (allegorical rather than symbolic) of thought and experience between, for example, the technical marvelry of the missiles and bombs and their potential consequences, between deterrence and mutually assured destruction and between security and freedom. It is these gaps and deferrals that open up the space between presence and absence are often articulated sensuously, as moments of affect, impact, haunting, doubt or unqualifiable intensity that I am calling ruin.

These moments of impact—there is literally nothing that can be said—reveals the haunted edifices of American nuclear museums as places not of revelation but of a doubled spectral absence that, in its excess, marks a presence that explodes across the body as an affective event of dense lack, as a moment of negative impact. More than anything, nuclear museums embody the anxiety that has marked the nation's relationship with nuclear weapons. Unable to reconcile or to pin down nuclear weapons as either weapons that enable and ensure freedom, justice, victory, the saving of lives or as weapons that in their profound and unimagineable destruction, and limitlessness—the fact that they not only place the body of the Other at risk but all bodies—nuclear museums exhibit the profound violence of sovereign practice.55 Nothing makes this clearer than the byzantine and unclear ways in which the legacy of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki are dealt with in New Mexico nuclear museums.

The complexity and importance of the ruin is that it marks, simultaneously, the imprint of biopolitical sovereignty, which Agamben has reformulated for the post-

55 This is a violence that is not only a physical potential but is, to echo Levinas (1998) and his concept of our responsibility to the face of the Other, present in the ethical fabric of everyday life.

212 Foucault age as the “make survive” and a zone of ultimately unregulated outbursts, leakages or becomings, all of which form the basis of radically potentializing moments which elude and undermine the sovereign impulse.

4. It is Walter Benjamin, of course, who first called our attention to the unlikely but everyday presence of ruins in our midst. For him the once grand but, by the time he observed and wrote about them in the 1930’s, by then seedy nineteenth-century shopping arcades of Paris existed as instances of “petrified history,” evidence of both capitalism’s obsession with the new and the short-lived fetish power of its objects, but also of its ephemerality and fragility (Buck-Morss 1989: 160 & 164). For Benjamin, the arcades existed as a sign of capitalism’s phases, fossils of that era, but also, and more importantly, of capitalism itself as a phase—not of nature but of history—and therefore of its vulnerability. For Benjamin, the production of ruins in capitalism, then, existed both as an example of the internal machinations of capitalistic enterprise—the discard of detritus on by side of the road—and the ruin embedded within capitalism itself. As

Kathleen Stewart writes in her ethnography of Appalachian West Virginia: “[Ojbjects that have decayed into fragments and traces draw together a transient past with the very desire to remember. Concrete and embodying absence, they are confined to a context of strict immanence, limited to the representations of ghostly apparitions. Yet they haunt.

They become not a symbol of loss, but the embodiment of the process of remembering itself; the ruined place itself remembers and grows lonely” (1996: 92-3). The ruin folds back upon itself, catching itself up along with all the discarded fragments and traces of its past, becoming both more and less than the sum of its parts. The ruin’s ability to

213 accumulate intensity, momentum and memory in these ways means that the ruin confronts us allegorically, rather than symbolically. It was this allegorical technique that

Benjamin sought to promote, for in the symbiosis of the ruin and the allegory he saw logic and rationality beleaguered by sense, retrospective contemplation of time mired in the stoppage of the excessive overflow of memories piled up too-fast one-upon-another.

Again Stewart, she writes:

There is something of the sense of allegory in the stories of the ruined and the trashed. They begin at the end of things, overwhelming the ordinary flow of time with inescapable memories and desires. A narrative suspense forward through events to discover what will happen next is overwhelmed by a spatial scene and frozen in the involuntary repetition of the haunting image... A melancholic epistemology of loss, unavailability, episodicity, and deferment throws ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’ into question” (1996: 95).

Benjamin’s conceptions of ruin and decay confront us allegorically and are instructive and politically important because they demonstrate not just that ruin is a by­ product of civilization, but that civilization itself is susceptible to ruin. It is in this susceptibility that potential exists, for in the ruin’s kinship with allegory—which leads not forward or backward but resides in the virtual profusion of a moment of impact, stoppage and inhabitation of the space of apparent paradox—it exists and operates as a fragment, a trace, or better yet as what Agamben (1999) calls “ a remnant.” In this way the ruin haunts, suggests, reminds, disturbs, interferes and interrupts but it does, cannot, declare. Instead it exists within the realm of the potential, forever between the possible and the impossible, at the very frontier of the archive and its dissolve.

This suggests the possibility, largely unexplored, that the conception or allegory of ruin need not be tied to or deployed from material wrecks and remains in order to maintain what Benjamin would call its dialectic power. To take this one step further, I

214 am suggesting that the consideration of ruins has been limited by precisely this allegiance to their literal existence and presence as things and places in states of decay. It is not that this is wrong but that it is perhaps too exclusive. Moving away from this requires us to loose ruins from the spatially oriented sites via which we have conceived and understood them.

I would like to suggest an alternative rendering of the ruin. Imagine the ruin not as a crumbling structure that, in its decay, is able to hint all the more seductively at its past nobility. Try to resist the temptation here to gather up the forceful will to remember through the fragments and traces of the past. Think not of ruins as relics, fossils, or as people, places and things caught in a forever petrified freeze-frame, like the surprised faces at Pompeii eternally covered in the ashes of Vesuvius. I am asking you here to consider a different kind of ruin, one that is perhaps more difficult to identify yet no less destructive. Imagine ruin not as a place or a thing but as a force that comes to reside in the body. It is as a force, too, that ruin can be seen to actualize itself not in the decomposing remains of a bygone era, but in the gleaming, still new, formations of an imperial present. This, then, is to consider the paradoxical possibility of ruins in the moment of their profound absence.56

56 See LaCapra 1999 for an important discussion of the non-binary distinction between “absence” and “loss” and their respective relationship to the concept of (historical) trauma. Most important for our purposes here is LaCapra’s criticism that the two terms are too often conflated, with deleterious effects for both the comprehension of past traumas as well as the ability to work through them. The basic distinction LaCapra draws sees loss as historically rooted in particular events, whereas absence must be situated “transhistorically” and is ambivalent, unspecific and not amenable to practical solutions or strategies in the same way that historical losses might be. The main problem, as LaCapra sees it, of “converting” absence to loss is the possibility of asserting a “misplaced nostalgia or utopian politics in quest of a new totality or fully unified community.” Conversely, in carelessly exchanging loss for absence, “one faces the impasse of an endless melancholy, an impossible mourning” (698).

215 Recently, Ann Staler (2008) has begun to articulate a notion of ruins that comes close to what I am trying to assert here. Writing against macro models of sovereignty and empire that she regards as monolithic and static and that view ruins as monumental leftovers of previous eras and ignore the “less dramatic” instances of suffering resulting from imperial relations, Staler urges anthropology to “refocus on the connective tissue that continues to bind human potentials to degraded environments, and degraded personhoods to the material refuse of imperial projects” (2008: 193). Stoler seeks to direct the ethnographic gaze towards the microeffects and microecologies of imperial ruins and to engage in the questions of how ruin is lived, felt, narrated and made sense of in everyday, out of the way, places. By doing this and looking at the stories that

“congeal” around the margins of imperial formations, she tries to eschew the vocabulary of centre and periphery in imperial studies, in favour of looking at the ways in which people take on and remould ruinous circumstances.

My hesitation to fully embrace Staler’s work on ruin stems from the sense I get that, for her, ruin remains an external relationship or characteristic, albeit revised in scale, that affects, impacts, distinguishes or describes the relationship of bodies to power. To these ends she writes: “[i]t is to recognize that the bio in biopolitical degradations is not haphazardly joined with histories of empire” (Stoler 2008: 204). It is the joint or the hinge that troubles me here. My reading of biopolitics steers me towards a subtle yet significantly different conclusion. It seems to me that there is no such connection point per se between “histories of empire” and the “bio” at all. Rather it is that histories of empire are written and executed through the body itself such that biopolitically rendered

216 bodies form the only trace of empire or sovereign exceptionalism. The ruinous detritus of environments, economies, liberties and structures are secondary products of ruined and ruining bodies.

If we are to consider ruin less as a physical circumstance or outcome of capitalism, as I am arguing that in this case we should, and more as the virtual-corporeal quality of biopolitical sovereignty itself then we are unbound by the constraints of centre and periphery, or the appearances of violence, peace, poverty or prosperity. In the scenario I am proposing, dream and nightmare, success and failure, ruin and triumph exist alongside of and always immanent to each other. In other words, seeing ruins as a virtual force (a resonating paradox; a dialectical image vibrating with tension) that lodges in bodies as an intensity, epistemologically liberates the deployment or identification of ruins from the plodding persistence of presence. In doing so it sets in motion a circuit of doubling and folding, where ruin ping-pongs back and forth between presence and absence, settling indistinguishably between the two. It is, then, precisely the absence of ruins in nuclear museums, for example, that signals them as places facilitating intensified destruction and decay. And, conversely, it is the ruin that points—like a metronome that swings back and forth—to the success of the sovereign enterprise, ruin’s absence.

Read this way—as embedded within the body—also updates Benjamin’s sense of ruin as a doubled entity, as both evidence of society’s decay and a clue of humanity’s possibility for redemption, for the biopolitical era. For power, sovereignty and capitalism can no longer be read or deployed apart from the desiring body and then clumsily imposed upon it from the outside. Rather, they must be read together as emanating from

217 the body itself. This allows us to decipher the complex ways in which ruin both acts upon and is produced by the body in both structural and intimate ways. Moreover, not only does it allow us a way to read ruin as a bodily self-impact of biopolitical sovereignty, it allows us to understand the flipside of ruin—the possibility of redemption—in a bodily manner as well. For to be caught up in the body’s intensities, its in-betweeness, is to recognize that within the folds of the body are pockets which escape the structuring zeal of ruin and position the body as Benjamin intended, as both ruin and redemption, despair and hope.

5. In the autumn of 1976 the museum received a letter from Japan. Enclosed with the letter were two other pieces of paper. The letter, written in careful and precise English script, was from Akira Yasui, a Japanese visitor to the museum more than three years before. One of the pieces of paper enclosed was a clipping from the Japanese newspaper

The Asahi Shimbun. The article describes an air show in Texas in which a B-29 bomber recreated the dropping of the atomic bomb from thirty years before in 1945. The article, says Yasui, had reminded him of his visit to the museum, which had taken place on a trip to Albuquerque “to give a speech about Japan-U.S. Trade relation for the members of the

Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce.” He writes that at the time of his visit, a side trip to the museum was a “MUST” for him in order to see the model of Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. His wife, he writes by way of explanation, was “at the Hiroshima

Station waiting for a streetcar in the morning of August 6, 1945.” Mr. Yasui goes on to explain that while it was imperative for him to visit the museum and to see the museum's exhibit of Little Boy, he never told his wife about it. To this day, he writes, his wife has

218 no idea about the museum or it's display and of his visit to witness them. He emphasizes in his letter to the museum that while his wife has and continues to suffer enormously as a result of her exposure to the radioactive fallout of the bomb and detests war and violence in all its forms, she harbours no ill will towards Americans. “She hates wars and armed conflicts” he says, “not the person who dropped the bomb.” By way of explanation he describes two “enjoyable” vacations spent in the United States. The other piece of paper enclosed along with the letter and the article from the newspaper is one from the museum itself. “Recently I found the leaflet and [the] question paper which I didn't fill up and return to you.” The “question paper” he refers to is something often found near the exit of museums asking visitors for their feedback. He returns the feedback sheet empty

“as a mere visitor...although it's more than three years old.”

6. Based on conversations with staff and volunteers and using past museum publications as a guide, let me say that, although the location of the museum is now different than it was in 1976, the display of Little Boy seems to have changed very little from the time the

Akira Yasui visited to the times I visited between 2003 and 2005. Little Boy, along with

Fat Man, constitute the museum’s premier attractions and they are among the first exhibits encountered as you make your way through the weapons exhibit in the back half of the museum. Little Boy is mounted on a squat black metal pedestal and, although significantly smaller than Fat Man, is ten feet long and two-and-a-half feet wide. A small black placard with white writing reveals just the barest details of the bomb: its technical specifications including its explosive “yield”; some details regarding its invention and construction; and, finally, the fact of its use on August 6, 1945.

219 7. Shortly after he showed me where to find the archive—a few dusty boxes stowed in a cubicle comer—the museum’s historian was let go. This was part of a larger rationalization of the organization of which the museum .was just a small part. A museum that was chartered with the task of interpreting and displaying the nation’s atomic and nuclear history, did not, it seemed, need an historian. This was near the beginning of my fieldwork in New Mexico and I was casting my net as widely as possible, worrying that what I saw was all there was. For a few days I installed myself in the large meeting room which ran along one comer of the museum near the back which looked out on the dusty side parking lot -only beginning to see a car or two when I arrived each morning- and, just beyond that, the train tracks. There was still a loading dock, now largely unused, at the back of the museum which opened directly onto the tracks, at boxcar height, from when the museum was still a warehouse or a factory. Few people came in or out, while I was there, thankful, I think, that I had something to occupy myself with. The archive itself contained many of the memos and documents exchanged between military and municipal leaders that led to its establishment and a chronologue of the changing styles of the museum’s flyers, visitor maps, displays and handouts. These elements of the archive are its foundation, happily clicking together like joints and sockets or posts and beams, securing the past in continuous journey that “articulate[s] the unity of an ideal configuration” (Derrida 1996: 3). But because nuclear museums are among the few public faces of the history and nuclear reality of present-day America, they also form another kind of archive. Sitting in the back of the museum going through its modest archive made me acutely aware that I was sitting in what itself amounted to a larger

220 archive. As a collection of documents and artifacts, they added up to a story of the museum’s own history, but they also added up to a larger event of nuclear history steeped in sovereign power. In this way the step-by-step narrative of the museum’s archive is burst apart by the museum itselfas archive. As an archive of American nuclearism, the narrative of nuclear history is undermined by the interplay of secrecy, fear and trauma which mark the era. It is this interplay between my exploration of the museum’s own archive, where I found the letter by Akira Yasui, and the museum as archive that I want to explore here.

Derrida’s psychoanalytic analysis of the archive as, in part, a response to and a hedge against the death drive is perhaps particularly apt here. But it is not the stewardship of the violence of the past—recorded or not as the case may be—which makes the archive so alive with potential danger. It is rather, Derrida insists, the way in which the archive speaks with the future, offering to it but one highly codified, classified, unified and ultimately conservative story of the past. It is this “very singular promise of the future” that makes the archive central to our understanding of “modernity’s pain”

(Derrida 1996: 15, 36).

But it is embedded within the archive itself that we may find clues that light the fires of internal combustion, fires which erode the laws by which the archive not only governs itself, but governs memory now and in the future. These clues are contained in the archive’s focus upon the making of memory and thus to the making of ourselves. In a nod to Nietzche, Derrida argues that the need to archive is also a mol d 'archive, which can be translated as sickness, but perhaps more accurately in this case, as a passion or a

221 compulsion to archive and this urge pushes us to archive right to the very limits of the archive itself (Derrida 1996: 89-90). This moment, “when the archive slips away”, when it shifts from a finite to an infinite register is a moment tense with paradox. The desire to archive in the place where the archive begins to dissolve is both the moment of the archive’s greatest destructive power, the moment of the archive’s greatest vulnerability and the very source of the compulsion to archive in the first place (Derrida 1996: 94).

This desire to archive what cannot be trained or disciplined to fit into the archive situates the archive within the space of a lacuna. It is in the indistinct space of the hiatus that the archive can be read oppositionally, or latently, or that moments of rupture and impact can be identified that interrupt the seemingly continuous circulation of the archival narrative.

More recently Ann Cvetkovich (2003) has articulated a different kind of archive, what she calls an “archive of feelings.” In contrast to mainstream archives, these archives are organized largely around sites of trauma and oriented towards the kinds of knowledge and memory that would not normally find its way into an archive. Composed of ephemera and scraps of paper with jottings and casual notes, flyers, pamphlets and even pornography, comics and other kinds of graphic art, such archival collections are largely oriented around expressions of affect, “sentiment and emotion” (Cvetkovich 2003: 269).

The “archive of feelings” disturbs the traditional ordering and boundary-making impulse of the mainstream archive, not to mention the museum or memorial. Moreover, it institutionalizes as its very purpose “practices of mourning” that preserve the ephemera of memory and the marginal histories of traumatized groups in ways that do not siphon

222 off the pain and wounds left by such a history. By keeping this history open “the successful archive enables the work of mourning” (Cvetkovich 2003: 271).

Cvetkovich argues that “archives of feeling” are not what Derrida is referring to in

Archive Fever, and it is this encounter between Cvetkovich and Derrida that seems worthwhile to reflect on momentarily. In Archive Fever, Cvetkovich is right, I believe, to infer that Derrida is largely interested in the “traditional institutions” rather than the

“material specificities of a more experimental grassroots...archive” (2003: 268).

However, she seems to think that the different nature of the archives she is articulating put them beyond the logic of the archive articulated by Derrida. I am not so sure. My interest here is less in critiquing one or another notion of the archive. Rather, I am more interested in how these dual notions of the archive might be more productively brought together in such a way that illuminates the kinds of archival evidence I have encountered in my own work. For Cvetkovich, the traumatic nature of these archives, the counter­ pressure they exert against the “institutionalizing” ideology of museums, monuments and archives, puts the grassroots archive of feelings beyond “the impossibility of the archive articulated by Derrida toward collections of texts and objects that embody the sentiments and obsessions of archive fever” (2003: 271).

Does an archive of feelings move beyond the “impossibility” of the archive cited by Derrida? It seems to me that an answer is more complicated than a yes or no here.

Rather I think that the archive of feelings is entangled complexly with both the possibility and the impossibility of the archive, or, in other words, the archive’s institutionalizing tendencies and the lines of flight that a deterritorialized archive of feelings embarks upon.

223 Any archive of feelings is, after all, an archive and cannot, it seems to me, totally escape the ordering tendencies implicit in such an enterprise at the same time as it strains against or unsettles them. To me it seems that the archive of feelings exists right at the frontier of the archive, the edge that Derrida suggests flirts with its own possibility. Tacking between possibility and impossibility, unable to finally assert either one for to do so would mean that either the archive of feelings is an archive in traditional sense or it is not. Neither is satisfactory, neither is accurate.

What the archive of feelings does do is better alert us to the possibility that emotions and sentiments, affectively-inspired events of intensity, do not easily inhabit both archives and “the archive.” They strain against the impositions of their form and storage, they exist, they build, become sticky with in-formations and emergences but they do not structure. Unable to contribute to the architecture of the archive, no coherent narrative can be erected from them; they inure and fold, growing and shrinking in intensities, never able to conclude a story or a make an argument.

Understood this way—in ceaseless dialogue with the impossibility of the archive, threatening to take it over the edge—archives of feelings, and instances of affect in otherwise “traditional” archives are also politically more radical and potentializing. In

Cvetkovich’s understanding, archives of feeling, establish their own separate strain of traumatic memorial that is an archive without being an archive. In this way, it seems to me, they really have little to say about the power of the archiving impulse at all, nor about the hegemonic power of the archive to define what counts as knowledge. But understood as part of that impulse, albeit in continuous tension with it, is altogether different. It

224 keeps the archive, or at least aspects of it, open, by both being inadequate and exceeding the domains of their classification in the archive. This better accomplishes one of the main goals for Cvetkovich’s archive in the first place, that of mourning. It places mourning at the centre of power, as an unassimilable and undiminishable question or contemplation.

The archive of feelings, then, helps to articulate ruin from within the archive.

Here is where we can switch registers at will, meaning that the archive I refer to here can be both specific and general, it can refer to an archive but also to the archive of knowledge. Archives of feeling, alerting us to ruin, a ruin which doubly encompasses the bodies articulating those feelings and the archives in which they are contained, are always minoritarian impulses.57

57 While I have concentrated on archives I believe that Andreas Huyssen’s (1995)work offers us a, in a preliminary but relevant fashion, similar way to think through museums. Unfortunately Huyssen emphasizes what he calls the life-affirming aspects of the museum over its disciplinary heritage instead of demonstrating the ways in which these two aspects of the museum co-articulate one another...Like Benjamin who saw the political potential for new sound and image-making technologies and their ability to re-enchant an everyday burdened by an anaesthesia that descended like fog over the din of industrial shock, Andreas Huyssen sees new potential for museums at the end of the twentieth century. While acknowledging the institutional critique of the museum as a “disciplinary archive” that helped produce Western civilization by demarcating its boundaries of in/out, high/low, Huyssen argues that this line of critique is now becoming exhausted and as paralyzing as it claims the museum itself to be. Instead the modernist museum of old is giving way to a new museum, a “mass-medium, [as] a site of spectacular mise- en-scene and operatic exhuberance” (1995: 13-14). Huyssen compellingly puts forward an idea of the museum experience and museal spectatorship as inherently unstable, fluid and creative. Due to new curatorial and exhibitionary practices the museum can no longer be relegated to the scrap-heap of hegemony but, like the museum object itself, can be seen to have been re-enchanted. Cultural amnesia and speed, the dissolution of time, have left the museum behind in such a way, he argues, that the museum experience is liberated to some degree and has the potential to be counter-hegemonic and life-affirming; a project in vitality instead of a moldering, static and uni-directional pedagogical experience. One amendment to speak of here. The vitality that Huyssen attributes to the postmodern museum is not simply due to new museum strategies and the happy accident of the museum’s archaic status as slow­ time holdout in a culture of speed. The affirmation of life is never a one-way thing, it depends most importantly, on the bodies that move through the museum. To acknowledge that the affective body has some role to play in how we theorize the experience of the museum may be new, however the experience is as old as the museum itself. While he is careful to say that it is important not to relativize the ideological

225 8. Akira Yasui’s letter hints not (just) at the grand disasters of nuclear war, but at the quiet disasters of not only his wife’s life, but of his life with his wife, the empathetic disaster. He meets the museum’s absence as one not of regret but as some display of that disaster, the absence of disaster, with his own equally powerful statement of absence—both absences contain their own disasters and ruins. I would like to explore, however, what the letter and the returned, but unfilled-out, feedback form reveal to us about how witnessing and testimony confront the experience of visiting the museum.

The letter contains no demands or requests and is not marked by anger or a desire for redress. The letter does not explicitly call the museum to task for its representation of the bomb and its absence of any meaningful consideration of its effects. Nor does it seek to morally resurrect the issue of whether the bomb should have been dropped or not in the hopes that a penance of guilt or regret may be offered. Instead, with its mixture of the matter-of-fact and the intimate, revelation and refusal, said and unsaid, the Japanese visitor’s intervention seeks “as a mere visitor”, it seems to me, only to recognize the absence and to leap into the unknown ethical territory it represents. If the absence of

Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) represents a wound, this is not an attempt to suture or heal it, but rather more courageously, an attempt to both keep the wound open and dwell inside of it. That is, Yasui seeks to bear witness.

critique of the museum as a static, “mummifying” institution, Huyssen urges us to look at what the museum experience produces. This exhortation, in my mind is the central contribution of Huyssen’s book and cannot be underestimated in its impact. In pointing us towards the museum as a life-enhancing rather than mummifying institution in an age bent on the destructive denial of death: the museum becomes a site and testing ground for reflections on temporality and subjectivity, identity and alterity. (Huyssen 1996: 16).

226 9. According to the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, the only “true” or “complete” witness to atrocity is, paradoxically, he or she who can never bear witness at all. The true witnesses are the dead, for only they have experienced the annihilation of life that the survivors have escaped. Survivors then, he argues, are at best a “pseudo-witness” a proxy for those who fell (Agamben 1999: 34). Yet this represents a problem, for how are the dead—who themselves cannot speak—the only ones truly able to testify? Such is the negation at the heart of witnessing, where it literally implodes in upon itself before it even begins. Bearing witness, then, is fundamentally a process of acknowledging the very impossibility of the act, of ever truly bearing witness (Agamben 1999: 39). It is an act of constant deferral, always gesturing towards its inadequacy to take up the very task it embodies. This situates witnessing in the space of an aporia, a paradox from which it cannot emerge. I am interested here in exploring witnessing but somehow untying it from the strict tethers of “seeing something” and “being there”. How does witnessing travel—affectively, traumatically—across time and space? And how can we make witnessing manifest in these spaces of contradiction and deferral?

Yet the task is not emergence, Agamben argues, but to dwell in the aporic space ever more deeply, for it is only here that the ethical subject materializes and the testimony of the witness is able to articulate its potentiality. Testimony itself is a relationship based on the potential of speech; “between the sayable and unsayable in every language—that is... between a possibility and an impossibility of speech” (Agamben 1999: 145). It is not that testimony—the articulation of the witness—simply exists between the possibility and impossibility of speech, but that for testimony to be possible it must maintain a

227 relationship with its own denial, it must embrace its impossibility, “their inseparable intimacy is testimony” (Agamben 1999: 146). The witness and testimony both can only exist undivided from their negation: the witness with the dead, testimony with the impossibility of speech. Undivided, they provide the platform from which the subject’s testimony opens up an ethical intervention that does not seek to classify, explain, assign blame or responsibility; rather it seeks to open up spaces of potentiality provided by the embrace of the moment of deferral. It is this moment of deferral which modem biopolitics seeks to shut down, Agamben argues, by cleaving the paradoxical pairs apart: human from the inhuman, animal life from organic, the speaking subject from the living body, the witness from the dead and on and on, until it has achieved its goal of creating a living body stripped completely of its subjective attributes—simple yet dreadful— survival. Witnessing and its declarative act, testimony, then constitute simultaneously the trace of the ruin and the refusal to be reduced to survival, to bare life, in “being subject to desubjectification.” Witnessing and testimony constitute subjectivity itself, Agamben writes, and they do so not as a closed, linear process that orients us in official “history”; not as ends, but as remnants which elude structure, classification, foundations and the archive—that shadow repository of the said and the unsaid inscribed in its flipside, not the potential of speech but the enunciated word—itself (Agamben 1999: 158-9).

Sometimes the physical archive contains that which is unarchivable, something which strains the very mandate of the archive itself by inserting a gap between meaning and structure or between body and system. Witnessing, the endless deferral to

228 impossibility always executes such a gap. It is within this context that I want to examine more closely the envelope that I found that day in the archives.

10. As I have said the envelope contained two distinct parts, one a letter to the museum and the second a museum feedback request. It is this extraordinary pairing of the written and the blank sheet of paper that is important here. It perfectly demonstrates the paradoxical pair that Agamben insists constitute witnessing and testimony, the intimate embrace of the possibility and the impossibility of speech. But there is something else about the letter and visitor card that is important here: what kinds of speech they potentialize. Agamben writes that testimony is always, and can only be, a kind of poetics, a speech act that eludes the archive. Witnesses are by definition poets, and the poetic word is “always situated in the position of the remnant’’ as that which perseveres in the face of impossibility of testimony. The letter constitutes such a poetic testament, a witnessing of subjectivity in the face of desubjectification. The visitor questionnaire, however, represents the possibility of another kind of language. Akira Yasui’s refusal to fill in the very form which requests his opinion does not represent the absence of testimony. Instead it must be read as refusal to participate in the archive, in language that is non-poetic, utilitarian, structured, segmented and enclosed by the questions posed. The visitor feedback sheet, oriented as it is towards the ends of “evaluating] our program and insurfing] that it maintains its high standards” refuses the deferral of the remnant and seeks instead the closed finalities of improving the visitor experience.

11. In Alain Resnais’ now iconic movie about the atomic bombings, Hiroshima Mon

Amour, the two characters, a Japanese man and a French woman spar over the

229 possibilities of knowing what happened in Hiroshima. “I saw everything” the woman contends. “You saw nothing,” the man replies. This exchange is repeated over and over again through the film. The woman claims her knowledge on the basis of what she has seen in pictures and film footage and at the Hiroshima museum. In return the man, her lover, denies that this can be the basis for knowledge about the event. “You saw nothing,” he repeats. The film positions the viewer between the desire to know about the event and the impossibility of ever attaining such knowledge. As the two characters struggle with each other, their competing claims to knowledge and its limits, the film positions spectators permanently in the “incommensurable gap between perception and reality” (Maclear 2003: 234). In her article “The Limits of Vision,” Kyo Maclear argues that it is the resistance of the filmmaker to close down this gap and to maintain us perpetually at the limit or within the deferral that forces the viewer to deconstruct the easy one-to-one relationship between vision and knowledge or comprehension and to interrogate the “what one does and doesn’t see in epistemological and ethical terms”

(2003: 234).

In claiming the archive as knowledge of the event, the woman in the film grapples on to the available representations of the Hiroshima bombing as a means of understanding. However, her absolute claim to knowledge, “I saw everything” also closes the event down and, as a misguided means of lamentation, assigns it to the past.

Her repeated assertions of comprehension, however, also point ever more excessively to the realization of the gaping hole, a wound of sorts, that the event opens up. It is only in the modest and humble recognition of the event as unknowable that any ethical mourning

230 can begin to replace the desire for comprehension in the face of events of such violent magnitude.

Watching Hiroshima Mon Amour is a profoundly confounding and disorienting experience, so strange is the lack of narrative and moral direction. The disorientation this produces seeks an outlet or an escape through a re-formation or re-unification into a linear code. However, with Resnais’ film it does not get this. This disorientation expresses itself as a bodily experience—rather than an intellectual one—of unease and anxiety, a nervousness and a difficulty with continued watching. It does this because it unhinges the by now almost rote identification of vision with a privileged claim to truth, facticity and knowledge. As Feldman (1997) and many others have described this constructed kinship is itself a kind of violence, one that produces and denies certain kinds of knowledge, ways of being and making meaning. In Feldman’s work this takes on a very literal meaning as the scopes of sniper rifles and surveillance cameras literally form what he calls a “scopic regime” that by means of these visual prostheses actually produce political subjects and categorize them indexically according to their perceived threat to the state (1997: 29). Yet this is not just true for regimes of intense state surveillance and clandestine counterinsurgency operations. The alignment of vision with a concept of

“truth” is a project that has been underway since at least the early Nineteenth century and has had profound consequences for the construction and production of knowledge as well as for the understanding and perception of the Real (see Crary 1990; Jay 1993). The

231 disembodying medicalized gaze and the racist colonial gaze are but two such examples of the violent underpinnings of occularcentrism in Western culture.58

It is this violence embedded in the gaze’s appetite to know, that Cathy Caruth

(1996) identifies as the Hiroshima Mon Amour’s most potent critique. It is not, she observes, that the woman simply does not see enough to come to an informed opinion on

Hiroshima. It is not a matter of the consumption of information and images. Rather, the repeated refrain “you saw nothing” is meant to indicate that the problem with the woman’s sight lies not in its scope but rather in the way it translates what it sees into an objective picture or understanding of the event. It does no such thing, Caruth in her analysis of the film, contends. Instead:

[TJhe man’s denial suggests that the act of seeing, in the very establishing of a bodily referent, erases, like an empty grammar, the reality of an event. Within the insistent grammar of sight, the man suggests, the body erases the event of its own death (Caruth 1996: 29).

The persistent desire of vision to see something, to identify, to regulate, to classify and thereby to know is the antithesis of the open-ended desire to mourn and to lament not just the dead but the consequences for the living as well. For as much as the atomic bomb took hundreds of thousands of lives, its effects did not end there. A consideration for the billions of lives put in peril by the bomb also had to be built into this mourning.

12. It is the parallel dialectics between Hiroshima Mon Amour and the letters and papers sent to the museum by Akira Yasui that are important here. The back and forth between the two film characters operates in a similar fashion to the juxtaposition of the letter and

58 On the medicalized gaze see Foucault (1973, 1978) and for an example of the production and reproduction of the colonial gaze see Deborah Poole’s (1997) ethnography on photography in colonial- era Peru called Vision, Race and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World.

232 the visitor questionnaire—both enact a deferral of knowledge about the event, Hiroshima, in the interest of ethical contemplation and mourning. By prolonging the gap, they resist the temptation to jumpstart the circulation of the archive—a circulation both film and museums traditionally contribute to. Perpetual circulation is the natural condition of the archive and one it aches to return to in the prolonged hiatus of impact. By extending the moment of impact, and letting it seep and linger, Yasui and the film both enact the poetics of witnessing in the sense that Agamben speaks of. Both moments not only do not ignore but explicitly call attention to the impossibility of witnessing in the face of such incomprehensible atrocity and destruction. This, ironically, is their sole moment of declaration. The declaration that it cannot be done—what Taussig in a separate context calls “the labour of the negative” (1999). And yet, paradoxically, the declaration of impossibility is not an conclusion to but the launch of testimony.

If testimony exists in the gap of knowledge, in the moment of impact where the linear flow of thought stops moving forwards and builds up, creating tension and pressure—think perhaps of a river that is dammed, spilling it sides, little rivulets spontaneously asserting themselves in every direction—of what exactly is being testified to? The testimony of both the movie and by Akira Yasui is the testimonial of ruin itself.

This, I believe, is the extent of witnessing. In the face of its impossibility, or what

Maclear (2003), following Drucilla Cornell, calls the “philosophy of limits”, witnessing can only ever testify to the bodily ruin of itself. This is what Yasui articulates in the passage where he writes:

I didn’t tell my wife about the museum and my visit there till today. She does not know at all about the museum and “Little Boy”. More than 30 years since the explosion of the

233 A bomb on the human heads of Hiroshima—was the continuation of the radioactive influences for her as well as for me. She hates war and armed conflicts not the person who dropped the bomb (emphasis added).

This excerpt speaks to Yasui’s encasement within the ruin that was and continues to be

Hiroshima—a ruin that manifests intimately and bodily. It is expressed in his shame at having visited the bomb as a museum attraction—a shame that is the basis of his silence to his wife on the matter even after three years—yet a shame that could not overcome his desire. “It was,” he wrote, “a MUST for me to visit.. .the museum to see the prototype of

“Little Boy” dropped on Hiroshima...” It is the contradiction here that best illustrates the ways in which the biopolitical body is compelled towards what Benjamin (1968) described as the contemplation of its own destruction. Yasui’s body is the biopolitical body that is caught between the sovereign decision on life and death. The paradox of contemplating one’s ruin reveals the twisted logics of contemporary sovereignty, the ways in which it in-builds certain kinds of desire or pleasure. But Yasui also demonstrates the incompleteness of sovereign exceptionalism, by meeting absence with a parallel absence, a refusal to square-off the dialectic with an “appropriate” response, this

Japanese museum visitor exceeded or penetrated the circular logics of the exception.

Yasui’s actions, I believe, reveal the body and its relation to the event as a messy state that doubles back and folds in upon itself. Folds always create provisional interstices and airpockets which escape and persevere in the totality of biopolitical capture—ruin inhabits these spaces. In doing this, the ruin opens itself up to its complexity as a force lodged and written on the body and thus subject to the body’s simultaneously disciplined and insurgent rhythms. The nature of ruin then is revealed as an intricately bundled

234 moment of both overcoded and potentially infinite violence and, in the tenacity of testimony, albeit the modest witnessing of its impossibility, the resoluteness of hope.

13. There is a particular quality of light in new Mexico that lends itself to verbs like

“bathed” and “soaked”. It is almost, or perhaps it already is, a cliche, but all the same it deserves mention because it shapes so much of the perception of the immediate world around you in New Mexico. It did for me and for others too. I know as it was so often remarked, “look at the light.” One cannot actually see light, but only the way it reflects off of the surfaces surrounding you. This is where the perception of the light moves beyond vision and becomes something felt, something interpreted. The light feels warm and embracing, it casts a glow that is enchanting.

Light in New Mexico is not sterile nor is it harsh and exacting, rather it is fuzzy at the edges. The beauty and the power of the light cast in New Mexico is not in the revelatory, or its potential, but rather in the play of light and shadow, in the margins, where light and darkness bleed together in a slow orbit of give and take. Here in this bleed is the immanence of possibility.

14. i) Contemporary disputes over the legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in America are contested largely on which items are used to represent, exhibit and memorialize the event.

The photographs of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are particularly contentious elements of this legacy. An important element of the veteran’s vociferous critique of the now infamous Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum in 1995 was the plan by curators to include large-scale photographs of the Japanese wounded and dead alongside the airplane. In New Mexico, in 1999, a local activist group, the Los Alamos Study

235 Group (L.A.S.G.), went to court to force the Bradbury Museum at Los Alamos National

Laboratory to mount an exhibit they had constructed, a significant part of which were photos of the dead and wounded in those Japanese cities. What is it about these photographs—still iconic but surely no longer so shocking as the album of photographed atrocities has only grown exponentially since 1945—that continues to provoke strong feelings in the United States? Both supporters of the atomic bombings and those against it seem to see the photographs as powerful talismans that represent a real or a too-real element of the bombs. They see them, then, either as too much for people to see, a sensory overload that would bias any rational opinion about the bomb, conversely they are seen as necessary viewing for all those who wish to make an informed decision about the bomb through a careful consideration or examination of their effects on bodies.

A version of this scenario played out in 2005 at the National Atomic Museum in

Albuquerque. But instead of reiterating the contours by which this debate unfolded in a localized setting I want to explore the ways in which these photographs speak to us in other ways. This involves, crucially, putting aside for the moment the debate that underpins the cyclical flare-ups between activists and veterans groups and their supporters concerning the truth value of photographs of atrocity and the ability of such images to shock one into action even if it is just the action of making up one’s mind about the validity or irrationality of past decisions. ii) Around the same time as I was sitting in the boardroom of the atomic museum in New

Mexico sifting the papers in those boxes where I found the letter from Akira Yasui 1 also got my first chance to interview the museum’s director. Brad, the director, had been

236 really accommodating of me, an obviously young researcher without a clear plan or sense of what he wanted to do. As I said earlier, this was still early in my fieldwork and I keenly felt the absence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki stories from the museum’s as an anger, an indignation and an ethical mantle for my work. It was something to be pounced upon and revealed as moment of shame.

It was in this vein that I brought my questions to Brad in our interview. He was, as he said, “not a nuclear guy, but a museum guy” meaning that his background was in the professional administration of museums not in the nuclear industry. All the same,

Brad was savvy about the issues and more than this just used to getting the same old questions over and over again. Mine were no different. Why isn’t there more material documenting the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I literally blurted this question out after a few perfunctory introductory questions. More than his answer, I remember the frustration I felt upon receiving ft. It was a frustration that lasted in some form or another for months, in part because I was unable at the time to articulate some form of adequate follow up or response that would have caught him out. As I saw it then his answer was full of slippery words and logics that seemed to wriggle out of my grasp and yet were irritatingly convincing at the same time—like a salesman you distrust but in the end still make a purchase from. What I wanted, I realized some time after, was a confession.

Only now I realize that, for selfish purposes, a confession would have been counterproductive. It would have been an ending in the place where I and others sought an open-ended reckoning. In place of the confession I was left, for many months, confronting both actually and conceptually an absence.

237 Many months later, more than a year in fact, as my own fieldwork was coming to a conclusion, the museum was being buffeted by a series of confrontations with activists.

This was the summer of 2005—the 60th anniversary year—and the museum was feeling the ill-effects of the publicity of a demonstration surrounding a gala event they had hosted. In the wake of this event the museum announced that, in coming recognition of the August 6 and 9 anniversaries, they would mount an exhibit—alongside their displays of Little Boy and Fat Man—of photographs and text addressing the bombing of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their legacies.

The announcement of the new exhibit seemed to satisfy those who had decried the absence of this kind of exhibit from the museum previously.59 However, in its own ways, the presence of this exhibit set off the proliferation of new plateaus of absence, even more powerful in their own way than the absence which seemed to have been addressed by this new display. These absences replaced the old ones, hanging there heavily, weighing down the moral victory.

The new exhibit was modest in size, a couple of panels with photos and some text flanked by two easels holding enlarged pictures. Upon first glance what one noticed right away was the lack of any pictures of the burned, the wounded and the dead that the atomic bombings had produced. One picture, an aerial shot or at least taken from a height of some kind surveyed the empty landscape where once Hiroshima had stood in all its urban density. Two other pictures hinted at the human cost of the bombs but did not

59 Indeed a considerable debate occurred within segments of the New Mexico anti-nuclear activist community about the exhibit and an accompanying panel discussion the museum hosted. There was considerable debate amongst activists who felt participation in the panel discussion was potentially productive and those who felt it would simply co-opt the activist message.

238 actually display it, one displayed the “shadows”, imprints of human bodies, left on a bridge and the other showed men and women lining up for food ration cards in the wake of the destruction.

Beyond the disappearance or the absence of these bodies, what was most striking about the exhibit were the temporal leaps the photos made between the event of the bombings to the contemporary. Photos of present-day Hiroshima and Nagasaki that illustrated vibrant, rebuilt urban landscapes were paired alongside of another picture of smiling children folding paper cranes at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial.

Fig.4.3—National Atomic Museum, “A-bomb 60th Anniversary Peace Exhibit.” Photo by the author. 15. Disappearing acts, magical or otherwise, are misnamed. For isn’t the disappearing act’s true moment of wonder, in fact, the reappearance that closes the circle

(simultaneously re-opening it) and marks the disappearance as an act of power and

239 control to be marvelled at? It is not quite the disappearance that is extraordinary but the idea, made manifest before your eyes, that the disappearance can be reversed at will.

Reappearing acts, then, are always in a sense traumatic since they play on the form of trauma as described by Freud, as an event (that wounds) that is only recognized as such upon its reappearance (in memory). Trauma’s are reappearing acts of the first order since it is precisely the repetitive return of the deferred original event that identifies them as traumatic.

Photographs are classic markers of presence and absence; the edge of the photograph and the frame of the camera’s viewfinder denote both the end and the beginning of something else. In this case they are also the medium by which the dis/re- appearances of Hiroshima and Nagasaki take place—they are the medium of American

A-bomb related trauma. Ulrich Baer (2002) has argued that the medium of photography is itself traumatic and by its very nature resists or undermines the claims for authenticity and memory that photography and its supporters make. Rather than protecting and archiving the real past, he writes: “I read the photograph not as a parceling out and preservation of time but as an access to another kind of experience that is explosive, instantaneous, distinct—a chance to see in the photograph not narrative, not history, but possibly trauma” (Baer 2002: 7). What does it mean to see the photograph as traumatic?

What Baer intends here is more complicated than at first it seems. His analysis emphasizes the multiplicity of the photograph, the ways in which its endings are just beginnings, its disappearances leading to reappearances and so on. By invoking the

240 traumatic Baer intends to elude the binary terms by which the photograph is either a sign of life as a testament of what was or a sign of death, of all that is foreclosed.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki constitute a tangled site of disappearance and reappearance in US culture, a disappearing act that continually and in different forms reappears. The constant need to address the American role in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is continually played out in exhibitions like the one at the National Atomic Museum and in other formats as well.60 Yet each subsequent reappearance is marked by its own traumatic disappearances that in turn demand their own reappearances. The tensions between presence and absence in Hiroshima and Nagasaki exhibits in the United States play out in carefully calculated indices of atrocity—how much should we see?—that are inevitably bound to fail. But I want to move slightly away here from the theoretical circuitry of traumatic spectatorship, while maintaining the idea of the traumatic embedded in the photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in favour of a more contained analysis of the specific exhibit and the effects it produced. This is to acknowledge what

Gusterson writes about the “disappearing” bodies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the discourse and representations of nuclear weapons science, that “the mutilated bodies of a- bomb victims have an incendiary, subversive potential that at the same time makes them dangerous” (1996a: 109). But it is also to ask: how and what then?

Specifically, I want to examine the ways in which the disappearance of dead and wounded human bodies from the exhibit at the National Atomic Museum and others like it is often channelled through a concern for, and a protection against, children. Children

60 See the considerable debate around the publication of Alperovitz’sThe Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb (1996).

241 are particularly sensitive, so the argument goes, to images of atrocity and the trauma that is depicted can also migrate and—jumping from screen to living host—lodge itself in the child’s body as a traumatic event that is not yet recognized as such. To this I want to add an analysis of what kind of work the disappearances that characterize the photographs of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki do for the state. Of particular importance here are the ways in which war is depicted to the next generation of Americans.61 Seen this way the temporal leaps that the exhibit makes between the post-atomic, but uninhabited city, and the contemporary urban landscape of Hiroshima as well as the emphasis on the depiction of happy, healthy Japanese children are not just clumsy attempts to fashion a sanitized display of an historical event but part of a national strategy of making citizens more comfortable with war by neutralizing its effects or disappearing its horror, particularly its violence effected upon the human body.

All nation-states have war at their core. It is the monopoly on violence that all reserve as their purview. The ability to wage war on the enemies of the United States is held up as a, if not the, central purpose of the state. These ubiquitous assertions are by now dull and almost empty. What is not exactly clear, though, are the ways in which this privilege manifests not in the actual waging of war, but in the preparation of everyday lives and sensibilities for war. Nuclear museums inevitably serve to re-present these sentiments to the public and the way they do so is not incidental. The recycling of past war stories, specifically triumphant ones, is central to the continuity of the state, continually re-founding and re-justifying its mythologies of origin. This continuous re­

61 I am indebted here to the analysis provided by Marilyn Ivy (2008) in her article “Trauma’s Two Times: Japanese Wars and Post-Wars”. While Ivy’s analysis refers to Japan, I feel that a similar analysis, while inverted, applies equally well to the United States.

242 hashing of past wars in the United States belies the “culture of amnesia” supposedly such a prominent feature of contemporary culture in the West, and especially in the United

States. It is not that the past is unremembered or lost in the dust of a culture obsessed with speed and ephemerality, rather we must pay attention to the ways in which memory is selectively put to work. The field of memory in America is, according to Marita

Sturken an “entangled” place or a contested site where the claims and counter-claims of memory are exercised (1997: 5).

The representation of the victory of the United States over Japan via the atomic bomb represents just such an entangled place where the fracture lines of competing memorial strands can be identified through their presence and absence. The disappearance of bodies from the exhibition on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the National

Atomic Museum was meant to freeze the act of contemplation precisely at the moment of the bomb’s atomic flash which is equated rhetorically with the moment of American victory over Japan in World War Two (Ivy 2008: 171). Any contemplation of the terms and the aftermath of the atomically-rendered victory would drown the triumph with images which are too-horrible to contemplate and overwhelm the glow of the victory itself, washing away the sense of power and faith in military solutions that it seeks to endow.

This is what is meant when veterans or others complain that such exhibits constitute “revisionist” history. By which they mean that it is impossible to judge yesterday’s actions from today’s moral and political values, except their own of course.

These kinds of accusations are common when talking to veterans and other nuclear

243 workers about the museums and have been a common feature of nuclear exhibits since the infamous attempt by the Smithsonian to revisit the role of the Enola Gay in a 1995 show.62 At the Bradbury Museum of Science in Los Alamos, where activist groups have mounted competing exhibits about the brutal aftermath of the atomic bombs, on the one hand, and the atrocities committed by the Japanese against prisoners of war, on the other, the comment books are filled with charges, such as the examples below, that the anti A- bomb exhibit, which highlights pictures of the dead and wounded (the only ones in the museum), are unfairly reinterpreting history. Others charge that the atomic bombs saved their father/grandfather/uncle’s life and so was justified and would be justified again.

Dropings [sic] of the bombs on Japan saved my father’s life and my father in laws [sic] life, plus perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives. Plus because of the human carnage we can now know how bad nuclear weapons are, w/o Japan dropings [sic] the world might have used nucs [sic] in a much greater way. or

My father fought in Europe, but may have had to go to Japan had it not been for the A- bomb. If not for the bomb, my father’s children might not be here, along with countless other Americans and Japanese. War is cruel, but one side must nearly always be vanquished to bring an end to the war... Revisionist historians bring a great injustice to my family & all veterans who fought in wars to keep our country free.

But in thewake of these contentious debates atomic museums, particularly in New

Mexico, have largely chosen a third way, which is not to represent the aftermath of the bomb at all. By freezing the moment in the A-bomb’s flash and in the immediate physical, but importantly not human, destruction that followed—fetishized in the now iconic pictures of the mushroom cloud or in the landscapes denuded of humanity but marked by charred but persevering architectural landmarks: the cathedral with the ribs of its domed roof exposed, the torii-gate still standing but surrounded by rubble—the United

62 See Linenthal and Englehardt (1996).

244 States attempts to hold open or defer, continuously into the future, the victory it achieved.

Here, at least, Susan Sontag’s assertion that: “To be sure a cityscape is not made of flesh.

Still, sheared off buildings are almost as eloquent as bodies in the street” does not hold water (2003: 8). Moreover, by cutting between photographs of the physical destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and photos of their current or contemporary iterations, the exhibit simultaneously attempts not only to revel in the moment of victory but make an ethical claim to the provision of the foundation for the cities’ future prosperity. This is only emphasized by the transition that the photographs themselves make from black and white to colour. War then, is exhibited both as a moment of uninhibited triumph, untroubled by the loss and destruction of human life, and as an ethically justified motivation that establishes the United States as a liberator, guide and facilitator of a generous future as well. In doing this exhibitions on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the

United States, such as the one at the National Atomic Museum, keep war at the centre of

American culture. They do so by attempting to carefully manipulate and calibrate forms of presence and absence in these exhibitions. Specifically, by privileging, even fetishizing the material power of military weapons and by limiting the appearance of the human cost of war, these exhibitions attempt to harness the power of these kinds of images to galvanize bodies and minds to state ends while insulating them from the potential trauma.

16. Little places and moments stand out for me. People and places that rubbed against the grain, like Dave with whom I began this chapter, that didn’t quite fit into the overall flow of things. There was that area at the nuclear museum called “kidzone” marked off

245 from the rest of the exhibition space by its brightly coloured walls and carpet, its small- scale geometric furniture and the exhibits and objects that encouraged little hands to explore. A children’s space in a nuclear museum is perhaps not so out of place, especially when it is understood as a science museum, but it seemed that way to me. I once saw a birthday party being held in the “kidzone,” which is directly adjacent to the weapons exhibit. But the proximity of children to war is more than just incidental.

17. Children are, in fact, key to this process. Barb, a museum employee, described the museum’s thinking like this:

Well, we talked about this in some detail you know, and in the end, well, we felt that photographs like that just aren’t appropriate for children to see. We felt that as a science museum and not a war museum—and we place a lot of stock in that distinction—that there are some things that are appropriate for people to see here and some things that are not. People aren’t expecting to have to encounter large photos of burnt up bodies when they come here, let alone their children. It’s hard to explain to children what happened.

Children constitute both the future generation that must be initiated and groomed as citizens of a nation for whom war is at the centre of its origin mythology, a mythology that needs to be continually re-ignited, and are those most acutely susceptible to trauma.

The classic traumatic scenario, according to Freud, is a childhood experience of sexuality that is repressed and only manifests itself much later in a destructive onslaught of memories.63 It is between these two poles, the child’s body as future soldier and as a fragile entity that these exhibits are cast. The intimacy of war and the child’s body with trauma is ably explained by Ivy:

Thus an integrated “post-Vietnam approach to trauma” not only brought with it a history of thinking through war and trauma, but explicitly articulated this history with the locus of childhood sexual trauma. Sexual trauma...and war: two sites of catastrophe that are historically linked in the imagination of trauma, and its therapeutic engagement. These

63 While trauma is a topic that runs through much of Freud’s work, its most important and complete formulation occurs in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1961).

246 two sites index different, if overlapping, domains of historicity: the child as a site of interior and domestic subjectivization, and war as the epitome of the historical meta­ event, that which is resoundingly not restricted to the individual or the domestic. The genealogy of trauma emerges, via Freud and after, from the twinned sites of the primal sexual traumas of childhood and the combat neuroses of war...(2008: 168-169). Exhibitions and museums, crucially so for the state, act as sites that effectively mediate these two domains and bring them together. By creating an exhibit that navigates between the traumatic susceptibility of the child and the need for the state to produce citizens for whom war is central to their conception of the nation and their part in it, museums provide safe-spaces for children to engage with war—a war that does not threaten the child’s body and sensibilities. That the exhibit’s primary address is to the child is only emphasized by the use of pictures of Japanese children making peace signs or another picture of origami cranes (an iconic symbol of peace) with whom American children can perhaps more readily identify. However, to be clear, it is not simply the exposure of children’s eyes to skeletons and mutilated bodies that is threatening and must be prevented, for this kind of exposure is by now commonplace in the variety of media that make up the daily lives of a majority of Western children. The threat is contained in the linkage that the exhibit makes to national greatness, a link that is placed in danger when connected to atrocity, risking a proliferating series of presences and absences, landscapes without bodies, destruction without consequences that circulate as questions without answers. These kinds of questions represent the true threat to such exhibits and once they have gained a kind a kind of inertia jeopardize the production of useful citizens by ruining the system of binaries by which war should be understood.

18. But the desire to protect the child’s sensitive eyes and mind from the images of atrocity suggests something more elusive as well. For it is not as if the museum is

247 responding to an epidemic of children that have run away screaming from photographs and sights they could not bear. And yet they invoke and appeal to the child, elevating them to the status of the ultimate viewer, casting them with a simultaneously contradictory sense of awe and paternalism, marvelling at their sensitivity while disparaging their ability to comprehend truth. Because, in fact, it is adults and not children who fear these images—or perhaps more accurately, if such a thing as accuracy exists in this murky terrain, it is the adult’s fear projected onto the vulnerable body /mind of the child and then recouped and re-narrated again by the responsible adult. Taussig refers to this phenomenon more evocatively as “the adult’s imagination of the child’s

imagination” and in his description captures the deferrals and absences embedded in such

a movement of the mind (2003b: 449). These absences and deferrals are of course mirrored in the play of revelation and concealment that the pictures on the wall engage in.

Here the child acts as a “reservoir” for the adult’s imagination of the unsaid, the

concealed and the secret. Of course, as we have already seen, the adult’s imagination of the child’s imagination constitutes an expansive and unconfmed landscape that “is appropriated by modernity and by the state in particular (Taussig 2003b: 454). To what ends? Appropriating the child’s imagination is used to invoke an area of indistinction, where the dead and where the violence of the everyday reside. Deemed too much for the child, the child is then invoked to cover over the graves that the adult does not wish to contemplate and as such it is the child which stokes the furnace of the machines of everyday culture, fuelling them. The adult’s imagination of the child’s imagination is crucial to protecting the child from the secret of culture, namely its foundations in an as-

248 yet unchecked violence, and in-tum lending a modicum of its easier access to the fantastical to the adult in order to buy into the public secret that is the basis of the myth of the benevolent state. The adult’s imagination of the child’s imagination rebounds back and forth.

Again, though, there is something more—something I can only suggest here.

Stuck, unfairly but stuck all the same, in the adult’s imagination as the “mute-absurd”, the child is not just the wide-eyed and dumbstruck who is used unknowingly to lubricate the wheels of everyday life, what Taussig calls, “the rules by which social intercourse courses” (2003b: 456). The adult must appropriate the child’s imagination not just in order to harness its own but because there is something intrinsically threatening about the child’s imagination itself. About the child itself. Something threatening to the very status of the public secret—what is known not to know. It is that the child-either in its innocence and naivety or knowing “only too well what not to know—cannot but blurt it out” will reveal the secret (Taussig 2003b: 59).

It seems to me that this brings us back to the structure of the traumatic, and the adult fear of the traumatic susceptibility of the child. But the traumatic that threatens the child is not the atrocity of the images, but the revelation, and the messy aftermath in which all forms melt and disperses, of the public secret. The revelation is, simply yet shockingly, that the adult (the state) is responsible for the image the child is being protected from, which subsequently extends its protection to the adult protecting the adult in the name of the child. The infantilization of children doesn’t stop there but extends

249 neatly and inexorably to the adult as well.64 As Barb, the museum employee said, how to explain this to a child indeed!

19. By holding open the moment of victory continuously, however, and skipping over the aftermath into a too-rosy future, the photographs serve to, simultaneously, hold open something else. By endlessly deferring the victory, the exhibit—precisely in its condition of total excess—also holds open the moment which the deferral continuously works to hold back: the conditions and costs in terms of human lives of the victory. By maintaining the moment of military triumph then, the photographs paradoxically do exactly what they are supposed to prevent, they maintain the triumph’s flipside or, in photographic terms, its negative: the traumatic, ensuring its future return. So it is the very enforcement of an aesthetic of disappearance or absence in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki exhibit that engenders the very returns of the traumatic.

That consideration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s futures are projected on the wall alongside the photos of its destruction—as if teleologically—seems to indicate that the A- bomb was just one huge civic demolition and reconstruction program, sponsored by the

USA. Here these photos of the future do not indicate any promise of a past accounting.

In the absences in their narratives, their jumpy virtual quality of just having appeared there in all their “nowness” alongside of August 6, 1945, they trouble the past for their place, seeking an index for their gaps and wounds. While it is this virtual quality of jamming pasts and futures alongside each other that produces an affective release of the traumatic anxiety of that accompanies war in the first place, it is also the instability of this

64 This is a point that has been made elsewhere in other contexts. See, for example, Scarry (1993).

250 virtuality that leaks, circling back towards the traumatic once again. So, paradoxically, it is Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s optimistic futures here that haunt the past, signalling back.

This was reinforced for me by a Japanese A-bomb survivor who told me after visiting the museum that she saw nothing of her experience there. But aside from her concrete disavowal of the museum’s relevance, I was more often reminded of this troubling of the past, the lingering haunt of the traumatic that goes unaddressed by those visitors who, when asked if they felt there was anything missing from the displays, repeatedly answered affirmatively but when pushed to articulate those absences could not quite place them. The inability to index an absence while simultaneously noting its presence seems to me to speak to the difficulty of breaking out of the logic that the exhibit sets up—a binary code of war and redemption—while a simultaneous suspicion that its totality is in fact false front lingers. The realization of the absence is a moment of instability and threat, a sensuous event pregnant with potential.

20. A dull melancholy seemed to increasingly blanket my days in New Mexico.

Sometimes, always when the sun has begun its descent, this melancholy steeped and began its grinding expansion into sadness. I felt it, peculiarly, on nights when I was returning to Santa Fe from days spent in Albuquerque and points south. That last imposing climb tilted the car up towards the wide and imposing darkness of the sky. In those moments, when the car was pointed towards a nothingness, an endlessness took over and my systems of containment seemed to rupture. Just before the car levelled out and the lights of Santa Fe began to appear, sprinkled out over the landscape below, it seemed that the darkness might just envelope me.

251 Friends, still incredulous about the whole concept of nuclear museums inquired about my fieldwork. Sometimes I tried to tell them what I was feeling. These moments were inevitably frustrating. There were instances of subtle recognition, brief but disturbing moments where the whole thing seems unbearably depressing. The greater and more perplexing truth, however, lies not in the power of these moments but in their brevity. But my recognition of the fleeting nature of these impacts only lends fuel to the gloom that I can’t shake.

There was a pool at one place where I stayed but it might as well not have been there. A strict set of rules governed the use of the pool. These rules were so comprehensive that I never saw the gate to the pool unlocked, even on what seemed to be

ideal days for swim—hot, sunny, without a cloud in the sky. There were many such days in New Mexico. I took to asking if the pool will be open, especially on days like this.

Invariably, the caretaker said that there was a storm on the horizon (isn’t there always?), or that it was too hot or too cold or that the pool’s chemistry was off. I took these rules

seriously. The pool rules tell me that there is a darkness, a threat or a danger, that lurks, unseen.

Night was time that needed to be filled in, occupied, lest I just got up and quit this place for home. Headlights from Cerillos Drive marched steadily across my window and they and the television work harder and harder to light the darkness. Ads provided just an adequate respite to make notes on the days events, just another distraction this way, no need to reflect. This becomes my pattern. Sometimes, however, the darkness became a sanctuary from the ruins of the visible. An escape into what could be. On these nights, I wished I would furtively hop the fence into the pool and have a swim.

21. It is mid-afternoon on an early summer afternoon. We are in an auditorium about the size of mid-size university lecture hall. There are other similarities too. A group of

Japanese college students, about thirty in all, is clustered in the middle rows, sitting in twos, threes and fours. On the stage in front of the Japanese students are a group of four men ranging in age from their early thirties to their early sixties. They are members of the local chapter of Veterans for Peace and they are there to tell the students about their experiences in Vietnam and, for one of them, the first Gulf War and how these experiences have informed their subsequent anti-war activism. The hall is part of a larger facility, an old rehabbed warehouse in Santa Fe’s railyards that has been given over to local cultural, arts and activist groups.

The Japanese students are taking a class on violence in America and are in the midst of a three week tour of the United States organized by their instructor, a former journalist and now a media studies professor, named Sumiko, at a university just outside of Tokyo. Earlier in the day I had been asked by a local activist to accompany him on a tour of a nuclear museum that he had been invited to provide the class. I was supposed to provide some insights for the class from my own work. Truth be told, however, I hardly got a word in edgewise, unable to articulate my fuzzy thoughts in the face of the activist’s confident narrative. Nonetheless there was something interesting about the class and their teacher beyond the tense but ultimately superficial charge of the historical

253 connections brought to life as the Japanese students gathered around Fat Man and Little

Boy and snapped photograph after photograph.

Back in the auditorium in Santa Fe the third of the four veterans has begun his talk. The first two have stuck fairly close to what is by now a fairly conventional script.

They speak about the disillusionment they experienced in Vietnam and the gap between what they were told they were going to do and what they actually did there. They are, by and large, confident narratives, ones that seems almost rehearsed. And so they are. In movies, television and books, Vietnam, and particularly veterans agonizing experiences and conflicts over it, has become a commonplace narrative. So much so that the disillusioned Vietnam veteran has become in some circles the stuff of the American

Dream, a hero constructed in the very act of questioning the State. Even so, only in retrospect, however, do I realize that these first two narratives are striking in their easy digestibility. For in the recounting their experiences of trauma, pain and suffering, which for the two of them include loss of limbs and the unending horror stories of Post- traumatic stress disorder (P.T.S.D.) that betray multiple levels of personal ruin, the two men have discovered and honed a language that normalizes, contains and, ultimately, dispels the very trauma they narrate.

The third veteran is different. He is also a Vietnam vet and has a thick head of pure white hair that I only notice because he is invariably staring down at the table in front of him. Later on I would meet him and find out that his name was Jeremy. Up on stage he is visibly struggling to find the words to begin his story. When I glimpse it, his face seems etched with tension and grief and he stutteringly begins to offer up some

254 reflections on his past. And then he stops. He looks up and starts again, this time somewhat differently. Again he halts his narrative. His nervous fidgety demeanour and the unpolished rawness of his words are beginning to ripple outwards. Sumiko, the professor, who has been translating is also beginning to struggle a little to articulate his words. Finding a conclusion to his reflections on Vietnam, varied and uncollected as they have been, the man is clearly shaken and his voice wavers as he says to the class and their teacher, “Before I finish I just want to say sorry. I want to apologize on behalf of my country for what we did to you in 1945, for dropping the atomic bombs. If there is one thing I want you to know...I just want you to know that not every American agrees with their government.”

A silence followed this statement as the vet took his seat. Sumiko had not translated what the vet had said and as the silence prolonged her class began to eye her expectantly. After a few moments she turned in her seat towards her class who were arrayed behind her and in the pale light of the auditorium it became clear that she was openly weeping. Eventually, after a long pause, the professor crying less now, was able to speak and, apologizing profusely for her tears, she went on to translate what Jeremy had said.

22. The Veterans for Peace workshop, located in the same converted warehouse as the auditorium and where I caught up with Jeremy later on, is lined with shelves which hold dozens and dozens of papier mache skulls. The skulls were part of an art and activism project on the Iraq war that the vets were putting together to coincide with the celebration of the Mexican day of the dead. When I asked him about what he had said earlier that

255 day, Jeremy didn’t seem to want to reflect upon it and became, it seemed to me, increasingly irritated with my desire to explore his motivations and meaning. Cutting me off after a while he asked me: “Really, what else could I say?”

23. I hesitate to write anymore about this moment in the fear that by doing so I betray the truth that underlies Jeremy’s question. So here I seek not to explain or contextualize the moment but to prolong and draw it out. I am mindful of the situation that Allen Feldman

(1994) describes at a conference on violence he attended in Sweden in 1992. There, a keynote speaker, a folklorist from Croatia:

Delivered a paper punctuated in the white space between her words, by barely concealed emotional disorder approaching public mourning. This did not seem to be the aftershock of her life in a war zone, nor the catharsis of having momentarily exited. Rather, her distress exposed the frustration, risk, and uncertainty of communicating local terror to an audience at an historical and experiential remove (Feldman 1994: 404-405).

Faced with the impossibility of understanding this bodily narrative drenched in the almost palpable sensoria of terror, the assembled scholars rushed to suture the open wound of the folklorist’s body and her experience of violence by reorienting her narrative in ways they could more readily understand and thereby close down. The press of questions that sought to fill the threatening void in the aftermath of her speech channelled the discussion towards questions of media representation of the war in the Balkans. By doing so, the audience was able to re-enter what had been a space of sensory alterity that they could not bridge, by recasting the discussion in normative ways. Feldman calls this inclination

“cultural anaesthesia” by which he means: “the banishment of disconcerting, discordant and anarchic sensory presences and agents that undermine the normalizing and often silent premises of everyday life” (1994: 405). The desire to identify a common and thus normative thread that pushes forward past or around moments of profound sensory

256 impact does not just characterize the extreme moment, such as the one he describes, but permeates everyday life to such an extent that it becomes the lubricant of the social; a lubricant, incidentally, that does not just facilitate everyday violence but, in fact, constitutes it. Feldman writes that although faced with a “Croatian choking on the experiential inadequacy of conventional representation” the audience sought to steer the conversation right back to the ways in which the media in Bosnia and Croatia were representing the war in the Balkans (1994: 405). As the body of the Croatian woman dramatically performed the failure of representation to contain and palliate trauma, the cultural tendency was to return to the safety of representation itself. Mindful of this, I seek, as I said above, to prolong and extend the moment in the interest of allowing each body a passage of emergence that avoids the desire, ever-present, to contextualize and explain.

By asking me “what else could he say?” Jeremy sought to challenge my desire to push past his apology, an apology that came from the body, from an anger, a disillusionment and a disease that precedes and exceeds the articulation of all of these things. From his perspective, “what else could he say” meant two things at the same time: there was both nothing else to say other than the apology and there was nothing more to say.

24. Thus far I have been using the word ruin to describe a bodily orientation between the possible and the impossible. Ruin profoundly marks the territories from which Jeremy’s apology emanated and from which Sumiko responded. These are moments of ruin as affect, as a force that resides in the body and sometimes emerges with an impact that

257 cannot be anticipated or completely controlled. It also reveals the ways in which ruin operates outside the confines of clear physical conditions or appearances of ruin, the way in which ruin folds and diffuses into the virtual space of the everyday.

The desire to make sense of such a situation would seek to contextualize Jeremy’s apology and Sumiko’s affective reaction within multiple legacies of historical trauma, and anti-war and peace activism, by doing so it would rectify the deferrals and gaps that permeate the event and mark it out as a moment of what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) might label “minoritarian” emergence. To acknowledge and maintain the gaps at the heart of the event pays attention not to the call to make sense of the event but to the event’s sensations. Rather than threaten the authenticity of the event, the gaps I maintain, are key to establishing the truth of the event. Let me enumerate the moments of deferral—those gaps that defy sense—that characterize the event and then offer a model by which these deferrals are enhancing and productive moments, indicative of a vitality instead of moments which do not essentially add-up. First there is the status of Jeremy.

A Vietnam vet not yet bom in 1945 when the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan,

Jeremy’s connection to the event seems to be absent. Sumiko, the Japanese professor, and her class were also not bom when the atomic bombs were used. Neither were she nor they from Hiroshima or Nagasaki—a link that would have been tenuous but a link nonetheless. Moreover, the class and their presence in America, as critics no less, could be taken to indicate the success of post-war Japan, the status of the two countries as allies and friends and the cessation of tensions and animosities stemming from the conflicts of

258 the past. The only connections, in fact, however fragile, that can be drawn are that

Jeremy is American and Sumiko and her students Japanese.

In many ways, as I have said, what I have termed these deferrals may be read as rendering the event irrelevant and insignificant. What possible consequence or importance can be attributed to an apology offered under such circumstances? An apology, no less, between parties whose connection to the events of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki are distant and disempowered. What effect or relevance has this apology when no apology has ever been offered by a United States President nor has one ever been sought by the government of Japan? Yet it seems to me that to subscribe to such an idea would be to get caught in idea of politics as something that exists and is practiced on the level of and between nation-states instead of between and amongst people in everyday settings. Not to mention envisioning history as contained and segmented enterprise, in which the past does not seep into the diverse arenas of the everyday. Such conceptions then would also render apologies and the forgiveness it seeks, in the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as irrelevant or meaningless at any scale besides that of the nation to nation.

In a short text, Jacques Derrida (2001b) considers the groundwork and the conditions necessary for forgiveness to take place.65 His reflections on forgiveness are informative here for they do not seem to dismiss the conditions of Jeremy’s apology but rather, in all its humility, to affirm it. In fact, it is just such a structural definition of forgiveness—as something that is sought and granted between states—that Derrida seeks

65 For a very different take on forgivness see Card (2002), particularly the chapter entitled “The moral Power of Victims.”

259 to dispel. He notes that in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the Nuremberg trials,

Hannah Arendt wrote that forgiveness can only occur where one can properly judge, in order to evaluate the truth and punish the guilty (Derrida 2001b: 59). Arendt’s assertions form the basis of Derrida’s thinking on forgiveness if only as a platform from which to articulate an alternative set of claims. For forgiveness to be subject to an evaluation of judgment, an architecture of power, a sovereignty, needs to be established. However, it is Derrida’s “dream” in this text to sever the link between forgiveness and sovereignty, to make forgiveness pure and unconditional (2001b: 59). A forgiveness which emanates from a sovereign enterprise or entity is always infected with the violence that indissociably marks every founding claim to sovereignty. Even those nations whose claim to sovereignty is made in the name of the people and the aspiration to justice and freedom, especially those, in fact, are always founded in violence because the establishment of the sovereign is always prior to “the law or legitimacy it founds”

(Derrida 2001b: 57).66

It for this reason that Derrida insists that forgiveness must have no tie, residual or otherwise, to legal or justice systems. Moreover, it must not be aimed at achieving a reconciliation, a return to a previous state of affairs, what he calls a “normalization”—an effort which would only serve to re-inscribe forgiveness within the walls of sovereignty.

In other words, for forgiveness truly to achieve its mandate it cannot participate in the politics of the possible—what can be achieved through an apology or via the granting of forgiveness. Rather, it can only ever seek to engage with the horizon of its own

66 Elsewhere Derrida has elaborated on the violent underpinnings of sovereign foundations in greater detail. See, for example, “Declarations of Independence” in Derrida (2002).

260 impossibility. Impossibility—the unforgivable—marks both the inauguration and limit of the force or usefulness of forgiveness (Derrida 2001b: 30-31). For forgiveness to be oriented towards what is forgivable is to amputate the vitality of forgiveness and render it redundant—the forgivable is, by its very nature, always already cocooned within the realm of forgiveness. Like the category of the witness discussed above, forgiveness must announce itself in relation to the conditions of its own capture or territorialization. The horizon of impossibility places forgiveness permanently between presence and absence, and in doing so, it marks forgiveness as a site of ruin, but one from which potential and hope are simultaneously always in the process of emergence and becoming.

The poignant question that animates Judith Butler’s book,Precarious Life, “what is a grievable life?” is surely also relevant here (2004: 20). Like Derrida, she eschews the legal frameworks delineating personhood and consequently marking out the normative contours of the grievable life. For Butler, the primary component, the radical component of grief are the ways in which it serves to connect us indiscriminately to the other; how grief: “tear[s] us from ourselves, bind[s] us to others and transports] us, undo[es] us, implicate^] us in lives that are not our own, irreversibly, if not fatally”

(Butler 2004: 25). It is the vulnerability of grief which Butler seeks to re-imagine here, not as a form of weakness but as the basis on which to build a new kind of community unburdened by the designations and fractures of identity politics.

By investing in grief in this way Butler seeks to transform it from an object of fear and weakness—something to be banished—into something to be nurtured, cultivated and acknowledged for the ways in which it opens up our bodies and their fundamental

261 fragility into connection with the other bodies that surround us. It is states and sovereign powers, of course, in whose interest it is to banish, often violently, the vulnerabilities of grief or the grief of vulnerability, translating as they do grief and vulnerability with powerlessness. A new politics, she asserts, lies in the keeping open the “unbearability” grief and making it the basis of a new commonality. In seeking to keep the radically connective tissues of vulnerability and grief closed, violence itself enters into a strange zone of abdication or effacement. In fact it is (at least) a double effacement. In closing down the possibilities, both material and ethical, that present themselves through an

articulation of grief into community or, (if we can switch registers without too much encumbrance) to deny the impossibilities of forgiveness and operationalize the apology within a purely instrumental future-oriented framework, both the victimized bodies of the past negated and consequently violence itself disappears from the register of tools of state power. The denial of grief and the negation of the impossibility of forgiveness, a denial of the dead—which, to be clear, is violence par excellence, violence raised to its highest

standard—is what I am calling this double effacement of violence, an erasure not only of the material traces of violence but of violence itself. However, as we have seen elsewhere, the dead do not just quietly disappear, they linger, they call out and they haunt. For this reason, as Butler makes clear, violence must continually (re)kill the dead it wishes to keep buried; dead it paradoxically does not even acknowledge in the first place. Another paradox. It is this very process of killing the dead that don’t exist that contributes to or helps produce their ghostliness (Butler 2004: 33).

262 In pointing to this double abdication of violence, Butler gestures to the largely hidden cultural and political mechanisms at work which deem some lives as ungrievable or not worthy of grieving. The ungrievable life is reminiscent here of Giorgio

Agamben’s category of homo sacer, the life that has the capacity to be killed yet not sacrificed and is thus held “in a zone of indistinction” by dint of its inclusion in the political order by the fact of its exclusion (1998: 9 & 73). She writes:

We have to consider how the norm governing who will be a grievable human is circumscribed and produced in these acts of permissible and celebrated public grieving, how they sometimes operate in tandem with a prohibition on the public grieving of other’s lives, and how this differential allocation of grief serves the derealizing aims of (military) violence...In this sense we have to ask about the condition under which a grievable life is excluded and maintained, and through what logic of exclusion, what practice of effacement and denominalization? (Butler 2004: 37, 38).

If we can place Jeremy’s apology as within the logic of forgiveness or “grievability”, and

I believe we can, it has a lot to tell us about the way Hiroshima and Nagasaki operate as mobile sites of bodily ruin even after more than sixty years. Jeremy’s apology seeks no redress, no outcome, no finality, nor is it met with one, except grief—a grief that itself was met with no urge to contain or mollify. More than this it rejects, by its very existence, the role of nation-states to seek or grant such states of absolution. It seeks and finds only the recognition of its own impossibility, and there it finds the grounds of its ethical truth or authenticity. Actively recognizing the impossibility of its own terms—its marginal, disempowered status, its inability to make-up for the past—it issues forth not simply in spite of these limitations but also because of them. Speaking to its own impossibility it achieves the ethical not by attempting to exorcise ruin but by acknowledging it. Moreover, even though it acts from the location of its impossibility or, in Butler’s terms, its vulnerability, or perhaps because it does, the apology and the grief

263 with which it is met is both radically potentializing of new emergent forms of connection and becomings that, in evading sovereign forms of control, are themselves enormously threatening to state power.

What is illuminated, by contrast, are ways in which museum representations of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki in New Mexico operate to mould and constrain the memory of the bombings into one that is both highly technocentric and invokes a narrative of nostalgic nationalism . These exhibitionary narratives either ignore the human cost of the bombs altogether and focus on the bombs as extraordinary national technological achievements or perform a rhetorical and philosophical trick by switching the category of

‘Japanese lives lost’ for the hypothetical, but much more potent, category of ‘American lives saved.’ Here grief is displaced in favour of relief, lives lost are replaced by lives saved. Museum displays of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in New Mexico are emblematic of the violence of effacement Butler talks about. The lives of the Japanese victims are effaced in these exhibits which act as mediums by which sovereignty acts to “re-kill” the already-dead victims of the past in order to rejuvenate itself.

Jeremy’s apology, which both is and is not a seeking of forgiveness, reveals the ways in which the aftereffects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki greatly exceed the normative containers in which they are placed and by which we, almost casually now, understand them. In New Mexico’s nuclear museums and the other arenas of the nuclear public sphere dominated by official and quasi-official attempts to render the memory of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki in America through the lens of the successful development of the atomic bomb the logic of logocentrism is turned on its head, instead of a

264 “metaphysics of presence” we encounter a metaphysics of absence. The violent results, however, are the same. A crude but clever machinery of exclusion is installed whereby absence precludes presence and vice versa. Time and history in this scenario are things that exist independently and outside of the bodies that live them. The absence of the portrayal or discussion of the human and material devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are meant to foreclose upon the need to contemplate or even know of these effects.

Again and again the violence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is re-enacted to suture the wears and tears in the sovereign fabric. The irony, of course, is that sovereign is both unable and unwilling to limit the ruins to the past.

25. The cultural and memorial politics of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in America exceed the national or state frames that sanction official kinds of memory, places such as museums and exhibitions. In escaping the monopoly of these forms, I have tried to track the ways in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki erupt at unexpected times and places, defying the logocentrism of absence and the discrete periodization of historical time, if only momentarily, and come to reside in the virtual vicissitudes of the body. Here Hiroshima and Nagasaki lie largely dormant, not interfering with the affects of the everyday

(Stewart 2007). Except when they do not. Then they emerge with force and impact, catalyzed as an affect that slides into anger, sadness, despair, guilt, grief or sorrow—a wound that suddenly blooms, erupting and interrupting, shrugging of the shroud of everyday anaesthesia.

Taking a cue from Walter Benjamin, I have tried to extend his concept of ruin to these corporeal appearances of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In locating the ruins of

265 Hiroshima and Nagasaki in bodily eruptions of affect, I seek a way to examine the lasting effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in places where the material destruction and the dead of those cities are largely absent from American contemplations of these two events.

These corporeal ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki catch up with bodies long after and far away from the event, these ruins wash over bodies who have no apparent connection to the event, except of the most seemingly blurred and artificial sort, the accident of nationality. So, while ruin exists here as a material condition of the history of the atomic bombings of Japan, it is not exactly an objective place “out there” that can be identified, mapped and archaeologically excavated. Instead, ruin here is more an expression of the condition of bodies caught within the sovereign logic of permanent exception, a place that Agamben describes as a profound “zone of indistinction” (1998: 5). Ruin, as a bodily realization of sovereign indistinction, nullifies another, perhaps lower order, of sovereign logic, the binary code of presence and absence by which the state attempts to control the memorial status of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in America. Ruin ping-pongs between presence and absence, increasingly blurring the differences between the two, making them harder and harder to identify without reference one to the other.

But the bodily ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not simply expressions of the despair of being caught in the always renewing violence of sovereignty. No. The materiality of ruin, its bodiliness makes sure of that. The body works as the edge across which virtuality seeps into actuality. The virtual quality of ruin, mediated by the body, ensures that ruin always exceeds or escapes the total enclosure of sovereignty. If ruin were a geographical feature of landscapes it would, according to Deleuze and Guattari,

266 striate the smooth landscapes that sovereignty seeks. The transition of ruin from virtual to actual, its seepage into the unmediated spaces of the body is the source of its potential

(Massumi 2002: 43). It is only here that my cue from Benjamin assumes its lull realization because for him, as I wrote in the beginning of this chapter, ruin was allegorical. It both pointed to the disasters of the past while hinting to the potential of a future that learned from those mistakes of history. Ruins were tangible symbols of the simultaneity of past disasters and future becomings. Ruins as affective outbursts of bodies are not allegorical in the way that the ruins Benjamin referred to were. Yet bodies contain, in the very structure of affect, an unassimilable aspect that turns ruin outward and sees in it the possibility for something else. Here ruin confronts the impossibility of witnessing with the poetics of testimony, or the impossibility of forgiveness with the apology that does not seek forgiveness. Ruin operates here both as an awareness of the impossibility of bodies within the exception made permanent and their paradoxical tenacity and as such it points toward hope, a hope not oriented towards a specific future but, as Massumi has said, as “a capacity for the future.”

267 Conclusion: Nuclear Seasons

As I write this fire season has returned to Northern New Mexico. Indeed, I heard yesterday on the radio that fire officials in New Mexico were concerned about a fire in

Los Alamos that had begun to bum out of control close to Los Alamos National

Laboratory facilities. At the end of the report the announcer felt the need to explain what

Los Alamos was and why it was important. For a moment, nuclear weapons broke out of the past calling attention to themselves. Forest fires in high summer that threaten the lab are one of those times when nuclear weapons break out their invisibility, stopping us in our tracks as our ears perk up as we suddenly find ourselves listening to a radio we didn’t even realize was on a few seconds ago.

In drawing things to a close, or perhaps new points of departure I want to speak using a vocabulary of seasonality, both literally and more metaphorically. I highlight the seasons not to set up a timeline of events or any sense of evolution. Rather, these seasons unfold multiply and atop each other, they track bodily emergences and as well.as moments of stoppage and decay. Seasonality and the weather marks and shapes the ethnographer’s body in profound ways. Both tracking and producing its ups and downs.

The highlighting of seasonality is meant to acknowledge a number intertwined processes.

My own physical presence in the fields of ethnography, multiple as they were but mostly confined to New Mexico; the changes in my environment and my apprehension of these changes. There was the time when I woke up in Santa Fe to fifteen centimetres of snow, an experience I had not expected in heading south from Toronto via Chicago. But it is also to emphasize time as experienced in the space of nuclear weapons. Here time can

268 only be experienced as a sense of the uncanny, the phantasmatic, the traumatic or the moment of intensity.

I wrote this ethnography, implicitly shot through with the seasonality of the high mountain desert climates in New Mexico, hot, dry days and cool night, big sky and the softy, tawny almost liquid nature of the sunshine there. But I also evoke seasons in order to mimic their forms. Seasons, marked as they are by forms of transformation, are instructive in that they force us to pay attention to movement, unfoldings and becomings; beginnings and endings are rarely just that in the context of the season, they are part of long and short histories or trajectories of arrival and departure, possibility and decline.

Seasonality also forces us to pay attention to absence, to what is past and what is on the horizon, as well as to the things that just don’t quite fit. Seasons only stand out when something happens that is somehow out of the ordinary, something untimely in the unfolding of time. Counter-intuitively, then, contrary to their seemingly seamless unfolding one after the other, the seasons draw our attention to what Elizabeth Grosz calls the “untimely”,

a kind of evanescence that appears only at those moments when our expectations are (positively or negatively) surprised. We can think it only when we are jarred out of our immersion in its continuity, when something untimely disrupts our expectations. We can think of it [the untimely] only in passing moments, through ruptures, nicks, cuts, in instances of dislocation, though it contains no moments or ruptures and has no being or presence, functioning only as continuous becoming (2004: 5).

Like the historical dates which punctuate the different sections of Deleuze and

Guattari’sThousand Plateaus (1987), the seasons do not mark time in any linear fashion, but call attention to time from the space of the untimely. One nuclear season does not slowly and naturally bend and blend into the next, rather they co-exist simultaneously,

269 each colonizing, borrowing, becoming and capturing with the others in a continuous process of in- and un-folding. Seasonality allows us to approach these questions not as a timeline of their evolution but as singularevents whose immense complexity does not deny them alternative existences and possibilities in other seasons. So I imagine nuclear seasons as simultaneously territorializing and deterritorializing concepts in that they both point toward and help to organize the themes discussed in this dissertation but do so without anchoring them or weighing them down into the figure of an argument, an explanation, a narrative or even a dialogue. Indeed, the metaphors of nuclear seasons are intended to proliferate the themes as much as contain them, suggest new lines of flight as well as re-tread on those already established.

I began this dissertation with a quote from the novel Independence Day by

Richard Ford which spoke to a quality of modem life wherein sometimes the things we most fear and constantly scan the horizon for signs of their arrival have, in fact, already happened without us even knowing it fully. I used that quote to hint at the peculiar dimensions of contemporary nuclear violence that has been one of the central themes of this dissertation. Specifically, I have argued that nuclear violence is not a consequence of nuclear war or even the proliferation of nuclear weapons. As such nuclear violence is not a thing of the past, an historical relic. Rather, nuclear violence is an ongoing product of the biopolitical relations of sovereign indistinction. In doing this I have tried to evoke the simultaneity and depth of the nuclear contradiction in the United States: at once past and growing more invisible every day and increasingly rendered as visual spectacles put on display for all to gaze upon.

270 So, this project began as a way to track vanishings, particularly nuclear

vanishings. So its starting point was an ending of sorts, or at least a declared or stated

ending. If nothing else, a felt ending. Beginning in 1989 with the "Solidarity" movement

in Poland and culminating with the dissolution of the USSR 1991, the fall of the iron

Curtain and the end of the Communist Eastern Bloc of Europe effectively ended the Cold

War that had simmered between the United States and the Soviet Union for almost half a

century and with the end of the primary nuclear threat. Ten years later, by 2001,

terrorism had replaced the nuclear threat as the primary strategic threat to the nation as

well as the emotional index of national fear. However, despite successive agreements to

reduce the size of nuclear arsenals-including most recently, the signing of the "New

START" treaty in April 2010 between the U.S.A. and Russia, which reduced the number

of respective nuclear missile launch mechanisms-little, qualitatively, has changed about

the scope and power of nuclear weapons arsenals. While there have been various nuclear

flare-ups in the intervening years (Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Israel), the nuclear threat is

largely seen to be over.

It is precisely in this landscape of foreclosure, resolute pastness, vanishing, that

this project situates itself as a tracker of nuclear presents and futures. It envisions these

nuclear presents and futures not as cut off or disconnected from the apparent vanishing of

a threat-laden nuclear past, but as distinct but mutated continuations of them. And so a

primary goal of the dissertation was to re-imagine nuclear present-futures and in doing so

re-imagine the terrains (corporeal, symbolic, cultural, political) of nuclear violence.

Nuclear seasonality also calls attention to time in such as way as to highlight the

271 differential spectra of temporalities that co-exist, the forgetting or the vanishing of nuclear weapons into the remnants of the historical past in which the project was initiated, the temporalities of the bodies that interact with nuclear weapons, an nuclear temporalities themselves which exist both in the too-short and the too-long to be recognized: the microseconds of the nuclear detonation and in the extended futures so long as to be unimaginable of nuclear half lives.67

(Nuclear) Winters: indistinction & capture 1991- Soon after the advent of the atomic bomb nuclear and climate scientists began to speculate on the climactic effects of nuclear war. Even a small scale nuclear conflict, it was predicted, would produce an extended period of global cold weather due to the smoke and soot that would be thrown up into the atmosphere with the effect of blocking the sxm. This effect came to be known as nuclear winter and it, rather than the nuclear weapons directly would have been responsible for the majority of deaths following a nuclear explosion via crop failure and, ultimately, starvation. Besides this, more literal definition, “nuclear winter’ operates as shorthand for any post-apocalyptic scenario invoking scenes of widespread death, destruction and desolation.

Nuclear winter evokes, shockingly so, our worst nightmares of a feared future state. Repeatedly, however, I have sought to reorient our perception of nuclear violence and unhook it from future oriented scenarios based on hypothetical what-ifs and situate the nuclear winter as a here and now material reality of everyday life unreliant upon the deployment and/or detonation of these weapons. In this scenario nuclear winter is well upon us and has been for most, if not all, of the nuclear era. Yet nuclear winter only

67 For more on the traumatic temporality of nuclear weapons see: Peter Van Wyck (2004).

272 achieved its full articulation, the unfolding of itself through indistinction, with the declared end of the nuclear era. It was then that nuclear winter took over to reproduce and continue the sovereign capture of citizens severed from the direct threats of nuclear

Armageddon and a perceived enemy. The end of the nuclear era, paradoxically, marked the permanence of the sovereign nuclear winter. The challenge of marking this absent- presence has occupied much of this dissertation. How is that something which claims it is in the past, the nuclear threat, has really just been further embedded in everyday culture?

Summer 1945, 2005, 2025: endless sunny days While the extended nuclear winter of indistinction continues to unfold in time and space, aspiring to permanence, another nuclear season imposes, embraces and entangles itself over top of indistinction, wrapping it up. Despite the fact that the pre-eminent characteristic of nuclear winter is the blocking out of the sun, in many ways summer is the only season of the post-nuclear nuclear age. This is the continually sunny nuclear summer of the era of nuclear spectacle. Here the vanishings of the nuclear winter are upheld, institutionalized, monumented and memorialized. The permanent summer of nuclear weapon’s vanishing is what I encountered in New Mexico. If nuclear winter speaks directly to the forms of capture and ruin at work in indistinction, summer testifies to the ways in which indistinction manifests as forms of recreational spectacle. The nuclear public sphere—that network of nuclear-themed museums, monuments, memorials and tourist events—aspires to operate in the permanent summer of tourism oriented everyday banality. The permanent summer of nuclear indistinction speaks to the profound connections between nuclear spectacle and sovereign exceptionalism.

273 Particularly potent and alive in cultural forms of containment and exclusion, such as secrecy, haunting and ruin.

Autumn 2006: necro-ethnographies I left New Mexico for good in October 2006 and headed for an eight month stop in

Chicago. Fall in New Mexico is sudden and brief, largely unpunctuated by falling leaves, the heat of summer gives way, in the high mountains, to snow and colder temperatures.

But in Albuquerque and south of their, the summer never really gives way. I arrived in

Chicago in the midst of a more typical north-eastern autumn. Already the armour of daily duty-filled fieldwork had begun to crumble and I was sinking into a post- ethnographic melancholy driven by what I saw as an ethnographic project steeped in death that I could not help but see reflected in the seasonal changes occurring around me.

In much of his early work Michael Taussig considers what it means to write ethnography in the space of death. His question is as much about theory and politics as it is about strategies and forms of writing itself. Writing about Roger Casement’s reports on the horrific treatment—including widespread torture and routine execution—of indigenous labourers during the Putumayo rubber boom. Taussig argues these “spaces of death” demand cast us into an “epistemic and ontological murk” that is more than a problem of hermeneutics but becomes the very medium by which a politics of domination operates (1984: 491). Writing in the spaces of death demands, Taussig says, an approach that is able “[T]o penetrate the veil while retaining its hallucinatory quality” (1984: 471).

What can Taussig’s thoughts on the spaces of death and the approaches to it tell us about the ways in which we approach indistinction, a space neither of death nor of life in which both are profoundly located in the “epistemic murk” Taussig cites.

274 The nuclear public sphere is a space of both life and death, complexly interwoven, sometimes transposed one upon the other. Writing in the space of death can itself be an act of death, if we use that writing simply to describe or explain, or to relate methods that seek such positive outcomes. How-ever, to operate within horizon of death can also make inroads, expand or elongate the possibilities of life. I have tried to transform the act of writing itself into a production of potentiality that engages with death and negation without giving into it. This is to engage with the multiple autumns at work in the nuclear public sphere and move with them not as monolithic externalities but as processes with their own internal and external complexities, complications and contradictions, as movements that fold and unfold both forward and backward in time. Even the space of death has its own untimely moments. It was the search for these easily passed-over moments, spaces and feelings in the form of affective intensities, hauntings, excesses and inadequacies that guided the methodology this dissertation. These cultural forms also necessarily dictated the form and subjects taken up here. Writing in the space of death— the nuclear autumn—meant to take into account how death, decay, negation, ruin and closure had attempted to foreclose upon forms of life. Yet it also entailed not denying or rationalizing nuclear autumn’s own untimely moments, its own nicks and cuts, which opened to spaces and orientations of potentiality.

Spring: lively proliferations 2004-2011... If forms of political potential are to be articulated they must be identified not as external possibilities for emancipation but intricately entangled within the spaces and forms charted, controlled and maintained by forms of political domination. The nuclear seasons which this dissertation has addressed are not discrete, nor even do they blend one into the

275 other in a neat line. Rather, as I have said, they co-exist, overlap, overlay, co-articulate and co-create each other. In contrast to and in companionship with nuclear winters, spring brings with it constant states of lively becomings, rebirths, rejuvenations, new proliferations of bodies, affects and intensities that constantly bubble up between and alongside winter’s sovereign indistinctions. I have employed the trope of proliferation throughout this dissertation. Once the preeminent facet of Cold War nuclear warhead accumulation, proliferation, I argue, is now equally an element of indistinction and the affective bodies that inhabit it. During my fieldwork and the writing of this dissertation I have been consistently taken by surprise by the intense proliferations that emerge at the most unlikely, seemingly desolate or violent, moments.

In contrast to the capture and ruin deployed through the proliferation of indistinction, bodies also proliferate in their own ways that are not always assimilable or co-opted to sovereign powers. Along the ways I have tried to highlight these moments— not in the desire to structure a dialectic of proliferation operating between the lively and indistinct, nor even to suggest lively proliferations as presenting some form of resistance to indistinction—but to extend and augment the proliferative complexity of the everyday.

Proliferations of indistinction and moments of capture are inevitably accompanied new openings of potential and new initiatives of becoming. Moments of haunting and ruin can also be read for movements that resist the stasis of capture and begin to articulate new points of departure, new seeds of hope, new forms of becoming that emerge through what seem to be totalizing events of ruin.

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