Between 1951 and 1963 the US government engaged in acts of terror and killing that subjected so-called “low-use segments” of the population to radioactive fallout from nuclear explosions. These “test” detonations of nuclear weapons at the Nevada Test Site repeatedly released radioactive material into the atmosphere, which then later settled as fallout over vast swaths of the Great Basin and desert Southwest. On a purely material level, this fallout continues to render entire ecological systems toxic and continues to contaminate numerous desert communities. I would argue that the environments produced by this nuclear testing are a version of what Achille Mbembe calls “death-worlds,” spaces or landscapes whose inhabitants are not granted the status of life and are instead relegated to existence as “living dead” (40).
That this form of subjection to state technologies of death is necropolitical in quality is not in itself a contentious argument. The effects of radioactive fallout on the bodies of those subjected to this radiation, especially those who worked at the Nevada Test Site and in close proximity to the detonations, are widely documented by scholars like Carole Gallagher and Jay Gould. And the government’s designation of those affected by fallout as “low-use” is clearly a bureaucratic expression of the biopolitical. Yet all of this occurred domestically. That is, even if the detonation of the nuclear bomb signifies a conventionally-defined act of war, these detonations signified only as rehearsals, expressions of military grandeur and the futurity of death, not as acts of what Mbembe might call terror per se. For example, in Watkins’ “Ghosts, Cowboys,” the narrator produces a vignette—a re-creation of her mother’s earliest memory—in which mother and family form a willing audience for one of these detonations:
It’s 1962. She is three. She sits on her stepfather’s lap on a plastic lawn chair on the roof of their trailer. Her older brother and sister sit cross-legged on a bath towel they’ve laid atop the chintzy two-tab roof, the terry cloth dimpling their skin. They each wear a pair of their mother’s—my grandmother’s—oversize Jackie O. sunglasses. (6, in my print version of the text)
In this narrative, a normative family-nation dyad is consolidated via the spectacle of the nuclear detonation. Because the deaths and material violence occasioned by the nuclear test are both spatially and temporally far-flung, the spectacle resists categorization as a manifestation of the strictly necropolitical, if I follow Mbembe’s example of contemporary Palestine. But perhaps it’s possible to consider the necropolitical in relation to killing that occurs in belated or temporally discontinuous contexts, like the killing that has occurred in the desert spaces around the Nevada Test Site. For example, Watkins reads the specter of nuclear fallout as a kind of web that links temporally and spatially disparate subjects by their shared subjection to radiation. Indeed, these multiple narratives are for Watkins the same story, since they all pass through the nexus of the Site itself. As she states,
[t]he July breeze is gentle, indecisive. It blows the radiation northeast, as it always does, to future cancer clusters in Fallon and Cedar City, Utah, to the mitosing cells of small-town downwinders. But today it also blows the curse southeast, toward Las Vegas, to my mother’s small chest, her lungs and her heart. And it blows southwest, across the state line, all the way to the dry yellow mountains above Los Angeles. These particles settle, finally, at 1200 Santa Susana Pass Road. (7)
When material manifestations of subjection to the killing state are delayed and scattered—that is, when radiation-induced cancer clusters are necessarily relegated to the realm of the future—what new forms of social existence does the necropolitical produce? Mbembe poses the related question of how “the manner of killing and the manner of dying” are related by “the arms used to inflict death” (36). What happens during an invisible nuclear war?
4 comments:
I'm really interested in how your post provides an opening for Mbembe's theories to extend past a concrete and continuous warfare. After reading your post, I felt compelled to look up a little more about Foucault's concept of biopower which, from a brief foray into Wikipedia, doesn't seem restricted to, a.) a government's influence on other nations or b.) the state of war. I wonder why Mbembe's necropolitics seem attached to those things, even though he sets himself up in relation to Foucault?
I ask these questions because your post seems to point out where your novel could benefit from some kind of necropolitical reading, but there are obstacles to doing so - this is a domestic and dispersed kind of killing. As you suggest, is it still "necropolitics" if its against your own citizens? Or when they are just casualties of the state's necropolitical "practice"? In your discussion of the physical and unpredictable movement of the radiation, I also think of biological weapons - bacteria, parasites, etc. - that are equally unpredictable and hard to control and what kind of complications they create for this kind of thinking.
Perhaps the question here is how to define the state of war? I think Mbembe takes as a given that politics is always a state of war, which is why I extended that to this apparently domestic context. (Also, I forgot to post the word count: 652.)
Hi Aaron,
First of all, I really enjoyed your thesis here, as it offers a clear, contemporary analysis and expansion of Mbembe's conception of "death-worlds" (nuclear test sites), which could have been an example that he used.
I'm interested in your use of the expression "the futurity of death," which you claim is not exactly correlated to terror. However, if I examine the Trinity Test as the quintessential militaristic show of power, or the Cuban Missile Crisis as a widely-viewed "only a matter of time" scenario, I can't imagine these situations as causing anything but societal terror (on both foreign and domestic fronts). After all, the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki occurred in 1945, almost 20 years before the family from "Ghosts, Cowboys" witnesses the test in Nevada. I don't see this as being particularly "temporally far-flung," since the effects of radioactive fallout were widely known. Although fallout often leads to delayed death, one would be remiss to ignore the causal link, the bomb itself. In my view, the symbol of the atomic explosion, something that haunted the American psyche for arguably the entirety of the Cold War (and beyond), is tied to necropower as a political strategy. Does it make a difference whether this power over death is explicitly domestic (rehearsed) or foreign (resulting from war)?
-Zach
Hiya, Zach--
Absolutely, yes, it makes a difference. Nuclear weapons detonated in the context of open war--that is, as attempts to kill or destroy people and infrastructures--destroy by force, not by exposure to low-level radiation from fallout dispersion (although this is also a technology of killing). In a domestic or "test" context, though, the weapon is detonated under the pretense of safety. The Atomic Energy Commission, as I think Gallagher points out in American Ground Zero, went to great lengths in the 1950s and 1960s to downplay the health effects and spatial reach of fallout from the Nevada Test Site. Many of the downwinders affected by fallout were unaware of their exposure to radiation, or the gravity of their exposure. I do agree with you that the specter of atomic annihilation haunts (I think Derrida has an essay about it, actually), but I would argue that the discursive distinction between avowed killing and disguised killing is highly important here.
AB
Post a Comment