Nuclear necropolitics

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?

Despotic Networks: The Art of Social Control

     Last week, I examined the complicated correlation between biopower and necropower, specifically in terms of Trujillo’s dictatorship. Undoubtedly, Trujillo spearheaded policies that enforced domination over bodies through systemic terror networks. In strictly Latourian terms, a “network is defined by…. What takes any substance that had seemed at first self-contained… and transforms it into what it needs to subsist through a complex ecology of tributaries, allies, accomplices, and helpers” (Latour 5). Trujillo excelled at creating self-contained networks of control that subjugated large numbers of Dominicans and also led to a massive genocide of Haitians. Latour, however, claims that “networks are a great way to get rid of phantoms such as nature, society, or power, notions that before, were able to expand mysteriously” (8); furthermore, he argues that a network revolution is clearly political (5), but implies that the control rests in the hands of the citizenry. I would like to offer a counterpoint, in which networks can be used as tools by despots to expand seemingly fantastical power.

     Indeed, in Brief Wondrous Life, Trujillo creates an actor-network that exponentially improves his control over society and effectively eliminates resistance by means of the Trujillista. Although his network is not digital, the results (i.e. the disempowerment of individuals and the creation of a social aggregate) are the same. In fact, similar authoritarian leaders in contemporary history have controlled virtual networks to regulate a citizenry (communist China’s paranoid censorship of the internet or the banning of Facebook in Iran are salient examples). Trujillo, then, becomes “a supernatural, or perhaps alien, dictator who had installed himself on the first island of the New World and then cut it off from everything else, who could send a curse to destroy his enemies” (Diaz 246).

     Belicia Cabral’s inability to escape the symbolic “Plátano Curtain” of the DR, defined and controlled by Trujillo, is the most striking evidence of this form of network that enhances totalitarian power in society. Diaz writes:

Beli had the inchoate longings of nearly every adolescent escapist, of an entire generation, but I ask you: So fucking what? No amount of wishful thinking was changing the cold hard fact that she was a teenage girl living in the Dominican Republic of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, the Dictatingest Dictator who ever Dictated. This was a country, a society, that had been designed to be virtually escape-proof (Diaz 80).

The teenagers of Belicia’s generation in the DR, who would ultimately be the reason for the rebellion against Trujillo’s regime, feel unassailably contained and trapped by the so-called “Curtain,” a node of the network, a phantasm of power and imprisonment that overrides the traditional ideology of individuality being tied to freedom. 

     Beli, however, discovers her own power and individualism through overt sexuality and hyper-femininity. Diaz writes: “By the undeniable concreteness of her desirability which was, in its own way, Power. Like the accidental discovery of the One Ring… Belicia Cabral finally had power and a true sense of self… With great power comes great responsibility... bullshit. Our girl ran into the future that her new body represented and never ever looked back” (Diaz 94). Ironically, the manner through which she finds her own power also causes her own victimization, echoing a concrete milieu of misogyny and rape employed by Trujillo and his Secret Police. In terms of the Latourian actor-network, she uses her sexuality to exceed other females in the DR, but her identity is subsumed and superseded by the opinions of others (especially those males with characteristically Dominican machismo). “The reason is that a given individual will be defined by the list of other individuals necessary for its subsistence… Every individual is part of a matrix whose line and columns are made of the others as well” (Latour 13). Ultimately, Beli rebels against the constraints of her explicitly Dominican lifestyle, enforced by the maternal figure, La Inca. She cannot gain any true satisfaction, or become a truly self-contained individual, fighting for her place in the self-contained DR (Latour 9). She, therefore, consorts with gangsters of ill-repute, who epitomize Trujillo’s crime network, and is finally impregnated by two different men, the second of whom has Haitian ancestry, which causes her to flee the island for America. Only by removing herself physically from the DR, escaping Trujillo’s Curtain, (which still, nonetheless, brings thousands of Dominicans yearly to return home) can she escape Trujillo’s network of power. 

Slippery Semiotics: Identity, Network and Meaning. (For Obama-the Shutdown Warrior)

In last week’s post I was determined to discredit Achille Mbembe’s necropolitical taunts about the romance of individual sovereignty. It seemed to me that in the particular case of Sir Gawain the thorny experience of reading and the traction of genre expectation impeded the wholesale application of Mbembe’s argument about killing to a text so fixated on the act of it. It would appear as though in my challenge of an impulse to apply Mbembe to Sir Gawain I have made the individual sovereign and triumphant.

But then, I feel Bruno Latour, of the essay “Networks, Societies and Spheres,” aggressively tap my shoulder, nudging me to think otherwise. He reminds me that “to believe in the existence either of individual or of society is simply a way to say that we have been deprived of information on the individuals we started with; that we have little knowledge about their interactions; that we have lost the precise conduits through which what we call ‘the whole’ actually circulates. In effect, we have jettisoned the goal of understanding what the collective existence is all about”(12).  In simpler terms, Latour chides me for not getting enough data. And I must admit that analyzing Gawain alone omits a lot of data. For when we try determine Gawain’s character, or the “drama of identity” in Patterson’s terms, we must analyze in reality a series of interactions and performative roles: Gawain as knight in King Arthur’s court, as challenger to the Green Knight, as traveler in Bertilak’s inn, as beloved of Bertilak’s wife, etc. At the very moment that we as an audience could begin to state who Gawain is, we find Gawain is networked with many others becoming a profile of various connections.

Still, Latour does not characterize our lack of data as a simple omission or innocuous forgetfulness that can be recovered; he calls the lack that leads to our conception of the individual as a deprivation and as a loss. Defining the myth of the individual and the insufficient data that created this myth in this fashion recalls Jacques Lacan’s psychological concept of lack wherein as humans, the objects of our desire are always beyond our grasp. In these terms, our quest to get to “the whole” Latour argues always escapes us.

I find that the inability to get to a “whole” Gawain is a point of anxiety that marks the text itself—particularly as Gawain and those in his network try to attach meaning to the green girdle. At the end of the poem, Gawain adopts the green girdle as a marker of his virtue. Yet, in his 1983 essay “Unlocking What’s Locked: Gawain’s Green Girdle”, Ralph Hanna points out that the Green Girdle gains an assigned meaning from every major character in the text: Bertilak’s wife, Bertilak, Gawain and King Arthur’s court[1]. Hanna concludes that in the characters’ insistence on creating some meaning from the green girdle  “…the poem approximates a process of discovery or exploration, the process of recognizing the persistent intractability of experience, its potential variousness, and the often self-willed limitation of human efforts to comprehend that variousness. The multitude of interpretations to which characters subject a green silk belt adorned with gold thread suggests both the difficulty of knowing a simple physical object and the potential caprice involved in all human claims to knowledge” (158).  I draw attention to Hanna’s argument about the slippery semiotics of interpreting one singular object within the frame of the poem illustrates that not only can we have difficulty identifying all the ways Gawain is networked but also how difficult it can be for the network to orient itself around objects, Gawain and events. In other words, it is not enough for scholars to pick out who is networked to whom, or how they are networked to each other, but also how the network wrestles with its reality in the grip of a lack of data. I wonder, in this world of lack, where even the actors and networks we study are also bounded in lack, that instead of defining individuals (as we are want to do) or listing their attributes (as Latour suggests ANT should do), if we should rather list the ways individuals define themselves.  

Additional Works Cited:

Hanna, Ralph. "Unlocking What's Locked: Gawain's Green Girdle." Viator 14 (1983):  289-301. Reprinted in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Norton Critical Edition. Eds. Marie Borroff and Laura L. Howes. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010. 144-158.

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[1] The wife presents the girdle to Gawain as an object of magic that can help him evade his death. Bertilak later characterizes the girdle as a sign of his conquest over Gawain. Gawain names the girdle as a sign of his cowardice. Lastly, the fellow knights of the Round Table hail the girdle as a sign of their shared humanity.

Haunted Networks in The Little Stranger

Last week, I applied Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics to The Little Stranger. Such an argument encounters a hiccup when, as Lee and I discussed in the comments, it becomes unclear why someone seeks power over others and the nature of their success. This week, I find that Latour’s essay offers a valuable way to continue that discussion in a different direction. Latour states that the advent of the internet has meant that “‘to have’ is quickly becoming a stronger definition of oneself than ‘to be’” (121). I would argue that, even in the pre-internet era of Waters’s novel, the concept of having connections within a network rather than “being” something concrete and stable allows a different understanding of the novel. To say that Faraday now is the ruler or sovereign of Hundreds Hall seems inaccurate, as I’ve discussed in previous posts. To say that he has the Hall seems more accurate, as it doesn’t include a qualitative assessment of that ownership.

A connection along the lines of a network also erases the hierarchy indicated by ownership. As I wrote in my first post, I’m not convinced that the Hall hasn’t subsumed Faraday into a part of its own past, as indicated by the final image of Faraday’s face reflected in a cracked mirror in one of the Hall’s passages. If that is true, Faraday is just as much a part of the Hall’s network – its physical being, its past, present, and future owners, its relationship with other similar estates, all of the objects it contains, etc. – as it is part of his.

Indeed, I think this is one of the more valuable things that Latour’s theory of networks can bring to literary analysis and to a novel like The Little Stranger. Ghost stories are, after all, stories about the secret history of the nonhuman, whether that nonhuman is the ghost itself or those inanimate objects that feature in the haunting. Barry Curtis states, “‘The Ideal Home’ is a complex ecology of past and present, interior and exterior, configuring a resolved relationship between structure and inhabitant. The haunted house is a scenario of confrontation between the narrative of the inhabitants and the house.” Therefore, to deploy Latour’s networks in Waters’s novel is to decenter the novel’s focus on its human characters and broaden the scope of its interests.

Network theory allows one to envision the novel as being essentially about Hundreds Hall itself. Faraday’s manipulation of the house – by animating household objects or scrawling mysterious messages on the walls, for instance – changes its “ecology,” but ultimately allows the house to remain existing. As Latour says, “what takes any substance that had seemed at first self contained (that’s what the word means after all) and transforms it into what it needs to subsist through a complex ecology of tributaries, allies, accomplices, and helpers” (5). For the Hall, Faraday is one of these “allies” in its continued existence. In Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (I had to read it for my other seminar. Don’t judge.), he describes that any object achieves “continuity through discontinuity.” That is, it performs little changes and adaptations in order to remain the same. Although Faraday’s wresting of the estate from the Ayres family is an example of one of these little discontinuities, it also allows the Hall to continue to exist. The uniqueness of the Hall’s “effort” to continue is revealed in discussions of what similar old aristocratic estates throughout England are undergoing – being split up, sold off, and torn down.

Curtis, Barry. Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film. London: Reaktion Books, Ltd., 2009. Print.

[exactly 600!]

Resisting Necropolitics

A question I've had several years now recurred again when reading Mbembe: how can an individual or a society resist totalizing systems of government, oppressive regimes, and the large-scale power structures he describes? Part of my unease with Mbembe's and Foucault’s definitions of sovereignty, biopower, and necropolitics stems from the fact that that they leave little or no room for counteraction by the subject—if the subject in fact exists and is not a pacifying romance. And although I know scholarship has moved beyond theories of resistance and subversion, the absence of productive answers to this question still troubles me.

Milton’s image of Truth’s dismemberment recalls the brutalities enacted on the human body by necropolitical regimes. Truth's death is not a simple killing: she is tortured and maimed, “hewed into a thousand pieces…and scattered to the four winds” and therefore fits Mbembe's definition of sovereignty as the appropriation of the power to decide how to die (Milton 742). Her identity as Truth also echoes Foucault’s discussion of power’s relation to/manufacture of truth. By hewing apart truth, those in power demonstrate “no more regard for the limits of identity than [they] do for the limits of death” (Mbembe 16). For the violence against truth does not end after she dies: her remains are also violated and discarded of in a manner reminiscent of mass burials. She loses both the ability to control her own death and the power over her life essential to a modernist (and early modern?) understanding of subjectivity.

Milton presents his fellow Englishmen as restorers of that subjectivity, piecing together the remains of Truth (whether her personal history or her metaphorical body, a truth that transcends political agendas) after her death and counteracting the violence of those who pose as sovereigns [i.e. the Catholics].[1] In this case, Truth works as a metonym for the subjects of a necropolitical regime—the masses it attempts to control, the marginalized groups it attempts to destroy.

The recombining of the body of truth seems to in some way counteract (dare I say subvert?) the necropolitical actions of the "wicked deceivers." And while it's been established that part of the project of necro/biopower is to determine who matters and who does not--thereby ensuring that the disposable lose their histories as well as their lives--can there be some form of resistance located in piecing together the histories of those a power disposes of?

Then the question remains: what past are we recovering, and to what ends do we use it? Can resistance to pervasive necropolitics begin with a move similar to Milton’s, naming the sovereigns as “a wicked race or deceivers” and denying their assumed right to kill? Is the restoring of a victim’s presence, remembering their life, enough of a reclamation of subjectivity in an age when even personal histories are subject to appropriation and erasure? And what practical effects would this have when sovereign regimes still hold the power to kill those who speak against them?

Necropolitics must be understood in the context of the states of exception and siege, and Milton’s example, although it demonstrates sovereignty over bodies, does not engage these additional contexts. Milton [arguably] did not conceive of power on such a global and pervasive scale as we now experience, but this is not to say that we must totally disregard his model for action. Milton presents a possible avenue of resistance: the recovery of victim’s histories and the naming of oppressive sovereigns as such, but those of us who wish to work against the contemporary operations of necropolitical structures must consider additional factors of race, economics, surveillance, and others. (Word count: 603).

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[1] Attempting to restore, but not completely erasing. For according to Milton, Truth will not be fully whole again until the Second Coming, and thus her body remains, in Mbembe’s words, “[a] skeleton… simple relics of an unburied pain,” functioning to “keep before the eyes of the victim—and the people around him or her—the morbid spectacle of severing” (35).

Reading Without a Map: (Il)legibility in Jewett

Claire Colebrook’s essay, “The Context of Humanism” proposes a critical return to “thinking theoretically” in order to make legible a world in which records remain, but a clear sense of “original” context is lost. For Colebrook, a text’s legibility is not tied to its historical context but to something “radically unhistorical,” something that communicates across time. To read theoretically for Colebrook is to “ask not what this text means here and now, but what it could mean for any reader in any historical or cultural context” (703-4). 

I’m specifically interested in this question of legibility as it relates to the critical reception of The Country of the Pointed Firs. One could argue that what I’ve previously referred to as the text’s “subtlety” is in fact a euphemism for its inscrutability—it seems to evade reading while also encouraging it. The text’s interwoven sketch structure problematizes any attempt to try and place it snugly within any defined literary category. As critic Marjorie Pryse points out, “Jewett's resistance to traditional categories produces a salutary crisis for critic[1],” and indeed it’s critical reception has changed drastically overtime (518). Jewett’s text has been called everything from “alternative cultural vision” and proto-feminist masterpiece to white supremacist propaganda, but what is it about this text allows for such varied interpretations? Is it written in a style so context-specific that it somehow demands to be “read theoretically”?

As I’ve mentioned before, the text’s fragmented structure draws attention to itself; it bogs you down in minute details of the lives of seemingly random individuals and challenges you to discern the shape of the forest from the accumulation of the trees (Jewett repeatedly compares her characters to trees). Our tailing of the narrator seems arbitrary—she is no heroine upon which to focus our affections—and her choice interactions with other characters seem equally so. We, like the narrator, are privileged wanderers of this rustic seaside village, but we have no anchor, map or familiar structure. Like life, the text is rife with contradictions of which we expectant novel-readers must struggle to make sense. In this way, Jewett’s text actually seems to welcome critical dissidence—in its simulation of life, it acknowledges the impossibility of a single reading.

As I read this text, I feel like I’m struggling to contain it; here and there I find a foothold, but to use Colebrook’s terms, these moments where meaning travels are “radically unhistorical,” or at least less so. In short, they appeal to my humanity—my desire for connection, nourishment and stimulus—not my intimate knowledge of literary history. On the contrary, the texts singularity doesn’t allow me to fall back on familiar literary forms or contexts as a guide. Paradoxically, within her sort of a-temporal, fragmented “plot” structure, Jewett situates characters as products of a highly mythologized, whitewashed conception of the past. The narrator’s hostess, Mrs. Todd, is described as a “giant sibyl” whose herb gathering rouses a “remembrance of something in the forgotten past”(6) and the gigantic Bowden family of whom everyone in town is somehow a part, are situated as echoes of great ancestral families from the Middle Ages, “when battles and sieges and processions and feasts were familiar things (83).

This text, in its stark juxtaposition of disjointed “present” and steadfast antiquity, suggests doubts about the historicity of the recent past. In other words, Jewett’s text problematizes context; the narrator reads her present as the product of a historical context, separate from the lives of any of her possible readers. Even in Jewett’s lifetime the text was relegated to the category of “minor literature[2],” which raises the question of whether the text has always seemed inscrutable—impenetrable thus begging to be opened—and therefore remains (il)legible to her current critics.

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[1] Pryse, Marjorie, “Sex, Class, and ‘Category Crisis’: Reading Jewett’s Transitivity". American Literature 70.3 (1998). 517-549. Web. 15 October 2013.

[2] According to Pryse, The Country of the Pointed Firs occupied the space of “minor literature” until revisionary criticism of her work appeared in the 1980’s.

"Your picture has taught me that" - Dorian Gray and the Contexts of Human Readers

It is the spectator, and not life, that art truly mirrors. -Oscar Wilde, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray

Claire Colebrook situates her call for a return to theory in a very precise historical moment, a moment when the potential of texts to be preserved materially in “a posthuman world” from which their “‘original’ context[s] of reading [have] disappeared” seems increasingly imaginable (702). While post-humanism (which is, as Colebrook herself might note, “itself an historical event” (714)) supplies the ethos for Colebrook’s argument, it also produces an image of context as something perpetually evaporating. The exciting flip-side of context’s necessary tenuousness – the idea that new ‘contexts’ and new potentials for reading are continually emerging – appears only in a summary of Deleuze and Guattari, who, Colebrook writes, “are concerned not with what a text might be reduced to, but with what a text enables” (704).

What I would like to consider, thinking the implications of Colebrook’s argument through Wilde’s The Picture of  Dorian Gray, is how a text enables certain unanticipated forms of communication across time – how a text’s circulation in new contexts (new concepts) results in the accumulation of meaning, rather than meaning’s disappearance. I should clarify here the idea of a text’s meaning exceeding the context of its production is present in Colebrook’s article, but the turn to post-humanism – “the various ways in which the human reading brain…may be disappearing” (703) – renders it redundant. For me, the question isn’t what theory might do in the face of a post-human world, or even what theory makes possible for human readers, but what human readers and their ever-expanding bricolage of concepts make possible through and with theory.

From its first chapter, The Picture of Dorian Gray dramatizes the capacity of texts to exceed the meanings available in the contexts of their production. Basil Hallward’s portrait of Dorian comes in contact with new readers who put new concepts into circulation around the painting, opening it to new meanings. For Basil, the painting exposes the “curious artistic idolatry” (Wilde 14) with which he regards Dorian Gray; Dorian’s portrait contains both the suggestion of “an entirely new manner of art” (13) and “the secret of [Basil’s] soul” (9). Lord Henry Wotton, the consummate aesthete, brings a different context to his interpretation of the painting, in which he sees a “brainless, beautiful creature” (7), “a wonderful creation” (23) that has remained so far unexposed to the influence of the world. This is the interpretive context that Henry creates for Dorian himself - “You have a wonderfully beautiful face, Mr. Gray” (24) – so that, when Dorian first sees his completed portrait, “the sense of his own beauty came upon him like a revelation” (27).

The context of the portrait’s production, Basil’s “artistic idolatry” of Dorian that he fears “the world might guess” merely from looking at the picture (14), does seem to have disappeared from contexts of Henry and Dorian’s readings. But more significantly, these new readers’ new contexts have generated an unexpected range of meanings around the painting. The painting enables these meanings, even though they were absent from the context of its production (that is, from Basil’s conception of the portrait). Yet the introduction of new meanings relies equally on human readers – like Lord Henry, with his obsessive concern for beauty – who can place the concepts that shape their specific context in contact with the text. 

Knapp and Michaels’ metaphor for the experience of reading that theory enables seems to have gotten things backwards. It’s not that readers have been lucky enough to find intelligible English sentences washing up on the beach, but that human readers have stumbled upon marks in the sand and, astonishingly, been able to make sense of them – to use the concepts circulating in our present and, in many ways, highly individual contexts to generate meaning from inanimate materiality. This very human reading is what theory enables, and if theory is called for on the brink of a post-human world, it isn’t because theory itself is somehow posthuman (do computers generate concepts?). Rather, theory suggests that as long as texts and human readers are coming into contact, a text’s meanings can never be exhausted. If the “human reading brain” is disappearing (Colebrook 703), it seems imperative to make as much sense as we can out of the marks in the sand before we readers, not the lines of poetry, are washed off of the beach.