Proposal for a Diacritics Colloquium on Nuclear Criticism

Reviewed work(s):
Source: Diacritics, Vol. 14, No. 2, Nuclear Criticism (Summer, 1984), pp. 2-3
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/464753 .
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By Nuclear Criticism is meant something positive and something unavowed, a new topic and an explicitation of what is already everywhere being
done. This proposal arises, on the one hand, out of readinga certain amount of
recent criticism and critical theory and feeling that without exception it
recounts an allegory of nuclear survival;and, on the other, out of the sense that
critical theory ought to be making a more importantcontributionto the public
discussion of nuclear issues. The field would invite both kinds of criticism, the
sort that reads other criticalor canonical texts for the purpose of uncovering the
unknown shapes of our unconscious nuclear fears, and that which aims to show
how the terms of the current nuclear discussion are being shaped by literaryor
critical assumptions whose implications are often, perhaps systematically
ignored.
In the second category, taking our hints from work which is already
underway, in disparate forms and fields, one might investigate subjects such as
these:
-The conjunction of the second millenium with the literallyapocalyptic
power of the nuclear arsenal has excited virulent forms of eschatological thinking like that which has periodically raged through our culture. Eschatology,as a
concept and a discursive practice, has a textual tradition, a social history, and a
logic which deserve to be recalled. The use value, as well as the profit,that can
be derived from predicting the end of things ought to be examined critically.
- The current arms race has arisen under the conditions of a bilateralconflict between the two superpowers. The tendency therefore of both sides to
enact the dialectic of mimetic rivalryis powerful and increasinglyvisible, confirmingthe necessity to explore furtherthe nature of its compulsion, the consequences of its application to the mutual representationsand policy decisions of
the antagonists.
-The power of horror, which the nuclear horizon proposes, has its own
abject influence on the quality of our lives and on the cultural climate we
engender, and may determine in ways we do not yet understandour capacity
to act, even to will. That power itself has begun to be analyzed.
- Criticaltheory for some time has been given over to analyzing the interpretations of origin in our culture. The danger of nuclear destruction arises out
of a technological programaimed at discovering the atomic origin of things. The
nature of the desires, the concepts of use and aim, the value of the values which

nuclear

criticism

have motivated the theory and practice of techn&in our culture require urgent
philosophical repetition.
- The psychology of arms racers must be analyzed. What do scientists
want? Why do they go on building what many of them wish to disarm?What do
soldiers dream? Why do they so love peace, above all when they retire?The
role of gender in motivating the choice of goals ought to be determined. On
one side are mostly men who make policy decisions and invent the vocabulary
of arms talk. On the other are frequently women leading men against installations, with figures and scenarios for anti-nuclearstruggletaken from the vocabulary of their own.
-It is not just "nukespeak,"but all the forms of nuclear discourse which
obey rhetorical constraints, which submit to forms of censorship, exploit narrative figures and tropological devices, in order to persuade. Rhetoricalanalysis of
the forms, the themes, the performance of nuclear political argument as it is
presently enacted must begin.
-The calculus of negotiations depends on epistemological assumptions
and theories of strategywhich may well be illuminated by the insightsof critical
theory into the structureof discourse, the functions of signs, and the conditions
of sending messages.
-The representation of nuclear war in the media as well as in the literary
canon demands to be analyzed ideologically, that is, in terms of the interests it
seeks to promote and to conceal, in terms of the whole critique of representation which for some time has been engaged. To what extent do all the current
versions of apocalypse now merely feed the vice of the hypocritical reader, the
deep-seated boredom of an alienated public that dreams of debris, of swallowing the world with a yawn? To what degree do the stereotypes of nuclear
destruction, like the proliferativefigure of the mushroom cloud, aim to make us
forget by their mechanical repetition the realitythey are supposed to designate?
-Crises usually have their origin in the interpretationof unexpected, frequently aleatory events. The attribution of motives, the misreading of intentions, the sometimes cynical fabrications elaborated around an occurrence
serve to invest it with meaning, to constitute it historiographically,not only as
an object of understanding but as a significant fact which has the power to
change the course of events. Criticaltheory must play a role in analyzing the
mechanisms by which nuclear narrativesare construed and enacted.

diacritics / summer 1984