Kato, Masahide - Nuclear Globalism

Alternatives 18 (1993), 339-360

Nuclear Globalism:

Traversing Rockets, Satellites, and

Nuclear War via the Strategic Gaze

Masahide Kato*

Theorem: when fixed social capital appears as nuclear capital, then its reproduction no longer takes place peacefully. It is neither legitimate nor tolerable. This capital must be destroyed.

Antonio Negri

Nuclear war has been enclosed by two seemingly opposite yet complementary regimes of discourse: nation-state strategic discourse (nuclear deterrence, nuclear disarmament, nuclear non-proliferation, and so on) and extra-nation-state (or extra-territorial) discourse (antinuclearism, nuclear criticism, and so on). The epistemology of the former is entrenched in the "possible" exchange(s) of nuclear warheads among nation states. The latter, which emerged in reaction to the former, holds the "possibility of extinction" at the center of its discursive production.

In delineating the notion of "nuclear war," both of these discourses share an intriguing leap: from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the "possible" nuclear explosions in an indefinite-yet-ever-closerto-the-present future. Thus any nuclear explosions after World War II do not qualify as nuclear war in the cognitive grid of conventional nuclear discourse. Significantly, most nuclear explosions after World War II took place in the sovereign territories of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations. This critical historical fact has been contained in the domain of nuclear testing. Such obliteration of the history of undeclared nuclear warfare by nuclear discourse does not merely posit the deficiency of the discourse. Rather, what it does is reveal the late capitalist form of domination, whereby an ongoing extermination process of the periphery is blocked from constituting itself as a historical fact.

*Department of Political Science, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822.

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340Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockets, Satellites, and Nuclear War via the Strategic Gaze

In the first half of this article, I trace this disqualification process of nuclear war against the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations to the mode of perception that objectifies the periphery in order to subordinate it to a. reconstructed homogeneous time and space. Particularly, I highlight the role of the strategic gaze of transnational capital in constructing a homogeneous social totality (globalism) derived from the image of the globe. In the second half, I translate my analysis of this mode of perception into an analysis of discursive formations by showing the ways in which globalist discourse, predominant in nuclear criticism, effaces the history of nuclear extermination from our consciousness. Last, by probing into the problem of technosubjectivity, which runs through both the global discourse and perception, I expose important aspects of the strategy of global transnational capital/state.

Triumph of the Strategic Gaze

In 1945, amidst the ruins of war, Theodor Adorno noted the decay of the notion of "strategy," which the fascist regime had raised to an "absolute" level. Moreover, optimistically and mistakenly, he hoped for the downfall of technology with the demise of strategy.' In the same year, three hundred freight car loads of V-2 rocket components confiscated from Germany arrived at the White Sands Proving Ground, eighteen miles west of Alamogordo, where the first nuclear bomb exploded on earth. Along with the procurement of rockets, the United States adopted one thousand German military scientists, many of whom later occupied important positions in the military, NASA, and the aerospace industry.2 Originally, German scientists put the rocket to practical use by revolutionizing access to an aerial view of the earth at the dawn of this century. Historically speaking, the development of perceptive technology, warfare technology, and strategy have always been closely intertwined.3 Thus, not surprisingly, the first experimental V-2 rocket launched from the White Sands Proving Ground in 1946 was loaded with a camera that successfully captured the curvature of Earth, that is, a partial image of the "globe." It took twenty years (until 1966) from the experiment until the totality of the image of the globe became available to the First World community. The "long-shot" of the globe rising from the lunar horizon taken from the Lunar Orbiter I manifested the totality of the globe eloquently to First World eyes. The most commonly circulated image of the globe, however, was shot by the crew of Apollo 8 in 1968. This attainment of a photographic image of the globe marked the triumph of an "absolute" strategic gaze.

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Historical contestations over the privileged position of the gaze and hence over the perspective with higher strategic significance ended with the emergence of the absolute strategic gaze.4 The newly emerged regime of the absolute strategic gaze rendered obsolete the very notion of perspective and hence dimension.5 Thus, Adorno's thesis was proved to be wrong: the downfall of fascist state(s) merely marked the turning point when strategy shifted its gear and dispersed beyond conventional (e.g., national) boundaries with the help of the absolute strategic gaze.

Late Capitalist Reconstruction of Time and SpaceThrough the Strategic Gaze

Following the pathbreaking work of Ernest Mandel, Frederic Jameson posited nature in the periphery and the unconscious as the latest fields of capitalist reterritorialization.6 The former is related to the destruction of the relative autonomy of the peripheral space, which had not been fully incorporated into the international division of labor through ever- expanding penetration of transnational corporations (TNCs). (Jameson gives Green Revolution as a case in point.) The latter is primarily a First World phenomenon whereby the mass media, particularly television, deregulated or democratized the propagation of the mode of perception that had been confined to the site of entertainment (a shift in the site of reception from theater to livingroom)." The absolutization of the strategic gaze facilitates the penetration of the logic of capitalist accumulation into these two different domains at one stroke. On the one hand, the strategic gaze furnishes the First World states and transnational corporations with an unprecedented monopoly of space and time over the periphery, crushing the political thrust of the Third World movements. On the other hand, the strategic gaze obliterates the ongoing reproduction of power differentials (the "unequal development," or ceaseless reproduction of international division of labor) from First World consciousness by fabricating the illusion of homogeneity.

The Objectification of the Periphery

As mentioned earlier, the absolute point of the strategic gaze abolishes the historical contestation over perspectives, giving way to a total monopoly of interpretative media. The camera's eye from outer space produced what had been long sought since the invention of camera and the rocket: ahistorical or transcendental "rectitude." An aerial photographer captures the emergence of such rectitude very succinctly:


The advantage of hyperaltitude space photographs is that each one shows vast terrains in correct perspective, from one viewpoint and at one moment of time. Thus they are far more accurate than mosaics of the same area pieced together from photographs taken from the constantly shifting points of view of conventional aircraft at random periods of time, extending from dawn to sunset or even over weeks and months, depending upon clear weather.9

The pursuit of rectitude in the field of aerial photography has been none other than a constant battle against the three-dimensional existence of forms and volumes that allow more than a single point of view. With the vantage point of hyperaltitude from outer space, "three-dimensional forms are reduced to texture, line and color."10 Rendering the totality of Earth a two-dimensional surface serves no purpose other than for technostrategic interpretation of the earth as data and maps, thereby disqualifying "other" points of view (i.e., spatiolocality). In this way, with the back-up of technoscientific reason, the "absolute" point of the strategic gaze manifests uncontestable control as far as the interpretation of surface of the earth is concerned.

Flattening the surface of the earth has also brought about a radical change in the regime of temporality. As the words of the aerial photographer quoted earlier reveal, the notion of rectitude also depends on the construction of the single privileged moment. The image of every part of the earth is now displaced onto that "absolute" moment. In other words, the "absolute" point of the strategic gaze produces a homogeneous temporal field (i.e., an a-temporal field, or to use common vocabulary, "real time") in which 'juxtaposition of every locality, all matter" becomes viable." The so-called "real time" is therefore the very temporality of the strategic gaze, that is, the absolute temporality that presides over other forms of constructing time (i.e., chronolocality). Such construction of temporality did not suddenly emerge with the advent of the new mode of communication. It is a historical tendency of capitalism to displace geographical distance onto temporal distance. As Karl Marx pointed out, development of transportation and communication displaces spatial distance onto temporal distance, which is arranged and hierarchized in relation to the metropoles.'2 Therefore, to borrow Paul Virilio's term, the development of transportation and communication transforms geopolitics into "chronopolitics." The "instantaneous transmission" produced by satellite communication has rendered metropolitan centers capable of pushing chronopolitics further to the absolute level in which temporal distance reflects nothing but the strategic networking of capital.

Let us now tie this configuration of transcendental space and time to the process of transnational capitalist formation, specifically in its

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conquest of the periphery. In 1962, TNCs such as AT&T, ITT, RCA, and General Telephone inaugurated the state-sponsored monopoly business (Comsat Corporation) in the field of communication satellites. During the Vietnam War, the technology of communication satellites played a critical role in the so-called "remote control warfare." Through various sensorial devices, every movement in the hinterland of Southeast Asia (although they couldn't distinguish liberation armies from lay villagers or water buffaloes) were transmitted to the absolute gaze of the commander positioned at Kissinger's office." The words of Retired General Schriever (who was appointed as an adviser on space and science policy by the Reagan administration) accurately summarize the "absoluteness" of the power of surveillance by satellites:

What I want is a radar surveillance system which allows you to spot everything that's moving, either on the surface or above the surface of the earth. . . . You could pin your enemy down on earth. What would they do? If I control the high ground and you can't move, what are you doing to do? You're going to negotiate a surrender. That's what it's all about."

What is so significant here is not so much a sophistication of warfare enhanced by technological innovationas the dissemination of warfare into the process of technological innovation itselffor ever more vigorous penetration of the logic of capitalist accumulation." The reconnaissance technology spots "everything that's moving" not only in terms of military value but also in terms of economic resource value (oils, crops, forestries, and so on). In 1968, a technician at the University of California, Berkeley, had already found such potential for the penetration of capital in the photo image of Australia taken from Gemini V:

It seems evident that one of the best ways to produce suitable reconnaissance maps for the remainder of underdeveloped Australia and for other underdeveloped areas of the world would be through the use of space photography supplemented ... with field checks."'

Such practice of reframing/redefining the periphery through photo image became operational with the launching of the Earth Resource Technology Satellite (ERTS, also known as Landsat) in 1972. The technostrategic map prepared by ERTS was clearly designed for the benefit of TNC capital:

The major oil and mining companies, who could expand the resources in learning how to identify geological formations that indicated reserves,


stood to reap the most dramatic benefits. Speculators in crop futures would also find ERTS data profitable, using them to predict yields.'

Politically speaking, the image recapitulation of the earth by transnational capital and imperial states bespeaks their effort to reterritorialize/contain the spatial movements of excolonies (the so-called "Third World movements"). Through an objectification process of the periphery, TNCs have attempted to make the Third World disappear from their screen by reclassifying it in the cognitive category of "natural resources." The same process has taken place in the case of the Green Revolution, in which the strenuous recolonization of the peripheral space was none other than a counterrevolutionary attempt to destroy the hegemonic recomposition of the periphery (the Third World movements). In both cases, what was at great stake was the sovereignty of the Third World, that is, the relative autonomy of Third World space and time. By the objectification of the periphery through the eye of the absolute strategic gaze, the sovereignty of the Third World has been nullified without involving any conventional battles. The Declaration of Bogota in 1976 signed by eight equatorial nations (Brazil, Colombia, Congo, Ecuador, Indonesia, Kenya, Uganda, and Zaire) protested the First World monopoly over satellite surveillance.'s It was a desperate attempt by the Third World nations, who were faced with the invisible invasion and destruction of their sovereignty by the TNCs and imperial states.

The final transfer of Landsat to a private corporation, the Earth Observation Satellite Company (EOSAT), in 1984 consolidated an era of transnational capitalization of the strategic gaze. France joined the competition for the remote-sensing satellite information market with SPOT (satellite pour l'observation de la term), which produced images with 10-meter resolution (as opposed to the 30-meter resolution provided by Landsat).'9 The images reproduced by SPOT have further liquefied national configurations, replacing them with the configurations of transnational capital. With the dissolution of the superpower rivalry between the United States and the former Soviet Union, their terrain of competition has shifted to launching commercial satellites on converted intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) rockets. Herein, the integration of the First World imperial states and TNCs has become total as far as satellite surveillance is concerned. For example, Satelife, which is a private venture run by U.S. and former Soviet specialists, aims to "give physicians in remote areas of developing countries access to major centers of medical information located in industrialized countries." Planet Earth, a U.S., Japanese, and West European project, is designed to monopolize "a relatively detailed and accurate picture of the changes and interactions occurring in the planet ecosphere."" Behind the rhetoric of such

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humanitarian postures, it is very clear the TNCs and imperial states have secured a monopoly over transcendental space and time, traversing and penetrating the Third World with impunity.21

Outer space thus has become the space of transnational capital par excellence. One could say that satellite surveillance perfected one of Sun Tzu's axioms, "supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting."22

First World Way of Seeing

As I have argued, the objectification of Earth from the absolute point of the strategic gaze leads to a rearrangement of each locality into an order organized according to the late capitalist strategy. Such rearrangement finds its expression in an iconographic image of the globe representing the order of the world. The emergence and propagation of this image have crucial relevance to Jameson's second thesis, capital's penetration into the unconscious. Significantly, the commercialization of the unconscious consolidates the First World way of seeing by disseminating images through the mass media. One such manifestation of the First World way of seeing is the fiction of the earth as a finite, unified and integrated whole. The representation of the globe as a unified whole, however, is not a new concept: it has been the cognitive basis of world-wide expansion of capital since the Renaissance."

Nevertheless, the significance of the image of the globe in the late capitalist phase differs from that of earlier phases on three accounts. First, unlike in earlier phases, the image of the globe is based on a photo image which is mechanically reproducible and transmittable. The dissemination of images, which is ideological reproduction sui generic, proceeds extensively with the commercialization of the unconscious. In other words, the photo image of the globe needs to be situated in the historical context wherein mechanically reproducible images are the very materiality of the reproduction of the social order. Second, the notion of the globe is no longer anchored in a cartographic abstraction of the surface of the earth, but is now a figure perceived by the camera's eye. Thus the image ineluctably involves the problematic of technosubjectivity in the construction of the social totality. Third, the image (ultimately the technosubject) serves as a principle of equivalence between self (First World self) and matter in general (earth, humanity, environment, and so on). In other words, technosubjectivity renders the First World self capable of attaining an unprecedented mode of domination over the rest of the world. I will defer my ideological analysis on the last two points to the next section. Let us first focus on the emergence of the


global discourse facilitated by the dissemination of the image of the globe.

The fiction of the globe as a unified whole lends itself to the emergence of globalism. The discourse of globalism is well epitomized in Richard Nixon's address to the "planet" in 1969: "for one priceless moment in the whole history of man, all the people on this earth are truly one."24 The statement is ideologically more essential than what is later to be called Nixon doctrine: it capitulates the global strategy of transnational capital in the post-Nixon doctrine and post-Bretton Woods era. Therefore, we must read such seemingly universalistic phrases as "global village," "one earth," "global community," and so forth, very symptomatically. Those buzzwords are none other than the manifestation of a global discourse signifying the emergence of a global transnational collectivity disguised in "planetary" vocabularies.

The pseudo-universalistic rhetoric of globalism is a discursive configuration of the spatial and temporal homogenization discussed earlier. Susan Sontag also attributes the emergence of the myth of homogeneous time and space to the photo image taken from the point of the "absolute" strategic gaze:

Our very notion of the worldthe capitalist twentieth century's "one world"is like a photographic overview. . . . This spurious unity of the worldis effected by translating its contents into images. Images are always compatible, or can be made compatible, even when the realities they depict are not.25

The totality of the globe (i.e., the notion of "one world") is thus achieved by obliterating the "other" side of the image, which Sontag calls "realities."

One must dwell on the implications of this process of automated and institutionalized preclusion of "realities" on the ontological terrain. The "realities" that are precluded from the images belong to the domain that cannot be represented or captured in homogeneous space and time, both in the production of photo images in general and the image recapitulation of Earth produced by the absolute strategic gaze. However, the realities as "otherness" of the homogenizing regime of space and time do not necessarily configure the social forces that resist the transnationalization of capital. They simply, as in the positive and negative image of photography, reveal the other side of the movement for the accumulation of capital: differentiation as opposed to homogenization. This flip side of accumulation is significantly obscured by globalist perception and discourse. The process of differentiation includes differentiation in space, time, and power (the North-South relationship in particular, for example). In sum, the process of differentiation can be identified as "unequal

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development" of capitalism. Therefore, the globalist discourse masks, for example, the ongoing (re)arrangement of international division of labor (deindustrialization or creation of the "third worlds" in the First World, and transformation of the Third World into a ghetto for metropolitan capital), and historical accumulation of capital by the North, for further intensification of the techno-automation of the production process in the metropoles. The global discourse represents the sociality of the globe as an ahistorical, undifferentiated whole that has been always and already there. Such ahistorical and a-spatial image narratives, reinforced by the globalist discourse, recapture the classic teleological narrative of the linear "progression" of capitalism.

Some would argue the "dialectical" nature of globalism, by asserting that the globalist discourse engendered the emergence of the environmentalist and antinuclear discourses in the First World community, which in turn would counter the linear course of capitalism. I would argue that it is the militancy (especially their neo-Ludditte praxis) of some First World environmentalist groups, not their actual ideology, that counters global capitalism. In fact, the First World environmentalist and antinuclear discourses have been the very media through which globalist discourse has been disseminated. I will next discuss nuclear criticism as the case in point.

Nuclear War Imagined and Nuclear War as Real

The vigorous invasion of the logic of capitalist accumulation into the last vestige of relatively autonomous space in the periphery under late capitalism is propelled not only by the desire for incorporating every fabric of the society into the division of labor but also by the desire for "pure" destruction/extermination of the periphery.26 The penetration of capital into the social fabric and the destruction of nature and preexisting social organizations by capital are not separable. However, what we have witnessed in the phase of late capitalism is a rapid intensification of the destruction and extermination of the periphery. In this context, capital is no longer interested in incorporating some parts of the periphery into the international division of labor. The emergence of such "pure" destruction/extermination of the periphery can be explained, at least partially, by another problematic of late capitalism formulated by Ernest Mandel: the mass production of the means of destruction." Particularly, the latest phase of capitalism distinguishes itself from the earlier phases in its production of the "ultimate" means of destruction/extermination, i.e., nuclear weapons.

Let us recall our earlier discussion about the critical historical


conjuncture where the notion of "strategy" changed its nature and became deregulated/dispersed beyond the boundaries set by the interimperial rivalry. Herein, the perception of the ultimate means of destruction can be historically contextualized. The only instances of real nuclear catastrophe perceived and thus given due recognition by the First World community are the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which occurred at this conjuncture. Beyond this historical threshold, whose meaning is relevant only to the interimperial rivalry, the nuclear catastrophe is confined to the realm of fantasy, for instance, apocalyptic imagery. And yet how can one deny the crude fact that nuclear war has been taking place on this earth in the name of "nuclear testing" since the first nuclear explosion at Alamogordo in 1945? As of 1991, 1,924 nuclear explosions have occurred on earth.28 The major perpetrators of nuclear warfare are the United States (936 times), the former Soviet Union (715 times), France (192 times), the United Kingdom (44 times), and China (36 times).29 The primary targets of warfare ("test site" to use Nuke Speak terminology) have been invariably the sovereign nations of Fourth World and Indigenous Peoples. Thus history has already witnessed the nuclear wars against the Marshall Islands (66 times), French Polynesia (175 times), Australian Aborigines (9 times), Newe Sogobia (the Western Shoshone Nation) (814 times), the Christmas Islands (24 times), Hawaii (Kalama Island, also known as Johnston Island) (12 times), the Republic of Kazakhstan (467 times), and Uighur (Xinjian Province, China) (36 times)." Moreover, although I focus primarily on "nuclear tests" in this article, if we are to expand the notion of nuclear warfare to include any kind of violence accrued from the nuclear fuel cycle (particularly uranium mining and disposition of nuclear wastes), we must enlist Japan and the European nations as perpetrators and add the Navaho, Havasupai and other Indigenous Nations to the list of targets. Viewed as a whole, nuclear war, albeit undeclared, has been waged against the Fourth World, and Indigenous Nations. The dismal consequences of "intensive exploitation," "low intensity intervention," or the "nullification of the sovereignty" in the Third World produced by the First World have taken a form of nuclear extermination in the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations.

Thus, from the perspectives of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations, the nuclear catastrophe has never been the "unthinkable" single catastrophe but the real catastrophe of repetitive and ongoing nuclear explosions and exposure to radioactivity. Nevertheless, ongoing nuclear wars have been subordinated to the imaginary grand catastrophe by rendering them as mere preludes to the apocalypse. As a consequence, the history and ongoing processes of nuclear explosions as war have been totally wiped out from the history and consciousness of the First

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World community. Such a discursive strategy that aims to mask the "real" of nuclear warfare in the domain of imagery of nuclear catastrophe can be observed even in Stewart Firth's Nuclear Playground, which extensively covers the history of "nuclear testing" in the Pacific:

Nuclear explosions in the atmosphere ... were global in effect. The winds and seas carried radioactive contamination over vast areas of the fragile ecosphere on which we all depend for our survival and which we call the earth. In preparing for war, we were poisoning our planet and going into battle against nature itself. 31

Although Firth's book is definitely a remarkable study of the history of "nuclear testing" in the Pacific, the problematic division/distinction between the "nuclear explosions" and the nuclear war is kept intact. The imagery of final nuclear war narrated with the problematic use of the subject ("we") is located higher than the "real" of nuclear warfare in terms of discursive value. This ideological division/hierarchization is the very vehicle through which the history and the ongoing processes of the destruction of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations by means of nuclear violence are obliterated and hence legitimatized. The discursive containment/obliteration of the "real" of nuclear warfare has been accomplished, ironic as it may sound, by nuclear criticism. Nuclear criticism, with its firm commitment to global discourse, has established the unshakable authority of the imagery of nuclear catastrophe over the real nuclear catastrophe happening in the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations almost on a daily basis.

Nuclear Criticism and Globalist Discourse

Nuclear criticism flourished particularly during the early 1980s in reaction to the imminent "threat of limited nuclear warfare," which swept the entire European continent as well as other countries in the First World bloc. Nuclear criticism has variants depending on the perspectives and targeted audiences. The most notable critics belong to what I call "popular nuclear criticism," which includes such authors as Jonathan Schell, Robert Lifton, and Freeman Dyson. The leftists, most notably E. P Thompson, on the other hand, made a less popularized and yet very serious critique of superpower nuclear imperialism. Those earlier versions of nuclear criticism have offered a good text for deconstructionists such as Jacques Derrida et al. in Diacritics.

Reflecting the historical context mentioned above, in which nuclear critique gained unprecedented popularity, one can say that nuclear criticism has been shaped and structured by the logic of superpower


rivalry." The superpower rivalry has distracted our attention from the ongoing process of oppression/violence along the North-South axis. After all, the superpowers have functioned complementarily in solidifying the power of the North over the South.33 Therefore, nuclear criticism has successfully mystified the North-South axis as much as the superpower rivalry. Just as the facade of superpower rivalry (or interimperial rivalry in general for that matter) gave legitimation to the strategy of global domination of capital, nuclear criticism has successfully legitimated the destruction of periphery through nuclear violence. What is significant here is to locate the discourse in a proper context, that is, the late capitalist problematic. To do so, we need to shift our focus back to the questions of strategy and technology discussed earlier.

Let us recall our discussion on the genealogy of global discourse. The formation of global discourse has been a discursive expression of the formation of technological interfaces among rockets, cameras, and media furnished by the strategy of late capitalism. In a similar vein, nuclear criticism, whose epistemological basis lies in the exchange of nuclear ballistic missiles between superpowers, emerged from yet another technostrategic interface. Significantly, the camera on the rocket was replaced by the nuclear warhead, which gave birth to the first Inter Continental Ballistic Missile in the late 1950s both in the United States and the former Soviet Union.34 Thus, the discourse of nuclear criticism is a product of technostrategic interfaces among rocket, satellite, camera, photo image, and nuclear warhead. I next decipher the discourse of global capitalism (globalism) interwoven throughout nuclear criticism by linking the technostrategic interface to the formation of discourse.

The Configuration of Extinction

Nuclear criticism finds the likelihood of "extinction" as the most fundamental aspect of nuclear catastrophe. The complex problematics involved in nuclear catastrophe are thus reduced to the single possible instant of extinction. The task of nuclear critics is clearly designated by Schell as coming to grips with the one and only final instant: "human extinctionwhose likelihood we are chiefly interested in finding out about."33 Deconstructionists, on the other hand, take a detour in their efforts to theologize extinction. Jacques Derrida, for example, solidified the prevailing mode of representation by constituting extinction as a fatal absence:

Unlike the other wars, which have all been preceded by wars of more or less the same type in human memory (and gunpowder did not mark a radical break in this respect), nuclear war has no precedent. It has

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1 from the axis. After difying the iticism has uperpower rial rivalry

of global imated the significant :e capitalist questions

never occurred, itself; it is a non-event. The explosion of American bombs in 1945 ended a "classical," conventional war; it did not set off a nuclear war. The terrifying reality of the nuclear conflict can only be the signified referent, never the real referent (present or past) of a discourse or text. At least today apparently.36

By representing the possible extinction as the single most important problematic of nuclear catastrophe (posing it as either a threat or a symbolic void), nuclear criticism disqualifies the entire history of nuclear violence, the "real" of nuclear catastrophe as a continuous and repetitive process. The "real" of nuclear war is designated by nuclear critics as a "rehearsal" (Derrik De Kerkhove) or "preparation" (Firth) for what they reserve as the authentic catastrophe." The history of nuclear violence offers, at best, a reality effect to the imagery of "extinction." Schell summarized the discursive position of nuclear critics very succinctly, by stating that nuclear catastrophe should not be conceptualized "in the context of direct slaughter of hundreds of millions people by the local effects."38 Thus the elimination of the history of nuclear violence by nuclear critics stems from the process of discursive "delocalization" of nuclear violence. Their primary focus is not local catastrophe, but delocalized, unlocatable, "global" catastrophe.

The elevation of the discursive vantage point deployed in nuclear criticism through which extinction is conceptualized parallels that of the point of the strategic gaze: nuclear criticism raises the notion of nuclear catastrophe to the "absolute" point from which the fiction of "extinction" is configured. Herein, the configuration of the globe and the conceptualization of "extinction" reveal their interconnection via the "absolutization" of the strategic gaze. In the same way as the fiction of the totality of the earth is constructed, the fiction of extinction is derived from the figure perceived through the strategic gaze. In other words, the image of the globe, in the final instance, is nothing more than a figure on which the notion of extinction is being constructed. Schell, for instance, repeatedly encountered difficulty in locating the subject involved in the conceptualization of extinction, which in turn testifies to its figural origin: "who will suffer this loss, which we somehow regard as supreme? We, the living, will not suffer it; we will be dead. Nor will the unborn shed any tears over their lost chance to exist; to do so they would have to exist already."39 Robert Lifton attributed such difficulty in locating the subject to the "numbing effect" of nuclear psychology. In other words, Lifton tied the difficulty involved here not to the question of subjectivity per se but to psychological defenses against the overwhelming possibility of extinction. The hollowness of extinction can be unraveled better if we locate it in the mode of perception rather

352 Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockets, Satellites, and Nuclear War via the Strategic Gaze

than in nebulous nuclear psychology: the hollowness of extinction is a result of "confusing figure with the object."4 This phenomenon, called "the delirium of interpretation" by Virilio, is a mechanical process in which incorporeal existence is given a meaning via the figure.'" It is no doubt a manifestation of technosubjectivity symptomatic of late capitalism. Hence, the obscurity of the subject in the configuration of extinction results from the dislocation of the subject by the technosubject functioning as a meaning-generating machine.

Technosubjectivity deployed in configuring "extinction" is the product of interfaces among the camera's eyes, photo (or video) image, the ultimate speed materialized by rockets and satellite communications, and nuclear warheads. Carol Cohn persuasively analyzed one such aspect of the interface in shaping and structuring the discourse of defense intellectuals: in the discourse, of nuclear war, national security, and nuclear criticism, it is the bomb that is the subject of discourse.42 The satellite communications, rockets, camera's eye, nuclear warheads, and other technostrategic gadgets, which are rendered subject in the field of discourse and perception, are essentially a fixed capital. Therefore, although the problem of technosubjectivity seems to be a new phenomenon in the age of high technology, it remains part of an ongoing process of subject-object inversion inherent in the very concept of capital.

Having established the link between the disqualification (or delocalization) of the history ("real") of nuclear catastrophe on the one hand and the mode of perception under late capitalism on the other hand, let us approach the core of the ideology of globalism cum technosubjectivity manifested in nuclear criticism.

Late Capitalist Re(con)naissance and "Global" Technosubjectivity

Nuclear criticism offers preservation of self and matter as a solution to its own imaginary/ideological construct of extinction (as manifested in the buzzword "freeze"). Accordingly, preservation of self and matter as an alternative to the inertia of the "unthinkable" cannot be anything but an imaginary/ideological construct. It is in this fantasy that one can find the ideological content of globalism.

The proposition of preservation as a solution to the imagined extinction at the same time involves redefinition of the notion of "humanity." The image of extinction drove even a Marxist, namely, E. P Thompson, to abandon "class" analysis, embracing humanity instead: "exterminism itself is not a 'class issue': it is a human issue."43 In this sense, nuclear criticism recreates the Renaissance in the late capitalist era in its reinvention of humanity through technosubjectivity. Robert Lifton

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defined the collectivity in danger by comparing the threat of extinction with the hostage-taking, which in turn entails a very revealing redefinition of humanity:

But unlike ordinary hostage taking, nuclear terror encompasses everyone. Precisely for that reason it throws us back on our collective humanity. In calling into question the idea of human future, it raises equally ultimate questions about our evolutionary equipment for shaping that threatened future."

But what does "humanity" designate? Who are "we"? Sontag also encountered this obscure notion of humanity created by the photo images, and she deciphered it as "a quality things have in common when they are viewed as photographs."45 Again we cannot escape from finding the figural origin (i.e., photo image of the globe) of the construction of "humanity." Herein the "interpretative delirium" proceeds with the disguise of "universalism," establishing a total "deregulation" in exchanges among what are reconstructed as objects by way of figure. The regime of the "absolute" subject (i.e., technosubject) governs this deregulated image economy where heterogeneous existence of subjectivity (whose epistemological basis is anchored in locality) is reduced to one of many objects. The notion of humanity is thus a reification of the regime of the absolute technosubject cloaked in pseudo-universality.

Let us probe further into this process of displacement by analyzing the ways in which self and matter are reconstructed in nuclear criticism. Matter to be preserved and hence not to be exploded is interchangeably designated as the earth, the ecosphere, life (humans and nonhumans), environment, the unborn, and the future. The notion of humanity facilitates the dissolution of self into matter and vice versa because humanity is self that preserves matter but humanity is also matter. The dissolution demarcates the total mimesis between self and matter. This may sound similar to Indigenous People's conceptualization of their group identity in relation to their locality, Mother Earth. However, this mimesis, in fact, stands in a diametrical opposition to that of the Indigenous Peoples. The mimesis in the globalist discourse is none other than a result of the technological process of displacement whereby matter is simultaneously reduced to a photo image and given a new meaning and totality by the absolute point of the strategic gaze (the vantage point of technosubjectivity). In other words, as we have already discussed in the case of configuration of extinction, it is again the figurality of the globe that realizes the mimetic relationship between self and matter. The vantage point of technosubjectivity, however, is not a void. We must


analyze further the nature of self that is assimilated into matter in order to decipher the ideological implication of the mimesis.

Derrik De Kerkhove's words reveal the linkage between "individual" identity and "planetary" identity: "We are beginning to acquire a sense of a planetary 'body-image,' much in the way that we acquire our own individual identity as we begin to perceive the limits of our own bodies.' Schell also reconstructs such linkage in his thesis on earth. The earth, according to him, is a "special object" to be "regarded as a single living entity, [because] like a person, the earth is unique, it is sacred, and like a person, it is unpredictable by generalizing laws of science."47 Furthermore, the following passage, in which Robert Lifton conceptualizes the relationship between self and "world" in reference to the exultation in the antinuclear movements, also reveals the true nature of the notion of self: "That exultation has to do with a new sense of integrityor of the possibility of integrityin one's relationship between self and world. No longer bound by nuclear distortions only half believed, one's world seems to open out into new personal options."

It is clear from the language "individualism" in the statements above that the image of the globe (and other incorporeal bodies) is the outcome of the projection of late capitalist private existence (i.e., the life world of the First World) onto the level of generality.49 The self in question is not the self (the life world of the Third World, Fourth World, and Indigenous Peoples) that has been endangered already by nuclear wars. The subjectivity of the periphery, as discussed earlier in this article, has been rendered matter (e.g., natural resources) through satellite surveillance. Under the regime of technosubjectivity, the First World self assumes an unprecedented form of domination by assimilating itself into matter, and thereby it conquers matter.

The latest form of domination through the mimetic relationship between (the First World) self and matter via technosubjectivity unveils its uniqueness in the mode of propertization. Technosubjectivity materializes the condition in which the First World self establishes property relationship with what has not been coded in the conventional space and time parameters (e.g., the earth, the ecosphere, life, environment, the unborn, the future). For example, by using apocalypse, nuclear critics set up a privileged discursive position whereby the First World self is authorized to speak for amorphous "future" generations. This discursive position entails a colonization of temporality by the First World self. The colonization of "future" has an immediate effect: the preservation of unborn generations as a case against extinction endorsed by some nuclear critics, for instance, cannot be isolated from the extension of patriarchal self over women's bodies.5 In a similar vein, the nuclear

;azeMasahide Kato 355

critics' assertion regarding the preservation of the ecosphere or the identification of an individual with the earth as an antithesis to extinction betrays the extension of the First World self over the space configured by the image of the globe. One should not., on the one hand, discount the political significance of the environmentalism emerged from the nuclear discourse; on the other hand, however, one should also be alert to the fact that such environmentalism and also the notion of "futurity" discussed earlier are a structural counterpart of the globalization of space and time by capital (both are linked through technosubjectivity). The extension and propertization in terms of both time and space proceeds instantaneously from the micro level to the macro level and vice versa: "the earth, like a single cell or a single organism, is a systemic whole."5' The holism reconstructed here is a discursive translation of the instantaneous focal change (from the image of the whole to the image of the spot) from the point of the absolute strategic gaze. Overall, the nuclear critics' position in freezing the status quothat is, the existing unequal power relationshipproduces nothing short of an absolute affirmation of the latest forms of capitalist domination mediated by mechanically reproducible images.52

Thus dissolution between self and matter via technosubjectivity demarcates the disappearance of the notion of territoriality as a boundary in the field of propertization/colonization of capital. The globe represented as such in the age of technosubjectivity clearly delineates the advent of nonterritorial space which distinguishes it from the earlier phases of capitalism. According to David Harvey, the Enlightenment conceptualization of the globe had a territorial demarcation, which corresponds to the hierarchical division between self and the other:

I do want to insist that the problem with the Enlightenment thought was not that it had no conception of "the other" but that it perceived "the other" as necessarily having (and sometimes "keeping to") a specific place in a spatial order that was ethnocentrically conceived to have homogeneous and absolute qualities.53

Therefore, what is so characteristic of the global spatial order in late capitalism is a total eradication of "the other" by abolishing the notion of territory. As I have already discussed, what matters for the First World is no longer the relationship between self and other but self and matter, which is nothing but a tautological self-referential relation with self. This ontological violence against "the other" underwrites the physical violence against the Third World, Fourth World, and Indigenous Peoples.


First Wor their glo diametric Indige no their ima latter."

Epilogue

Frederic Jameson's proposed formula to cope with the global strategy of late transnational capitalism is for us to gain a firmer grip on global space so that such space is brought to the social level. According to him, in the process of socializing this latest spatial horizon (becoming "Symbolic" of the "Imaginary" to use Lacanian terminology), "we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and again a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion."54 Nevertheless, let us not forget that the Symbolic in the global configuration of space and time is none other than the discourse of technosubjectivity. The construction of global space and time, accordingly, has been the ontological horizon of the transnational capital/state with its control over the ultimate form of violence. The "social and spatial confusion" (which again resonates in Litton's formulation of the "numbing effect") in the postmodern aesthetics that Jameson urges us to overcome, stems not so much from the inadequate socialization of global space as from the very meaning-generating machine of technosubjectivity. Thus Jameson's formula has a strong possibility of legitimating technosubjectivity, which leads us nowhere but to a further global integration of capital with its increased power of pure destruction.

The dialectic (if it can be still called such) should be conceived in terms of resistance to and possibly destruction of global space, time, perception, and discourse for the possibility of reinventing space. The nuclear warfare against the Fourth World and Indigenous Peoples should be viewed in this context. It is not their expendability or exclusion from the division of labor; rather it is their spatial-temporal construction that drives transnational capital/state to resort to pure destruction. In other words, what has been actually under attack by the nuclear state/capital are certain political claims (couched in the discourse of "sovereignty") advanced by the Fourth World and Indigenous Peoples for maintaining or recreating space against the global integration of capital."

The question now becomes: Can there be a productive link between the struggles of the Fourth World and Indigenous Peoples against the exterminating regime of nuclear capital/state, and First World environmentalist and antinuclear social movements? This link is crucial and urgent for a subversion of the global regime of capital/state. Nevertheless, we have not yet seen effective alliances due to the blockage that lies between these social movements." The blockage, as I have shown in this article, is produced primarily by the perception and discourse of the social movements in the North, which are rooted in technosubjectivity. The possibility of alliances, therefore, depends on how much

Masahide Kato 357

First World environmentalist and antinuclear movements can overcome their globalist technosubjectivity, whose spatio-temporality stands in diametrical opposition to the struggles of the Fourth World and Indigenous Peoples. In other words, it is crucial for the former to shatter their image-based politics and come face to face with the "real" of the latter.57

Notes

The author would like to thank the following people, who in various ways assisted and inspired him in the process of writing this article: Manfred Henningsen, Michael Shapiro, Robert Stauffer, Richard Hutchinson, Doug Margolis, Andy Hoffman, Cindy Kobayashi, Carrie Dann, David Solnit, and Allison Yap. However, the author assumes sole responsibility for what is written here. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Midwest Radical Scholars and Activists Conference, at Loyola University, Chicago, November 1011, 1991.

1.Theodore W. Adorn, Minima Moralia: Reflection from Damaged Life, trans. E. F N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), pp. 107-108.Jack Manno, Arming the Heavens: The Hidden Military Agenda for Space, 19451995 (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1984), p. 11.

2.On the relationship between perception and war, see Beaumont Newhall, Airborne Camera: The World From the Air and Outer Space (New York: Hastings House, 1969); Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (New York: Verso, 1989).

1.Paul Virilio deciphered the connection between social power and the position of the gaze very succinctly: "Social privilege is based on the choice of viewpoint (before attaching itself to accidents of fortune or birth), on the relative position that one manages to occupy, then organize, in a space dominating the trajectories of movement, keys to communication, river, sea, road or bridge." Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986), p. 73.As Walter Benjamin and John Berger demonstrated, the notion of perspective derived from the theological "vanishing point" has become obsolete with desecration of the point of gaze brought by the mode of perception in the age of mechanical reproduction (photographic seeing and cinematic seeing), which provided a gaze with total mobility. The new regime of the gaze produced by satellite pushes it further whereby the point of gaze becomes both absolute and mobile at the same time. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 217-251; John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972).Frederic Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,"

New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-92.

7. Toni Negri and Felix Guattari also brought up the penetration of the logic of capital into every fabric of society including the unconscious: "Now the remaining private spherefamily, personal life, free time, and perhaps even fantasy and dreamseverything from that point on became subjected to the semiotics of capital." Toni Negri and Felix Guattari, Communists Like Us: New


Spaces of Liberty, New Lines of Alliance, trans. Michael Ryan (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990), p. 25.

8.Unlike Roland Barthes, who insists on the role of photography in actualizing the intrusion of the real (i.e., history) into our perception, I am more attentive to the transhistorical, or correctly speaking, ahistorical effect of photography. See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflection on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, the Noonday Press, 1981). Susan Sontag puts this ahistoricization (or derealization) of photography very succinctly: "Cameras miniaturize experience, transform history into spectacle." Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Noonday Press, 1989), pp. 110-111.Emphasis added. Newhall, note 3, Airborne Camera, p. 54.

9.Margarette Dreikaussen, Aerial Perception: The Earth as Seen from Aircraft and Spacecraft and Its Influence on Contemporary Art (Philadelphia: Art Alliance, 1985), p. 54.

10.Virilio, note 4, p. 136.Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. II, ed. Frederik Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1967), pp. 252-264.Manno, note 2, p. 140.Ibid., p. 158.

8.With regard to the dissemination of warfare into the process of technological innovation, see Paul Virilio and Sylver Lotringer, Pure War (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), and Virilio's other works. However, Virilio does not attempt to locate his notion of "pure war" in the context of the late capitalist problematic, which inevitably confines him to the ranks of other "postmodern cyber-priests" such as Jean Baudrillard and Jean Francois Lyotard, who preach an electrified version of the Book of Revelation.

12.Quoted in Newhall, note 3, Airborne Camera, p. 122.

8.Manno, note 2, p. 134.

14.Ibid., p. 143.

8.David T. Lindgren, "Commercial Satellites Open Skies," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 44, no. 3 (1988): 34-37; Leonard S. Specter, "Keep the Skies Open," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 45, no. 7 (1989): 15-20.

16.Ann M. Florini and Willam C. Potter, "Goodwill Missions for Castoff Missiles," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 46, no. 9 (1990): 30.

17.One can see the parallel between this nullification of Third World space through satellite surveillance and the general IMF-World Bank paradigm. Both of them intend to dismantle the last vestige of autonomy in the periphery for never-ending accumulation of surplus value.

18.Sun Tzu, The Art of War, ed. James Clavell (New York: Delacorte Press, 1983), p. 15.

19.David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 246-247; Jameson, note 6, pp. 90-91.

20.Quoted in Dale Carter, Final Frontier: The Rise and Fall of the American Rocket State (New York: Verso, 1989), p. 198.

21.Sontag, note 8, On Photography, p. 174.

26. Although they do not include nuclear warfare in their scope of analysis as I do here, Negri and Guattari unveil the continuum between exploitation and extermination: "in fact, there are only differences of degree between exploitation, destruction by industrial and urban pollution, welfare conceived as a separating out of zones of poverty, and the extermination of entire peoples,

Masahide Kato 359

such as those which occur in the continents of Asia, Africa, and Latin America" Negri and Guattari, note 7, pp. 59-60.

27.Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, trans. Joris De Bires (London: Verso, 1978), p. 578.

28."Nuclear Note Book," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 48, no. 3 (1992): 49.

27.Ibid.Jane Dibblin, Day of Two Sons: US Nuclear Testing and the Pacific Islanders (London: Virago Press, 1988); Stewart Firth, Nuclear Playground (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1987); International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Radioactive Heaven and Earth: The Health and Environmental Effects of Nuclear Weapons Testing In, On, and Above the Earth (New York: Apex Press, 1991); IWGIA News Letter 45 (1986); John May, The Gnenpeace Book of the Nuclear Age: The Hidden History of the Human Cost (New York: Random House, 1989); Bernard Nietschman and William Lebon, "Nuclear Weapon States and Fourth World Nations," Cultural Survival Quarterly 11, no. 4 (1987): 5-7.

31 Stewart Firth, note 30, Nuclear Playground, p. x.

32.E. P Thompson is exemplary in this regard. He sees a dear break between imperialism and what he calls "exterminism" as the latest mode of production (or anti-production?): "Exterminism simply confronts itself. It does not exploit a victim: it confronts as equal. With each effort to dominate the other, it calls into being an equivalent counter force. It is a non-dialectical contradiction, a state of absolute antagonism, in which both powers grow through confrontation, and which can only be resolved by mutual extermination." E. P Thompson, "Notes on Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilization," in New Left Review, ed., Exterminism and Cold War (London, New Left Review, 1982), p. 24. Evidently, he fails to recognize the role of interimperial rivalry in intensifying the exploitation of the periphery and in solidifying the collective power of the imperial bloc.

32.Virilio and Lotringer, note 15, Pure War, pp. 159-172; Negri and Guattari, note 7, p. 63.Manno, note 2, p. 42.

34.Jonathan Schell, Fate of the Earth (New York: Avon Books, 1982), p. 76.

35.Jacques Derrida, "No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)," Diacritics 14 (1984): 23.

32.Derrik De Kerkhove, "On Nuclear Communication," Diacritics 14 (1984): 78; Firth, note 30, Nuclear Playground, p. x.

32.Schell, note 35, p. 21.

38.Ibid., p. 138.

40. Paul Virilio, The Lost Dimension, trans. Daniel Moshenberg (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), p. 113.

41 Ibid.

42.Carol Cohn, "Rational World of Defense Intellectual," Signs 12 (1987): 687-718.E. P Thompson, note 32, p. 28.

42.Italics original. Robert Jay Lifton and Richard Falk, Indefensible Weapons: The Political and Psychological Case Against Nuclearism (New York: Basic Books, 1982), p. 115.Sontag, note 8, On Photography, p. 111.

44.De Kerckhove, note 37, p. 79.

45.Schell, note 35, p. 78.

48. Lifton and Falk, note 44, p. 120.


Alternatives

49.Here I use an analytical reading, which I adopted from Adorno and Horkheimer's classic ideological analysis. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Harder & Harder, 1972).Zoe Sophia makes a thorough and critical analysis of the nuclear discourse from this perspective. Her analysis of the movie, 2001: Space Odyssey, clearly shows how the image of the globe mediates the mimesis between patriarchal self and woman rendered matter. Zoe Sophia, "Exterminating Fetuses: Abortion, Disarmament, and the Sexo-Semiotics of Extraterrestrialism," Diacritics 14 (1984): 47-59.

51 Schell, note 35, p. 92.

52.Similar argument is made by the Midnight Notes Collective, Midnight Notes 4, no. 1 (1983).Italics original. Harvey, note 23, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 252.

53.Jameson, note 6, p. 92.

52.Negri and Guattari likewise subvert the "victimological" approach to the marginal group:

one should take into account that marginal phenomena are part of a context which does not define them as being at the margin, but which, on the contrary, confers on them a central place in the capitalist strategy. The marginal subjectivities, in as much as they are the product and the best "analyzers" of command tendencies, are all those which resist it the best.

Negri and Guattari, note 7, p 129.

52.At Newe Sogobia (also known as the Western Shoshone Nation), where the US nuclear war facility (Nevada Test Site) is located, there has been a unique joint direct action effort between the First World peace movements and the Indigenous Peoples, dealing with issues of colonialism and racism. However, from my own participatory experience, the overwhelming majority of participants were from a white middle-class background, which exemplifies the environmentalists' deep anchor in the milieu of the First World intellectual labor force.For a more thorough discussion on the blockage and the possibility of alliance, we must analyze the class relationship between the "guaranteed- intellectual labor force" (the main force behind the antinuclear and environmentalist movements), nonguaranteed labor force (significantly absent element in those "peace" movements), and the nonwaged labor force and/or those who refuse to be incorporated in the wage scale (Indigenous Peoples and the Fourth World people). The Midnight Notes Collective has been spearheading in this direction. See, for example, Midnight Notes Collective, Strange Victories: The Antinuclear Movement in the US. and Europe (London: Elephant Edition, 1985).

Documents

Kato, Masahide - Nuclear Globalism