Nuclear Culture, Nuclear Criticism

Messmer 161 Michael W. Messmer Nuclear Culture, Nuclear Criticism In an important recent book the historian Paul Boyer demonstrates brilliantly how quickly, how pervasively, and how deeply the atomic bomb penetrated the fabric of American life in the five years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.1 Extremes of fear and hope, pessimism and optimism suffused American reactions to the beginnings of the nuclear age. In virtually every discernable grouping within the American community — from professors and pundits to advertising men and cartoonists, from churchmen and theologians to Hollywood publicity agents, from business people to politicians, from scientists to science-fiction writers, at every level of culture from the most elite empyreans of high culture to the broadest bases of popular culture — the bomb entered Americans' awareness, consciously or unconsciously, clearly or dimly. It is this pervasive cultural embeddedness of the bomb which I intend by the phrase "nuclear culture." My concern here is to investigate ways of exploring this nuclear culture in which we all live and therefore to contribute to the development of that "nuclear criticism" recently called for by the authors of diacritics.1 A variety of approaches to this problem of criticizing nuclear culture have begun to appear in the work of literary critics, philosophers, social theorists, and others who practice critical theory. My assertion is that thinkers in the human sciences can make a contribution to the current nuclear debate different from and supplementary to those made by the policy makers, strategic theorists, military figures, scientists and engineers, peace activists, and politicians to whom we might expect to turn more readily for guidance and whose expertise we might expect to be more directly relevant to the issues posed by a nuclear culture. In what follows I offer several examples of criticism of nuclear culture and, in so doing, hope to demonstrate the depth and intimacy with which specifically nuclear issues entwine with other crucial present concerns. No one needs to listen very long to American politicians who decry current abuses of human rights or to read very far in reports published by Amnesty International to realize the extent to which torture has become a political tool throughout much of the contemporary world. In 1982, 162 the minnesota review Amnesty International listed forty-three different political regimes in which torture is widely used and officially condoned.3 Elaine Scarry begins her recent book, The Body in Pain, with a meditation on torture. In a complex , sometimes frustratingly prolix argument, she seeks to address the fundamental problem of the nature of human creation and its relationship to the human body, and especially to the experience of bodily pain, what the subtitle of her book designates as The Making and Unmaking of the World. Here I want to isolate a fragment of the argument in the first part of her text, which focuses on what she calls "unmaking," that is, ways in which painfully created human worlds are systematically destroyed by human beings themselves. Torture and war are the foci of her attention. What first emerges from her discussion is a phenomenology of torture which presents it as an act in which one of the participants is reduced to nothing but his or her body in pain and the other is similarly reduced to nothing but his or her power, expressed not just in the physical act of torturing but as well (and equally important for her) in the verbal act of interrogation. If, as Scarry argues, "Every act of civilization is an act of transcending the body consonant with the body's needs," then torture is the most extreme manifestation of the negation of civilization, for it breaks the essential bond between the body and the overcoming of the body which is fundamental to any civilized act. A body with no voice, a voice with no body — these are Scarry's tortured and torturer.4 This articulation of torture's structure is followed by a chapter on "The Structure of War." Here Scarry is careful to show that in the final analysis although war inflicts pain to substantiate a set of beliefs (as does torture), there is a fundamental difference centered on the notion of consent. In the case...