Infrastructure Beyond Control: Clowning the Nuclear Age

Clowns are, perhaps surprisingly, recurring figures in nuclear literature. Russell Hoban's 1980 post-nuclear-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker includes a mutation of the English clown/puppet show Punch and Judy as a major motif, while in a more realist mode the Māori novelist James George's 2005 Ocean Roads features a character who has leukemia as a result of his father's work developing the atom bomb, and who spends much of the novel performing beautifully-described clown routines. Martin Cruz Smith's 1986 Stallion Gate, a historical novel about the construction of the first nuclear infrastructures at Los Alamos, opposes the Western scientism of the nuclear complex with the decolonial epistemologies of Pueblo clowns, and in activist circles anti-nuclear protestors have dressed as clowns for their protest actions across two decades (Plowshares 2018). What is it, then, that makes clowning a go-to aesthetic form for thinking about nuclear infrastructures and their failures?

My contention in this essay is that clowning, as an art form rooted in the tension between control and its loss, is uniquely able to help us to conceptualize infrastructure (and specifically nuclear infrastructures) as a material object that simultaneously fulfills a fantasy of control and confronts us with the limits of that fantasy. The question of infrastructure, in turn, is central to critical theories of control. In his 1992 essay "Postscript on the Societies of Control," for instance, Gilles Deleuze frames control as a specifically infrastructural issue. Narrating the turn from Foucault's "disciplinary societies" to "the societies of control," Deleuze describes the disciplinary society as being constituted by and through "environments of enclosure," built environments such as the school, the barracks, the hospital, and the prison that organize and orient human life towards the orderly extraction of capital (1992, 3-4). With the post-World War II shift into the society of control comes a different set of infrastructures with a different mode of social and spatial organization: "the crisis of the hospital as environment of enclosure" produces new sites such as "neighborhood clinics, hospices, and day care" (4). The story of the shift from the disciplinary society to the control society thus brings with it its own environmental narrative of a transition from the fixed, spectacular structures of discipline to the flexible assemblages of infrastructural control; as Deleuze writes, "Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point" (4).

This understanding of infrastructure as central to a decentralized, Deleuzian system of power has been fundamental to recent analyses of infrastructure's social function, especially in critical theory and the social sciences. Building on the work of Michel Foucault, social theory has developed a broad consensus that "liberal 'government' does not reside exclusively or even primarily in governments but consists rather in ad hoc assemblages of technologies and designs, architectures, and infrastructures that make up the built environment" (Wakefield 2018, 2). Yet as Stephanie Wakefield has pointed out, the idea of infrastructure as a space of control, of mastery over the natural world, has come under increasing pressure in the emerging timescale referred to as the Anthropocene, as degrading infrastructures become more present in everyday life and ongoing disasters such as climate change and toxification become visible as a consequence of precisely the desire for the control indexed by large-scale infrastructural projects (2018). This shift suggests the need for a more dialectical understanding of the relationship between control and out-of-controlness, one that can account for the ways in which fantasies of control intersect with the awareness of the impossibility of control to shape the emergence of infrastructure itself.

This article addresses the relationship between infrastructure, environment, and control through an analysis of nuclear infrastructures and their epistemological foundations, and the challenges posed to those foundations by recent representations of nuclear infrastructures, their failures, and the clowns who inhabit them. My objects of analysis are two nuclear texts drawn from very different fields. The first is the 1983...