Nuclear Cultures: Irradiated Subjects, Aesthetics and Planetary Precarity
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This essay examines two unclassifiable texts—interweaving the genres of the essay, novel, poetry, and life writing—published in Japanese and in French in the aftermath of the triple disaster that hit Japan on 11 March 2011. These post-Fukushima hybrid works by Hideo Furukawa and Michaël Ferrier attempt to narrativize this unprecedented conjunction of natural and man-made catastrophes—which combined the unfathomable damage caused by the tsunami and the invisible nuclear radiation, which both induce a specific challenge in terms of representation—by blending not only the fictional and the documentary, but also the personal and the collective, via a plurality of voices (including those of victims met in the Fukushima region in 2011). This allows them to develop a critical, (bio)political, and historical perspective on these events, their causes, and their consequences, and to counter nationalist and, at times, misleading official discourses conveyed by the Japanese central state and the media. By so doing, they directly follow in the footsteps of trailblazers of disaster literature and of the composite genre of “notes” in the twentieth century, most notably Kenzaburō Ōe and Svetlana Alexievich, the authors, respectively, of Hiroshima Notes (1965) and Voices from Chernobyl (1997).
Latour encourages us to use science-in-the-making as an entry point to understanding science, because it allows us to see how scientific knowledge is constituted and through which processes the ‘absolute certainties’ of ready-made science appear. He approaches science-in-the-making from the perspective of semiotics because it enables him (1) to attribute equal importance to humans and nonhumans, and (2) to let the actors in scientific practices speak for themselves. We argue that Latour’s semiotic approach to science-in-the-making and his understanding of scientific instruments as inscription devices do not fulfill these desiderata. This, in turn, prevents him from understanding the crucial role that scientific instruments play in science-in-the-making. As an alternative to Latour’s semiotic approach, we present a postphenomenological approach to studying science-in-the-making. Using the notion of technological mediation, we argue that scientific instruments actively mediate how reality becomes present to – and is treated by – scientists. Focusing on how intentional relations between scientists and the world are mediated by scientific instruments makes it possible to turn them into genuine actors that speak for themselves, thereby recognizing their constitutive role in the development of the interpretational frameworks of scientists. We then show how a postphenomenological approach can be understood as an ethnomethodology of human-technology relations that meets both of Latour’s requirements when studying science-in-the-making.
Experiencing the atrocities in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945, Chinese-ink painter Iri Maruki and oil painter Toshi Maruki began their collaboration on the Hiroshima Panels in 1950. During the occupation of Japan by the Allied powers, when reporting on the atomic bombing was strictly prohibited, the panels played a crucial role in making known the hidden nuclear sufferings through a nationwide tour. In 1953, the panels began a ten-year tour of about 20 countries, mainly in East Asia and Europe, and disseminated the stories of the sufferings in the age of the US-Soviet arms race. Acquiring perspectives that transcended national borders and ethnicities through dialogues with many people in these exhibitions, the Marukis embarked on collaborations in a new direction in the 1970s with their emphasis on complex realities of war in which the victim/perpetrator dichotomy was not clear-cut and on other forms of violence such as pollution and discrimination. The forceful images of the paintings give us an opportunity to know the memories of the dead that would otherwise be doomed to be erased from our collective memory, and to stimulate our imagination to recognize that we are always facing the problem of life. Understanding the “memories” that we have never experienced would constitute a torch to survive hardships in this world.
In the present essay we argue for biophilosophy as a feminist and posthumanities methodology that attends to the question of life by focusing on multiple differences and transformations, materiality and processuality, as well as relations, intra-actions, and disconnections. By combining both the ontological and ethical concerns that go beyond what is conventionally seen as “life”, biophilosophy offers a critical and innovative approach to the issues of death, extinction, liveability, terminality, and toxicity, among others, which all form a backbone of the environmental crises and changing conditions of life on Earth, also framed as the Anthropocene.
We first discuss select theorisations and implications of the “life/death” coupling as an ethico-political question; subsequently we elaborate the concept of biophilosophy as a methodology; and finally, we propose two examples where we test biophilosophy as a framework that allows us: (1) to engage with the enmeshment of life and death through the concept of the non/living, and (2) to explore the concept of toxic embodiment as an onto-ethical condition we all (human and nonhuman) are differentially immersed in.
In: Berger, K. Mäki-Reinikka, K. O’Reilly & H. Sederholm, eds. Art As We Don’t Know It. Helsinki: Aalto ARTS Books, pp. 54-63. [peer-reviewed]
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The concept of scientific persona was developed by historians of science at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin fifteen years ago in order to understand how science works and how it can be conducted in a credible way. The Latin word persona means mask and the discussions of the term were elaborations of Marcel Mauss´s introduction of the concept in an article published in 1938 (Mauss 1938). In Mauss´s conceptualisation, persona was a feature that characterized societies in an evolutionary stage—a stage where members of the society had started to perceive themselves as individuals, but were still expected to fulfill certain, culturally defined roles. In such contexts, persona was not mask to cover the ‘real’ self of the performer, but a mask that enhanced certain features of the person. Transferring Mauss’s approach to the scientific world, Lorraine Daston and Otto Sibum (2003) defined, in an often cited article in Science in Context, scientific persona as an intermediate between individual biography and social (scientific) institution: it is a cultural identity that forms the individual in body and mind, and creates a collective with a shared and recognizable physiognomy (ways to be and to behave). Daston and Sibum characterized scientific personas as templates that emerge and develop in historical contexts and used the concept to investigate the creation of certain types of scientists: when, how and why have distinct “scientific personae” emerged?
This paper analyses hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) poetry as examples of the nuclear sublime, which Rob Wilson argues is ‘one of the unimaginable, trans-material grounds of a global condition that, paradoxically, can and must be re- imagined, represented, and invoked to prevent this trauma of negativity from happening in post-Cold War history’ (1989: 1). We argue that of all atomic bomb literature, poetry best captures the devastation of atomic warfare and a message of hope for the future because of its emphasis on the economy of expression and, as Robert Jay Lifton argues, its ‘symbolic transformation’ (1991: 21). The ineffability of experience, explored in the Burkean Romantic Sublime, will be discussed as persisting into the politics of the twentieth century and impacting on definitions of the nuclear sublime. While hibakusha continue to be discriminated against – compounded recently by the ongoing catastrophe at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex – the nuclear sublime compels them to record their experiences in testimony, literature or poetry or to risk a ‘forgetting’ that may lead to the annihilation of the human race. This paper argues that poetry – specifically tanka and haiku – best captures the nuclear sublime.
This study examines the impact of photographic-textual and risk-benefit frames on the level of visual attention, risk perception, and public support for nuclear energy and nanotechnology in Singapore. Using a 2 (photographic-textual vs. textual-only frames) x 2 (risk vs. benefit frames) x 2 (nuclear energy vs. nanotechnology) between-subject design with eye-tracking data, the results showed that photographic-textual frames elicited more attention and did have partial amplification effect. However, this was observable only in the context of nuclear energy, where public support was lowest when participants were exposed to risk frames accompanied by photographs. Implications for theory and practice were discussed.
The concept of 'scholarly personae' emerged about a decade ago in the history of science. Since then it has increasingly been used both inside and outside the historical discipline. This article examines where this interest comes from, what shapes it takes, and what types of research it stimulates. The thesis advanced in this article is that interest in scholarly personae, defined as ideal-typical models of being a scholar, emerges from at least four different sources. 1) The theme enables historical theorists to develop a 'philosophy of historical practices'. 2) It offers historians the possibility of writing an integrated history of the sciences and the humanities. 3) It challenges linear story lines in historical writing. 4) Last but not least, it stimulates moral reflection on contemporary models of being a scholar, if only by providing a vocabulary for those wishing to judge models like the 'successful grant applicant' on their relative merits.
In this article Bosch argues in favour of an understanding of the concept of ‘persona’ in which embodiment means more than the conclusion that everything that men do originates in or arises from a body. Following historians of science and their biographical achievements, Bosch considers being perceived as a reliable and trustworthy scientist or scholar as the core of the formation of a scientific/scholarly identity or persona that scientists and scholars can perform in a specific context. They do so with an eye to how other scientists perform their identities and with the creative use of old and new repertoires of scientific performance and social constructions of identity (for instance in terms of gender, class or race) that contribute to scientific authority. By focussing on the scientific or scholarly persona or the self-fashioning in biographies of scholars and scientists, such works can elucidate the epistemology of a discipline or field of research, especially with respect to the question of who earns scientific authority on what grounds. After a thorough discussion of the relevant literature relating to scientific biography or the biographical approach to historiography in which the concept of persona plays a role, Bosch, by way of a light exercise, applies her definition of persona to the analysis of an eclectically selected group of Dutch historians, men and women.
Wetenschappelijke personae en twintigste-eeuwse historici. Verkenning van een concept.
Bosch pleit in dit artikel voor een opvatting van het concept ‘persona’ waarin ‘embodiment’ of belichaming meer is dan de vaststelling dat alles wat mensen doen een oorsprong heeft in of voortkomt uit een lichaam. In navolging van wetenschapshistorici en hun biografische verrichtingen ziet Bosch het worden waargenomen als een betrouwbaar en geloofwaardig wetenschapper als de kern van de vorming van een wetenschappelijke identiteit of wetenschappelijke persona die wetenschapsbeoefenaars in een bepaalde tijd en context kunnen aannemen. Zij doen dat met oog voor hoe collega-wetenschappers dat doen en door de creatieve inzet van oude en nieuwe repertoires van wetenschappelijk gedrag en van sociale constructies van identiteit (bijvoorbeeld van gender of klasse) die bij kunnen dragen aan wetenschappelijk gezag. Door te focussen op de wetenschappelijke persona of de self-fashioning van de wetenschapper in de biografie van wetenschappers en geleerden kan de biografie licht werpen op de epistemologie van een vak, met name waar het gaat om wie wel of niet op welke gronden wetenschappelijk gezag verwerft. Na een bespreking van de relevante literatuur op het gebied van wetenschapsbiografie en de biografische benadering van historiografie waarin het persona-begrip een rol speelt, past Bosch haar concept van persona bij wijze van oefening toe op een eclectisch samengestelde groep Nederlandse historici, mannen en vrouwen.
Protest against nuclear power plants, uranium mining and nuclear testing played a pivotal role in the rise of a mass environmental movement around the globe in the 1970s and 1980s. Nevertheless, the history of anti-nuclear activism has largely been told from a strictly national perspective. This HSR Focus approaches the phenomenon from a transnational perspective for the first time. Against the backdrop of the debate on transnational history, this article develops a framework of analysis, and contextualizes anti-nuclear protest in a broader postwar perspective. The contributions show that anti-nuclear movements across the globe were transnationally connected. First, scientific expertise and protest practices were transferred between movements, and subsequently adapted to local requirements. Secondly, transnational cooperation and networks did indeed emerge, playing an important role in taking protest to the international and European level. However, as opposed to contemporary rhetoric of grass-roots transnational solidarity, such cooperation was limited to a small, highly skilled and committed group of mediators - often semi-professional activists - who managed to overcome the obstacles of distance and cultural differences and had access to the necessary resources.
Images of scientists and ideas about science are often communicated to the public through historic biographies of eminent scientists, yet there has been little study of the development of scientific biography. Telling Lives brings together a collection of original essays by leading historians of science, several of them biographers, which explore for the first time the nature and development of scientific biography and its importance in forming our ideas about what scientists do, how science works, and why scientific biography remains popular. Theoretical and historical studies range from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, concentrating on such icons as Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, Humphry Davy, Florence Nightingale and Sir Joseph Banks. With its broad sweep and careful, imaginative scholarship, this volume provides a timely and challenging examination of an important aspect of the culture of science that will be of special interest to historians of science, academics and students, and the general reader interested in the popularization of science.
This book is an analysis of the complex but hierarchical global nuclear order produced, maintained, and obscured by the workings of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime. Using an analysis heavily influenced by postcolonial International Relations theory, the book examines the interstate inequalities that sustain this order, the mechanisms that produce a (mimetic) desire for nuclear weapons, the neoliberal interests that drive the production of nuclear power, and the communities and bodies made vulnerable by nuclear pursuits. Making a case for nuclear abolition, the book suggests that the path to nuclear zero is more effectively traversed through the political economy of injustice rather than the prism of “security”. This book is unique in bringing a Postcolonial approach to the study of the global nuclear order. The book is aimed primarily at scholars and students of International Relations (IR). In terms of its academic genealogy, it is situated within two areas in IR – Postcolonial International Relations and Critical Security Studies.
This book was written especially for all those concerned for the welfare of children, but it also serves as a compendium for pediatricians to the hazards of atomic radiation and other effects of the bomb. In a sense the text may be considered a continuation of the Academy's endeavor to communicate related information to its membership in which I have participated in the past.
This effort began in 1957 when the Academy created a Committee of Radiation Hazard and Epidemiology of Malformations that subsequently became the Committee on Environmental Hazards. My assignments included updating the information on the ongoing studies of the children in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Marshall Islands and related studies, which the Committee reported in Pediatrics.
It has been my privilege to serve on the Committee especially with Drs Robert Aldrich, Lee Farr, Fred Silverman, and Paul Wehrle, most of whom successively chaired the Committee. They have encouraged the writing of the narrative and have reviewed the manuscript.
Images of scientists and ideas about science are often communicated to the public through historic biographies of eminent scientists, yet there has been little study of the development of scientific biography. Telling Lives brings together a collection of original essays by leading historians of science, several of them biographers, which explore for the first time the nature and development of scientific biography and its importance in forming our ideas about what scientists do, how science works, and why scientific biography remains popular. Theoretical and historical studies range from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, concentrating on such icons as Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, Humphry Davy, Florence Nightingale and Sir Joseph Banks. With its broad sweep and careful, imaginative scholarship, this volume provides a timely and challenging examination of an important aspect of the culture of science that will be of special interest to historians of science, academics and students, and the general reader interested in the popularization of science.
The Nobel prize places scientists who have usually not been the object of attention outside of their own area of expertise in the public eye. This paper investigates two aspects of this. First, it describes theoretically how a public persona that to a significant extent depends on a process of ’celebrification’ has been constructed, not so much of the individual laureate but of the role as Nobel laureate. Second, it investigates the historical roots of this. Looking at the process from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective, we find that the Nobel laureates become a special kind of scientific celebrities, since their fame is based not so much on their public achievements as on the selection by a committee. This is traced to the first decades of the prize’s history, using examples from the first award in 1901 to the early 1930s. We also see how the annual repetitions of the media representations of the prize helped create the persona of the Nobel laureate. The conclusion is that the laureates are not celebrities in their own right, but as a representative of a type – a constructed cultural persona called the Nobel laureate.
This article explores the legal structures and discursive framings informing the governance of one particular “backward” region of India, the Andaman Islands. I trace the shifting patterns of occupation and development of the islands in the colonial and postcolonial periods, with a focus on the changes wrought by independence in 1947 and the eventual history of planned development there. I demonstrate how intersecting discourses of indigenous savagery/primitivism and the geographical emptiness were repeatedly mobilized in colonial-era surveys and postcolonial policy documents. Postcolonial visions of developing the Andaman Islands ushered in a settler-colonial governmentality, infused with genocidal fantasies of the “dying savage.” Laws professing to protect aboriginal Jarawas actually worked to unilaterally extend Indian sovereignty over the lands and bodies of a community clearly hostile to such incorporation. I question the current exclusion of India from the global geographies of settler-colonialism and argue that the violent and continuing history of indigenous marginalization in the Andaman Islands represents a de facto operation of a logic of terra nullius .
In the United States anti-aging is a multibillion-dollar industry, and efforts to combat signs of aging have never been stronger, or more lucrative. Although there are many sociological studies of aging and culture, there are few studies that examine the ways cultural texts construct multiple narratives of aging that intersect and sometimes conflict with existing social theories of aging. In Uncanny Subjects: Aging in Contemporary Narrative, Amelia DeFalco contributes to the ongoing discourse of aging studies by incorporating methodologies and theories derived from the humanities in her investigation into contemporary representations of aging. The movement of aging is the movement of our lives, and this dynamism aligns aging with narrative: both are a function of time, of change, of one event happening after another. Subjects understand their lives through narrative trajectories-through stories-not necessarily as they are living moment to moment, but in reflection, reflection that becomes, many argue, more and more prevalent as one ages. As a result, narrative fiction provides compelling representations of the strange-indeed uncanny-familiarity of the aging self. In Uncanny Subjects, DeFalco explores a thematic similitude in a range of contemporary fiction and film by authors and directors such as John Banville, John Cassavetes, and Alice Munro. As their texts suggest, proceeding into old age involves a growing awareness of the otherness within, an awareness that reveals identity as multiple, shifting, and contradictory-in short, uncanny. Drawing together theories of the uncanny with research on aging and temporality, DeFalco argues that aging is a category of difference integral to a contemporary understanding of identity and alterity.
This book analyses the 1980s as a nuclear decade, focusing on British and United States fiction. Ranging across genres including literary fiction, science fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, graphic novels, children’s and young adult literature, thrillers and horror, it shows how pressing nuclear issues were, particularly the possibility of nuclear war, were and how deeply they penetrated the culture. It is innovative for its discussion of a “nuclear transatlantic,” placing British and American texts in dialogue with one another, for its identification of a vibrant young adult fiction that resonates with more conventionally studied literatures of the period and for its analysis of a “politics of vulnerability” animating nuclear debates. Placing nuclear literature in social and historical contexts, it shows how novels and short stories responded not only to nuclear fears, but also crystallised contemporary debates about issues of gender, the environment, society and the economy.
Discussion of global climate change is shaped by the intellectual categories developed to address capitalism and globalization. Yet climate change is only one manifestation of humanity’s varied and accelerating impact on the Earth System. The common predicament that may be anticipated in the Anthropocene raises difficult questions of distributive justice – between rich and poor, developed and developing countries, the living and the yet unborn, and even the human and the non-human – and may pose a challenge to the categories on which our traditions of political thought are based. Awareness of the Anthropocene encourages us to think of humans on different scales and in different contexts – as parts of a global capitalist system and as members of a now-dominant species – although the debate is, for now, still structured by the experiences and concepts of the developed world.
Each month brings new scientific findings that demonstrate the ways in which human activities, from resource extraction to carbon emissions, are doing unprecedented, perhaps irreparable damage to our world. As we hear these climate change reports and their predictions for the future of Earth, many of us feel a sickening sense of déjà vu, as though we have already seen the sad outcome to this story. Drawing from recent scholarship that analyzes climate change as a form of "slow violence" that humans are inflicting on the environment, Climate Trauma theorizes that such violence is accompanied by its own psychological condition, what its author terms "Pretraumatic Stress Disorder." Examining a variety of films that imagine a dystopian future, renowned media scholar E. Ann Kaplan considers how the increasing ubiquity of these works has exacerbated our sense of impending dread. But she also explores ways these films might help us productively engage with our anxieties, giving us a seemingly prophetic glimpse of the terrifying future selves we might still work to avoid becoming. Examining dystopian classics like Soylent Green alongside more recent examples like The Book of Eli, Climate Trauma also stretches the limits of the genre to include features such as Blindness, The Happening, Take Shelter, and a number of documentaries on climate change. These eclectic texts allow Kaplan to outline the typical blind-spots of the genre, which rarely depicts climate catastrophe from the vantage point of women or minorities. Lucidly synthesizing cutting-edge research in media studies, psychoanalytic theory, and environmental science, Climate Trauma provides us with the tools we need to extract something useful from our nightmares of a catastrophic future.
This article charts a media historical relation between radiation and celluloid film, ranging from the downwind 1956 production of The Conqueror to early scientific imaging practices, war photography, war documentaries, military industrial film, and contemporary artists working on radiation aesthetics. Posing the collection as a diagnostic media ecology, this article argues that the valuable evidence provided by the environmental metadata stored in celluloid film is the product of ecological warfare and violence. By turning to the material sciences for a better understanding of how nuclear weapons affect media on large spatial and temporal scales we gain a parallax view to how photographic practices – defined as the aesthetic exchange of light and energy – occur autonomously within our ecology, although some of these forces are mobilised in deadly and imperceptible ways. By demonstrating that non-human agencies released by Cold War energy policies have contaminated military industrial and commercial film archives alike, this article asserts that nuclear testing and warfare have contributed to a global condition of test-subjectivity that can be evidenced by diagnostic media ecology.
The genre of scientific biography is among the oldest in the history of science literature, but its historiographical value has not always been appreciated. With the professionalization of history of science in the post-1950 period, and especially with the turn to social history in the 1970s, biographies of individual scientists became somewhat unfashionable. Although it is generally agreed that biographies that integrate social and institutional dimensions are preferable, the approach is not without problems. One problem concerns the division between science and non-science, and another the involvement of the biographer in the history of his or her chosen subject. In the discussion of the merits of scientific biographies, it is important to recognize how broad and varied the genre is, not least when it comes to audiences. Although the standard biography deals with the life and work of an individual scientist of the past, there are also interesting experiments with more non-standard kinds of biography.
Tracing material and metaphoric waste through the Western canon, ranging from Beowulf to Samuel Beckett, Susan Morrison disrupts traditional perceptions of waste to better understand how we theorize, manage, and are implicated in what is discarded and seen as garbage. Engaging a wide range of disciplines, Morrison addresses how the materiality of waste has been sedimented into a variety of toxic metaphors. The vibrancy of matter itself disturbs these metaphors, especially those used to characterize people as disposable garbage. If scholars can read waste as possessing dynamic agency, how might that change the ethics of refuse-ing and ostracizing wasted humans? A major contribution to the growing field of Waste Studies, this comparative and theoretically innovative book confronts the reader with the ethical urgency present in waste literature itself.
Images of scientists and ideas about science are often communicated to the public through historic biographies of eminent scientists, yet there has been little study of the development of scientific biography. Telling Lives brings together a collection of original essays by leading historians of science, several of them biographers, which explore for the first time the nature and development of scientific biography and its importance in forming our ideas about what scientists do, how science works, and why scientific biography remains popular. Theoretical and historical studies range from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, concentrating on such icons as Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, Humphry Davy, Florence Nightingale and Sir Joseph Banks. With its broad sweep and careful, imaginative scholarship, this volume provides a timely and challenging examination of an important aspect of the culture of science that will be of special interest to historians of science, academics and students, and the general reader interested in the popularization of science.
In this compelling interdisciplinary study, Elizabeth Klaver considers how autopsies are performed in a variety of contexts, from the "real" thing in hospitals and county morgues to various depictions in paintings, novels, plays, films, and television shows. Autopsies can serve a variety of pedagogical, legal, scientific, and social functions, and the autopsied cadaver, Klaver shows, has lately become one of the most spectacular bodies offered up to the public on film, television, and the Internet. Setting her discussion within the history of the modern autopsy, and including the narrative of her own attendance at a medical autopsy, Klaver makes the autopsy readable in a number of diverse venues, from Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson and Vesalius's Fabrica to The Silence of the Lambs, The X-Files, and CSI. Moving from the actual autopsy itself to its broader symbolic ramifications, Klaver addresses questions as disparate as the social constructedness of the body, the perception and treatment of death under late capitalism, and the ubiquity of paranoia in contemporary culture.
In 1954, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had emerged from World War II as America's foremost scientific advisor to government, faced a security hearing which stripped him of his security clearance and barred him from government work. This paper provides a novel interpretation of this event and its significance by arguing that the hearing exposed fundamental and endemic tensions in the place of science in liberal democratic politics. Science's image of impersonal objectivity makes it useful to the liberal democratic state. Scientific advice helps to legitimize executive power as a neutral tool of the public will. However, as it is appropriated by the state, science is itself held accountable to bureaucratic conceptions of objectivity. Personal trust and personal authority in science become problematic in the context of state administration and the use of science for political legitimation. The Oppenheimer hearing exemplified the way in which the incorporation of science into the administrative apparatus of government has involved disciplining scientific experts and fashioning scientific authority after the bureaucratic model of the state.
This book analyzes the relationship between the imagination of the global and the ethical commitment to the local in environmentalist thought and writing from the 1960s to the present. Part I critically examines the emphasis on local identities and communities in North American environmentalism by establishing conceptual connections between environmentalism and ecocriticism, on one hand, and theories of globalization, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism, on the other. It proposes the concept of "eco-cosmopolitanism" as a shorthand for envisioning these connections and the cultural and aesthetic forms into which they translate. Part II focuses on conceptualizations of environmental danger and connects environmentalist and ecocritical thought with the interdisciplinary field of risk theory in the social sciences, arguing that environmental justice theory and ecocriticism stand to benefit from closer consideration of the theories of cosmopolitanism that have arisen in this field from the analysis of transnational communities at risk. Both parts of the book combine in-depth theoretical discussion with detailed analyses of novels, poems, films, computer software, and installation artworks from the United States and abroad that translate new connections between global, national, and local forms of awareness into innovative aesthetic forms combining allegory, epic, and views of the planet as a whole with modernist and postmodernist strategies of fragmentation, montage, collage, and zooming.
Lynch's essay explores the divergence between the symbolic imaginary of nuclear power and the imaginative terrain of environmentalism through a look at documentary film about the civilian nuclear industry. Lynch first analyzes several films about US antireactor activism produced in the 1970s and 1980s, showing how they manifest the codependence of antireactor activism and environmentalism. She then turns to recent films that look more broadly at the industrial processes involved in nuclear power creation. Drawing on disparate strands of scholarly inquiry- including ecocriticism, documentary theory, and science studies- Lynch reads these newer documentaries to illuminate how changing political, material, and economic realities have reshaped how opponents of nuclear energy imagine the relationships between body, place, and planet. She suggests that this reimagining is predicated on a complex global sensibility far more sophisticated than that embraced by past US opponents of nuclear power, as these newer films bring to mind what ecocritic Ursula Heise has described as "eco-cosmopolitanism" or "environmental world citizenship." This latter group of films, in fact, serves as a model for cosmopolitan environmental discourse, thus broadening the applicability of Heise's revisionary critique into a reconsideration of environmentalism as represented in documentary film.
Having set global warming in irreversible motion, we are facing the possibility of ecological catastrophe. But the environmental emergency is also a crisis for our philosophical habits of thought, confronting us with a problem that seems to defy not only our control but also our understanding. Global warming is perhaps the most dramatic example of what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects”—entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place. In this book, Morton explains what hyperobjects are and their impact on how we think, how we coexist with one another and with nonhumans, and how we experience our politics, ethics, and art. Moving fluidly between philosophy, science, literature, visual and conceptual art, and popular culture, the book argues that hyperobjects show that the end of the world has already occurred in the sense that concepts such as world, nature, and even environment are no longer a meaningful horizon against which human events take place. Instead of inhabiting a world, we find ourselves inside a number of hyperobjects, such as climate, nuclear weapons, evolution, or relativity. Such objects put unbearable strains on our normal ways of reasoning. Insisting that we have to reinvent how we think to even begin to comprehend the world we now live in, Hyperobjects takes the first steps, outlining a genuinely postmodern ecological approach to thought and action.