Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockets, Satellites, and Nuclear War Via The Strategic Gaze A

Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockets, Satellites, and Nuclear War via the Strategic Gaze
Author(s): Masahide Kato

Source: Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Summer 1993), pp. 339-360
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40644779
Accessed: 02-05-2020 01:32 UTC
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40644779?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Sage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political
This content downloaded from 73.15.84.5 on Sat, 02 May 2020 01:32:02 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Alternatives 18 (1993), 339-360
Nuclear Globalismi
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-closer-
to-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.
339
340 Nuclear Globalismi 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 technosub-
jectivity, 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.1 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.
Masahide Kato 341
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 Space

Through 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).7 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 Objedification 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."8 An aerial
photographer captures the emergence of such rectitude very succinctly:
342 Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockets, Satellites, and Nuclear War via the Strategic Gaze
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.11 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 métropoles.12 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
Masahide Kato 343
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.13 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.14
What is so significant here is not so much a sophistication of warfare

enhanced by technological innovation - as the dissemination of warfare
into the process of technological innovation itself- for ever more vigorous
penetration of the logic of capitalist accumulation.15 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.16
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.17
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.18 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 terre), which produced images with
10-meter resolution (as opposed to the 30-meter resolution provided by
Landsat).19 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."20 Behind the rhetoric of such
Masahide Kato 345
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 iconographie 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.23
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 generis,
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
346 Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockeis, Satellites, and Nuclear War via the Strategic Gaze
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 world - the capitalist twentieth century's "one
world" - is like a photographic overview. . . . This spurious unity of the
world - is effected by translating its contents into images. Images are
always compatible, or can be made compatible, even when the realities
they depict are not25
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
Masahide Kato 347
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
métropoles. 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 capital
I would argue that it is the militancy (especially their neo-Ludditte pr
of some First World environmentalist groups, not their actual ide
that counters global capitalism. In fact, the First World environment
and antinuclear discourses have been the very media through w
globalist discourse has been disseminated. I will next discuss nuc
criticism as the case in point.
Nuclear War Imagined and Nuclear War as Real
The vigorous invasion of the logic of capitalist accumulation int

last vestige of relatively autonomous space in the periphery unde
capitalism is propelled not only by the desire for incorporating
fabric of the society into the division of labor but also by the
for "pure" destruction/extermination of the periphery.26 The penetr
of capital into the social fabric and the destruction of natu
preexisting social organizations by capital are not separable. How
what we have witnessed in the phase of late capitalism is a r
intensification of the destruction and extermination of the perip
In this context, capital is no longer interested in incorporating
parts of the periphery into the international division of labor.
emergence of such "pure" destruction/extermination of the peri
can be explained, at least partially, by another problematic o
capitalism formulated by Ernest Mandel: the mass production o
means of destruction.27 Particularly, the latest phase of capi
distinguishes itself from the earlier phases in its production of
"ultimate" means of destruction/extermination, i.e., nuclear weap
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).30
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
Masahide Kato 349
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 batde 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.32 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 complementarity 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 problemat
involved in nuclear catastrophe are thus reduced to the single poss
instant of extinction. The task of nuclear critics is clearly designa
by Schell as coming to grips with the one and only final instant: "human
extinction - whose likelihood we are chiefly interested in finding
about."35 Deconstructionists, on the other hand, take a detour in th
efforts to theologize extinction. Jacques Derrida, for example, solidi
the prevailing mode of representation by constituting extinction
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
Masahide Kato 351
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.37 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 figurai 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
than in nebulous nuclear psychology: the hollowness of extinction is

a result of "confusing figure with the object."40 This phenomenon, called
"the delirium of interpretation" by Virilio, is a mechanical process in
which incorporeal existence is given a meaning via the figure.41 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 Reiconhaissance 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. E 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
Masahide Kato 353
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.44
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 figurai 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 fìgurality 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."46
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 integrity - or
of the possibility of integrity - in 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."48
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.50 In a similar vein, the nuclear
Masahide 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."51
The holism reconstructed here is a discursive translation of the
instantaneous focal change (from the image of the whole to the imag
of the spot) from the point of the absolute strategic gaze. Overall, th
nuclear critics' position in freezing the status quo - that is, the existin
unequal power relationship - produces nothing short of an absolu
affirmation of the latest forms of capitalist domination mediated b
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 delineat
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, whic
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 lat

capitalism is a total eradication of "the other" by abolishing the notio
of territory. As I have already discussed, what matters for the First Worl
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 violen
against the Third World, Fourth World, and Indigenous Peoples.
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 Lifton'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 technosub-
jectivity, 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.55
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.56 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 technosub-
jectivity. 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 10-
11, 1991.
1. Theodore W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflection from Damaged Life, trans.
E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), pp. 107-108.
2. Jack Manno, Arming the Heavens: The Hidden Military Agenda for Space, 1945-
1995 (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1984), p. 11.
3. 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).
4. 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.
5. 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).
6. 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 sphere - family, personal life, free time, and perhaps even
fantasy and dreams - everything 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 Ludda: 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.
9. Emphasis added. Newhall, note 3, Airborne Camera, p. 54.
10. Margarette Dreikaussen, Aerial Perception: The Earth as Seen from Aircraft
and Spacecraft and Its Influence on Contemporary Art (Philadelphia: Art Alliance,
1985), p. 54.
11. Virilio, note 4, p. 136.
12. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. II, ed. Frederik Engels (New York: International
Publishers, 1967), pp. 252-264.
13. Manno, note 2, p. 140.
14. Ibid., p. 158.
15. 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.
16. Quoted in Newhall, note 3, Airborne Camera, p. 122.
17. Manno, note 2, p. 134.
18. Ibid., p. 143.
19. 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.
20. Ann M. Florini and Willam C. Potter, "Goodwill Missions for Castoff
Missiles," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 46, no. 9 (1990): 30.
21. 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.
22. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, ed. James Clavell (New York: Delacorte Press,
1983), p. 15.
23. 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.
24. Quoted in Dale Carter, Final Frontier: The Rise and Fall of the American
Rocket State (New York: Verso, 1989), p. 198.
25. 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 Mandei, 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.
29. Ibid.
30. 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 Greenpeace 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 clear 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.
33. Virilio and Lotringer, note 15, Pure War, pp. 159-172; Negri and Guattari,
note 7, p. 63.
34. Manno, note 2, p. 42.
35. Jonathan Schell, Fate of the Earth (New York: Avon Books, 1982), p. 76.
36. Jacques Derrida, "No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles,
seven missives)," Diacritics 14 (1984): 23.
37. Derrik De Kerkhove, "On Nuclear Communication," Diacritics 14 (1984):
78; Firth, note 30, Nuclear Playground, p. x.
38. Schell, note 35, p. 21.
39. 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.
43. E. P Thompson, note 32, p. 28.
44. Italics original. Robert Jay Lifton and Richard Falk, Indefensible Weapons:
The Political and Psychological Case Against Nuclearism (New York: Basic Books,
1982), p. 115.
45. Sontaer, note 8, On Photography, p. 111.
46. De Kerckhove, note 37, p. 79.
48. Lifton and Falk, note 44, p. 120.
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).
50. 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.
52. Similar argument is made by the Midnight Notes Collective, Midnight Notes
4, no. 1 (1983).
53. Italics original. Harvey, note 23, The Condition of Postmodernity. p. 252.
54. Jameson, note 6, p. 92.
55. 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.

56. 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 environmen-
talists' deep anchor in the milieu of the First World intellectual labor force.
57. 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 U.S. and Europe (London: Elephant
Edition, 1985).

Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockets, Satellites, and Nuclear War Via The Strategic Gaze A

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockets, Satellites, and Nuclear War Via The Strategic Gaze A

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

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

Author(s): Masahide Kato

Theorem: when fixed social capital appears as nuclear capital, then

Nuclear war has been enclosed by two seemingly opposite yet

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

In the first half of this article, I trace this disqualification process

Triumph of the Strategic Gaze

Historical contestations over the privileged position of the gaze and

Late Capitalist Reconstruction of Time and Space

Following the pathbreaking work of Ernest Mandel, Frederic Jameson

The Objedification of the Periphery

As mentioned earlier, the absolute point of the strategic gaze abolishes

The advantage of hyperaltitude space photographs is that each one

The pursuit of rectitude in the field of aerial photography has been

What I want is a radar surveillance system which allows you to spot

What is so significant here is not so much a sophistication of warfare

It seems evident that one of the best ways to produce suitable

Such practice of reframing/redefining the periphery through photo image

stood to reap the most dramatic benefits. Speculators in crop futures

Politically speaking, the image recapitulation of the earth by

First World Way of Seeing

As I have argued, the objectification of Earth from the absolute point

global discourse facilitated by the dissemination of the image of the

development" of capitalism. Therefore, the globalist discourse masks, for

Nuclear War Imagined and Nuclear War as Real

The vigorous invasion of the logic of capitalist accumulation int

Thus, from the perspectives of the Fourth World and Indigenous

Nuclear explosions in the atmosphere . . . were global in effect. The

Although Firth's book is definitely a remarkable study of the history

Nuclear Criticism and Globalist Discourse

Nuclear criticism flourished particularly during the early 1980s in reaction

Reflecting the historical context mentioned above, in which nuclear

The Configuration of Extinction

Nuclear criticism finds the likelihood of "extinction" as the most

never occurred, itself; it is a non-event. The explosion of American

By representing the possible extinction as the single most important

than in nebulous nuclear psychology: the hollowness of extinction is

Late Capitalist Reiconhaissance and ''Global" Technosubjectivity

Nuclear criticism offers preservation of self and matter as a solution

defined the collectivity in danger by comparing the threat of extinction

But unlike ordinary hostage taking, nuclear terror encompasses

critics' assertion regarding the preservation of the ecosphere or the

I do want to insist that the problem with the Enlightenment thought

Therefore, what is so characteristic of the global spatial order in lat

Frederic Jameson's proposed formula to cope with the global strategy

First World environmentalist and antinuclear movements can overcome

Negri and Guattari, note 7, p 129.

You might also like