Rocket States: Atomic Weaponry and the Cultural Imagination 9781628926910

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List of Illustrations Figure 1 The sheltering form of the parabola . . . occurs . . . just prior

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to the development of the mushroom cloud: a convex shape of light and thick fog . . . consolidates . . . into a spherical, englobing structure. Figure shows a red trajectory rocketing skywards, while US ‘super’ power languishes, a plain stretching out beneath Soviet missiles. A scope of leads . . . are inserted into what, in the illustration above is an impressionist rendering of the shades of the earth as a body of water. As corridors stretch onwards until they reach bulbous districts, the self-sustained organism of the plant, a Titan I cell, materializes. The wedge of land that, midway between Jacksonville and Miami, extends into the Atlantic . . . The predominating geometries are those of circles, reinforced steel cylinders and box-like shapes linked up through runways pointing towards the horizon. Courtesy of the estate of R. Buckminster Fuller. In an illustration of the completed tower, Wardenclyffe is an air warfare installation illuminating the night sky in a corona of light projecting its radiance. Thanks to the Tesla Memorial Society of New York.

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Acknowledgements In Spectres of Marx, Jacques Derrida talks about Marxism in terms of a philosophy of responsibility that operates in the spirit of a radical critique: unceasing, interminable. I hope, however little, to contribute to this effort with the present book but also beyond this writing, and I would like to thank the following people, without whom this project would have been impossible: David Pascoe at Utrecht University and John Coyle at the University of Glasgow as well as Geoff Ward at Homerton College, Cambridge, for their invaluable assistance throughout this project, made possible through the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)’s generous financial support and through a research grant from the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Presidential Library at Columbia Point, Massachusetts. I particularly would also like to thank Adam Piette at the University of Sheffield for being such an inspiration and source of constant support, as well as Stephen Plotkin at the Kennedy Library for his generosity and help with the archival material. I further extend my gratitude to all my colleagues and friends at the University of Sheffield – most notably, Joe Bray, Maddy Callaghan, Matt Cheeseman, Katherine Ebury, Sam Ladkin, Agi Lehoczky, Bob McKay, John Miller, Marcus Nevitt, Terry O’Connor, Paul O’Neill, Amber Regis, Ranjan Sen, Andy Smith, Richard Steadman-Jones, Duco van Oostrum and Graham Williams – and above all, Alex Benchimol, Christine Ferguson, Chris Gair, Andrew Radford, Bryony Randall and Rhian Williams at the University of Glasgow. I would also like to thank my friends, especially Chris Armour, Simon Craig, Rob Drummond, Alex Dunst, Konstantina Georganta, Tom Harrington, Matthew Holman, Robbie Ireland, Osh Kealey, Adonis Leboho, Ciaran Lyons, Seán McCorrie, Alan McKendrick, Kate McLoughlin, Anne-Marie Millim, Lucy Monkman, David Overend, Derek Ryan, Warren Steele, Emily Thew, David Turton, Sam Wiseman and Niken Wresniwiro, as well as Mike Diehls, Pol Hermes, Genevieve Jadoul, Alain Pauly, Martine Post, Joé Reuter, Keven Schmitz, Veronique Schmitz, Philippe Thelen, Ben Weis and the people I have, over the years, met at conferences and became friends with too, particularly David Ashford and Tim Jarvis. I also had the pleasure to meet such great scholars as Ryan Bishop, Mark Dorrian, Roger Luckhurst and Larry Rickels; to teach brilliant, enthusiastic students at both Glasgow and Sheffield; and to take part in thought-provoking, frequently hilarious, discussions in reading groups on Gravity’s Rainbow, V., critical theory. Thanks also to Haaris Naqvi at Bloomsbury for his assistance and patience. Finally, I’d like to thank my mum Lucie, Rosch Schmitz, my sister Stephanie and the rest of my family for supporting me unconditionally throughout, and besides, this project. I would like to dedicate my book to the above: a network of affinity.

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Introduction: Ignition

In Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, a ‘very large white Finger’ appears to Tchitcherine ‘among the debris of some numberless battery’s last stand’; its ‘Fingernail is beautifully manicured: as it rotates for him, it slowly reveals a Fingerprint that might well be an aerial view of the City Dactylic, that city of the future where every soul is known, and there is no place to hide’.1 In the book, the revelation that follows is realized as a composite noun towards which points a drawing of a hand, itself appearing after a gap in the text – the configured term, here, is ‘Rocket-cartel’, a structure that, though ‘[c]ircus-bright’,2 nonetheless escapes definition and delimitation. This book adapts Pynchon’s expression to formulate an argument that refers only to the United States and is, as such, enclosed, its dimensions finite; the rocket states of the title concern the interface between American geography and missile technology. Organized topographically, according to specific regions and the purposes of the machines implanted inside, the ensuing project analyses how missile technology, in its various manifestations, articulates itself in locations accommodating its titanic machinery. It further bites its way into an awareness of the United States, and of American superpowers, as a nation-state proceeding towards self-destruction according to ‘an implacable law’, that is, in Jacques Derrida’s words, an ‘auto-immunitary process’ attacking its own (un)living being.3

Text-world/Dream-work Rocket States investigates US missile technology in terms of a peculiar sensibility that emerges, in a first instance, through Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow because of certain qualities and attributes that recur in his writing, most notably in relation to the forces and hauntings of technology. The book is alert to these phenomena as it is to Pynchon’s prose technique which exemplifies these aspects in its proliferative connections and modes of association; secret affinities swarm around the development of technological projects, so that an analysis of technology has to be expressed in an idiom that corresponds to its subject matter: labyrinthine, fantastical, dynamic, rhizomatic, resonant. This mode of thinking refers to the work of a number of theorists, most notably Jacques Derrida, Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Giorgio Agamben and Walter Benjamin, whose work (often silently) guides this book’s narrative structure and investigative tactic. The introduction attempts to create a textual environment that offers a way of reading US missile culture as dream-work, not necessarily in reference to Freud, another spirit, but more so in terms of a manner of

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expression returning forces associated with technological projects: unconscious desires, compulsions and pathologies. The introduction provides a framework and treatment of a philosophy of thought and writing that is indebted to the theorists mentioned above, but whose influence, in the main body of the text, is frequently latent: these early stages formulate an operational practice that, once launched, disappears in flight to become an absent presence – an inhabitation. This preliminary phase provides the guiding principles of a book concerned with the nuclear bomb/missile and the culture that lodges it in its empty centre, and as such establishes the project’s principal, eternally recurring areas of interest: engines of death as dream-machines; the empty space of the state of exception consolidated by the nuclear weapon; inward-turning energies released by the consumption of security; the logic of haunting and potential movements of resistance against an overwhelming technological order (though by no means through a nostalgic restoration of ‘Man’, rising up, regenerated, against the machine). Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, that ‘monumental . . . ruin’ behaving like an interpretation of dreams, functions as an appropriate model to consider technological production, existing as fiction, fantasy – ‘all technology is, at certain stages, evidence of a collective dream’.4 It is, ‘at the beginning’, as Benjamin records, but also subsequently – because associated with idealized designs, future orders of silent functioning – ‘in the grip of dreams’,5 a ‘fiction seeking to come true’, as Bruno Latour observes: ‘[b]y definition, a technological project is a fiction, since at the outset it does not exist, and there is no way it can exist yet because it is in the project phase’.6 Latour discusses technological projects relative to ‘degrees of realization’, taking on and losing reality ‘by degrees’: technology is dream-text and functions as literature, extensive textworlds, before it consolidates, if never fully or unequivocally, into a concrete object, ‘[weighed] . . . down with reality’: Nothing has a bigger appetite for paper than a technology of steel and motor oil. We were all aware that they had to draw, calculate, anticipate the shape of each piece on plans and blueprints; we knew that every machine is first of all a text, a drawing, a calculation, and an argument. . . . But we still thought, in spite of everything, that the agents mobilized by machines eluded forms and programs. We thought there was a frontier beyond which one really moved into matter, that inert and cold stuff, functional and soulless, which earned the admiration of materialists and the scorn of humanists. But no, calculators continue to accumulate layers of forms and diagrams, adding them to other forms and other masks, half spirit and half matter, half imprint and half text, without ever crossing the famous barrier between sign and thing, between spirit and matter7

Latour does not talk about weapons systems; his book is about a personal transportation device linked up into a network: small, individual transport units connecting up and branching off a train that constitutes itself ‘as if by magic’,8 forming and derealizing itself in transit. Aramis, had it achieved object-status, would have kept on mirroring, in its continuous formation and disassembly, the precarious status of its becoming, the movement from fiction to technology, the latter another threshold whose divisions

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cannot be established, or held. Considering Aramis’ purpose – guided-transportation components gliding through Paris, moderating its congestion, asphyxiation – it is easy to talk about it in terms of love: the coupling of individual elements to bring into being a train occurs invisibly, without cables, pulling the units closer to each other: they ‘merge ever so gently’.9 The subjective projection, here, a reference to the integration of the observer into the system, functions to draw attention to the human/machine amalgamation that occurs throughout the book. Aramis, or The Love of Technology is predicated on – narrated by way of – such a gentle merging, considering that, as Latour argues, ‘[t]echnological projects are deployed in a variable-ontology world’; machines are ‘hybrid beings’,10 and so are we, so-called humans. The consciousness of the (man/) machine,11 Aramis, appears in italicized sections, but the rest of the book is similarly concerned with establishing the interface between flesh and an engine that is neither ‘human’ nor ‘inhuman’ but offering, ‘rather, a continuous passage, a commerce, an interchange, between what humans inscribe in it and what it prescribes to humans. It translates the one into the other’.12 This, too, is a border area whose confusion Latour, like Donna Haraway, takes pleasure, or finds grounds for compassion, in; Aramis, because never conferred the privilege of being mute – silence belongs to systems in existence, whose functioning is taken for granted, every day, without notice or comment – speaks of kinship as ‘the pitiful hero in an experimental novel’13: How can I become a being, an object, a thing – finally a self, yes, a full set, saturated with being – without them [scientists, engineers, politicians e.g. the “humans”], their agreements, without their coming to terms (since I myself am made from them, flesh of their flesh, a rib extracted from theirs), without their acknowledgment that I am transports, displacements of human beings?14

‘I am transports,’ but Aramis is also Victor Frankenstein’s creature and a fleshy ‘extraction’, unloved, itself displaced to remain ‘pitiful’, unmade; the speeches, here and there throughout the book, dispel Jacques Ellul’s conception of technique as ‘pure’ and rational, an agent acting against ‘man’ as a ‘recording device’ measuring the ‘effects and results’ brought about by the ‘self-directing’ movement of machines15: the ‘displacements of human beings’ in favour of autonomous technical forces. What Latour proposes, instead, is an interpretation of the machine endowed with (our) subjectivity through a process of ‘translation’ or incorporation that problematizes ontological distinctions, whose variations happen through couplings, love affairs yielding a ‘Carte de Tendre, the Map of the Land of Tenderness’.16 This geography – or pornography of trajectories, which Pynchon describes in Gravity’s Rainbow but which Latour also intimates here, through the suggestion of replacing ‘tenderness’ with ‘hardness’ – is not so much the product of a conceptual analysis than the result of a Traum Deutung that is not at all rational and whose existence depends on the incentive to ‘follow projects lovingly through their entire duration’.17 Machines, in order to come into being, need to be ‘[acquainted] . . . with love’,18 their presence accounted for in records of ‘tenderness’, couplings, uncouplings between man and machine. To move into an analysis of the material culture of technology, consequently, is a course of

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thought that is also an act of love, a process and proposition whose fascist-fetishist dimensions arise in Gravity’s Rainbow, for one, where the politics of such an embrace become abundantly clear. And yet, Latour’s approach has to stand, to a certain extent, as model – and never mind, for now, the ‘degrees of realization’ he identifies with respect to technological projects, fictions with a ‘variable geometry’19 – because it is an effort to investigate machinery as dream-work, whose content is gadget love. This desire, which Marshall McLuhan considers as narcotic, ‘involving us in a state of numbness’,20 needs to be politicized, a prerequisite that Latour does not fulfil; such an incentive remains, perhaps, outside the bounds of his objectives – to dispel, for example, the myth of an autonomous technology, the presumptions of technological reality as subjected to reason. It is also worth remembering that Latour’s subject matter is a benign technology – further indicating that to consider devices as neutral, ignoring the nature of the medium, does not bear scrutiny21 – as opposed to a weapons system, in reference to which gadget love, projecting a ‘Map of the Land of Hardness’,22 unleashes an orgy of war. Dream-interpretation remains, however, the analytical method with which to approach the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), not least because (strange) love, hyper-sexualized, figures so prominently in cultural responses to the ‘oh, so phallic’23 warheads and weapons delivery vehicles. There is, though, also the sense, in Lydia Millet’s Oh Pure and Radiant Heart – note the parallels between the emphatic expression of pleasure associated with the nuclear bomb24 – of a correspondence between Latour’s concept of love and Millet’s, who ends her novel with the following observation: They [the nuclear scientists] worked because they wanted to see; they worked because they worshipped the structure deep within the universe, what was sweetly unknown and could only with great perseverance be drawn into the light. As others might feel tenderness for a child or a home, so they cherished and nurtured their science. It was love that led them to the bomb.25

What this means, as it were, beyond the pleasure principle – the ‘oh’ of the (war/ love) game – is that technological projects draw off ‘what [is] sweetly unknown’, a gesture, also, towards the wish-fulfilment function of dreams, the psychic apparatus of the unconscious that is ‘full of machines as well as affects’.26 Latour describes the development of devices according to a ‘war of dreams’ raging in Paris, ‘working through its subterranean spaces and stations’27; interior and exterior collapse in this dream architecture, the ‘great technological system of tunnels and thoroughfares’28 that is simultaneously indicative of the city and the collective, machinic and machinedreaming unconscious. Anti-Oedipus begins with a paragraph about ‘desiring-production’: It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever

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said the id. Everywhere it is machines – real ones not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections.29

Deleuze and Guattari’s work – intimated in Latour’s descriptions of the dreamingmachine and machine hall of the unconscious – so evidently is about pleasure, delirium and desire, about the formation of a dynamics of critique assembled through link-ups, ‘[p]rinciples of connection and heterogeneity’, that is, the theory of the rhizome, which ‘can be connected to anything other, and must be’.30 A rhizomatic analysis stands in opposition to the ‘tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order’: this type of writing – shifting, ruptured, gestural – ‘has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come’.31 As such, their critical practice is set up, though that is the wrong word – the point is its commitment to open lines, nomad thought – on elements or forces that counter fixity and order; in the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, Brian Massumi notes that Nomad space is “smooth,” or open-ended. One can rise up at any point and move to any other. Its mode of distribution is the nomos: arraying oneself in an open space (hold the street), as opposed to the logos of entrenching oneself in a closed space (hold the fort).32

The reference to movements of resistance is clear, here; to hold the street raises the possibility of the collective, though its velocity does not necessarily presage justice (used in the Derridean sense, beyond the Law) or generate a ‘Body without Organs’, itself an expression of modalities of being that attempt to escape hierarchies. The practice of the surveyor is similarly at risk of returning or upholding a discourse of privilege – maps, after all, tend to be totalizing structures33 – a danger that Deleuze and Guattari recognize: there has to remain, always, an awareness of subject positions, a resistance to becoming rooted, to holding the fort. The points, or lines of connection, that affiliate Latour with Deleuze and Guattari (considered alongside others, such as Virilio, Derrida, Foucault), developing in such a framework – defined or kept indefinite as rhizomatic, nomadic, dromocratic,34 the latter yet another reminder of danger or ‘tumour’35 – occur by way of an experiment with form, as well as style. These practitioners’ engagement with, and development of, narrative is invariably conflicted, the language itself, especially concerning Derrida, already ‘out of joint’; in his last interview in Le Monde, published on 19 August 2004, Derrida talks about a ‘violent manner of working with the language’,36 a state of being/writing that characterizes his work. In Spectres of Marx, Derrida considers translations as ‘deranged’ or ‘dislodged’; he writes that ‘[h]owever correct or legitimate they may be, and whatever right one may acknowledge them to have, they are all disadjusted, as it were unjust in the gap that affects them. This gap is within them . . . ’.37 The gap is extrapolated to occupy the living present; Spectres of Marx is about ‘a habitation without proper inhabiting’, a haunting that ‘one must not chase away but sort out, critique, keep close by, and allow to come back’.38

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What gradually emerges, then, is the necessity of a means of, and commitment to, a critical thinking that, regardless of what the matter or spirit of investigation consists of, has to resist a discourse that ‘finally totalizes and reassures’,39 as Foucault remarks in the preface to Anti-Oedipus. There should be no creation of gods, the ‘celestial eye[s]’40 of vantage points indicating immovable regimes, especially if the matter/ spirit at hand is precisely such an order, that is, nuclear weaponry, whose dominance is indeed total, but even so no less subjected to hauntings. After all, ‘[h]aunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony’,41 and, bearing in mind the world of technology as dream-like, dreamt up by desiring subject-machines, the requirement for such an analysis becomes yet more pressing. Both Latour and Benjamin – the latter so attentive to technologies and architectures dissolving in light, briefly perceptible as if through ‘the casting’ of (cinematic) fantasy42 – proceed to assemble studies that are structurally layered, composed of fragments accumulated from among ‘the “refuse” and “detritus” of history’,43 the ‘little bundles’ of notes attempting to determine the ‘remote causes’44 of failure. Consequently, the resulting narrative is one of ‘ruin’, as Benjamin’s translators propose in relation to The Arcades Project, an understanding, so they note, predicated on ‘arborescent’ thought, crystallizing into chains of command, ‘refused’ in the collage structure of a text that enters, gets lost, in the sunken aspects of landscapes, topographical orders, textualities of space. Accordingly, a passage that exemplifies this fabric, ‘blasting apart . . . pragmatic historicism’,45 grounded and balanced in the service of an ‘overcoding’46 organism, turns from strata to sub-surface, and in the process reveals the rationale for the compositional drive of the Arcades undertaking: Our waking existence . . . is a land which, at certain hidden points, leads down into the underworld – a land full of inconspicuous places from which dreams arise. All day long, suspecting nothing, we pass them by, but no sooner has sleep come than we are eagerly groping our way back to lose ourselves in the dark corridors. By day, the labyrinth or urban dwellings resembles consciousness; the arcades (which are galleries leading into the city’s past) issue unremarked onto the streets. At night, however, under the tenebrous mass of the houses, their denser darkness protrudes like a threat, and the nocturnal pedestrian hurries past – unless, that is, we have emboldened him to turn into the narrow lane.47

As a practice, The Arcades Project disclaims rationalization, of both city and text-space; the notion of transparency is absent here, in ‘convolutes’ shaped, for the most part, out of citations disjointed from any larger continuous narrative or temporality. It is also at once threatening and seductive, as well as playful and audacious, but nonetheless an abjuration of what De Certeau calls the ‘erotics of knowledge’, an ‘ecstasy of reading’48 that delights in the exaltation of a particular, ruinous scopic regime: total visibility of the world below. This ensemble, then, as if charting its own endless ‘becoming’ – it consists just as much of an unravelling than an agglomeration – approximates the possibilities that Deleuze and Guattari identify in A Thousand Plateaus: this exploration of space is akin to their conception of a map that is ‘open and connectable in all its dimensions; it

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is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification’.49 The form of Benjamin’s work, as a result, indicates the idea of a text-world, the ‘immense texturology’50 of Paris, ‘libidinal, unconscious, molecular’,51 and that therefore cannot or should not be inserted back into a unity, or totality. The stockpile of nuclear weaponry, as Derrida comments, similarly is ‘fabulously textual’,52 a condition that Latour, in relation to technique by and large, examines in Aramis, whose composition changes fonts, includes subdivisions marked off by boundary lines varying in breadth. Such modifications of typescript are no gimmick, but instead demonstrate the paper existence, and discourse formations, of technological projects: No technology without rules, without signatures, without bureaucracies and stamps. Law itself is no different from the world of technologies: it is the set of the modest technologies of writing, registering, verifying, authenticating that makes it possible to line up people and statements. It is a world of flexible technologies coming to the aid of even more flexible technologies of interest in order to allow slightly more solid technologies to harden a bit.53

Another statement concerning the ‘degrees of realization’ that alter the shifting realities – hardening, then turning back into paper – of machines, this passage, besides, interprets (like Derrida, like Friedrich Kittler) the process of writing as a technology. The techno-materiality of writing – whose ‘modesty’ is contestable, bearing in mind Kittler’s argument that ‘so-called Man’ is a concept that came into being through such technologies54 – yields yet more machines. Derrida maintains that, [n]uclear weaponry depends, more than any weaponry in the past, it seems, upon structures of information and communication, structures of language, including non-vocalizable language, structures of codes and graphic decoding. But the phenomenon is fabulously textual also to the extent that, for the moment, a nuclear war has not taken place: one can only talk and write about it.55

The ‘hypothesis’ of total nuclear war – despite made possible by ‘solid’ delivery systems which, regardless of their monumentality, retain degrees of fictitiousness – remains, ‘for the moment’, a fantasy while it concurrently constitutes a ‘massive “reality”’.56 To a degree then, to borrow Latour’s term for a similar phenomenon, the difference between matter and text is always in doubt: ‘the “reality” of the nuclear age and the fable of nuclear war are perhaps distinct, but they are not two separate things’,57 according to Derrida. The state of existence, in existence, develops because of a ‘fable’ of all-out atomic warfare, whose impact, even though it has not as yet occurred, has already altered culture, transformed it into a nuclear landscape and into a condition of ‘pure’,58 continuous war. Considering the textuality of nuclear war but, beyond that, of technology – writing as one technological medium among countless others – the imperative, then, with respect to analyses about technology, nuclear or otherwise, is to conduct these in

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an investigative mode operating according to lines of articulation that resound with multiplicities. This, in and of itself, refers to multiple mechanisms, all entangled: the plurality of discourses that engrave technological fictions as material realities (including their oscillating movements back and forth, from spirit to matter); the inheritance of radical critiques addressing and attempting to resist orders of total dominance; the logic of haunting that persists inside and around techno-culture; the spirits that emerge between text and matter, neither of which are fully one thing or the other. Latour is interested in these interstitial areas; his novel is a textual machine – like Deleuze and Guattari’s books, little love and war machines59 – that seeks to erase distinctions between ostensibly discrete dimensions: machines are not inert and cold, but souls.60 Aramis (or Norbert H., the principal investigator of the research project and ventriloquist or medium) brings up Frankenstein’s monster, right at the start and throughout the book, whose compositional form, even, is suggestive of underworlds: buried records, spirit possessions or transferrals (the soul of gadget-loving ‘man’ projected into the machine), the recurring resurrections of the undead. In The Vampire Lectures, Laurence A. Rickels adopts a similar strategy, though his book is more experimental in style than in form: still, in this ‘corpus’, made up of a ‘course load’ of lectures/injections on technology and haunting into the ‘student body’ at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Rickels notes: I included burial-plot summaries of so many fictions that in class had remained unread, unread. I kept a record of redescriptions (which, as in therapy, are implicit interpretations) of all the other film and TV resources, and kept the running record below the main lecture text, an underworld on every page.61

The study is about peripheries, about the ‘vampire located on the margin of psychoanalytic treatment of mourning sickness’ transmitted via technical media; it is on the ‘sidelines’ of the ‘proper pursuit’ of aberrant mourning that Rickels ‘[acquires] all this marginal knowledge’ and proceeds to ‘switch perspectives a little bit, in the usual move of seeing the marginal as somehow more central than it had seemed to be’.62 The result is a study attentive to the phantom dynamics of techno-culture and therefore also to its dream-like aspects; this is a (psycho) analysis of technology attentive to its unconscious politics: The fantasy content of technologization is immortalizing, replicational, doubling, or narcissistic on an upbeat only. The allure of the vampire does overlaps with this happy-face intake of what is going down technologically or as technology. But where there is a positive overcoming of long distance, it is still the loss of the long distant, our dead or even undead, that just has not, not by a long shot, been overcome or even addressed. The occult fantasy analyses the techno fantasy and, inevitably, points to the missing place of the death cult inside techno-culture.63

Technology is dream-like, sublime, vampiric, developing systems of love and death whose purpose and ultimate aim are silence, the ‘mute function’,64 indicating reliability

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and automation, which also means that it can pass into invisibility: the phantom states of smooth, efficiently functioning machines. The ‘occult fantasy’, subsequently, at once suggests long-distance communications with, and revitalizations of, the (un)dead, but also intimates the disappearance of the medium beyond the realms of perception and interpretation. Such a process of disappearance prompts somnambulism, according to McLuhan, a ‘Narcissus trance’, which he links, first of all, to an act of observation that, at the same time, becomes impossible or very difficult: to ‘behold’ technology, a corporeal extension, necessarily requires an embrace.65 This line of reasoning emerges because of the premise of his book, that is, the Narcissus myth – or gadget love – as indicative of a technological engagement (and encagement) based on extension, the fusion of ‘man’ with machine, forming into a ‘closed system’ that then prevents selfrecognition.66 Rather than conservative, trying to maintain the fiction of ‘so-called Man’ as distinct being, separate from the technologies and discursive machines that constituted ‘him’, the point of the argument is to comment on the sleepiness that befalls the (dreaming) subject. The semantic fields of sleep and stupor abound in his chapter on the ‘gadget lover’, hypnotized, entranced, numbed by englobing technologies that instigate a ‘psychic rigor mortis’67: machine subjects go to sleep in feedback loops, the uninterrupted, continuous embrace of technical systems. Throughout the ‘corpus’ of his work, Jean Baudrillard similarly concentrates on technological networks fleshing out closed orders; in ‘ The Precession of Simulacra’, the essay that opens Simulacra and Simulation, he comments on the elaborate play of light, the ‘radiating synthesis’ that constitutes an environment ‘without atmosphere’.68 Yet his discussion also contains frequent references to the functions and remains of the body: regretful longings for the ‘vital functions’ of the real now caught in a ‘system of death’, perpetuated by Disneyland and other suchlike ‘frozen’ places that ‘feed reality’.69 There is no mistaking the nostalgia at work here, the impression of the ‘real’ that, cannibalized, is then lost in an ‘[e]mbalmed and pacified’70 artificiality induced by technological gadgets. The scope and abundance of the ‘requisite gadgetry’, varying in degrees of complexity and potential, preside over America too, both text and nation, and bestow it with the excess and magic of speed, with an ‘extraterrestrial comfort’71 derived from refrigerators and air-conditioning units, the mesmerizing spectacles of televised moon landings and bomb detonations. This state of ease – achieved by way of gadgetry that embalms the living or already undead ‘like drips in an intensive care ward’72 – is suggestive of Freud’s pleasure principle, the ‘tendency towards stability’ that he identifies as its main impetus, seeking to attain constancy to the point of inertia.73 While Freud remains tentative in his conclusion – relating to the issue of whether the pleasure principle serves the death instincts – Baudrillard’s position is more assured: this order of existence, closed and frozen, suspended in static perfection, operates according to the instinct to ‘return to the quiescence of the inorganic world’.74 This tendency is in evidence at every stage in America, so Baudrillard contends, from the production of kitchen utensils that prevent the interface between substances to the ‘frantic concern’ directed at the morbid ‘preservation of a youth that is, in any case, already lost’: these attempts belong to a rhetoric of over-protection and separation

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that demonstrates a techno-culture’s ‘obsessive desire for survival (and not for life)’.75 The ‘quiescence’ of the inanimate state – which comprises an easy switchover between the ‘flawless’ and the ‘funereal’76 – is caused by what Paul Virilio terms the ‘consumption of total security’, a condition or instinct that strives to attain an absence of movement.77 To ‘conduct life into death’78: that is the objective of security culture, an expression of the pleasure principle whose workings endeavour to lead to the elimination of external stimuli, and to thereby protect, and restore, to death. This consumption implies, beyond the meaning of the word, an expenditure as well as economy of transaction functioning as a ‘rite . . . into emptiness’, a ‘nostalgic desire . . . to revert to immobility’ that is, so Baudrillard remarks in accordance with Virilio, concealed beneath, or inside, absolute mobility.79 Absolute comfort, in turn, occurs to the point of silent extinction, and this economy of survival – a word and force that perpetuate the death drive – and infrastructure of consumption/extraction begins at home, where interiors become truly absorbing. Baudrillard, though not a Wandersmann80 – his journey is conducted by means of ‘astral’ freeways, the ‘warm coffin of a jet’81 approaching New York; he functions within the order of speed82 – passes through Santa Barbara, where ‘technical gadgetry inside the house, beneath it, around it’,83 engages and hooks up living tissue in endless feedback loops forming continual exchanges, or switches, between the organic and inorganic. Domestic devices, resembling life-saving equipment, perform a complex set of activities involving acts of re-animation, of recording signs of life but also drawing them off; this assemblage of instruments joins together in an integrated circuit to fold in on, and at the same time sustain, the living dead. A dream of inertia, this ‘soft, resortstyle civilisation irresistibly evokes the end of the world’: (funeral) homes constitute a ‘foetal’ or tomblike tranquillity84 realized by means of gadgetry trying to ‘bring events to Absolute Zero’.85

Degree zero The ‘Ideology of the Zero’ accomplishes multiple functions in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow: the reduction of a reflex ‘beyond the zero’, an attempt at deprogramming a conditioned response; a zone that exists between waking and sleeping; the incorporation of a system that induces ‘glassy wastes’; the point of impact, evidently, of ‘angels of death’.86 It is, then, associated with networks of enormous power, whose capacity of penetration and destructive potential also eliminate possibilities of shelter and threaten mechanisms of resistance. Considering that defence in such orders is no longer possible and that, at any rate, the offensive weapon replaces the fort – against supersonic speed, there is no structure that can hold – the state of siege alters in nature: territory loses ‘its significance in favour of the projectile’87 and the siege becomes permanent, illimitable. The ‘three-dimensional dream’ that Baudrillard enters in America exists, to a point (because the death drive operates beyond Santa Barbara, the ‘[s]tar-blasted’88 United States), as a corollary to this new dispensation of space and time, that is, the state of exception, aimless – the enemy hides out everywhere – and

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undying/undead. The consumption of security culture is the outcome of a situation that itself is the production of a curious ‘juridical void’: the state of exception, as Giorgio Agamben writes, is ‘not defined as a fullness of powers’ but instead in terms of (the ideology of) the zero, as an ‘emptiness and standstill of the law’.89 Baudrillard captures the ‘immense texturology’ of ‘astral’ America according to a gleaming void, vacuum as light – because the ‘real’ is replaced by the radiance of images – that he finds in evidence everywhere: US space explored, defined, through speed, which produces ‘a kind of invisibility, transparency, or transversality in things, simply by emptying them out’.90 He finds, in this romance of speed – the kinetic, from the very start of the book, is associated with the cinematic, as well as the atomic – a fascination with the void, and therefore also (future) catastrophe, variously expressed as an ‘aesthetics of disappearance’ that itself refers to symptoms of disaffection, the ‘cryogenisation of emotions’, an ‘amnesic intoxication’.91 The politics of speed, to recall Virilio’s argument, exterminates space – territory destroyed as distance, both spatial and temporal; the nuclear state, according to Virilio, forms the ‘ultimate stage of dromological progress’.92 This terminal phase of the nuclear state is achieved through ICBMs, whose megatonnage and (in time) minute deployment annihilate possibilities of defence, except in terms of an offensive strategic force kept in constant readiness, on permanent alert. Ground Zero, then, though located at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, where the first atom bomb was tested on 16 July 1945, spreads outwards to encompass the rest of the world. The ‘blinding artificial light of the bomb against the blinding light of the ground’93 at Alamogordo instigates a chain reaction of zeros in a culture that, henceforth, explodes catastrophic light. Pynchon’s special model rocket, the 00000, designated by such a succession of zeros ‘strung end to end’94 refers to this developing emptiness and brings to mind the ‘loud, long-drawn-out “o-o-o-o”’95 that Freud notices in relation to the ‘fort/da’ game, in which the child/subject enacts fantasies of object disappearance and return: the instance and sound of the game giving rise to Freud’s meditation on the pleasure principle/death drive is repeated in the ‘Fünffachnullpunkt’96 of the rocket number. The connection between the 00000 and the prolonged, expressive ‘o-o-o-o’ continually recurs in Gravity’s Rainbow, where in one instance the word ‘Carbon Dioxide Reducti-o-o-o-on-n-n’97 is similarly stretched in a process that comments on chemical reactions, particularly concerning the production of plastics. The 00000 is, of course, outfitted with a new, synthetic material, Imipolex G, itself ‘o-o-o-o’ so pleasurable, because erectile: the combination between gadget love and death drive culminates in ballistic missiles that release a progressive, blinding void. Baudrillard notes the following: You do indeed get the impression that America is made up of a fantastic switching between similar elements, and that everything is only held together by a thread of light, a laser beam, scanning out American reality before our eyes. In America the spectral does not refer to phantoms or to dancing ghosts, but to the spectrum into which light disperses.98

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Never mind, for now, the dismissal of haunting – a hegemonic exorcism of spectres that nonetheless persist, because this performative act is an ‘impotent gesticulation, the restless dream, of an execution’99 that comes to naught – this passage, indicative, as ever, of Baudrillard’s attention to strategies of simulation, also obliquely brings up the atom bomb. The United States of America, brought into being through ‘thread[s] of light’, thereby gesturing towards the creation of another giant, acquires super powers through a device of blinding energy that subsequent to its first detonation in New Mexico occupies the centre of a nation whose origin myth is, now, the superbomb. As Peter Bacon Hales observes, while surveying Alamogordo, ‘all geography emanates from this point’,100 which is both a place and an instant, the moment of the nuclear state’s formation, whose ideology of the zero further expands the ‘empty space of the state of exception’.101 What this means, above all, is that light – literal, metaphorical, the latter in reference to Enlightenment projects that, in many ways, form one of the core interests of the Pynchonian terrain – has to be theorized as operating in the service of a catastrophic order. Whether weaponized or not, light carries out a ‘military wisdom’,102 a fundamental ideological, as well as tactically utilized, violence that characterizes regimes of knowledge and regulation – hence the insistence on an evaluation of light as signalling the exterminating superpower of the ‘pure light of the zero’.103 Light belongs, then – if it does not in fact constitute the blank core of such ruinous orders – to the superstate, whose technologies of ‘security’ act as a ‘rite . . . into emptiness’, itself attributable to the Manhattan Project, creating a vacuum into which all referents disappear. So evidently a system of death, the atom bomb is nonetheless interpreted as a protective device whose idealized conception and motionless equivalent are that of the dome, anticipated by the arc that the ballistic missile traces. The sheltering form of the parabola – the in-flight arch – also occurs, for a brief moment, on the ground (Figure 1), just prior to the development of the mushroom cloud: a convex shape of

Figure 1 The sheltering form of the parabola . . . occurs . . . just prior to the development of the mushroom cloud: a convex shape of light and thick fog . . . consolidates . . . into a spherical, englobing structure.

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light and thick fog (or gelatin)104 consolidates, in a flash, into a spherical, englobing structure. This passing formation, even so, behaves as a recurring trope and desire in Cold War/security culture; the dome of nuclear light points to Paul N. Edwards’ discussion of the closed world, both machine and metaphor referring to totalizing systems of technological oversight. In his book, Edwards focuses on computers, articulating a closed-world discourse, that is, ‘global surveillance and control through high-technology military power’, operating on several levels, ‘simultaneously as technology, . . . political system, and . . . ideological mirage’.105 The premise of his study – machines influencing policy and vice versa; technologies shaping patterns of thought that, in turn, yield new machines – is containment culture, more specifically the ‘language of global closure’.106 The dimensions of this discourse, in view of realizing an ideal environment of total security, project military strategy outwards, globally but also beyond the planetary, into outer, as well as inner, space. This is a systematic vision and line of attack – the logistics of perception conflate the two; ‘the eye’s function is also the function of [the] weapon’107 – that subsumes the whole world to a bipolar struggle, requiring networks of illumination: (invisible) surveillance mechanisms, radar and weapons systems of global vision and global reach, ABC warfare that renders everything, everywhere, transparent. In many ways, this is a magical spectacle, a ‘technological mirage’, as Edwards argues, no less because all-out nuclear war is fantasy (to recall Derrida), but also because such devices evoke the technological sublime, whose beauty and terror displace political awareness and engagement in favour of blind captivity. The element of spectacular explosion is, at the same time, a concentration of matter and energy directed back inwards; the consumption of security is at once explosion and implosion, a double movement that compels both outward and inwardly turning targeting mechanisms. Edwards defines the latter as ‘self-containment’,108 the prerequisite to maintain a fictional, integral impermeability: the internal/eternal stability of a terminal design. ‘[S]helter in time of disaster’109: the principle on which closed-world discourse is founded and whose ‘archetype is the siege’: A “closed world” is a radically bounded scene of conflict, an inescapably selfreferential space where every thought, word, and action is ultimately directed back toward a central struggle. It is a world radically divided against itself. Turned inexorably inward, without frontiers or escape, a closed world threatens to annihilate itself, to implode.110

The siege has become a general condition, the state of emergency or exception that now functions as the paradigm of government, whose exercise of superpower acts according to an ‘implacable law’, namely what Derrida terms, in his reflection on the ‘event’ of the World Trade Centre attacks in 2001, ‘auto-immunitary terror’, the ‘strange behaviour where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, “itself ” works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its “own” immunity’.111 Derrida, who elsewhere already refutes apocalyptic conclusions, including the ‘end’ of the Cold

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War, engages in the ‘residual consequence[s]’ of Cold War dynamics partly by way of this auto-immunitary process that ‘ends up producing, reproducing, and regenerating the very thing it seeks to disarm’.112 At stake, here, on the one hand, are the illicit and openly secret continuities between the Cold War as a system of state, military and techno-strategic operations and current globalized military-industrial governance, continuities that have modified as well as intensified over the years, yet are legible, still, as Cold War imaginary constructs. Conversely, the illimitable Cold War, whose regime has shifted to the ‘war on terror’, itself is a process that sustains and braces an order that Agamben traces back to the Roman iustitium, a deferral and neutralization of the law: this standstill suspends democracy as a paradoxical, impossible means to save itself and its own democratic immunity. Agamben’s State of Exception begins with noticing the precarious position, a ‘no-man’s land’, that this state occupies concerning its politics and laws, particularly considering that a temporary measure has been instated as permanent; this transfer itself is indicative of a series of ambiguous definitions, situations that comprise, most importantly, the ‘threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism’.113 In addition to developing bureaucracies and territories, such as sites of ‘extraordinary rendition’, which, in turn, function at a remote – not only geographically but, more so, legally – subjects/suspects become equally unclassifiable in this state because themselves indefinitely captured in a terminology that fails to distinguish between friend and enemy: citizens have tendencies, sympathies, are passive supporters or as yet uncommitted bystanders/collateral damage.114 The defining theory, then, of the state of exception detects it in such – with reference to Pynchon – zones of suspension, an ‘interregnum’115 that detains terminology as much as individuals: the state of exception exists at the limits, in a ‘“degree zero” of the law’ whose localization or ‘illocalization’116 cannot, with any certainty, be delineated beyond the concept of an empty space, right at the heart of its logic.

Nuclear glas/s So often, the argument of this book comes full circle by coming back to the nuclear weapon, revenant and ground zero of a narrative that is inescapably – considering its subject matter/spirit and the state of exception that the weapon expands – attentive to thresholds: Trinity, the first atomic bomb test in 1945, forms the study’s hypocentre and point of eternal return. Tested on 16 July at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, Trinity’s luminous mass ascends to form a ‘thick parasol of a . . . bright but spectral blue’.117 As the shock front subsequently ‘cools into visibility’,118 the residue on the ground, directly beneath the blast, consists of sand and the remainders of the bomb’s metal tower superheated into bits of green glass. Trinitite reflects and congeals the gadget’s radiant energy; the analogy that unites bomb with glass also extends to the mythology of the device. Before it was consecrated by a pile of black rocks – as much a memorial to the world that just ended as to the one that exploded into existence – there was talk of preserving the site as a national park, accessed

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through a ‘sheltered walk’ and containing an ‘atomsite exhibit in place under glass’.119 Finally proved unfeasible – the intransience marking ground zero was already present radioactively, preventing the construction of such a monument – glass spheres nonetheless develop into a nuclear aesthetics: glass of course, is itself a material oddly suspended between solidity and its absence, between materiality and metaphysics, as though it belonged neither to one nor the other. Possessing ‘the faculty to annul itself . . ., to melt in light, without ceasing to be tangible, nor to function as physical obstacle’, glass exists without imposing its presence and borders on two entirely different orders, almost managing to ‘subtract itself from the laws that condition [a material’s] forms of manifestation’120: it stages crossovers between apparently discrete dimensions. In Technics and Civilisation, Lewis Mumford comments that ‘[t]he retort, the distilling flask, the test-tube: the barometer, the thermometer, the lenses and the slide of the microscope, the electric light, the x-ray tube, the audion – all these are products of glass technics’.121 He further argues that glass alters perspectives, and provides new ones, considering that lens technology, in microscopes and telescopes, extends the vanishing points of vision beyond the limits of the human eye towards infinity, and the infinitesimal.122 Glass technics, then, linked to mirrors – always just a ‘stroke of reversal’ away from the realm of the dead123 – alters the world, even if it does not, in itself, come with the means to raze it to the ground; yet, glass architecture and nuclear weapon share, to a point, the same dialectic, the ‘jeux de glace’ that continually engage in interreflexive references on thresholds or ‘glas’.124 That term, issuing from Derrida’s work on borders, textual boundaries crossed by the act of reading/writing, means death knell, opening up into a tomb-world; the links between glas/s and the nuclear are difficult to ignore in view of such shared properties or penetrations, the crises of representation that both are associated with. In many ways, the nuclear weapon is a liminal gadget, whose ‘excess visuality’ radically changes ‘the material and conceptual dimensions’ of existence, now situated ‘between not only two worlds but two universes’ – inside/ outside, visible/invisible, living/dead.125 In the wake of Trinity and its glass Reich, rather than activating a ‘beauty that is fresh and living’,126 which Claude Bragdon invests in the material in 1918, glass constructions articulate the will to retreat and endure, to live on, sheltered, in clear caskets – ‘[a]ll dwellings’, as Baudrillard observes in America, ‘have something of the grave about them’.127 Glas/s further reflects a passage from Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow concerned with the ‘special Death the West [has] invented’; Dominus Blicero, ultrawhite, is about to launch the 00000 towards new ‘death-colonies’: Is the cycle [of empire/death] over now, and a new one ready to begin? Will our new Edge, our new Deathkingdom, be the Moon? I dream of a great glass sphere, hollow and very high and far away . . . the colonists have learned to do without air, it’s vacuum inside and out. . . . Inside the colony, the handful of men have a frosty appearance, hardly solid, no more alive than memories, nothing to touch . . . only their remote images, black and white film-images, grained, broken year after hoarfrost year out in the white latitudes, in empty colony. . . .128

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Already irradiated, the colonists, all male, become light in a glassy capsule environment that protects to death: empty colony in an empty sky, this Deathkingdom forms the new cycle or paradigm of the rocket state carrying the spectres of fascism: terminal glas/s/ nuclear culture whose Nazi superpower is frosty, frozen in a vacuum. This icy stillness is indicative of a much wider attempt at temperature control and climate regulation on a global scale: though a gadget of heat and light, the nuclear weapon – often jointly evaluated alongside the amount of refrigerators owned in US/SU households; ‘soft’ technologies match the technology of the bomb – serves as the guardian of a cold stasis, that is, the balance of terror. In terms of its function, aiming to prevent a fantasy – nuclear war – from taking place, the device’s degrees of realization likewise suggest a narrative programme focused on the will to power and, equally, world salvation through superstate control and command. Dreamworld or Deathkingdom emerges from the same principle, the ‘impulse to empire’, according to Blicero, which is also the ‘mission to propagate death’129: extermination on the one hand and total, ice-cold security/stability on the other. It becomes impossible, consequently, to tell apart the living from the already dead or undead inhabiting death colonies, a threshold/glas situation provoked by the nuclear weapon – in time housed in a ballistic missile – that is already apparent in the etymology of the word gadget, code name for the Trinity device. The term ‘gadget’ itself defies the classic distinctions between inside and outwith; its root ‘presumably derives from the French GÂCHETTE (the spring catch of a lock or bolt)’, thus crystallizing the model of ‘a pervasive, protective space’,130 regulated and chilled by atomic power. The bomb, then, yields separate orders, coming into being both prior to and after its detonation, which negate oppositions, whether topographical (outside/inside), biopolitical (living/dead) or relating to matters of strategy (offensive/defensive). To recall, the expansive, nuclear state of exception corresponds to such crossovers in that it, too, is ‘neither external nor internal to the juridical order’,131 but at once outside and within, emerging in a lacuna whose emptiness is its very force: the void of the bomb compels the void of the law. Blicero’s glassy, static, radiant Deathkingdom operates as a dream state of exception whose air of remoteness, and remote-controlled seclusion, is attained by way of the 00000, whose imperative and ‘ideology of the zero’ hold sway. The Manhattan Project, dream-work in so far that it emerges out of love, the desire for constancy articulated through the degree zero of the atom bomb and its delivery vehicles, develops a cultural environment – a missile culture – that is equally dreamworld and catastrophe.132 In his analysis of the principal sites of the Project, that is, Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Hanford, Washington and Los Alamos, New Mexico, Peter Bacon Hales notices that the social landscape, arising in those areas, is at once a functionalized space and ‘utopian social experiment’133 in the service of the hybrid being of the bomb. So obviously nuclear, forming the nucleus of American postwar military strategy and political decision-making and, concurrently, borderline mechanism, the bomb’s order of brinkmanship – political, ontological – is reflected in its sites of origin and destination, the nuclear state that consolidates in the aftermath of the Trinity detonation. This (empty) state is one of spectacular technological enclosures, anticipated by the dish of glass and dome of viscous light forming in as

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well as after the instant of detonation and that is returned, in one way or another, in the dream-like siege-systems devised to offer loving, death-like protection. These sheltering techno-forms – ‘glossy [skinned]’,134 gelatinous, rubberoid, shrouded in a ‘sleek metallic shimmer’135 – are all derivatives of Trinity, of the photographic still (Figure 1) that captures a space that is unremittingly closed, at rest, because forever still-standing, yet in unrest. Rocket States is an exploration of enclosure: the nuclear state of exception expounding a techno-sublimity, crystallizing a fetishized, gadgetloving and auto-immunitary mythology of shelter.

Inhabitations Rocket States is about incorporation: the implantations of rocket technology in the territory, geographical and psychic, of the United States in a process of inhabitation that is one of deepening occupation. The book comes at the subject after the ostensible ‘end’ of the Cold War but is not one of apocalyptic unveiling, despite the nuclear glas that defines the rocket state or state of exception; eschatological discourses belong to this order of (atomic) light, of ‘a light of light’, brighter, disastrous, that ‘superarms’ the Cold War, pure war.136 The imminence of the end – seductive, as Derrida comments, aiming to subjugate or intimidate, to dispel political agency for awe – is brought about by the nuclear weapon, whose truth (itself apocalyptic)137 forms zones of emptiness; yet, the ‘bright angel of death’138 that falls towards the Orpheus Theatre in the closing moments of Gravity’s Rainbow leaves blankness, following a dash, at the same time that it produces a stockpile of writing, not least including Pynchon’s long novel itself. The structures of language include and proliferate the bomb, depending on communications systems, information relays, coding mechanisms, acronyms whose ‘clotted words spell out the coordinates of military, economic and technological power’.139 The ‘fabulous’ war effort depends not only on sophisticated storage and delivery technologies, but also on the missiles/missives that distribute its fantasies: [j]ust as all language, all writing, every poetic-performative or theoreticoinformative text dispatches, sends itself, allows itself to be sent, so today’s missiles, whatever their underpinnings may be, allow themselves to be described more readily than ever as dispatches in writing (code, inscription, trace, and so on).140

A text is a machine, concerning the transmissions of messages, the machinery of war; language ‘recalls (exposes, explodes) that which, in writing, always includes the power of a death machine’.141 The point, or necessary question, that arises faced with such difficulties – the propagation of death machines – is the issue of resistance against such totalizing, if not total, orders of dominance. It is, perhaps, not enough to refuse endings, though that perspective nonetheless forms one of the premises of this book, text-machine, on rocket states: it refutes, from the beginning, the ‘end’ of the Cold War. As such, it aligns itself with Derrida’s work, against apocalypse and closure, so as to stay alert to the continuum

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of war beyond a declared victory, which means to resist seduction/subjugation by, for example, concentrating on the ways in which the Cold War, that ‘thing’,142 remains part of the logic of the current ‘war on terror’. In his essay on ‘September 11’, Derrida investigates the continuing dynamics of the present global ideological conflict according to Cold War-like symptoms of auto-immunitary processes: US-armed and trained hijackers that attack the ‘head’ of American superpower; future traumatism originating or tracing back to US world-conquest, sustaining world order; a rhetoric that blindly accepts, and thereby endlessly repeats, the terms and conditions of a ‘war on terror’.143 It is the prevailing system that Derrida confronts; the word ‘prevail’ – under scrutiny in ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’ too – is indicative of an opposition that must occur against language and appellations like ‘war on terror’, ‘9/11’, the aim of which is to instigate a ‘dogmatic slumber’ induced by mechanical, ‘ritual incantation’.144 There is, then, a problem with language: I believe always in the necessity of being attentive first of all to this phenomenon of language, naming, and dating, to this repetition compulsion (at once rhetorical, magical, poetic). To what this compulsion signifies, translates, or betrays.145

This phenomenon also raises the issue of heritage, of inherited words and, beyond that yet always bound up together, the remains of the Cold War, the attributes of a system that still inform the prevailing, legitimizing discourses insisting on a radical break that takes place in the wake of the ‘event’ of ‘9/11’. That date further consists of an injunction that buries its own excesses, to mention Slavoj Žižek, the ‘excessive outgrowths’146 of US Cold War operations and an architecture whose functionality has to stay central, the nucleus, in a task – itself interminable – that seeks to think and speak ‘the thing’ in question: the illimitable Cold War. In Bunker Archaeology, Paul Virilio’s field of vision is taken up by solid masses, the vestiges of World War II, whose fortifications, ‘littoral boundary stones’, are now ‘worthless object[s]’: A long history was curled up here. These concrete blocks were in fact the final throw-off of the history of frontiers, from the Roman limes to the Great Wall of China; the bunkers, as ultimate military surface architecture, had shipwrecked at lands’ limits, at the precise moment of the sky’s arrival in war; they marked off the horizontal littoral, the continental limit. History had changed course one final time before jumping into the immensity of aerial space.147

Rather than indicative of a ‘weird nostalgia’148 for an order before ‘the immensity of aerial space’, when the security of the territory was a condition that could, if not be assured, at least be defended, Virilio’s project is as ever concerned with ‘advances’ in military equipment, which progressively disappears: monumental, solid and purely defensive formations become ‘worthless’ in a strategic reality in which destruction is instantaneous. The line of reasoning is then not necessarily backward-looking but, more so, is informed by an argument that, over the course of Virilio’s work, unceasingly

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focuses on militarized, technologized environments articulated as pure speed, to the point of total invisibility. These accelerations make it necessary to consider obsolete devices, the surface patterns of previous wars, whose spaces still allow for some form of concrete intervention, a walk among relics, sound recordings to arrest the atmosphere of a place.149 These initiatives, however, enter elements that, while now visible and accessible – because of stated conclusions that decree to abandon test sites and, in due course, declassify materials – belonged to a prior period of invisibility in terms of areas that were off-limits, existed at a remove. A technology’s degree of realization then also corresponds to an analogous process of stages regarding its detection, that is, the ontological phases that a machine passes through in order to come into being exist, correspondingly, as it passes out of its purpose. The ‘variable-ontology world’150 that technological projects, always at the brink of realization or derealization, are deployed in means that, once obsolete, their presence oddly becomes more tangible. The ‘progress’, in their instance, has stopped, if only to a certain extent: devices are upgraded; their earlier manifestations discarded. But, instead of being separable from the objects/ projects to follow, these derelictions provide the starting points for an analysis into present matter that, though fully realized, nonetheless vanishes – through speed, miniaturization, manoeuvres in aerial or subterranean spaces, a military strategy that relies on an arsenal of invisible weapons, rays, radar, satellites, and drone strikes. A project such as Virilio’s, informing this one, returns to a previous phase of technological realization to do with reasons of perception: Virilio keeps being sensitive to ‘the volatilization of all environmental conditions’,151 an unsurprising awareness considering that the pictures he took on his travels all stem from the time between 1958 and 1965. The ‘immensity of aerial space’ becomes particularly palpable after Sputnik, and the ‘survival machine’ of the bunker especially inadequate, even though its ‘shipwrecked’ solidity affects being able to withstand ‘terrific atmospheric pressure’, released by ‘an unusual world in which science and technology have developed the possibility of final disintegration’.152 An imagination of disaster is at work here, finding signs of annihilations to come but that concurrently seem to have already happened; the technological process, irrespectively, has still not halted: The poetry of the bunker is in its still being a shield for its users, in the end as outdated as an infant’s rebuilt armour, an empty shell, an emotionally moving phantom of an old-fashioned duel in which the adversaries could still look each other in the eye through the narrow slits of their helmets. The bunker is the protohistory of an age in which the power of a single weapon is so great that no distance can protect you from it any longer.153

There are, to be sure, ‘moving’ emotions at play, directed at a monument – a ‘still being’ – that is anthropomorphized, a phantom-shield for sentinels and a sentinel itself, but that also anticipates ‘final disintegration’; any shelter it offers is illusory – it is this fantasy of protection and the state of emergency that Virilio is discussing in a book ostensibly about ‘bunker archaeology’.

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If Virilio’s project is concerned with establishing the protohistory – by way of looking at relics from the previous war – of the nuclear weapon’s potential for absolute destruction, then this book follows suit: the early-generation missile force under investigation also functions as an analysis of the continuum of violence perpetuated by a titanic war machine that progressively disappears. Titans give way to Midgetmen; all the while, these devices form part of a network of superpower that is at once hypervisible and undetectable. In a way, the same urgency informs both Bunker Archaeology and Rocket States, in that tangible things prompt an engagement with an order whose systems of control and command are immense as well as miniaturized. The study of obsolete ‘survival machines’ is, by extension, a confrontation with unceasing technological ‘progress’: the ruins of superseded weapons may be all that is left before the ‘final disintegration’ of material techno-culture. The Cold War has not come to an end even though the ‘long game of détente’ between two great spatial powers might have been abandoned; its systems of thought governing ideological opposition ‘[continue] to live and thrive within our collective imaginations as a security state hysteria’.154 Closure is only presumed, invented; the Cold War’s ‘paranoid field of fantasies’155 form the premises of current policies of intervention that constantly upgrade the Cold War nucleus, that is, the state of exception and its fantasy of self-preservation. These prevailing narratives of siege, articulated as a lacuna and anomie, and fantasized through weaponry, form the subject of this book itself incorporating, as it were, the works of Benjamin, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Virilio, Latour, Agamben. Their theoretical positions offer a means to speak or write about a subject matter/spirit – technological projects like nuclear missiles; the state of emergency expanding under their warping pressures – that performs a dreamfunction as well as deadly logic. This arrangement simultaneously yields a theoretical and technological unconscious, the latter to do with a machine’s dream states, its degrees of realization that require less a definite line of reasoning than, as mentioned earlier, a Traum Deutung. To select such a mode of thinking – a more appropriate term with which to replace ‘selection’ would be necessity or compulsion – is, or seeks to be, a political act, an act of resistance against text-machines/death machines. Itself a text-machine, whose confrontation might, as a result, always be compromised, Rocket States nonetheless is executed in the spirit of a radical critique that, in the writing practice, is articulated in such a way that it allows for slippages (through metaphor, for example, but also punctuation) of meaning. This way – conceiving of language as parasitic, to refer to William Burroughs, as a colonial, lethal force, and as an imprisonment – it might, perhaps, be possible to overturn the ‘prevailing’ rhetoric: the text-shifts, is uneasy, threatens to collapse thereby upending the stability of the ‘structure’ of language. Injunctions, or echoes, of Derrida, then, but other inhabitations also occur: a body of work haunted by the ‘circulation of intensities’ and the possibilities of its own failures, or collaborations, in the sense of traitorous cooperation with the order it insists to oppose but might, after all, consolidate or hardly disturb. Because although executed in a style that prefers to be gestural, associative, to run lines rather than taking root, stabilization/neutralization of a text still happens, however much it tries to resist the maintenance of a balance (of terror). The unconscious, too,

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can – or has – become arborescent, another example of control imposed from above; the application of rhizomatic movements of expression is, yet again, an attempt to un-do a ‘rigidified [territoriality]’ of a theory of the unconscious through adopting a strategy that, though no ‘schizoanalysis’,156 practises displacements. The text, like its object of study, passes through stages of realization and derealization, moments when the fabric of its argument decomposes or evades culmination in an end point. The theoretical apparatus at work is, as such, multifaceted: part dream-interpretation, echoland,157 corpus of haunting, mechanism of ingestion, this book internally throws up its references, often becoming ghostly, absent presences whose substantiality has less to do with the accumulation of citations than with the essence of this text-machine. It is a space from which to address the hauntology and dream-work/world of nuclear technology, so as to remain open to what is allowed to come: conditions of extrication from a dangerous philosophy, the ‘degree zero’ of the state of exception.

Counter-conduct This book is an investigation of a condition of being, that is, the rocket state, which is also the state of exception whose terminal design – the ‘degree zero’ of its political system – is best captured in the early snapshot of the Trinity detonation (Figure 1): a shell of viscous transparency, a closed world, a dream of shelter, at the heart of which exists a great emptiness. The rocket state functions according to principles of detention, to hold within, operating in a system that really is a death colony; the recurring concerns of this book revolve around concepts and models of incorporation, endo-colonization, meaning inside occupation,158 and (the myth of) protection following an ‘implacable law’, an auto-immunitary process that turns against itself. As such, this project – with its empty centre, the rocket, its ‘ideology of the zero’ – is about terrestrial inhabitation: the implantation of the ICBM and of its support mechanisms in ‘fields of fantasy’: the geographical United States, the machinic unconscious of dreaming subjects. It is, then, a spatial project, considering a missile culture whose superpower imposes a Deathkingdom that begins at Trinity from which ‘all geography emanates’: from here, the rocket state/of exception, extending its reach, insinuates itself. The technocratic network of the Rakentenstadt, the rocket cartel that Thomas Pynchon describes in Gravity’s Rainbow, where it develops in the ‘stateless German night’, grows into a ‘structure cutting across every human agency and paper that ever touched it’. This book’s objective, however, is not to chase connections across ‘oceans and surface politics’159 that lie beyond America’s borders, but to stay within its (albeit voracious) perimeter, and to investigate, inside, the traces and damages left by Titans. Even so, the scope of the task remains narrow, the field notes limited; it does not, cannot, provide a map approximating, or covering, the territories in question, nor offer as many sources as Robert Del Tredici, a nomad, does in his photographic journey across the American weapons complex producing an arsenal imagined, in the Boston Science Museum, as a field of cones, amber waves of a grain installation.160 As an undertaking in which the whole nation is implicated, where practically every

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federal state performs a ‘vital’ function in the nuclear arms development, an analysis of its composite parts and ‘immense texturology’ requires tactics, trajectories that seek to pit themselves against the ‘amazing invisibility’ of the bomb.161 Del Tredici’s strategy is migrational, his book composed of black-and-white photographs that remember a fantasy, the preparation for a world-ending war that has not as yet occurred: pictures include close-ups of irradiated workers, aerial shots of ‘feed materials’ installations, nature mortes capturing contaminated water ditches, a tailings wall. The facilities the photographer visits are many; located in California, Utah, Texas, the Dakotas, Florida, they are distributed throughout the United States, spreading responsibility thin. The processes of nuclear weapons manufacture and assembly are drawn out, stretched so as to approach the vanishing point of their detection; their ‘amazing invisibility’ already anticipates total death, an event which, ‘in its very nature, must always remain invisible’, because, as Jonathan Schell remarks, ‘there will be no one left to see it’.162 In ‘counter-conduct’163 to these visions of emptiness, the extenuation of forms into geography and beyond vantage points, exist practices that transpose the bomb out of blankness into visibility. Production necessarily happens somewhere, as do the consequences prior to, and after, detonation, though these – the monstrous appendages of servicemen and women, the cancer rates in and around plutonium plants – are easily overlooked, relegated back into the remote domains in which they also initially occur. Any effort, therefore, to raise the atom bomb out of its phantom states is concerned with duality and also with ‘degrees of realization’: the nuclear weapon – matter and concurrently spirit – keeps passing through ‘every imaginable ontological stage’,164 even after it has reached, however briefly, material form. The ‘degree zero’ of the bomb, then, is as much a condition that refers to the state of exception it explodes as to the sites – dispersed, clandestine – of its making, attempting to eliminate its own presence, a development similarly evident in terms of the state of war, pure and permanent, no longer declared in its execution, but forever and silently ongoing in its imperceptible preparation. It has, as Tom Vanderbilt observes, shifted from a ‘marked’ occurrence to a limitless and ‘underlying condition’,165 playing itself out in fantasies, the machinery of a (missile) culture and security state colonizing itself (land, body/politic) through weapons plantations. Gravity’s Rainbow is indicative of this hauntology, the territorial and subject-occupation by the rocket submerged in prison camps, that is, rocket production facilities and bio-colonial outposts installed in the bodies of hostages. These rocket cities are hollowed out in darkness, the ‘dead black’ of the Mittelwerke, for example, ‘so whitely lit against the calm dimness of space’,166 the silos entombed in fields – internal worlds harbouring buried MADness. These voids placed at the centre of nation-states function as focal points in an investigation of the unique, sunken spatialities created, appropriated and occupied by technology. The narrative procedure of the book is determined by missile technology, in a process of domestication: nuclear weapons assimilate into already existing narratives defining the particular US States under investigation, thereby considering both mutation and continuity – a poetics of space yielding to dream-machines, death

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engines. But space, this time, is not empty, but rather defined, according to Anthony Vidler, ‘as a product of subjective projection and introjection’,167 so that any poetics of techno-space invariably manifests, precisely, the endo-colonization processes of missile culture and the ‘fabulously textual’ structures that give rise to it. To write this book, and to see, everywhere, the mechanisms of total war – an American space that is also absolutely atomic – manifest an imagination besieged by the pathologies of the Cold War and by its functional continuum: there is only the nuclear referent.168 It means, then, to be receptive to the ‘power of the death machine’, to welcome its colonization in an act of submission (or gadget love) that, despite its dangers, has to be accomplished: this act of collaboration allows, at the same time, the emergence of a counter-conduct. The Derridean project – as if a unity existed, as if it strived for the comfort of a totalizing theory when it is about refusing a ‘good conscience’169 – posits that opposition is part of the system and an interminable process of vigilance standing against the ‘ritual incantation[s]’ of text/death machines. It is as much a process of reading as it is a political intervention, operating from within, opposing the lull of total security – an expression of inertia – that the nuclear weapon and its carriers of propulsion seek to attain: Blicero’s ‘great glass sphere’, closed and removed, indicative of the techno-culture death cult. Dream-weapons are ‘mock-angels’,170 as Pynchon writes, but also, and more pertinently so, vampiric, disintegrating in the very light they bring about: the ‘progress’ of technology and the stockpiling of gadgetry set up feedback loops, habits of feeding pitching so-called Man, as soft support provision, against the predator/machine. The ‘Real Text’ to decode, so Pynchon mentions in Gravity’s Rainbow, however, rather than ‘a conspiracy between human beings and techniques’ – wars dictated by the ‘needs’ of technology; ‘dawn is nearly here, I need my night’s blood’171 – is not to maintain an abyssal order of being but to remember complicity: All very well to talk about having a monster by the tail, but do you think we’d’ve had the Rocket if someone, some specific somebody with a name and a penis hadn’t wanted to chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles and blow up a block full of civilians? Go ahead, capitalise the T on technology, deify it if it’ll make you feel less responsible – but it puts you in with the neutered, brother, in with the eunuchs keeping the harem of our stolen Earth for the numb and joyless hardons of human sultans, human elite with no right at all to be where they are –172

It is not with the intent to sustain divides keeping apart ‘man’ and machine, or to keep up the ‘joyless hardons’ of privilege that metaphors of vampires apply to rocket technology, but to insist on the death cult or drive evident in a culture defined by a weapon that, though clearly offensive, also functions in terms of an imagined, but no less fatal, parabolic shelter. A missile culture operates as an economy of security consumption that imagines total death – a ‘degree zero’ originating in the ‘marble pallor’173 of the mind, abdicating responsibility; these flights into (nuclear) enclosures are processes of exsanguination suggestive of a Kadavergehorsamkeit, the conformity of the corpse.174

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The word, and condition, of corpse-like compliance, occurring in Gravity’s Rainbow, also appears in Walter Rathenau’s Was Wird Werden, the title of a small collection of papers published in 1917, in which he claims that post-war Germany – ruined empire that buries the rubble of its defeat – must, in order to create a living, organic economy [Wirtschaftskörper], increase the production of its raw materials. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Rathenau is consulted during a séance called to try and determine rocket flight paths; the chemical process he talks about specifies the disposition of techno-cultures at large: ‘[t]he real movement is not from death to any rebirth. It is from death to deathtransfigured’.175 Closed-world, technologically induced isolation, armed to the teeth, freezes in its image of inert perfection, where the limits of mortality are breached; this evacuation procedure – the nuclear weapon as dream-machine projecting shelter – is, at the risk of repetition and regardless of its politics of speed, static, a cold arrest of auto-immunitary self-destruction. Even though generally bleak – the body of this book struggles to articulate itself against the massive inertia of missile culture – Rocket States, by way of an ostensible subjugation, attempts to raise the possibility of a counter-conduct against a system of truth whose Umwelt is that of dead light. The study is an infection – text-machines and death machines are viral – therefore also hoping to contest this Deathkingdom from the inside, held within the system and geography of the United States hosting the ‘selferasing’,176 subterranean technologies of the National Security State. A work on the territories that hold in place atomic shields – a concept that, like the word protection and the rest of its semantic field, hides its offensive nature – the book focuses on these ostensible security measures: by way of the concrete form of ICBMs and their support structures as well as the ghostly sweeps of death-ray weapons. The book occurs, in many ways, as a study of the blinking points between the alternating presences and absences of enormous machines. The investigation’s targets are Colorado, Kansas, Cape Canaveral and New York, forming a passage through space as much as time – the advance is roughly chronological, beginning in the late 1940s and early 1950s and coming to an end in the first part of the twenty-first century, with the emergence of a ‘kind of billowing mushroom cloud in reverse’.177 These areas form case studies, marked by different branches of the nuclear weapons industry and Cold War pathologies: Chapter 1, on Colorado, proposes an investigation of The Shining (Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick’s) in radioactive light. The Overlook Hotel functions as a textualized repository of Cold War compulsions, most notably the obsessive desire for shining superpower, achieved/archived through a re-programming or over-writing of (paternal) subjectivity into emptiness.178 Chapter 2, on Kansas, considers the protective space of the missile silo, taking into account ICBM development; a recurring conceptual space or zone is the threshold, commenting (as ever) on the proximity of dreamworld and death wish. The chapter further accesses what lies ‘beyond’ the ostensible ‘end’ of the Cold War in terms of retrofitting missile silo installations as designs for ‘war on terror’ life/undeath. Chapter 3 focuses on Cape Canaveral in order to discuss space age programmes of absolute engineering: subject evolution or enhancement into cyborg-beings and total-system environments instigated on the ground through ballistic missile technology. Chapter 4, on New York,

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studies anti-missile missile projects, specifically Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), anticipated by other dream-like siege-systems such as Nikola Tesla’s Wardenclyffe and the Batman’s sphere of operation: these arrangements seek to close off ‘life-worlds’ but instead generate death-ray envelopes. There is, as yet, no end point to this security state discourse: as such, there exists no conclusion, only (the hope for; a contribution to) a ‘mobilization’.

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Excavation: Colorado

The grounds of the bomb Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is about the rocket and rocket state formation, technologies of dream-like and catastrophic dimensions whose (de)realizations reconfigure the world: But a rocket has suddenly struck. A terrific blast quite close beyond the village: the entire fabric of the air, the time, is changed – the casement window blown inward, rebounding with a wood squeak to slam again as all the house still shudders.1

A book so concerned with reversals, films running backwards – ‘faired skin back to sheet steel back to pigs to white incandescence to ore, to Earth’2 – Gravity’s Rainbow deals with the impact of the missile, which it also considers in terms of ‘phases’ that occur before detonation. ‘Phase’ refers to conditioned reflexes, for example, installed in subjects recruited, willingly or unwillingly, as ‘colonial outpost[s]’ functioning in the service of the ‘metropolitan brain’3; the processes of excavation that this chapter considers are therefore also indicative of the order of emptiness installed through programmed commands in slaves that nonetheless think themselves masters. Prior to ‘angelic visits’ – and bearing in mind the missile’s apparent reversal of the ‘normal order of the stimuli’ – the rocket state coming into existence, even though it announces itself through a ‘terrific blast’, emerges as much out of the earth than out of the sky: it is ore that makes possible the ‘new cosmic bombs’ continuing, and expanding, ‘structures favouring death’.4 To reveal the ‘angel’ therefore means to return to the ground, to a moment before its explosive arrival by effectuating a backward movement, as it were, to consider a mineral: the ore and core of the nuclear weapon mined, among other places, in the state of Colorado. In 1997, Peter Bacon Hales published a book on ‘America’s atomic spaces’, a military creation that in time consolidates into a ‘new type of cultural environment, penetrating work, leisure . . ., language, and belief, and present even today as a significant, if surreptitious, strain of American culture’.5 He proceeds to investigate the Manhattan Project’s three principal sites, a holy trinity indicating an emergent technological sublimity assembled in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Los Alamos, New Mexico; and Hanford, Washington. Of these, it is only Los Alamos or, more specifically, White Sands Missile Range – where the plutonium device, in a test codenamed Trinity, is first detonated on

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16 July 1945 – that spectacularly erupts into visibility through the blinding light of the bomb. Here, in ‘Atomland-on-Mars’, as William L. Laurence, prophet of the nuclear age, notes, the vast energy locked within the heart of the atoms of matter was released for the first time in a burst of flame such as had never before been seen on this planet, illuminating earth and sky, for a brief span that seemed eternal, with the light of many super-suns. With the flash came a delayed roll of mighty thunder, heard, just as the flash was seen, for hundreds of miles. The roar echoed and reverberated from the distant hills and the Sierra Oscuro range nearby, sounding as though it came from supramundane sources as well as from the bowels of the earth.6

The implosion is all spectacle, shooting upwards in rainbow dyes; both visible and aural manifestations appear at once to emanate from extraterrestrial as well as earthly origins, whose compression, in the bomb, releases an energy whose glare is reflected on the surface of the moon. Laurence’s account, which suits the occasion in its hyperbolic rhetoric, marks the beginning of an empire of the super-sun, a messianic arrival but also sexualized outburst resulting in the ‘cry of a newborn world’.7 The metaphors really get mixed up – as if an indication of the mutations to come – in descriptions of the bomb’s constitution, approximated through polarized chains of words, phallic/vulvic, dark/light, terrestrial/‘supramundane’: it is at the interface of these expressions that the bomb materializes as an entity that is defined, above all, through (nuclear) fusion. The missing link, in the listing above, concerns the opposition between the visible and the unseen, the irradiations that occur at cell level and happen quietly on the inside, but also in relation to the secrets around which the bomb is formed and which it spreads out across the ‘newborn’ world. This order is distinctly that of the nuclear device, whose existence has, since the inception of the ‘atomic age’, concurrently been associated with monumentality and invisibility. Latour’s discussion on the lack of a frontier separating matter from spirit in relation to technological projects consequently also – or, perhaps, above all – applies to the bomb that, though momentarily a concrete object, explodes formlessness: the blankness of ground zero and the ‘spirit’ of radioactivity. The secrets of this total war-state – the state of emergency whose pure violence expands the degree zero of the law – leave their marks on the imagination besieged and traumatized by the Cold War and its in/ visible workings of power. In Underworld, Don DeLillo writes that ‘[t]here is the secret of the bomb and there are secrets that the bomb inspires’: the genius of the bomb is printed not only in its physics of particles and rays but in the occasion it creates for new secrets. For every atmospheric blast, every glimpse we get of the barred force of nature, that weird peeled eyeball exploding over the desert – for every one of these . . . a hundred plots go underground, to spawn and skein.8

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Before it arises out of the pre-dawn darkness, the bomb exists as shadow technology developed in a military bureaucracy that hides itself in nondescript, colourless edifices and through generic designations, like the Manhattan Engineer District (MED), implying the edges of an island when the project in effect exceeds all limits. MED, a giant cartel which, after World War II, shifts responsibilities to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), established by way of the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, adapts landscapes to a single purpose: the creation of a weapon whose damage begins before its detonation. Hales demonstrates that destruction is already to be found in the assigned worthlessness of pockets of land, deeds of property wiped out by District superpowers. As such, even though the bomb’s epicentre is located in ‘albino’9 topography in New Mexico, the production facilities and assemblage plants, as well as the consequences of manufacture and blast are dispersed throughout the nation, extending the Jornada del Muerto past its New Mexican basin: the journey and triumph of the dead claim the remainder of the world of the living. In the introduction to At Work in the Fields of the Bomb, Jonathan Schell comments on how Robert Del Tredici, a photographer travelling across a geography of war, ‘penetrate[s] . . . the “amazing invisibility” of the bomb’ by directing ‘our special attention’ to the preparations for total death, machinery that is approached through ‘oblique observation’, x-ray vision that traverses ‘ordinary’10 sights. Del Tredici’s photographs – comprising eerily silent, still perspectives of rocket displays devoid of any signs of life; ‘classic landscapes’11 masking suffering – do not record sublime explosions and pay no heed to the weapon’s ‘romantic grandeur’.12 What is evident instead is a sense of absence, the haunting emptiness of a techno-culture whose nucleus is occupied by the absent presence of the atom bomb. To look at this device, then, according to a mode of visuality that focuses on the processes of production and on the people involved in such developments is to notice a vacuum that lies concealed in details, in the ordinariness of towns whose life force is drained by surrounding plants: ‘super carrots’,13 superbombs. If, as Del Tredici so precisely captures, even unused atomic weapons radiate death, then the correlations between the bomb and (horror) fiction are not simply restricted to stories of apocalypse, zero-hour detonations mutilating and mutating human/animal ontology or spawning rampant, outsized plant life. After the blast, so Pynchon writes in Gravity’s Rainbow, the sound of the rocket arrives too late: it is a ‘ghost in the sky’ calling to ‘ghosts newly made’14; even prior to launch, however, the nuclear device is spectral, disappearing into code words and bleached space. The ‘amazing invisibility’ associated with its creation and continuing ‘proliferation’ – quotation marks for a word with botanical and biological origins, raising the spirit of an autonomous technology, thereby abdicating responsibility – characterizes both the bomb’s beginning and its end points. The ‘variable ontology’15 of the nuclear weapon, concurrently matter and spirit or text, refers not only to Latour’s work, but also to Derrida’s, concerned with the discourse formations of a ‘fable’, that is, all-out nuclear war, impacting on the collective imagination in terms of the recurring pathologies of the Cold War: a closed world of supreme control and total paranoia, whose metaphors/fantasies are so pervasive that

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texts can speak of nothing else. In his article for the ‘nuclear criticism’ issue of Diacritics, Derrida claims that nuclear war has become the ‘absolute referent, the horizon and the condition of all the others’, to the point that texts invariably refer back – ‘in order to assimilate that unassimilable wholly other’ – to that horizon.16 The nuclear symbolic, which Derrida talks of in terms of an ‘absolute’ trace that is ‘remainderless’ and yet ‘ineffaceable’,17 functions as the structuring force of writing, fantasizing about total selfdestruction; even texts that manoeuvre around the subject, the degree zero of a war that leaves nothing in its wake, are haunted by this perspective that ‘things are in the unmaking’.18 A case in point is Adam Piette’s analysis of Lolita in his study on the ‘literary Cold War’, concerned with the ‘direct link between private fantasies and the military-industrial complex running the world’.19 Piette investigates the occupation of subjects’ interiority, underground manoeuvres that find material expression in buried ‘defence’ mechanisms executing the Cold War. Titanic machinery carries out death wishes, but so does the ‘long game of deterrence and nuclear logic’20 that drifts, radioactively, into the constitution of a nation and its citizens alike. ‘ The aim of the book,’ Piette writes, ‘is to sketch out the secret, obsessive and paranoid story of the mind under the compulsions of the Cold War, to graph the triangulated nuclear anxieties of the citizen in the postwar security state.’21 Applied to Lolita, this approach yields a reading that matches up Humbert Humbert’s sexual plotting with Cold War secrecies; the assimilation of projects is initiated in the Arctic, where Distant Early Warning (DEW) lines of fantasy defence and hush-hush uranium mining instruct Humbert in techniques of camouflage. The subsequent findings relate to the identification of nuclear systems of aggression readily incorporated by Humbert, ‘death-ray’ exterminator, ‘lethally dosing Lolita with killer gamma rays’.22 In a text mined like this, managed so as to reveal the deadly energies at work in Lolita and directed against the girl child, a level of radioactive damage gradually becomes clear; it initially hides in words, references to landscapes absorbed into the Cold War effort, which Piette traces across Nabokov’s work – the Cold War forms Lolita’s heart of darkness or core of radiant light. Confronted with internalized killer strategies, it is, then, necessary to adopt peripheral vision – Del Tredici’s ‘oblique observation’ that penetrates ordinary sights; Piette’s readings of Cold War coded, encoded, discourses – combined with the requirement to become an insider so as to negotiate textual underworlds. As such, what is to come is a paranoid investigation of Stephen King’s The Shining (book and movie) in radioactive light, organizing Jack Torrance’s stay and decay at the Overlook Hotel according to the effects of ‘archive fevers’: nuclear, demonic, fakepaternal. The novel is published in 1977, at a time when the nuclear referent looks to have been displaced into much more unspecified environmental catastrophes – industrial waste, as opposed to the terror of the superweapon, forming cosmologies of refuse; daily garbage pushing into ‘every available space’23 – yet Stephen King, after all, is a ‘child of [his] times’. War baby grown up on Strontium-90, King defines his existence as a horror writer according to an ‘unheard-off occurrence’ that recalls

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the ending of Gravity’s Rainbow (as well as the opening stages of It, a novel about ‘Corpse-lights’)24: For me, the terror – the real terror, as opposed to whatever demons and bogeys which might have been living in my own mind – began on an afternoon in October 1957. I had just turned ten. And, as was only fitting, I was in a movie theatre: the Stratford Theatre in downtown Stratford, Connecticut.25

Here darkness sweeps in, then the house lights switch on, but the film, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, did not break; the real theatrical spectacle was ‘Spootnik’, an event that was unprecedented, unexpected and induced ‘tomblike silence’, the ‘living frieze’26 of a moment at a standstill. ‘Spootnik’, indicative of a logic of haunting, marks the beginning of a ‘colossus’ – that is, the ‘technological dreamwork’ of the United States – overturned by the ‘Russkies’ and by the ‘implication[s] of what [they] had done’: the satellite speaks/spooks of a ‘new and ominous . . . vocabulary of terror: ICBM’.27 If King describes this instant as formative – world-ending and emergent at the same time: the ‘real terror’ that, from this moment of silence, shapes his/mass consciousness – his trade, as a result, functions as compulsion, evident in the stockpile of his works as well as in their persisting, obsessive returns of writers, writing, reading, lexis machines.28 John Sears argues that King’s novels are text-machines, desiring and monstrously producing, whose incessant output and ‘relentless generic hybridity’ – an identity of continual genre becoming, ‘transforming, mutating, flowing into other spaces and becoming “other” to itself ’ – operate as assemblages of machines,29 ‘driving other machines’.30 These machinic flows, in King’s text-machines, send out missiles/ missives that expose/explode31 the emergency state of the Cold War (via ‘Spootnik’ and world-circling ICBMs) as the central concern of a colossus – King’s growing corpus of work – that remains, besides, attentive to mechanisms of place: deposits, cold pockets, charges, the taking place of archives, themselves a technologized haunting and ‘broadcasting’.32 In Danse Macabre, King dismisses the Marsten House in ’Salem’s Lot as incidental, ‘lending atmosphere’ but not doing much else, yet that in The Shining, the concept of the ‘Bad Place’ becomes crucial,33 as does the setting, Colorado, a territoriality that through its localized haunting ‘broadcasts’ beyond itself: it relays the ultimate horizon of meaning that is US nuclear security culture. This type of reading is invariably paranoid; as Roger Luckhurst notes in his analysis of Kubrick’s The Shining, the film ‘does to its viewers what the hotel does to its visitors – it makes them shine on things glimpsed that were never there, or were there all along, hiding in plain sight’.34 He specifically refers to the many slippages, the impossible space of the Overlook Hotel that generates an unceasing compulsion to consign signs together: Derrida speaks of the power of consignation in Archive Fever, aiming ‘to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration’.35 This ‘ideal configuration’ – though perhaps approximated by gesturing towards the histories of violence that ‘wacky’36 interpretations gather into unsettled theories – is never achieved, only archived as multiplicities, experiences of

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reading, writing, and haunting. The Shining, whatever its technicized form – as a novel or a movie – functions as a place of inscription, installation, location, registration37 of an insistent paranoid impulse to do with archival documentation and with readings. John Sears’ book on Stephen King’s Gothic is premised on acts of (re-)readings, (re-)writings that form, after all, ‘incessant activities in King’s work’; he argues that the ‘intentions and failings of writing’ are both ‘absent centre’ and ‘driving force’ of The Shining, staging a lethal ‘play’ of words and encodings38 in the textualized storage technology – the archive, this ‘place from which order is given’39 – of the Overlook Hotel. Place is a textual order, and King’s work is so intent on actions of placing, but rather than a ‘placeless place’, a comment that Sears attributes to the ‘indeterminate presence’40 of the Hotel – which also applies to the filming of the novel, which took place in Glacier National Park, Montana; at the Timberline Lodge, Oregon; on a soundstage in Hertfordshire – the Overlook archives a desire for superpower that is at once patriarchal and nuclear, the latter specifically because it is rooted in Colorado. The work (novel, film) demands to be read as repository of inheritance – as Luckhurst does in terms of, for example, ‘art-horror’ films of the 1970s or Sears accomplishes in relation to the Gothic – even if the film replaces King’s verticality with the ‘relentless horizontal glide of the camera’.41 The Hotel remains an impression, vertical or lateral, of an archive, a maze-like, palimpsestic space that is disorienting, incomprehensible, a ‘dark nest’42 of fatal repetitions, machinic frenzy, hallucinations that carry threats of mis-readings but also return to ‘spectral truths’.43 Derrida relates the ‘spectral truth of delusion or of hauntedness’ to Freud’s thesis, ‘[mobilizing]’ the ‘machinery of psychoanalysis’ which begins, ‘obviously, with the mechanisms of repression’44: the psyche as spectral archive that orders repetitions, the shadow plays of inherited violence that form The Shining’s heart/nest that, little by little, ‘had accrued’ a force, ‘secret and silent’.45 A text about deposits, silent or buzzing – ‘secret’ wasps conceptualize an invisible, radioactive force that, in turn, enters the recording device of the psychic archive, emptied out of everything but the impressions of the Father, hungry sound soul, and of patriarchal/ archival ‘strange . . . love’.46 Derrida himself returns, albeit in a process that keeps re-reading the ‘future as spectre’, as radically open, to a scholar who ‘would dare to speak to the phantom’.47 If Jack Torrance becomes progressively immobilized and hollowed out – Luckhurst observes that in the film, Jack ‘is only waiting for something to occupy him’ and that, towards the end, his performance is ‘entirely citational’ to demonstrate that ‘all he can do is quote’,48 as if every other inscription was erased by the ‘low somnolent buzz’49 of the Hotel – he cannot be conceived of as an active agent. He does not, consequently, ‘speak to’ phantom-forces but functions, instead, as an ‘in-human’, that is, interior, mechanism for archiving the desires – for ‘shining’ superpower; total submission to demonic paternal authority – of the Hotel: pure storage apparatus blankly citing the laws of the Overlook. This internal impression, to cite Derrida, follows the logic and semantics of the archive, of memory and of the memorial, of conservation and of inscription which put into reserve (“store”), accumulate, capitalize, stock a quasi-infinity of layers, of archival strata that are at once

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superimposed, overprinted, and enveloped in each other. To read, in this case, requires working at geological or archaeological excavations, on substrates or under surfaces, old or new skins. . . .50

The Overlook overprints Torrance, ‘saved’ as a text accumulating the ‘archival violence’51 of the Father, ‘white ghost-god’52 that works in conjunction with, or superimposition with, the laws of the text’s setting: the archive, as Derrida argues, forms a ‘topo-nomology’, a zone of intersection between ‘the topological and the nomological, of the place and the law’.53 Considering that King’s books treat location as textualized inscription, depositing at once internal and external forces/desires, the text as archive requires an ‘archaeological excavation’ that takes into account, in the case of The Shining, the state of Colorado, itself inscribed, in its substrates, with the ‘abyssal’ possibilities of the future, more specifically of a future annihilation, a condition of the archive which also commands its own effacement.54 This is, then, the scene of excavation: part of the Four Corners region, Colorado was the site of atomic booms in the 1950s; the Rocky Mountains contain mineral deposits including coal, mainly located along the Eastern slopes of the mountains, deep wells of oil and natural gas situated throughout Western Colorado, as well as an ore that acquires its value only with the bomb. DeLillo comments on the ‘curious connection’ between weapons and waste, if from a slightly different vantage point: ‘one is the mystical twin of the other’ because waste, too, is a ‘secret history’55 pushing deep into space. Waste matter constitutes one of the secrets of the atom bomb, transmuting shit into gold56: pitchblende, a uranium-rich mineral, in time becomes the sacred force of the weapon, whose c/ore is source of both light and death. The spatial dimensions of King’s work and his experiential situation – the ‘invitation to dance’ that occurs at the Stratford Theatre in Connecticut – produce a hallucinatory reading of The Shining, rooted in a localized history of ore extraction. The Overlook Hotel’s basement operations release the consequences of America’s Cold War nuclear strategy, archived as traces/phantoms that possess, overwrite, Jack Torrance in order to gain the core of the family unit, the shining child as undead, undying superpower. Torrance, excavated scholar, absorbs the psychopathologies, the ‘fake-paternal predatory power’57 and lethal energy emissions of the Cold War; the ‘truth’ of this ‘insanity’ is the production of a compulsive, emptied mind – whose emptiness is not absolute because buzzing with the sound of the Hotel, the shadow play of the ‘bad’, strangely loving Father – executing inward-turning, autoimmunitary processes of self-destruction.

Words like radium In 1948, the AEC announced the first federally controlled mineral rush, but the shadows of the boom only emerge with difficulty due to the Commission’s operations of obfuscation concerning tailings hazards; prosperity eludes most in this industry because the business, and its products, is volatile, while its dreams, like spirits, endure. Jack Torrance is a mining, dreaming scholar who compulsively descends into the

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basement of the Overlook Hotel where he finds a scrapbook – ‘yellow’58 matter – that raises the dead; down here, Torrance grows ill due to decay products disposed of as waste, never quite assembling into a secret history – an articulated unity – of the Overlook Hotel. This is hot stuff, concentrated energy leaking out of entombment, a desiring-flow that, as Sears argues, functions as one of the recurring, structuring concerns of King’s work, operating as a textualization and ‘spatialisation of historical force’ by way of a technology of writing (genre, but also in terms of occasional typographical ‘disorders’),59 that is itself palimpsestic, interstitial.60 Sears writes that, [t]he possibility of genre depends upon a notion of a formal and textual identity always already exceeding itself, each genre not fixed spatially or temporally but necessarily transforming, mutating, flowing into other spaces and becoming “other” to itself in its efforts to respond to, assimilate, redefine or annul other generic positions which border it.61

Writing is frequently machinic in King’s works, technologized and abject: writing shit but also radioactivity, like in The Tommyknockers, where Bobbi Anderson’s ‘thoughtsensitive’ typewriter – writing at a distance, while asleep, in a remote communication which is, at any rate, what writing designates – gives off a glow, ‘[s]ickly green light spilling up through the keyboard and over the words like radium’.62 This scene of writing installs another subjectivity in place, in The Tommyknockers as well as in The Shining, where nests of words – rotting, mouldy, monstrously organic – encroach on Torrance, in passive mode. The foundational violence that generates the United States, and which is mentioned in Kubrick’s movie, refers as much to the ‘family romance’ that plays itself out at the Overlook Hotel; King’s Torrance might not start out as always already vacuous, but it is nonetheless the seat or nest of his imagination that is receptive to the messages transmitted by an invariably absent Hotel management. It is the scrapbook that Torrance finds in the basement of the Hotel that initiates perverted acts of reading/writing: it barely contains fragments of the Overlook’s ‘toilet’ history suggesting to Jack the achievement of his aspirations, ‘not at all unreasonable’, he thinks, of ‘becoming a major American writer during the next decade’.63 Examining the material strewn across the ‘sickish’ light, Jack remarks that he ‘[hasn’t] felt this way in years’: It suddenly seemed that the book he had semijokingly promised himself might really happen. It might even be right here, buried in these untidy heaps of paper. It could be a work of fiction, or history, or both – a long book exploding out of this central place in a hundred directions.64

Torrance unearths the Hotel’s covert/‘toilet’ operations perpetuated over the years by ‘dummy corporations’ whose secret (waste) processes conceal both ownership and usage of the facilities, variously inhabited by presidents and crooks: ‘Wilson, Harding, Roosevelt, Nixon, and Vito the Chopper’.65 Toilet-paper invoices – an indication of excremental, archival excess – begin Torrance’s decay, unleashing his ‘fever’, ‘never to

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rest’, searching for a ‘place of absolute commencement’66 but also total order, endlessly thwarted by the administration’s games of hide-and-seek. Jack fails to pin down the proprietor of the Hotel, whose grounds are dissipated into shares; the spectral residues occupying the rooms, though either at, or temporarily past, the verge of turning solid, form another indication that the Overlook’s business regulations are equally shadowy. The distinct ‘impression’, present yet absent, is one of dispersal to the point of evaporation; Hotel management is, for the most part, too vaporous to be bound into a ‘gem-hard work of research’ as the ‘vital clues, the connections that would make everything clear’ keep slipping away: there are too many papers, notes in faded ink, ‘ghosts of perfume’.67 It is only the Overlook’s function that materializes, forming, as it does or according to Torrance, ‘an index of the whole post-World War II American character’,68 a guiding principle imagined as one of mastery or overlook: the Hotel archives the immense, abject textualities of American democracy as ‘démocrassouille’.69 There exists a tradition of reading hotels as archival spaces indicative of the ‘American spirit’; in The American Scene, Henry James reflects on the ‘possibilities’ of hotel spatiality, prompting him to ‘ask if the hotel-spirit may just not be the American spirit’.70 James articulates thoughts on the subject that emerge both before and after his own account: in 1844, Nat P. Willis of the New York City Weekly Mirror described the public hotel dining and drawing rooms as elements of the ‘tangible republic’71 while Jefferson Williamson, in 1930, celebrated the ‘egalitarian enjoyment’72 promoted by hotels. Hotel history, however, which began in the United States at the end of the eighteenth century and demonstrated, from the outset, a ‘willingness to incorporate the latest technology’,73 provides yet further overlaps with the spirit of the nation at large: the trope of King’s ‘Bad Place’ comments on a dream of escape – origin of the American Republic; lying at the heart of The Shining – as a forgotten, but resurging, process of extermination. Ostensibly a place of shelter, or of healing – a welding together of the shattered trinity of the nuclear family cell – the Overlook above all shelters, as it were, the domiciliation of (self-) annihilation,74 time and again referred to, in King’s book, by the frequent citations from Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, a story, after all, about glorious entrapment, a ‘deep seclusion’ at the heart of ‘an extensive and magnificent structure’.75 The temperament of hotels generally – severing the corridors of labour and machines from the upper levels – spawn what Henry James refers to as ‘conditions of extraordinary complexity and brilliancy’, the ‘gorgeous golden blur’ which ‘engulf[s]’ the visitor ‘in various fantasies’.76 The construction of such spaces, requiring set-ups of dimensionality, acts to hide, in deep space, the exertions of the workforce as well as the operations of management, the maître d’, who James conceives of in terms of a ‘high-stationed orchestral leader’.77 He writes that he ‘see[s] the whole thing overswept as by the colossal extended arms, waving the magical batôn, of some high-stationed orchestral leader, the absolute presiding power, conscious of every note of every instrument, controlling and commanding the whole volume of sound’78 – masses of detail coordinate into an overlooking totality. The seemingly effortless and automatic functioning of the Grand Hotel, an environment of deception that extends into a false sense of security – Paul Groth notes that the displays of wealth inside ostensibly

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protected surroundings attract ‘intelligent thieves’79 adopting masks of affluence and fortune – thus relegates the actual conditions of existence to underworlds. This ‘plumbin core’80 below, yet again indicative of King’s obsessive returns to waste matter, provides evidence of a secret/secreted excremental identity that Torrance desires to bind into a ‘gem-hard work of research’: a textual spillage finally immobilized into a solid body and record of ‘strange . . . love’. The ‘uninspired’ working title for the book is ‘Strange, The Story of the Overlook Hotel’,81 but far from ‘uninspired’, Torrance’s (strange) love – variously articulated as enchantment, enrapture, perverted responsibility – is precisely the result of an inspiration, a breathing into, an inhalation, infusion, communicated by an orchestral and spectrally presiding power. Jack’s fantasies of material ‘exploding’ out of dust as well as his flight into the eternal enclosure of the Overlook consist of an escape into inertia, whether achieved as a result of the lingering consequences of ever-lasting fame, his recognition, itself belated, by the literary establishment, or else – as his mind begins to slip – through the timelessness of death: existence for all eternity fixed in place and time. This is Freud’s pleasure principle, the ‘tendency toward stability’ whose final wish and outcome is death, life levelled out, returned to an inanimate, un-living state: all pressure is relieved.82 In this respect, the Hotel is not simply an ‘ocean liner’ but a ‘ghost-ship’,83 as Shelley Duvall’s Wendy thinks, a vessel drifting, largely unchanged, through the ages. The initial reversal of time during Jack’s early descents into the basement heralds its eventual abolition while its plasticity functions as a suggestion of unending returns, the closed loop of a clock under domed glass. Inside its transparent case, the clock – a persistent artefact throughout the text, with all ‘its wheels and cogs and springs’ exposed and a ‘chrome or steel track [running] around the outside of these works’84 – convenes two figures gliding along the metal track and Danny’s train of thought. The shapes of father plus mallet and son, which Danny discerns in glass, predict a possible future and reverses, through double reflection, a sequence of letters, REDRUM into MURDER.85 The clock, however, through its sounding of the hour and hands creeping towards midnight, invokes yet further apparitions: again and again Poe’s ‘ The Masque of the Red Death’ and Stanley Kubrick’s past compositions, most notably 2001: A Space Odyssey.86 As the clock strikes the hour, it tinkles Strauss’ Blue Danube, which constrains one to pause like Poe’s revellers and musicians of the orchestra, while its tune dissipates across the deep space of the Hotel through which Danny’s tricycle travels, according to Fredric Jameson, like an ‘interstellar vehicle’.87 Jameson mentions the ‘high-culture banality’ of the waltz to support his impression of a ‘depthless’88 existence, yet King’s novel, in contrast to Kubrick’s movie, suggests the exact opposite: a deeply vertical culture that always stands on the verge of abysses and is continually poised at the edge of a ‘darkness that [has] been hiding behind the clockface all along’.89 Danny’s falls into openings through the reflecting surfaces of glass and mirrors to contact Tony, that is, the spectral form of his ‘shine,’ refers to the Overlook’s depths obscured in refractions as well as in the basement’s yellow, ‘inspired’ data. As movements continue downwards, the expression of the Hotel as sheltered/buried luxury retreat lays bare overwritten formations lying ‘scant inches beyond [the other] one’.90 The unmasking – occurring

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through a progression of events over a period of a few months, first as isolated and geographically confined then increasingly frequent and widespread incidents – also affects the Hotel’s eternal ghost-guests whose faces start ‘running, changing’, their skin ‘becoming a hepatitic yellow, cracking’ and erupting with ‘red sores’.91 This reference to the Red Death – a palimpsestic dissolution that is already manifested in the ‘process[es] of displacement’ associated with the several ‘beyonds’ of the Hotel92 – functions as an indication of the latent identity, untenanted, corpse-like,93 that makes up the ‘whole post-World War II American character’: a closed, sequestered archival space whose silent influence, inspiration, impression on/in occupying/occupied subjects occurs through breathing in a ‘poison atmosphere’.94 Although James, in The American Scene, remarks how ‘quickly’ the ‘amazing hotel-world closes round’ the visitor, ‘the survivor scrambling out of the current’95 of metropolitan life, his account still includes observations that point towards a restoration occurring inside the ‘total-living enclaves’96 of the ‘hotel-world’. He notes, for example, that the Waldorf-Astoria in New York with ‘all its warmth, its colour and glitter so completely muffle’ the ‘pandemonium’97 outside, yet his perspectives on hotel management – the hints of its totalitarian rule – imply an aggressive disposition that, in part, seeps in from outside. ‘There is violence outside, mitigating sadly the frontal majesty of the monument,’ he writes, aware of the Waldorf-Astoria’s ‘absence of margin, [its] meagerness of site, [and] the brevity of [its] block.’98 Locked into an infrastructure of ‘impertinent cross-streets’ and the ‘narrow channel of the roadway’ that directs the ‘electric car’ to travel as a ‘projectile in the bore of a gun’, the Grand Hotel’s topographical envelope precludes absolute ‘detachment and independence’.99 Whatever alleviations the structure provides, the hotel’s splendour and ‘mere swing door’100 only manage to provide fleeting – and fatal, considering King’s book, echochamber of the Red Death – moments of release: ‘total-living enclaves’ really are death colonies. Consequently, James seems unclear about the exact nature of hotels, as if their promises of escape were, at best, flawed or else deceiving unsuspecting visitors to lure them into entrapment. What emerges amidst the discussions on the Waldorf-Astoria’s architectural arrangement is an engagement in a process of successive destabilization that becomes evident in statements made in relation to the hotel’s ‘possibilities’. These observations exist haphazardly and arise suddenly, often coming close to refuting previous claims; the paragraph on the absolute dominion of management, by far the most definite and direct assertion of sinister operations, is followed by a short comment of approval: ‘[s]uch was my impression of the perfection of the concert that, for fear of its being spoiled by some chance false note, I never went into the place again’.101 As a result, James’ piece – a strange or strangely loving text paying tribute to the ‘amazing hotel-world’ but nonetheless tinged with an underlying discomfort that surfaces here and there – harbours the suggestions of a different investigation underneath, impairing its subject matter from within, as if seeking its implosion. As the narrative advances, cracks appear in the constitution of the argument, the textuality of the building, causing the disintegration of concrete formations that Henri Lefebvre expands on in The Production of Space. A theorist of the unseen,

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investigating obscene forces at work, Lefebvre notes that ‘visible boundaries, such as walls or enclosures in general, give rise for their part to an appearance of separation between spaces where in fact what exists is an ambiguous continuity’.102 He proceeds to dismantle ‘the house’ usually considered as possessing an ‘air of stability about it’: One might almost see it as the epitome of immovability with its concrete, its stark, cold and rigid outlines. . . . Now a critical analysis would doubtless destroy the appearance of solidity of this house, stripping it, as it were, of its concrete slabs and its thin non-load-bearing walls, which are really glorified screens, and uncovering a very different picture. In the light of this imaginary analysis, our house would emerge as permeated from every direction by streams of energy which run in and out of it by every imaginable route.103

No longer characterized by its permanence or imagined impermeability because it possesses a ‘nexus of in and out circuits’ to the exterior, solidity becomes as illusory as refuge: ‘streams of energy’ steal into a building via its ‘plumbin core’ and deposit in its foundations.

New skins Detained in the Overlook, Jack Torrance, suffering from ‘inspired’ writer’s block – his flow of words is interrupted, re-routed by the Hotel – thinks he has hit gold amid the basement’s ‘yellow and mouldy’104 smell. Colorado’s dream-space certainly indicates such potential, archiving fossil fuels as well as an ‘annoying material’ called pitchblende: in the mid-nineteenth century, gold miners became ‘exasperated by a thick, black substance that clang like tar to their mining and processing tools’.105 In due course, the waste product of one ‘insane quest’106 turned into the objective of another; as gold was superseded in economic and industrial terms by molybdenum and vanadium, used as alloys in the making of hard steel, the region’s carnotite deposits – compounds of a ‘canary-yellow to greenish-yellow’ colour and composed of uranium, vanadium and small amounts of radium – were classified by the US government, in 1941, as strategic metals on which US national security depended.107 The ‘green sludge’108 of the uranium-vanadium concentrate – gunk that contaminates groundwater plumes and its bedrock aquifers – and uranium subsequently sparked off a ‘singular monomania’, entirely promoted and subsidized by the Federal Government.109 A ‘collective fantasy’, much like radium in the previous century, uranium was advertised as a ‘mystical new force’; Westinghouse adopted the customary hyperbolic rhetoric to capture the atom as ‘power seemingly without end. Power to do everything man is destined to do. We have found what might be called perpetual youth’.110 Such declarations registered the possibilities of the atom, whose existence formed a topic of intense scrutiny and doubt throughout the nineteenth century; in his book The Infancy of Atomic Physics, Alex Keller notes that ‘no one could produce direct evidence that there were any such things’,111 raising a theory of correspondence between atoms and

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phantoms, often inferred to be residual energies. As sub-surface phenomena, atoms effectively elide distinctions between the real and the imaginary, provoking strange (love) impressions that align ostensibly ‘rational’ projects with derangement, almost as if, to cite Bernice Eiduson, ‘scientific work . . . [were] paranoid’.112 He continues that, ‘in scientific work, creative thinking demands seeing things not seen previously, or in ways not previously imagined; this necessitates jumping off from “normal” positions and taking risks by departing from reality’.113 These leaps, at times irrespective of established principles, account for sensibilities that formulate hypotheses in which vast stores of power materialize ‘presumably out of nothing’,114 a statement that appears in a remarkable volume by Frederick Soddy, whose writings inspire H. G. Wells’ 1914 novel The World Set Free. Soddy’s The Interpretation of Radium, published in 1909, reflects the contemporary sensibility that consigned the atom, whose particles had long been thought ‘wildly improbable’ and were considered suspicious, to a ‘borderland between the perceptible and the imperceptible worlds’: [The atom] seems to claim lineage with the worlds beyond us, fed with the same inexhaustible fires, urged by the same uncontrollable mechanism which keeps the great suns alight in the heavens over endless periods of time. This tiny speck of matter we can hold in our hands exhibits in perfect miniature many ancient mysteries, forgotten almost in their familiarity, or mistakenly and too easily dismissed as belonging and appropriate to the infinitely great dimensions of the universe.115

Apparently domestic, slight in size and commonplace, the atom is nonetheless marked out, in this passage as well as throughout the book, as straddling two distinct realms, ‘the infinitely great dimensions of the universe’ and the narrow environs of ‘our hands’. As a particle that exists ‘in the worlds beyond us’ but also ‘belonging’ to earth, its changing grounds, or homes, posit qualities that range from the minute to the monstrous, and are bound up, in Soddy’s text, with the disclosure of matter’s ‘disguise’, burying ‘latent energies and hidden activities beneath a hitherto impenetrable mask’.116 The atom’s ‘character’ consequently is invested with attributes that include providing sustained life support to ‘great suns’, whose future utilization promises continual rejuvenation. Not ‘mere inanimate matter’, but a world of vast internal stores of energy, still beyond precise human ken and manipulation, the atom comes up against the ‘limit[s] imposed by the boundaries of knowledge’,117 and passes, from there, into (technologized) dream-space. The atom’s double nature – a particle both belonging to, and yet apart from, this world; a split that becomes apparent in Eisenhower’s ‘Atoms For Peace’ programme – also finds expression in the AEC, a schizophrenic military-civilian half-breed organization whose programmes occur outside of public control and awareness as well as against the public interest. Although the agency’s declaration of policy states that ‘the development of atomic energy shall, so far as practicable, be directed toward improving the public welfare, increasing the standard of living, strengthening free

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competition in private enterprise and promoting world peace’,118 its activities, though conducted under the shield of ‘public welfare’, target it instead. Radiation experiments – performed between the 1940s and 1960s on civilians – comprised plutonium injections, introductions of tritiated thymidine into the reproductive organs of jail inmates as well as radioactive cocktails and cereal prepared, respectively, for pregnant women and the captive population of institutions, which added to research carried out on GIs.119 Further, from the early 1950s until the mid-1960s, radioactive mill tailings, in the absence of a comprehensive AEC strategy concerning their disposal, were used as building material in the construction of sewer line and water pipe backfills (radioactive ‘plumbin cores’), pavements, swimming pools, classrooms.120 These domiciliation/ domesticating efforts shelter disaster: the AEC buried reports concerning the atom’s creeping damage; the agency’s interventions, as Eric Mogren argues, simply affected the regulation and containment of the ‘flow of information’121 – paper trails as toilet tissue. If the atom ‘claims lineage with . . . worlds beyond’ – and is, therefore, a particle that might not necessarily assure order, but threaten it instead – then Soddy’s account already and unconsciously conceives of a disturbed future: his study rings with underground reverberations. Particular selections of words, recurring imagery and observations on the disposition of the atom, its ‘aloofness and indifference to its external environment’,122 suggest the prospect of troubling slippages: the alien that ‘belong[s]’ to the familiar. The Interpretation of Radium – so close, in its title, to Freud’s work on dreams while also suggestive, in its content, of the uncanny – is on the surface confident and optimistic, showing evidence of Soddy’s trust in the opportunities of ‘an entirely new material civilization’,123 yet the book casts across its expectations shadows of impending doom, particularly evident in a brief section – as if wanting to restrict its implications – titled ‘Radioactivity and Mythology’. In this chapter, Soddy writes that he finds it ‘curious’ to fall short of establishing the origin of ‘the oldest and most universal beliefs’ – notably the ‘remarkable’ tale of the philosopher’s stone, ‘accredited the power not only of transmuting the metals, but of acting as their elixir of life’ – and thinks them residues ‘from one of many previous epochs in the unrecorded history of the world’.124 The lack of concrete evidence of an earlier civilization, whose ‘very atoms . . . have had time to disintegrate’, causes Soddy to ask: ‘[c]an we not read into [the traditions and superstitions] some justification for the belief that some forgotten race of men attained not only to the knowledge we have so recently won, but also to the power that is not yet ours?’125 The implications, here, are clear: a future, not of forward momentum, but of unending returns – superpower, ‘not yet ours’, but which is inextricable from total death – further indicative of the resolute presence of the unfamiliar inside the domestic. Under the censorship of the AEC however, the atom or specifically uranium, that ‘strange kind of half-metal’,126 as Martin Klaproth who first isolated the element in 1789 described it, loses its destructive core, overwritten by policies of domiciliation, an economy of ‘peace’, the peaceful atom commencing/commanding magnificent views, a future ahead, ‘clean and shining’127: the new skin of utopian technicity. In 1960, the AEC toured a pavilion to promote the ‘good’ atom; like a ‘friendly whale’, as Reyner

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Banham observed, ‘or something equally organic, the US Atomic Energy Commission’s portable exhibition theatre toured the world for almost a decade’.128 Designed by Victor Lundy and Walter Bird, ‘the theatre was, in effect, an enormous balloon with a double skin’ and, ‘all in all, with its double-breasted profile and gaping mouth it gave a more weird and wonderful preview of the technical future than any of the Atoms-For-Peace propaganda inside it’.129 Doubled skin, double-breasted, the balloon-pavilion inspires/ inflates a political culture of techno-sublimity: America, the ‘colossus of the world’,130 whose marks of incision or superimposition, on the substrate beneath twinned new skins, reveal, however, more than one age, one face.131 Doubling invariably recurs in the Gothic; King’s work particularly plays with this tradition – through narrative returns rewriting/redoubling; his texts as archives enacting regimes of repetition132 – and The Shining is, of course, full of doubles: Kubrick’s Grady sisters, the frequent mirror images, Jack’s submerged Doppelgängers, Roque and its mallet, a ‘schizo sort of game . . . of finesse and aim, and a game of raw, bludgeoning power’.133 Yet the thing that becomes un/faced – a demonic/atomic paternity with a wish for immortality and awesome power – is also articulated, in the book, as a secretly controlling force, always a green-yellow (not red) death initiating a process of melting, which begins with an invasive movement: the Hotel moves through flesh, ‘past . . . defences to the meat inside’.134 The unspoken, but nonetheless traced, double is that of radioactivity, ‘green fire’ that enchants through fantasies of sublime sovereignty and concurrently unmakes corporeality into something ‘liquid’.135 While this slacking or softening might be another indication of King’s gendered, female monstrosity – the horror of floods136 – it remains as an indication/inscription of an irradiation that indexes the height of American superpower as ‘lovely mask’137 overwriting catastrophe. All times are one, all ‘ears [are] together now’, towards the end of The Shining: the Hotel’s ‘coming into balance’ means an act of consignation, of gathering together many faces into a ‘shifting composite’.138 This multitude, which in the book is clearly insectile, ‘wakes up’ the ‘sound soul’ of the (bad) Father engraved inside inhuman slumbering Jack Torrance, turning into a ‘hand-puppet’139 seduced by superpower, shining, skin-deep.

Caretaker encoding The scene of over-writing, variously referred to as a process of awakening or resurfacing prompted by the Overlook, remains significant: the Rocky Mountains – never mind the ‘nests’ of masked radioactive deposits which, in time, inscribe the skin – form a textuality that itself suggests itself as an adequate setting for a story about abyssal temporality/spatiality. In 1897, Isabella Bird sent a series of letters to her sister about her travels through the Rockies; in her correspondence, Bird comments on the ‘living light’ that the summits exude – she also writes about losing time – while hiding, or apt to turn into, the ‘ashy paleness of a dead face’.140 She dreams of suffocation: a breathtaking space and ‘shadow land’ in The Shining too, this (death) zone shines with a ‘dreamy terror’,141 which Kubrick, despite King’s reservations about the movie, captures

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in the ‘oneiric dread’ of the camera movements: angelic, uncaring.142 Extensive though it may be, the state comes into being – in The Shining, Bird’s letters, Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, partly set in Colorado – as deep, airless: like the shafts of a mine, hence King’s insistence on maze-like verticality, depth-psychology, overwriting acts of inscription. Kubrick might eschew such symbolism, but his technical mastery nonetheless speaks of an absolute technologized system that, like the mine, is a space of entrapment.143 Everything is implacable here; the snow, smells, sounds, all forces of invasion and progressive enclosure: Hotel halls expand yet keep moving closer, time is running on/out before it is consigned into one ‘hepatitic’ face/lessness – a manifestation of monstrosity in King’s Gothic, in which horror is faceless, ‘unfaced’.144 Torrance’s ultimate ‘inspiration’ which turns him into something faceless (ripped, shredded) comes through drowning, suffocation in gin: a ‘gin rickey, a Manhattan, a depression bomber, a sloe gin fizz, a zombie’, a proceeding that ends in emptiness. Yet Torrance is compelled to enact cyclical homicidal violence reserved, preserved, archived inside him, and at the Overlook Hotel: the law of the Father, of ‘white ghostgods’ that emerges, above all, in writing, imprinting Jack’s role as the Hotel’s ‘caretaker’. Initially, he wants to finish ‘THE PLAY’ called The Little School, an investigation into the manipulation of power but as his stay at the Overlook extends, the source of abuse shifts from Denker/Dictator to Gary Benson, ‘leering’, ‘thankless’ monster-boy.145 This transferral mirrors Jack’s swelling paranoia, the sense that his son and wife are ‘planning together’146 to stifle his ambitions, while it also serves to cement the link between (over-) writing and killing, between text and murder. In Danse Macabre, King equates analysis, that is, re-reading, with dead insect displays: a butterflytext (not ‘a lexis machine’) mounted on a white board, a blank page, and ‘saved’ – beautifully petrified, forever unmoving – in a glass case.147 This sentiment is an echo; D. H. Lawrence, discussing Poe in Studies in Classic American Literature – Lawrence notes that Poe ‘never sees anything in terms of life, almost always in terms of matter’ – comments on the correspondence between knowledge and death: ‘[t]o know a thing is to kill it’.148 Knowledge as text, an engraving in inscriptions that is ‘rigid, glacial, and abstract in a peculiarly menacing way’, forms, as Henri Lefebvre contends, ‘harbingers of death’149; to shelter/save text is also to shelter the death drive.150 To be sure, in Kubrick’s movie, Torrance’s endless repetitions of ‘All work and no play make Jack a dull boy,’ arranged in blocks of letters and gaps on the page, indicate the hollow mind operating behind a large, toothy grin – his ‘oeuvre’ is indicative of the cyclical order of the Overlook Hotel overwriting subjectivity into (composite yet hollow) facelessness. In the book though, it is another text that initially activates a movement that King, in The Tommyknockers, describes as approaching an ‘unsettling translucence’, a ‘dreary species of blankness’.151 This process is one of negation, an aesthetics of disappearance that also applies to Torrance, hypnotized, in (both versions of) The Shining. Thus, although fairly early on in the novel (and unlike the movie), while Jack’s play still follows its original guidelines, Wendy hears the typewriter ‘burst into life for 30 seconds, fall silent for a minute or two, and then rattle briefly again’, a clatter she likens to ‘machine-gun fire from an isolated pillbox’.152 In the book, it is only when the sequence of gunshots comes to an end that life really is threatened – the

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paper, as it were, is now Torrance entranced, ‘inspired’ by the excessive, overwhelming ‘discourse network’153 of the Overlook Hotel. This place and order of the law quite evidently is the function of paternal power as ‘false face’154 and of ghostly, totalitarian authority, but the Overlook’s narrative of seduction works so well also because of its location, a secluded, deep, secreting, nuclear dreamland, as well as because of Jack’s compulsions (the drinking, ‘losing’ his ‘temper’). The process of reading as excavation, a textual mining operation, leaves its marks on the skin, not only metaphorically so: Derrida’s figure of speech – but which is literal for him, too: the skin as archive155 – becomes legible as a ‘wasting disease’156 in The Shining; substrate deposits, more than skin-deep, dwell at cell levels. Reading in the basement starts the growth of a malignancy likened, a little earlier in the novel, to forms of cancer, particularly brain tumours and leukaemia. Although a reference applied to Danny’s ‘shine’ as indicative of an invasion infecting healthy cell tissue, the Overlook Hotel’s actions are precisely that, an encoding of texture – and excavation of subjectivity – through psychopathological desire for shining superpower. Already after a few descents and limited exposure, Torrance’s mouth begins to bleed: the result of a drinking habit – a constant wiping of the lips – Jack’s bleeding mouth implies the return of an old impulse and suggests, at the same time, the workings of the Hotel’s invisible, ray-like contamination. The area of the wound attracted much attention during the early decades of the twentieth century, raising cases of radium poisoning in the luminous dial-painting industry where employees, mostly women, ‘generally healthy when hired’, would ‘tip’ or ‘point’ the brush, dunked in radium salts, between their lips so as to paint clock faces with precision. Referred to as ‘radium jaw’,157 the necrotic lesions, the severe anaemia and blistered tissue in and around the mouth bear resemblance to Torrance’s bleeding lips, leached skin, lost weight: this is hollow man, ‘all zero at the bone’.158 Deep in ‘shadow land’, Danny associates the Overlook with a ‘green witchlight’, glowing ‘into being on the front of the building’, where it ‘flickered, and became a giant, grinning skull over crossed bones’.159 The symbol for poison – the corpse grin an indication of the face as ‘bad joke’,160 of skull-face/clown-face horror – before assuming (then losing) face, points to The Tommyknockers: words like radium, like shifting emerald liquid. Bearing in mind that across his work, King ‘repeatedly constructs a fictional world of intertextual and machinic flows and blockages, becomings and transformations, interconnected desires and part-objects’, his books ‘constitute in totality a giant, endlessly proliferating writing-machine’161 referring to compulsively returning images like the Wizard of Oz, dead light, yellow-green rays shining nuclear. Radioactivity is intertextual, as are vampiric feeding processes, domeland security: The Shining gestures towards these other compositions that store closed-world Cold War references. A single moment – all eras flow into one – burns in Jack’s disappearing consciousness; in the movie, it is the 1920s, ‘the last confident moment of class and race hierarchy’,162 but in the novel, it is 29 August 1945, ‘the war won, the future stretching ahead . . . like a land of dreams’.163 A ‘card flutter[s] out’ of the scrapbook: ‘rich and creamy’, it portrays the Overlook ‘decorated with glowing Japanese lanterns’164; it is an invite to a masked ball. At the edges of Torrance’s awareness, held captive by the

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‘shining, glowing’ version of the Hotel on that ‘endless night in August 1945’, flickers a quote from the short story by Poe that echoes throughout the novel: ‘The Red Death held sway over all!’165 This single thought presages disaster, though the ‘illimitable dominion’166 of death now radiates a ‘golden-yellow light’167 spilling out of Japanese cities that August and already feeding, in ‘false face’ paternal power, on the spirit of the nation, allowing policies of paranoid aggression to prevail. The Hotel institutes, inside, inhuman hollow subjectivity, an archive of its implacable law: a compulsive, over-written mind, nested by nuclear logic – paranoid and sheltering, underneath new skin or glass domes, unending impressions of the deathly politics of the Cold War.

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Preservation: Kansas

Zone suspensions Thomas Pynchon begins the third section of Gravity’s Rainbow, titled ‘In the Zone’, a segment on the Nazi rocket programme established near Nordhausen towards the end of World War II, with a line from the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz: ‘Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore . . .’1 This subdivision, the longest in the book, is concerned with the production facilities of the Vergeltungswaffe Zwei (V2) that, after the Allied bombing of Peenemünde in August 1943, moved underground to an installation called Mittelwerke, in a ‘deliberately vague allusion to its geographical position in Germany’.2 The zone forms the heart of Pynchon’s novel; it is here, in a geopolitical ‘interregnum’,3 that the rocket state unfolds, dispersing its politics beyond the frontiers of Germany’s fascist regime. Unbounded, illimitable, it is suggestive of a transfer of power from Nazi Reich to the American state of exception that, though by no means issuing forth at this point in time, nonetheless spreads out in ‘peace’ or perpetual Cold War: Octopus I. G. as model of a ‘post’-war governmental practice that is incipiently totalitarian.4 This central part of Pynchon’s book focuses on a movement of relocation from Mittelwerke to US heartland, and from rocket production plant to the ICBM storage complex: Kansas holds in place security state mechanisms obliterating all borders. ‘Forget frontiers now, forget subdivisions,’5 these have all been suspended in a condition that, though specified as exceptional, has become quotidian; never mind, for now, the degree zero of the nuclear bomb whose catastrophic penetration of perimeters equals measureless destruction. The interregnum, a word that indicates a temporary abrogation – the zone pertains as much to time as to space, both of which are no longer restricted – comes to designate a political order that is itself limitless while it also, as Giorgio Agamben remarks, occupies a position at the limit, between politics and law, between democracy and absolutism: The question of borders becomes all the more urgent: if exceptional measures are the results of periods of political crisis and, as such, must be understood on political and not juridico-constitutional grounds . . ., then they find themselves

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Rocket States in the paradoxical position of being juridical measures that cannot be understood in legal terms, and the state of exception appears as the legal form of what cannot have legal form.6

This is a ‘no-man’s land’7 that applies at once to a provisional situation developing into a paradigm of government based on an anomie that can be wholly understood in neither political nor legal terms, thus also giving rise to a terminological uncertainty and contradictory Ausnahmezustand whose very indeterminacy is already contained in the language used to approach, without ever really defining, it. State of Exception provides a record of precisely this effort, a gradual herantasten, a drawing nearer, to a degree of equally gradual democratic erosion, an anomic order where the law is concurrently no longer – but also still – in force. It is a political phenomenon of the threshold, operating within and yet outside the juridical structures of (so-called) democracies in a ‘zone of indifference’, whose ‘proper locus’8 is, like in Pynchon’s book, a ‘blurry’ area, a recurring term in Agamben’s analysis often proceeding by way of a language that is ‘out of joint’: the ‘Force-of-Law’ that dis/articulates legal organization. The anomic space of the state of exception, best approximated in an act that both engraves and erases the textuality of the legal form, ‘is certainly something like a mystical element’9 whose obfuscation is evident in a strategy of inscription that is at the same time made impossible; the only other way to undo the expression ‘Force-of-Law’ would be by leaving a blank, ‘Force-of- ’, which would mean losing the word/system altogether in a space of pure disarticulation. Nonetheless, this form, which is also formless, an indeterminate void, marks out ‘the emptiness of the law’ that refers to the state of exception’s ‘iustitium’, that is, the juridical void and standstill existing at its heart.10 This is the degree zero of the rocket state, largely co-extensive with the state of exception/emergency/national security culture, even if the monumental presence of the ballistic missile, still its guardian or tutelary, at present no longer necessarily comes to mind as its ultimate symbol. The point is that Pynchon’s zone and the zone of absence that un/defines and ‘disadjusts’11 the state of exception are conceived according to corresponding anomies that continue wars beyond (and without) endings. These zones are tentacular systems of absolute placelessness in that they exceed geopolitical boundaries but that even so can be theorized, as it were, on the ground, in analogous threshold places. Kansas acts as a geographical conceptualization of the rocket state of exception particularly in relation to its ‘dormant’ gadgets; Gravity’s Rainbow indicates an alterity occurring in the state which, above all, has to do with the ballistic missile and its storage facilities, fitting into narratives of palimpsestic spatiality established before the transfers of ‘Operation Paperclip’: the rocket inhabits Kansan genealogy. If Pynchon, however ironically in Gravity’s Rainbow, can supply a map, ‘A Cheapskate’s Guide to the Zone’12 – used by American visitors that, perhaps, have strayed away from ‘Baedeker world’13 – it stands to reason that the rocket state, no matter how amorphous and dispersed, exists in place or, rather, para-geographically,14 apart from yet part of the

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more stable orders of sovereign or federal states. What this means is that tactics exist to anchor, and thereby investigate, an ‘unthinkable thing’15 – itself indicative of an order that Pynchon, time and again, associates with octopi and Plasticman, jelly-like beings that destabilize ontology16 – in space and, more precisely, in a state whose mythology reflects the fundamentals of security culture: threshold conditions, empty space, dead-centre existence. In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin assembles citations on networks of urban under/otherworlds, border gates that ‘[transform] whoever passes under [their] arch’: Nowhere, unless perhaps in dreams, can the phenomenon of the boundary be experienced in a more originary way than in cities. To know them means to understand those lines that, running alongside railroad crossings and across privately owned lots, within the park and along the riverbank, function as limits; it means to know these confines, together with the enclaves of the various districts. As threshold, the boundary stretches across streets; a new precinct begins like a step into the void. . . .17

The Wandersmann’s itinerant movement – which also issues a sense of opportunity relating to boundary phenomena – is already apparent in the principle of the work itself, narrative fragments that mark out boundaries; each subsequent entry is a ‘new precinct’, leaving a void in between. The Arcades Project, in its form – immense and dislocated – above all, articulates a space (of the city, of language) as broken, deranged,18 but this type of spatial analysis and awareness of extremities is, according to Michel de Certeau, possible in all places: ‘there is no spatiality that is not organized by the determination of frontiers’.19 De Certeau recognizes in this practice, which is also one of reading, a prospective tactic of resistance against a totalitarian imposition or programming of space; to ‘walk’ a spatial story can function as an act of transgression impeding totalities through anti-disciplinary ‘swarming’20 activities: a deregulated space. Within ‘structured’ spatiality, possibilities of movement – lines of flight – emerge; ‘microbelike’21 infestations, that is, ordinary, small-scale operational (counter) conduct, function as inside deflections of power: Things extra and other (details and excesses coming from elsewhere) insert themselves into the accepted framework, the imposed order. . . . The surface of this order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order.22

And yet, a void in the context of a system whose political objective is to perpetuate empty space is to invite disaster: the excess that inserts and insinuates itself everywhere is the nuclear missile whose inhabitation, in its material form, occurs above all in the American ‘heartland’, in the State of Kansas, whose legibility is made up of gaps, the ‘residing rhetoric’23 of lacunae, sites or moments of passage into unlimited war environments.

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Bright/Emptiness – The topoi of discourses on Kansas revolve around the concepts of Zwischenraum and Grenzbereich, spaces between and border zones. In his book West of Wichita, Craig Miner notes that, [t]here are two places called Kansas. One is a well-watered pastoral heaven lying between forested hills and tallgrass prairie. The other is an area of extremes, the true nature of which is still mysterious after more than a century of settlement by an advanced industrial civilisation. The haven, and most of the population of Kansas, is in the east; the mystery, and most of the emotion about Kansas, is, and has been, in the West.24

This line, the 98th meridian, slices through Kansas to the west of Wichita – hence Miner’s title – and constitutes a threshold, a point of radical departure concerning the composition of space; the frontier is a point of crossover which marks the onset of emergencies: the 1874 grasshopper devastation, the 1880 drought, the 1930s dust bowl.25 Here, limits are drawn that divide tall grass from short grass prairie, thereby further determining the point where the humid sections of Kansas defer to the state’s semiarid stretches26; the precision of the meridian acts ‘like a step into the void’ – the ‘new precinct’ that emerges beyond it is a region whose imaginary is that of a wasteland, a desert space understood in negative terms. In O. E. Rölvaag’s Giants in the Earth – a novel published in 1927 and ending with a frozen corpse whose dead eyes stare, unseeing, into the West – the prairie is described in terms of its affinities with the ocean, ‘its waves of yellow and green and blue’ darkened, ‘now and then’, by ‘a dead black wave’, a ‘cloud’s gliding shadow . . . [racing] over the scene’.27 The settlers’ caravan resembles a boat whose itinerary recedes into the tall grass that ‘straighten[s] up’ as soon as it has passed, so that the vessel ‘might just as well have dropped down out of the sky’,28 and into the plain’s mirroring elements of such deep spaces as the sea, the air. Once within, parties of explorers and settlers alike notice the Plains’ encompassing desolation, bathed in a ‘supernatural light’ and in a profound silence – ‘no warbling of birds rose on the air, no buzzing of insects sounded’.29 The spatiality the novel moves into is invariably bleak, an oppressive environment of absolute space – this is Blaise Pascal’s horreur du vide making comfort impossible – that imposes itself as infinite, awful, a territory of abjection. It is in those terms, the conditions of the abject, that the Plains region and, beyond it, the deserts of the West are registered; in time, they both become the landscapes of production and incorporation of ‘giants in the earth’, a policy partly made possible by a determination to interpret these areas as empty, evidently the premise of colonization or ‘development’ in the first place.30 When Jean Baudrillard remarks that ‘American culture is heir to the deserts,’ he comments, on the one hand, on ‘the perpetuity of the simulacrum’, and, conversely, on desert-like expansions past geographical features, though these are hardly neutral because always bound up with subjective projection/introjections: the deserts

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prompt in Baudrillard ‘a vision expurgated of all the rest’.31 Regardless of his starting point – the ‘natural’ deserts that, as John Beck notes, serve to naturalize an order of ruthless acquisition operating in the service of a permanent war economy32 – Baudrillard implies the creation of a ‘mental desert form’, which also seems to exist a priori, compelling viewers to perceive nothing: the desert functions according to an ‘aesthetics of disappearance’.33 It is a ‘rite . . . into emptiness’34 – no less by means of the Manhattan Project; American superpower clearly is ‘heir to the deserts’ – whose vision of absence extends beyond the horizon, as if it was ‘steadily enlarging its borders and at the same time intensifying its barrenness’,35 as Horace Greeley, the founder and editor of the New York Tribune, wrote in 1859. Greeley, though, travelled across the Plains, not the Western deserts, which nonetheless become a point of comparison: the lack of timber and the strong, unremitting winds prevent the growth of trees in what Greeley perceives to be a ‘Great American Desert’ expanding its aridity.36 W. Eugene Hollon similarly mentions instances of outward propagation caused, however, by aggressive pioneering techniques – an acknowledgement of responsibility – which press the desert out of ‘its proper climatic confine [and] into regions far different in character’.37 To apply the term and attributes of the desert to the Plains region is, then, problematic, its ‘deficiency’ a result of a cultural position that assumes neutrality but systematically obfuscates (and blazes) ideological forces38; rather than providing disinterested topographical descriptions, the ‘impulse to empire’39 is already – or rather still – silently at work in a process of (techno-)imperial occupation. The ‘mental desert state’ effectively is a prerequisite for colonization – white light – operating on the basis of voids, which it simultaneously creates and acts against; Rölvaag’s settlers, in response to the total terror of empty space, become subject to a ‘peculiar mood’ which comes ‘drifting in with the dusk’: It seemed to float on the evening breeze, to issue forth out of the heart of the untamed nature round about them; it lurked in the very vastness and endlessness surrounding them on every hand; it seemed even to rise like an impalpable mist out of the ground on which they sat.40

Though initially distinguished as lifeless, the prairie signals a mist-like, monstrous otherness whose vampiric ‘nature’ prevents the formation of what D. H. Lawrence calls a ‘living . . . community’,41 and instead imposes a mode of being approaching that of its negation. Low sod houses, structures partly digging into the ground so as to offer more protection against the chaos of an ‘untamed’ land, function as ‘bulwark[s] against some enemy’; the building material, ‘great heaps of cut sod, piled up in each corner, might well have been the stores of ammunition for defence of the stronghold’.42 Cut from low grass areas where the accretion of water and soil yields thicker grass and root mat, 4-inch sod bricks, employed in bonding patterns used in traditional baked clay construction, piece together dense walls up to 2 feet deep and sloping roofs that, due to drainage problems, continue leaking after days of rain.43 Inside the dugouts, also used to refer to these squatting compositions, it is dark, and apart from the leaking roofs, relatively well insulated; the matted roots of the grass of the prairie, the very

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substance or essence the settlers sought to escape, turns into the means of evasion, a shield, however flawed, against the space and scope of the land. Shooting up out of the ground like ‘enormous mushroom[s]’, the dugouts however – returning the exterior to the inside – shelter most effectively against the light which, ‘so strong it burn[s] the sight’,44 induces madness, while it also produces mirages that invoke and make up a (foetal, funereal) dreamworld. Myths define the ‘composite west’,45 whose totalizing narrative pertains to hallucinatory capitals – Cibola, ‘Seven-in-One’46 – or ‘drowned cargo’47 of fiction that reflect or refract off the ground, at times becoming invisible, the sky predominant, while earth-bound objects distort and magnify out of proportion.48 Such projections are the consequence of the interplay between specific geographical features – comprising altitude and flatness – climate and light, further unsettling an already peculiar landscape likely to tilt into unusual angles. The distinct character of the region, whose gulfs of space impel Ray Bradbury to compare it to Mars,49 confers a sense that points of reference are variable, and that previously firm or constant coordinates are, all of a sudden, uprooted. This field of experience is that of the threshold, indicative of a place situated precariously at the edge of intersecting worlds: inside/outside derangements, evident in the uncanny sod house that includes, within, the exteriority of the plain, point towards other crossovers – living/undead, human/non/inhuman. Kansas territory or textuality, the product of a specific historical vantage point, is characterized by a discourse of otherness that bridges ostensibly abyssal conditions of existence: any frontier can function as gateway. In Rölvaag’s novel, settlers are blind and half-buried, changing into Beast-People, a ‘houseful of moles’50; Walter Prescott Webb, in his study of the Great Plains, mentions frequent misreadings or naming that transform the buffalo, terminologically, into a bison. He further remarks that the prairie dog really is a squirrel reversing its movement – it is no longer going up into trees but down into the soil; species unheard of in adjacent areas, like the American antelope or pronghorn, ‘[occupy] an intermediate position between the goat and the deer’51: they are indicative of a place of transference moving states of being across into ‘new precincts’. Against this type of environment – because it is a space experienced in terms of dualities that keep being breached; space is threat – stand dugouts: compact, low, narrow constructions that are close to the ground. Their restrictive dimensions, as well as black-brown earthen walls and floor, are a symptom of the desire to push downwards – away from the sky, out of which surges disaster like plagues of insects/ missiles52 – to defend against the glare of infinite outer space. These dark constructions, in which darkness becomes material protection, an earthy, palpable thing, articulate ‘the instinct to return to an inanimate state’53; they raise similarities with a coffin, whose compressed shape becomes, in Rölvaag’s novel, the ultimate refuge: buried (alive) in her great-grandfather’s big chest, Beret – her mental facilities long immobile out of terror – imagines being able to attain a measure of peace inside the mortuary box. The sod house, then, because of its affinity with the realm of the dead, is an ambiguous monument of survival on the one hand – it is a case in point of adaptation to the environment – and the deathly, or vampiric, on the other. It is consequently arrested somewhere between life and death, in an indefinite moment and border zone linking

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the living to the lifeless, and is, perhaps, an indication that the settlers have in fact entered into, rather than prevented, an exchange with the ‘great’ Plain – this economy of circulation therefore also involves a crossing over or, at the very least, executes another inference of brinkmanship.

Hosts In his book The Great American Desert Then and Now, W. Eugene Hollon considers US Geological Survey maps of the early twentieth century and notes that in these representations the desert ‘[covered] a wide triangle, starting at a point near Boise, Indiana, its eastern edge passed through Salt Lake City and Santa Fe southward to the mouth of the Pecos River, and its western boundary extended along the Sierra Nevada to the mouth of the Gila River’.54 A slightly later edition of a standard college geography textbook from 1925, by contrast, ‘confined it to that part of the United States which borders the lower Colorado River. . . . No two books agree upon the boundaries of the modern Great American Desert’,55 he concludes. Even map-space fails to suppress the strangeness of this geographical region, less an ecosystem than, as mentioned earlier, an impulse: a migrational zone, its readability paradoxically is only stable, or intent, in relation to its shifting nature. It is as such a palimpsestic space – not simply an area of dismantled dualities that occur along the 98th meridian – whose composition is that of displacements: therefore also a landscape of remains, inhabitations, spectrality, lateral world-sets. Whether or not this gradient passing through Kansas marks the beginning of a great desert, the state, regardless, is associated with derangement, the terrors of normalcy at its worst and, at best, a Grenzbereich opening up passage ways into orders beyond the immediately evident – it is synonymous with buried worlds stretching out beneath a membrane of greyness. Frank L. Baum begins The Wizard of Oz, a story that since its publication in 1900 has drained all colour from perceptions of the state, with a description of the Kansan landscape from the vantage point of a gate opening outwards. Standing in the doorway of the small farmhouse, Dorothy, in regular proximity to portals, could see nothing but the great grey prairie on every side. Not a tree or a house broke the sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the ploughed land into a grey mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same grey colour to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and grey as everything else.56

Identified as the main source of colour depletion, the sun, acting in conjunction with the wind, functions as cause of exhaustion of both the land and its inhabitants: ‘[w]hen Aunt Em came to live here she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were

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grey also. She was thin and gaunt. . . .’57 In this context, the official state symbol – the sunflower – seems an incongruous choice, considering the rays of its blossom so suggestive of the star that, as Marvin Creager, managing director of the Milwaukee Journal wrote in 1930, is ‘always out in the open’: the sunflower ‘did not hide in dark places and did not seek the shade’.58 Turned ‘toward the sun’, he ‘like[d] to think of the sunflower as typifying the people of Kansas’,59 an opinion, nonetheless, at odds with the sod architecture prevalent in the state, averted, as it is, from the sky. The adoption of the sunflower in 1903 as representative symbol might, then, have been an evasive manoeuvre to cover up the history, literary or otherwise, of a state so frequently compared to the moon, not to the sun; its emptiness is a ‘clue to [outer] space’,60 as Norman Mailer writes. It is as if the State’s predilection for the sunflower was based, to refer to D. H. Lawrence, on ‘subterfuge’ and ‘double meaning[s]’,61 though Lawrence might well have picked another plant to exemplify the ‘spirit of place’, and have suggested the potato. A plant tended for its secret riches and fleshy underground stem, Lawrence first refers to it in his chapter on Benjamin Franklin, himself a figure haunting The Wizard of Oz; Franklin’s type of practical ingenuity works magic in the story.62 ‘And Benjamin tries to shove me into a barbed wire paddock and make me grow potatoes or Chicagoes,’ a remark that anticipates the chapter’s concluding interpretation of the United States: ‘[a]ll this Americanizing and mechanizing has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines.’63 The nation-state (via one of its Founding Fathers) behaves as a relentlessly colonizing, enclosing, tyrannical force; Americanization equals technologization, in turn creating a reality – total simulation, domination – akin to a world of fantasy: Chicagoes, potatoes are indicative of a desire to technologically and tuberously/tentacularly remake the world. Dictatorship (Americanizing, mechanizing) in The Wizard of Oz is hidden in light, if also behind doors manned by gatekeepers; from behind a screen, a little old man transmits invisible power that is everywhere, but whose (self-)destructive potential is kept in check – it only fully transpires in other works, disturbed by the story’s latent possibilities. In Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, Oz the ‘Gweat and Tewwible’64 is no ‘humbug’65 but horror, emerging as a vengeful force at the moment of a gruesome death66; Thomas Pynchon similarly relates Oz to an implacable spirit, that is, to the ‘blast of a rocket, fallen faster than sound . . . catching up to what’s already death and burning . . . a ghost in the sky’.67 The citation that initiates Gravity’s Rainbow’s section on the zone – ‘Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore. . .’ – enters the Mittelwerke; the plant’s entrance ‘is shaped like a parabola’ and leads ‘straight into the mountain, sunlight gone, into the cold, the dark, the long echoes of the Mittelwerke’.68 The architectural layout – developed by the SS, whose building policy and practices are implemented through processes of extermination69 – corresponds to the rocket’s paraboloid trajectory; the parabola functions as emblem of a fascist order in which construction and destruction coincide: The basic layout of the plant was another inspiration of Etzel Ölsch, a Nazi inspiration like the parabola, but again also a symbol belonging to the Rocket.

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Picture the letters SS each stretched lengthwise a bit. These are the two main tunnels, driven well over a mile into the mountain. Or picture a ladder with a slight S-shaped ripple in it, lying flat: 44 runglike Stollen or cross-tunnels, linking the two main ones.70

Inside this plant, whose tuberous roots articulate totalitarian technology, architecture and weaponry – bearing the ‘Speer Touch’, associating munitions and design – compose a Raketen-Stadt, ‘so whitely lit against the calm dimness of space’71; the intricate curves are advancing into a production unit thriving on flesh, the inmates of the adjacent prison camp Dora. ‘In the Zone’ is a section that, like the novel in general – concerned with ‘transmarginal phases’72 and reverse movements – is so clearly poised on a sequence of thresholds; the immobile art of architecture is modelled on the dynamics of the rocket and vice versa. The ‘double integral’ of the shape of the tunnels carries another ‘added meaning’, a ‘method for finding hidden centres’, and which specifies a ‘point in space, a point hung precise as the point where the burning must end, never launched, never to fall’.73 The ‘Brennschluss Point’, consisting, ‘most likely’, of ‘an interface between one order of things and another’, is a line – a meridian – on either side of which exist places and elements on the verge of something radically other, suggesting the beginning of an unusual dimension where motion freezes, ‘in space, to become architecture, and timeless’.74 Down here, in the Mittelwerke accessed by way of a citation from Baum’s dream/death-world, Oz and thereby Kansas – still coded discourse for gateways into tuber precincts – become ‘cross-tunnels’ that shuttle and transfer SS superpower to the United States, from one heartland into another.

Feed lots In his poem on Kansas, ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’, Allen Ginsberg grafts flesh to metal, the ‘human meat market’ to ‘giant demon machine[s]’: ‘Is this the land that started war on China?/This be the soil that thought Cold War for decades?’75 From the outset of the poem, Ginsberg notices remarkable constructions along ‘space road[s] ahead’,76 solid masses of matter that rise up into the air. He spots ‘aluminum/white tanks’, ‘Watertower dome[s] Lighted on the flat plain’, a ‘triangle-roofed Farmer’s Grain Elevator’ sitting ‘quietly by the side of the road/along the railroad track’, while an ‘American Eagle [is] beating its wings over Asia.’77 Such correlations – ‘Iron interlaced upon the . . . plain’78 – emerge throughout his trip, moving past Army Bases and the squatting complexes of the meat industry, and on through to the outer edges where steel meets tissue, and farming converges with bombing. In the ‘Bright/EMPTINESS – ’, the ‘land which gave right of way/to the massing of metal meant for explosion’, the cultivation of the earth refers to its destruction, and harvest to slaughter: ‘Flesh soft as a Kansas girl’s/ripped open by metal explosion – /three five zero zero on the other side of the planet.’79 Here, where Ginsberg fails to distinguish between ‘feed storage’ and ‘military fear factory’,80 two ostensibly different dimensions collapse: ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’ examines the correspondences between agriculture and war, the one a deposit – or host – within the other.

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Ginsberg records the tangible intersections between military installations and the spatial expressions of agriculture, yet points of contact already exist in their equivalent functions. US military power is ‘deemed to be essential for two reasons’, first of all as ‘an ultimate guarantee of our national security’ and subsequently as ‘an indispensable backdrop to the conduct of the policy of “containment”’, according to National Security Council (NSC)-68, a reassessment of US Objectives and Programs for National Security passed on 14 April 1950.81 NSC-68 interprets Cold War technology as a set of defensive, rather than offensive, devices operating in a closed world that globalizes threats to American homeland security, revamping, that is, erasing, the distinctions between offence and defence. In this consumption of protection, the nuclear gadget acts as ‘deterrent’ – the ultimate weapon strategically ‘freezes’ the possibilities of worldwide wars; in Speed and Politics, Paul Virilio comments that ‘the weapon replaces the protection of armour, in which the possibilities of offence and offensive ensure in and of themselves the defence’.82 These measures operate on the basis of the nuclear state as means and technology of survival, expanding the correlations between agriculture and the military in a process of accordance that is evident in the National Security directive’s intents: to ‘foster the seeds of destruction within the Soviet system’ by inducing a ‘retraction of the Kremlin’s control and influence’.83 Reciprocity, however, exists not simply in relation to figures of speech, but concerns the stockpiling of provisions to preserve the ‘vitality of our system’ and the ‘values which [animate] our society’.84 This is ‘Echo-land’85; animating security state technologies preserve the vitality of a (vampiric) system grounded in myths of a Jeffersonian democratic government. In 1945 Claude R. Wickard, secretary of Agriculture, published a short address titled ‘Thomas Jefferson – Founder of Modern American Agriculture’ in Agricultural History; this article, as well as the National Agricultural Jefferson Bicentenary Committee formed two years previously, linked the war effort to the ideal of an agrarian democracy. Thomas Jefferson, so Wickard argues, ‘was one of the first to realise that impoverishment of soil leads to the impoverishment of the people who live on the soil and the weakening of the entire Nation’: Today our freedom, our democracy, our way of life have been challenged by the military strength of dictators who have no regard for the rights of men. We shall successfully meet this challenge on the field of battle. When victory is won, we shall again take up the task of making democracy strong through making the individual intelligent and strong, and through enabling him to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom. That will involve furthering the principles and ideals of Thomas Jefferson in agriculture and in government.86

Never mind the absorption of Nazi ideology, an ‘idyll’ that, as Esther Leslie notes, is misleadingly ‘grounded on nature’s unmediated goods of blood and soil’,87 Wickard’s article supports the connection, promoted by Jefferson, between the preservation of the land, the small family farm and the upholding of democracy. Although Monticello, Jefferson’s plantation in Albemarle County, Virginia, fell short of the statesman’s model

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of a self-sustained economy – mainly because of prolonged absences and constant debts88 – the establishment and survival of democracy depends on a declaration of independence. These are recurring issues that run through, if not comprise, the bulk of Jefferson’s life and work; in his First Inaugural Address on 4 March 1801, President Jefferson spoke on the subject of the ‘successful’ American ‘experiment’: Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry. . . .89

Geographical isolation as a measure of safety forms the premise of an economic security rooted in the grounds of the nation/psyche through agricultural pursuits: small landholding farmers and the cultivation of ‘things of the earth’.90 Expected to yield ‘intelligent and strong’ individuals – passing private property on down through thousand generations; property, according to Jefferson and John Locke, is a ‘corollary to democracy’91 – agriculture similarly guarantees the vitality of the (capitalist) body politic. In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson expands: Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breaths he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. It is the mark set on those, who not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandman for their subsistence, depend for it on the casualties and caprice of customers. Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. . . . It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigour. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.92

Ideologically promoting the idea of nature and self-sufficiency as purifying forces – nature generates a ‘Stahlgestalt’93 – a nobility exists in the tilling of (owned) land yielding a ‘steel’d’94 temperament produced by work in the fields. As far back as 1755, Nathanial Ames noted that ‘[t]’was Toil that taught the Romans how to conquer; they from the Fields went to the Senate House; and from the Plough they led their Legions on to war, by Toil thro’ every Clime they gain’d the Victory’.95 The emphasis on property and on an occupation’s capacity to ‘preserve a republic in vigour’ tends this republic into an empire; the same impulse forms the essence of Wickard’s brief piece as well as M. L. Wilson’s 1943 article, ‘ Thomas Jefferson – Farmer’,96 whose final paragraph ends with contemporary wartime concerns, that is, those of defence and safeguarding.

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In hindsight, a considerable amount of analogies between Axis and America emerge in these agrarian ideals, functioning within a particular discourse: the struggle against an enemy. Yet even when confined to his times, Jefferson’s principles come under fire, considering that his ‘well-known enthusiasm for agriculture and farming was not an antidote to manufacturing’ or economic growth97: in Notes on the State of Virginia, the land is configured in terms of a banking metaphor – to make ‘deposits’ that, in turn, pay dividend. His philosophy further readily assimilates into an ideology of progress and the desire to impose order against the ‘havoc’ of nature; after all, the foundation which the majority of Jefferson’s strategies rest on consists of two little words from his Inaugural Address whose consequences are enormous: ‘room enough’, an expression formulating the magnitude, but also ensuing paradoxes, of the possibilities of a refuge. As such, it is unsurprising to find that Allen Ginsberg conflates farm buildings with the military-industrial complex; the superimposition of Cold War policies on agricultural formations, both ideologically and materially, happens easily – particularly, though not exclusively, when bearing in mind industrial agriculture, laying waste to the environment98 – and exist, above all, in terms of concerns for times to come: the compulsions for preparedness and storage. Wendell Berry resists the rhetoric of war applied to the production of food – ‘[c]onsider the associations that have since ancient times clustered around the idea of food [,] associations of mutual care [and] generosity’ – yet his book gathers them nonetheless: ‘nowhere is the cult of the future stronger than in agriculture’.99 The Unsettling of America is a response to Earl Butz, Secretary of Agriculture under Nixon, who engineered the 1972 grain sale to the Soviet Union; by extension, grain surpluses and agricultural exports could be withheld or denied in order to starve people into compliance and ‘help induce purchasing power into countries on our defence perimeter’.100 An angry publication, reacting to Butz’s statement that ‘Food is a Weapon,’ Berry addresses a ‘pure’ practice’s engulfment into an ‘economy based on anxiety, fantasy’ in his book, further referring to industrialized practices thriving on an energy ‘made available by machines’ and standing in opposition to ‘living things’.101 Maximum-production agriculture, feed-lot operations, surplus cultivation are all indicative of this order of the machine and are undertaken at great cost: scorched earth occupied by closed-world womb designs whose atmospheres are produced through total remote control. It is, in many ways, a nostalgic book, dreaming of a condition of being that never really existed – man, nature – and that, at any rate, has never been ‘pure’; agriculture’s ‘cult of the future’ now, more than ever, acts in the service of an economy of conservation and anticipation, aligning it with Cold War weapons policy: defensive, shielding, programmed for the future.

ICBM, the beginning From the early- to the late 1950s, a range of studies conducted through commissions established by President Eisenhower – groups variously labelled as the Technological Capabilities Panel (TCP) chaired by James R. Killian, Jr, the Strategic Missiles Evaluation

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Committee (SMEC), led by Dr John von Neumann, and analyses submitted by the Office of Defence Mobilization (ODM) – concluded that the United States, if under nuclear attack, lay unprotected. The ODM Security Resources Panel, referred to as the Gaither committee, asked to investigate and ‘form a broad-bush opinion of the relative value of various active and passive measures to protect the civil population in case of nuclear attack and its aftermath’,102 submitted its report to the NSC on 7 November 1957, a little more than a month after Sputnik spectacularly proved USSR ascendancy. Titled ‘Deterrence & Survival in the Nuclear Age’, but also considering the peril of growing Russian economic strength – a diagram compared the amount of washing machines and refrigerators owned by the United States/Soviet Union in million units – the study noted that the Soviet military arsenal was comprised of a ‘spectrum of A and H Bombs’, a long-range air force, and ballistic missiles whose production and development ‘probably surpassed [ours]’.103 Consequently, the panel arrived at bleak ‘broad-brush opinion[s]’: 1. Active defence programs now in being and programmed for the future will not give adequate assurance of protection to the civil population. If the attack were at low altitude, or at high altitude with electronic countermeasures (jamming), little protection would be afforded. . . . 2. Passive defence programs now in being and programmed for the future will afford no significant protection to the civil population.104

An accompanying figure (Figure 2) shows a red trajectory rocketing skywards, while US ‘super’ power languishes, a plain stretching out beneath Soviet missiles. The Gaither Report, following in the wake of those other investigations, the SMEC and TCP analyses as well as of Sputnik’s ‘pale fire’,105 convinced Eisenhower to first initiate, then increase manufacture of ICBMs; the report called for ‘prompt

Figure 2 Figure shows a red trajectory rocketing skywards, while US ‘super’ power languishes, a plain stretching out beneath Soviet missiles.

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remedial action’ concerning the exposure of Strategic Air Command (SAC) and the protection of the civilian population by ‘augment[ing] our deterrent power’.106 In terms of its recommendations, the 1957 report was comparable to the previous task forces’ counsel; both SMEC, in October 1953, and TCP, also designated as the ‘Surprise Attack Study’ from February 1955, suggested analogous strategies ‘to construct new defences, to give greater emphasis to the deterrence of war’.107 Organized into bullet points aimed at the heart of the matter, the recurring basic elements on the one hand unfailingly concerned the vulnerability of the United States and, on the other, the requirement for an ‘invulnerable deterrent’108 to assist and defend SAC. It is this ‘gap’ that John F. Kennedy exploited in his electoral campaign; in a speech on 29 February 1960, Kennedy declared that ‘it is indisputable that we are today deficient in several areas – and that in one of those areas, ballistic missiles, our deficiency is likely to take on critical dimensions in the near future’.109 In his Acceptance speech of the Democratic Nomination in Los Angeles, Kennedy proceeded to ‘[measure]’ the US ‘military position . . . in terms of gaps – missile gap, space gap, limited war gap’110 while positioning himself, and by extension the nation, on a sequence of brinks especially significant in relation to weapons production and targeting approaches. Although earlier studies and policy procedures had already stepped up ICBMs into a zone of high priority and accelerated output, Eisenhower, in the aftermath of the Gaither Report, reinforced but did not reconsider the doctrine of massive retaliation established through NSC–162/2 in October 1953 and mainly executed by SAC,111 thus limiting Kennedy, once elected president, to a choice between total annihilation and retreat. As such, one of JFK’s first acts in office was to remove Eisenhower’s strategy and replace it with a ‘spectrum’ of options, the doctrine of flexible response, ordaining a new Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP). Kennedy substituted SAC Commanding General Curtis LeMay’s ‘Sunday Punch’, a ‘simultaneous, massive, integrated [nuclear] strike, against a combination of target systems in the Soviet Union’,112 for a limited, presumably controllable, response delivered in discrete packages.113 SIOP-63, in preparation from 1961 to 1962 and activated on 1 August 1962, consisted of five options, of which the first focused on Soviet Strategic nuclear delivery forces – missile sites, bomber bases and submarine tenders – as well as elements of the Soviet military force located away from cities and that therefore, according to Curtis LeMay, reduced the opportunities for ‘bonus damage’.114 Subsequent target selections included Soviet command and control facilities closer to population centres and only, in the last instance, considered an ‘all-out urban-industrial attack’.115 The realignment in emphasis – from ‘soft’ to ‘hard’ target selection – designed to allow escalation control was possible because of improvements in technology: surveillance techniques providing detailed locations as opposed to deep-sea outlines116 and the enhancement of missile guidance systems. Donald Mackenzie, tracking the ‘missile revolution’ from initial resistance – mainly coming from the United States Air Force (USAF) – to gadget-loving embrace, writes that ‘very considerable accuracy is needed’ in order to hit targets like missile installations and underground command posts.117 The precision of ballistic missiles – a mechanism becoming more attractive to the military services with the invention of the hydrogen bomb, which generates a ‘higher yield-to-weight

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ratio’, thus reducing ‘the weight a ballistic missile would have to lift’118 – functions, according to Mackenzie, ‘without recourse to external references, landmarks or radio signals’.119 The blind, black box navigational system – developed, among others, by Dr Hermann Franz Joseph Hubertus Maria Anschütz-Kaempfe dreaming of a submarine voyage to the North Pole120 – replicates the icy, enclosing stasis of the Cold War. Any change in targeting strategy by necessity prompts an evaluation, on the ground, of those same targets; in his book On Thermonuclear War, published in 1960, Herman Kahn is concerned about the neglect and obsolescence of military installations: One military area in which we do not seem to take sufficient account of the possibility of war is in the structures that we build. It has not been the custom in this country even in the design of purely military installations to take account of the fact that they could need protection – either from fallout or blast – if they are to be used during the war or in the postwar period.121

Though he notes, in this section titled ‘The Special Importance of Installations’, that the government ‘has some underground headquarters’, he deems that the disregard of ‘the whole field’ derives from a lack of romanticism and therefore does not receive the necessary financial and administrative support: ‘they’, meaning government officials, ‘do not take war seriously’.122 Either way, whether through lack of commitment or ‘romantic’ interest, or because of a deliberate resistance by the structure of command, the mood imparted by these lectures is one of urgency and resolve to ‘build systems that have been designed to meet the full range of threats or that can be retrofitted or improved to meet increases or changes in the threat’.123 Existing formations are outdated, unable to provide refuge against absolute explosive movement because conceived ‘to survive inaccurate weapons carrying low yields’, and worse, they perpetuate ‘illusions of permanence’ – ‘[o]ne goes to sleep at night and the building is still there when one wakes up the next day’.124 Kahn, of course, advocates a credible second-strike capability which SAC bombers, either ‘parked out in the open or in relatively flimsy structures’, and early, liquid-fuelled, missiles, stored above-ground,125 are incapable of executing; their vulnerability demonstrates the failure to ‘[plan] for an uncertain world’.126 A strange paradox nonetheless underlies Kahn’s sprawling work, so aware of the possibility of overnight catastrophe dissolving the world into clouds of black dust; ‘planning for an uncertain world’ seems an impossible task, concrete designs too inflexible to be ‘retrofitted or improved’. The very nature of an act of death that is invisible dictates a need for changing, mobile, shapes like boats or balloons, a vast infrastructure of roads and railways, a ‘4000-mile trench stretching over backlands’, scuttling missiles back and forth.127 In his study on MX Peacekeeper, the ‘first missile to be deployed by the United States for the declared purpose of threatening missiles still in their concrete silos’, John Edwards writes that, by the end of the 1960s, the air force had contemplated a bewildering variety of shelters, hiding places, carriers and methods as invulnerable basing modes for land missiles. . . . These included the “sandy silo” idea, in which one hundred missiles would be buried

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MX, however, remained inert – it only entered service in 1986; the problem to solve, as Hermann Kahn had put it in 1960, was the ‘special importance’ of rocket storage facilities to safeguard the deterrent whose imperviousness of course does not, cannot, exist.

The cult of future death First-generation missiles, especially Atlas D, stood vertically on exposed launching pads and relied on external guidance, radio command easily jammed or disabled; their survivability was zero, their dependence on, and susceptibility from, the outside excessive. Subsequent Atlas E and F missiles were deployed in dispersed, semi-hardened sites,129 a reaction to studies indicating the prerequisite of a secure, protected force; their operational spheres evolved, according to David Stumpf, through four designs, from the ground-launched surface-attack-guided missile (PGM-16D) on a ‘soft pad’, via stages marked CGM-16D and CGM-16E, in which the missile lies horizontally in a coffin-shaped shelter, and finally to an underground configuration identified as HGM-16F: the silo.130 An airtight, usually cylindrical receptacle, with origins in agriculture and used for storing crops or grain, the silo permits a negation of the seasons, a certain indifference and detachment to its surroundings131; its monolithic concrete form, climbing out of the scenery, is aggressive, its severely functional architecture a repository of unease. The absolute mass of its appearance, its blind existence and self-containment, carries aspects not entirely of this world, features that, because they sever contact with adjoining regions, approach the extraterrestrial; analogies between Mars and the Midwest find their correlations in the approximation of farm building and Unidentified Flying Object (UFO), too. It is the separation from the environment, the creation of an interior space without any obvious openings, a realm off-limits to even the sightlines, that incites anxiety or impressions of terror while also encouraging close encounters, such as in Stephen King’s The Stand, with ‘weird, alien’ organisms that ‘[can] see tones of the spectrum that human eyes could never attain to’.132 A novel on the accidental outbreak of an engineered bug – the fail-safe containment mechanism malfunctions and is delayed, allowing a carrier to escape – The Stand is a story about the possibility of shelter against a presence described as viral, a ‘gas’ that ‘floats silently away and dissipates’.133 The need for protection, instilled here with its own ‘mythic dimension[s]’,134 a confrontation between the infected and the resistant, propels Nick Andros, seeking refuge from a tornado, into the cellar of a barn with an attached silo. Inside, everything becomes ghostly, is wavering between materiality and absence, just as the construction itself, bordering on unusual atmospheres, offers

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gateways, points of contact between one world and another. Simultaneously a shelter and a ‘prehistoric monster’, a shape revealed as ‘the boards’ of the barn are ‘stripped off the sides’,135 the storage building – used in Silo Killer, a 2002 B-movie, to hoard the hacked-up corpses of a bunch of college kids – imparts disquieting slippages. It inclines itself, ‘like rockets gone awry’,136 towards disaster, the death, rather than the sustenance, of multitudes. In Bunker Archaeology, Paul Virilio compares the solid volumes of bunkers partly submerged in sand to ‘works of fiction’, to ‘spacecraft parked in the middle of an avenue’ or else out in the open, on the margins of the land, ‘announcing the war of the worlds, the confrontation with inhuman species’.137 Throughout his piece, Virilio mentions ‘terrific atmospheric pressure’ and talks about a ‘new climate’ to which these military structures respond, but which they also engender; their implantation in the earth registers a conflict and ‘collage of two dissimilar realities’.138 Above all, he notes the correlations between military architecture and the ‘funeral archetype’, an observation that relates to aspects of tightness – envelopes of steel and concrete wrap around the individual: Slowed down in his physical activity but attentive, anxious over the catastrophic possibilities in his environment, the visitor in this perilous place is beset with a singular heaviness; in fact he is already in the grip of that cadaveric rigidity from which the shelter was designed to protect him.139

With the resolve to defend to death, the ‘works of fiction’ concern narratives of protection against a landscape in which everything is ‘volatile, . . . flammable’; shields against heat and light hence necessarily move into the ‘very thickness of the planet’.140 The constrictions of coffin-shaped shelters, however, do not cater to the ‘visitor’, or to any living being, but are instead fitted to accommodate the long, sleek silhouettes of ballistic missiles. The movement towards the interior, then, the structure’s disappearance from the surface, an attempt to drop out of satellite networks and escape the invisible rays of atom bombs, electromagnetic pulse and electronic arsenals – ‘weird peeled eyeball[s]’141 up in the sky – reflects a degree of care allocated to the weapon, not to its victims.142 In the mid-1950s, the Eisenhower administration adopted a dispersal policy regarding the distribution of defence dollars and installations, which had for the most part been altering the east and western extremities of the country143; the original rationale for this directive involved security reasons, and instructed a shift away from the coastal areas, vulnerable to submarine missile attack, in favour of the country’s interior. Though ‘transparent’,144 as Stumpf notes, because the deployed weapons system makes no place safe, Eisenhower’s strategy followed a more extensive incentive that also carried a transferral of priorities from the security of people to the safety measures for weapons. As first-generation missiles were decommissioned in the early 1960s other, solid-fuel ICBMs – Minuteman, inertially guided and promoting readiness for instant use – replaced the highly flammable liquid-oxygen-fuelled Atlas and Titan I, thereby also shifting the emphasis on accuracy and counterforce, later forming the

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core of SIOP-63. Consequently, the requirement for the protection of the missile and the question of arsenal vulnerability turned into pressing issues; the quick succession through acronyms, PGM-16D, CGM-16D and E, arrived, as mentioned earlier, at the underground silo design, progressively hardened as weapons and delivery systems evolved. Steel and concrete move into depth, into darkness. In Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Slothrop, entering Oz, the German heartland’s rocket fabrication facilities, wonders, while travelling through the enormity of the place, if ‘[p]erhaps Titans lived under this mountain, and their skulls got harvested like giant mushrooms’.145 The corresponding metal shapes underneath the expanses of the plains, Titan II, were set up in a silo blueprint drafted for the hot-launched British Blue Streak, a project almost immediately abandoned.146 The design for an in-silo-launched rocket was subsequently transferred to Titan II, which – despite still being liquid propellant and requiring considerable preparation before blast-off – remained operational until 1987 because of its sheer size and the bulk of its payload. Its storage and launch sites were devised to withstand three basic modes of attack: massive bomber deliveries, small surprise packages and missile assaults147 that were to be counteracted through the scattering, hardening and concealment of deployment configurations. Prior to such developments and despite their capacity to ignite the world, nuclear weapons were fragile, delicate mechanisms that required tenderness, envelopes of shielding materials; they were vulnerable deterrents, themselves in need of defence. The storage arrangements the missile was inserted into became, in time and like the delivery vehicle itself, structures that existed without, or with minimal, recourse to external referents. As such, replicating the ICBM’s black box procedures, its inertial navigation operating with no outside input, the facilities embracing the weapon were adjusted to provide a similarly self-sufficient environment, a mirror image of the devices they cradle. What eventually explodes as uncontainable light was slipped into settings that are blind; the black box, in this instance, refers as much to the rocket’s guidance as it does to the conditions of its maintenance. The Raketen-Stadt or missile silo, low-level shafts whose enormous scale and crossheadings indicate conglomerations like a city, function to protect, in deep space and through hard lining, the nation’s deterrent lying submerged, a sleeping giant dreaming of motion. Broken up into multiple equipment areas, sets of platforms that burrow into the planet with a single purpose, the silo is a constellation that, forming around a still dead star, provides life support to the rocket. The site supplies an operational capacity that inevitably is short-lived, because always modified, thereby dispensing with what Herman Kahn terms ‘illusions of permanence’. Though time – at least concerning the effective functioning status of the military installation and in relation to constantly evolving technologies – is not limitless, space nonetheless seems infinite down here. The world created is titanic, a formation like a labyrinth whose tuber tunnelling and foundations are, once completed, outfitted with electronics, control points and panels that manage temperature control, the transfer of gasses and the lines of communication between equipment in different parts of the arrangement. The various terminals, in a standard Titan II launch complex (Figure 3), consisted of launch control centre, a domed cylinder with a steel cage suspended inside so as to remove it from ground

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Figure 3 A scope of leads . . . are inserted into what, in the illustration above is an impressionist rendering of the shades of the earth as a body of water. motion; blast lock intending to shield the compound from a nearby nuclear detonation; access portal, plus entrapment area preventing unauthorized entry, cableway and silo. The facility’s main function emerged through the vocabulary arrested in the term and material expression of isolation, in the solid, often cylindrical geometries of the missile complex; inside the silo, a shaft 145 feet deep and carved up into nine equipment levels,148 sits and waits the rocket, a sentinel under a field of space. Construction began, so Stumpf writes, with an ‘open cut’, a network of ‘all-weather access roads’149 travelling towards the site of descent; masses of metal push into the blank landscape of the plains. A scope of leads, ‘long runs of cable or piping’, of ‘structural steel such as girders or rebar’,150 are inserted into what, in the illustration above (Figure 3), is an impressionist rendering of the shades of the earth as a body of water; the source of the play of light, however, no longer, or not yet, a red fireball suspended in the sky, is instead of uncertain origin, a radiance lingering around the mechanism of the rocket. The drawing – providing a window into another world, a vision of a glimmering city – locates dreams of utopia (Cibola; Oz) as resting with the missile, with a ‘cold dead lump of metal’ containing, beneath its smooth surface, the ‘potential for so much heat’, so much ‘silent white light.151 Down in the darkness, meanwhile, despite the drawn-out, violent procedures to sink it into excavated gaps, the finished form of the installation, concurrently linked to and separated from the ground, approximates the metallic to the organic. As corridors stretch onwards until they reach bulbous districts, the self-sustained organism of the plant, a Titan I cell (Figure 4), materializes, in its architecture, the ‘fearful symmetry’152 between nuclear power and transmutation.153 The facility, however, so akin in its communications systems to the circulation of blood, effectively is of an inhuman order, its workings operating out of outsized gadgetry that dwarfs attendant figures. Here, employees get smaller; ahead of the trend

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Figure 4 As corridors stretch onwards until they reach bulbous districts, the selfsustained organism of the plant, a Titan I cell, materializes.

to reduce technological devices, it is the ‘human’ element that shrinks – the aesthetics of disappearance also comments on awareness extinction in workers diligently plotting mass murder. Cold War technology was – up until further ICBM development that produced the much smaller Minuteman missile and multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles – linked to ‘Titans’, a construct that obscures, or minimizes, the involvement of shrinking men in the service of an overarching ideology. The result is a totally technologized space encrypting death fantasies delivered by gleaming devices; the totality of the Raketen-Stadt gives out a luminosity that seems otherwordly, ‘depth and brilliance’,154 as if light was emitted from the walls, the lining of the place, so much like a thing from outer space. The silo’s polished grandeur and diamond-hard surfaces combine with an array of computer technology, machines that occupy every available space and feed information to the nucleus. This environment is as much subterranean as it is extraterrestrial, its radiance and whitewash indicative of so many interstellar vehicles: the Discovery in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 or the USS Enterprise approaching translucency in J. J. Abrams’ Star Trek. As an impression, the whiteness, coolness, the brilliance of the gadgetry associated with extraterrestrial intelligence belongs to a convention aware of the shared patterns between machine and science fiction: the rocket, in any case, already is a space ship. The aesthetic form of the missile silo is, by extension, an otherworldly, monumental technology, establishing a universe severing points of contact with the

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host planet. This type of machinery, diminishing, if not yet annihilating, life by its sheer presence, appears not to belong to earth but to alien intellects which H. G. Wells describes, in The War of the Worlds, as ‘vast and cool and unsympathetic’.155 The network, consequently, is suspended, out and nonetheless still a part of this world; in the rocket city’s solid geometries, conscious living forms, so close to being atomized, are rare and transient creatures that, insect-like, atrophy in districts of technological density. It is not simply in terms of the installations through which ICBMs define and thereby materialize future worlds; the missile silo operates as a dream-work founded on an ideology of utopian preservation by way of the nuclear device. The atom bomb serves as silage; the strategy that interprets it as the core of the nation’s capacity for survival replicates, to recall, Jeffersonian principles linking issues of endurance to farming practices, whose applications provide both the groundwork and ‘backbone of democracy’.156 Though strategic thinking is no longer limited to geography, but extends into the stratosphere, missile development, right from the start, is associated with soil through the Nazi doctrine’s ‘Blut und Boden’, the myths of a return to ‘nature’ though all is, in fact, technologized. The V2 initiates ballistic trajectories; its engineers are transplanted from Germany to the United States, whose mythology of republic/empire refers to analogous roots. Imperial sustenance and expansion breed at family farms, feeding the United States: at stake is national salvation because, after all, the ‘vigour’ of the republic depends on the cultivation of things or giants in the earth sprouting superpowers. Agriculture, like food, is a weapon – other suggestions, lying hidden beneath Butz’s catchphrase, involve the usage of chemical warfare, mists of rainbow herbicides shrouding the crops of enemy nations; the ‘cult of the future’ a temperament or prerequisite of agriculture, coinciding with martial interests, really is a cult of future death. In the rhetorical discourse of NSC-68, the amalgamation between machine and organism becomes implicit: the sown crops are shoots of steel; missile farms,157 plants in intra-terrestrial space, expand the metaphor, an arsenal contained in grain installations. Missile launch complexes are then, to appropriate Virilio’s description, ‘almost botanical’158 in nature and converge with cellular formations; rockets – the ‘skulls’ of ‘Titans’ – are ‘giant mushrooms’, giving an indication of recurring events in dreamed scenarios about atomic power warping creature volumes. Outsized vegetables, for one, often appear in Hollywood productions; forming the premise of the 1957 movie The Beginning of the End, in which the settlement of Ludlow, Illinois vanishes overnight, they are, in this instance, grown by the US Department of Agriculture’s Experimental Station, the only facility in the vicinity of the little trashed town that ‘have been playing around with radioactivity’.159 In a shed, inside a black metal box, on top of which stand some specimens of nuclear gardening, Ed Wainwright, the project director, keeps his fertilizer, ‘a sort of artificial sun’ that causes the ‘growing process to continue night and day’; giant greens, Wainwright explains, a ‘hybrid that can be eaten . . . one day’, are ‘the future of the American farmer’. So, however, are 8-feet-tall locusts – whose ‘cell division’, after ingesting ‘some of the radioactive plant food . . . accelerated immediately’ – as well as enormous ants,

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a mutation ‘probably caused by lingering radiation from the first atomic bomb test’,160 as Dr Medford, also of the Department of Agriculture, suggests in Them!. As outcomes of military ventures and programmes conducted by investigative, or indeed industrialized, farmers over time coincide, and the Department of Agriculture is summoned to national disaster zones to solve the puzzles of giants, the gaps splitting food and weapons, plants and bombs, further recede. In remote installations, ‘pocket[s]’ in ‘albino’ topographies,161 the weapons systems – in stealth in their silos distributed ‘like seeds’ across air bases and states – are ‘waiting to bloom’.162 On maps, strategic missile squadrons or wings resemble cracks in the fabric of the territory; the rifts provide evidence of ‘Titans’ lying beneath the surface, ready to hatch. The kernels they eventually distribute out of their automated farms163 generate, within a certain radius, only absence; round about ground zero, scenery disintegrates into ashes, into empty space. A little further, though, amidst the ruins, as John Hersey records in Hiroshima, ‘up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along riverbanks . . . was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green’; the atom bomb ‘had not only left the underground organs of plants intact [but] it had stimulated them’164 – radioactivity, indeed, operates as an unparalleled fertilizer. Silos, then, hold the ‘backbone of democracy’, winter wheat or missile hardware, in protective embrace. Their tight cylinders, the receptacles for the ‘preservation of the inalienable rights of man’,165 retain and keep ‘alive’ the virtues of self-contained existence – an essence as invisible, if not as enduring, as radioactivity – that Jefferson found in the soil. The survivability of so-called democratic government consequently, according to this discourse’s metaphorical constructions, depends on crops implanted in the ground, in sub-surface storage outposts themselves buried in code words and abbreviations, in language levels that plunge as depths increase: ‘a hundred plots go underground’.166

Homeland security In Underworld, Don DeLillo investigates the ‘secret of the bomb’ and the ‘secrets that the bomb inspires’167 from the vantage point of a ‘post’-Cold War environment nostalgic for the balance of power; the covert sphere of missile installations has, likewise, and in recent years, been crossed over in efforts probing a zone from which the ‘civilian’ or ‘human’ was excluded. These are problematic terms in a state of pure war in which the opposition between military and civilian elements no longer exists; ‘man’ is, to being with, an invention, technologically defined, so that any attempts to enter the ‘allure of wartime technology’168 have to be understood in terms of an act of gadget love: Titan tenderness. Decommissioned by 1965, Atlas and Titan ruins, by the mid-1990s, appear in cyberspace; the prevalence of one military project allows for the circulation of another. With few exceptions, the relevant sites posting explorations are, to refer to one address, mainly epitaphs: they eulogize the passing of Titans. Set up by missile enthusiasts paying tribute to specific squadrons, by techno-fetishists now able to incorporate into their favourite weapons systems, these domains remain, despite

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their allegiance to the integrity of the project, curious sources. The material, depending on the motivation – celebrations of superpower, of man-machine collaborations; the dissemination of previously secret and still dangerous knowledge – includes both archival documents and present-day footage, photos of operational equipment put beside the plant’s wreckage. The available records form a corpus of information whose meaning explodes in all directions: they are attempts to recover an unquestioned supremacy that is now lost, return to the apparent fixities of nuclear deterrence, mark ongoing American engagements, impel sacrifice, and as if accidentally detect, in decrepit technology, the consequences of the Cold War. On occasion, entries are approaches that engage in a reversed space race, where visitors of this millennium travel, in a downward movement, back in time: faceless webmasters wear bio-suits, an indication of the temperament or temperature of the remains they access. Up until Minuteman, a solid-propellant vehicle – whose environmental control is, in contrast to the storage prerequisites for Atlas and Titan rockets, not quite as difficult to uphold – an unchanging climatic condition had to be maintained. As a highly explosive, liquid-fuelled mechanism, early missile technology, creeping towards megadeath, necessitated to be held in a uniform, unvarying atmosphere where temperatures were monitored and humidity was kept at an optimal level. The comfort for ‘gnomes’,169 as one investigator refers to himself – a recurring theme in a strategy that valued the survival of ‘hard’ war plantations over ‘soft’ civilian targets – was, therefore, of less importance than the parameters required for the effective functioning of the weapon. The propulsion vehicle’s fuel – a combination of liquid oxygen and liquid nitrogen either stored inside the rocket in times of alert or else in propellant terminals – was cryogenic gasses chilled to the point of becoming fluids. Coolers ensured a glacial space, a preservation of missile and world in ice: installations are frosty places – in terms of actual environmental conditions as well as in reference to the cool calculations of mass murder, the ‘cryogenisation of emotions’170 – so as to prevent a whole system, frozen in a Cold War, from going into meltdown. Yet, according to online data – providing evidence of equipment submerged in coagulations – overheating has already occurred, the meltdown already happened; these perspectives show a state of the world molten, twisted, inside atomic light. It is as if these abandoned facilities, this assemblage of obsolete machines – not simply evidence of the furious pace of weapons procurement – also serves as an impression of a world at its end. Here exists a vision of ruin, an order that archaeologists from the future or from outer space visit so as to document the inward collapse of a civilization. Dream-technology, in this case, releases a response that is twofold: an interior space race and the fantasy possession, through retrofitting rather than explorationcommemoration, of an exclusive realm; the holy trinity of technological sublimity is, in a related spatial endeavour, also domesticated on the home front. Operating out of an Atlas E site in Kansas, Ed Peden aims to adapt war zones into peace projects; the emptiness of the enormous military space is stuffed with an abundance of soft, yielding materials that fold around flesh. There is, in the posted promotional snapshots, a noticeable absence of appliances – the photographs rarely offer perspectives of the kitchen or of electric implements, such as washing machines and refrigerators, so

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often jointly evaluated with nuclear weapons in terms of mass production. Defined as yet another theatre of war part of an extensive network of technological systems,171 kitchen and Cold War associations are edited out of (strange) Love Generation missile appropriations. In effect, the recovery process of a Cold War relic constitutes an effort to insert life forms into a cold shell, but the accumulation of objects only serves to accentuate the mass of the vastness attempted to be covered up in tenderness, in ‘vision statement[s]’ that proclaim to establish, in this system, a ‘healthy, healing, community environment’.172 Yet there are more troubling issues raised in Peden’s marketing campaign, weirdly suspended between commendation and disapproval of the effort and resources spent during construction considering its rapid obsolescence; he further draws attention to the durability of the design, the ‘hard’ assets that accumulate value over extensive periods of time – features manifesting hopes to make capital from codes of fear. Peden’s domain, consequently, is itself in a state of permanent crisis, dimly critical of the ideological and material apparatus of the Cold War but also welcoming its embrace, and inhabiting its manipulation of language. Process of reclamation and Cold War rhetoric share the potential to ‘project a transformational vision of peace to the world’173: the atom bomb creates an uneasy ‘peace’ by deflecting active, open combat away from US/SU opposition and similarly emerges out of acts of love. The metaphor of bomb-home turns literal; it is inside this formation – propagated strategically by conceiving of the weapon as an atomic shield and deterrent, already failing to limit fictions of security – that subjects go into hiding so as to avoid, or await, the end of the world. As a genre, then, an architecture that consumes space by disappearing into it, the silo – according to one promoter a construction preparing ‘for an attack that never came’174 – functions as a mechanism that, like the ‘child’ inside it protects, promises the conception of an inviolable, privileged space. Abandoned then subsequently restored and retrofitted weapons launch installations permit a departure beyond the senses into a neutral, weatherless spot, providing a ‘luxury home safe haven getaway complex’; the silo exists as a colony detached and sealed in its universe, a world hanging from a ‘gigantic spring suspension system’.175 The facility’s ‘possibilities’ are advertised as ‘unlimited’,176 offering protective power against the sudden demolitions of an uncertain world, to be counteracted by solid, subterranean forms. The latter, whose interior is now furnished with rich fabrics, with drooping house plants replacing cables, profess to be zones of super-security and propose a mode of living based on codes of separation. This is a padded existence – life preserved inside cylinders, maintained in a space pod – caused by measures taken to evade death, a utopian realization that, because the result of morbid fixations, is shrouded in the obsessive fear and anticipation of (total) death. Both missile and silohome – the latter a bunker adjacent to a great vacuum, the layered abyss left by the amputated rocket – accordingly are fantasy devices that simulate dreams of flight. The silo, which in its inclination mirrors the mechanism it hoards, acts like a ‘moving vehicle . . . frozen, in space’ and time, a medium become inert, ‘never launched’, never to fall, finally accessing an interface between stasis and

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movement. Down in the confines of the luxury getaway, the state of preservation, however, no matter how sumptuous, crosses another threshold and forms a passage of transference into another order by emulating the circumstances of a burial. The desire to survive everyday life, and to secure domestic front and homeland against incursions consequently serves not as a removal from, but a movement toward, death. As ‘visitor’ turns resident, the shelter’s finite scale, though purporting to offer a mark against ‘catastrophic possibilities’, a refuge from the infinity of potential terrors, replicates exterior conditions, the ‘living-corpse mythology’177 also used to describe atom bomb survivors. The shapes and instruments of escape, because one and the same, each a subsystem within the other and contained inside larger networks of aggression, are ‘structures favouring death’178 whose formations, so close to a ‘funeral ceremony’, hold both subjects and the body of the nation in ‘the grips of [the] cadaveric rigidity from which the shelter was designed to protect [them]’. Inside coffin-shaped forms – a model accepting that shelter is not a place, but a gadget, that it exists underneath the umbrella of atom bombs’ ‘giant mushrooms’ – lurch the living, loving dead. These Cold War vestiges in America’s heartland demonstrate the continuation of encapsulating control systems that continue to implement techno-fantasies of self-preservation extending beyond the limits of mortality and the imagined closure of conflicts. The palimpsestic space of Kansas, past the operational range of ballistic missiles, similarly keeps functioning as a zone in which the undead, undying ‘interregnum’ and obsolete, retrofitted mechanisms of the security state inhabit the legends of a territory.

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Evacuation: Cape Canaveral

Total technology Towards the end of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, SS Schutzhäftlingsführer Weissmann, code name Dominus Blicero, mentions his dream of a totally technologized environment, a ‘great glass sphere’1 that, according to Dale Carter, encapsulates the ‘intersecting processes of evacuation, elevation [and] elimination’2: a terminal design of absolute security. Blicero’s dreamworld – closed, vacant, ice-cold – pushes out of rocket systems, more specifically out of the 00000, a special device outfitted with Imipolex G, an ‘aromatic heterocyclic polymer’ whose ‘target property most often seemed to be strength – first among Plasticity’s virtuous triad of Strength, Stability and Whiteness’,3 attributes so evidently aligned with fascism. Weismann/Blicero, a ‘white eminence’ in name and the spirit of rocketry’s linkage with Nazism, launches the 00000 in (gadget) love: Gottfried, ‘alloyed German gold’, is wrapped up inside in an Imipolex shroud.4 The ascent and final incorporation of man and machine happen like this: Brennschluss, when was Brennschluss it can’t be this soon . . . but the burnt-out tail-opening is swinging across the sun and through the blonde hair of the victim here’s a Brocken-spectre, someone’s something’s shadow projected from out here in the bright sun and darkening sky into the regions of gold, of whitening, of growing still as underwater as Gravity dips away briefly . . . what is this death but a whitening, a carrying of whiteness to ultrawhite, what is it but bleaches, detergents, oxidisers, abrasives – Streckefuss he’s been here today to the boy’s tormented muscles, but more appropriately is he Blicker, Bleicheröde, Bleacher, Blicero, extending, rarefying the Caucasian pallor to an abolition of pigment, of melanin, of spectrum, of separateness from shade to shade.5

The listing of ‘Blicker, Bleicheröde, Bleacher, Blicero’ functions as an accumulation of sounds that captures both the resonance and purpose or itinerary of the rocket which impels ‘whiteness to ultrawhite’. Bleicheröde – thinks Enzian, the leader of the Schwarzkommando, initially fictional African rocket troops devised in a film – is ‘close enough to “Blicker,” the nickname the early Germans gave to death. They saw him white: bleaching and blankness. The name was later Latinized to “Dominus Blicero.”’6 The blast-off of the 00000, which Gottfried experiences as an extension of the zero, a rarefication of his ‘Caucasian pallor’, returns the impression of ballistic missile and

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components, including launch site, as bleach-out processes of erasure. The cyborg, rocket-creature, rather than ‘impure’ – because a hybrid being – is not a progressive, blasphemous figure but instead a milky-white, almost transparent, manifestation of the deathly politics of racial purity and technicized body armour.7 The utopia/ Deathkingdom that Blicero wants to attain is similarly bleached, a ‘death colony’ drifting through ‘years of frozen silence’8: this dream of an arrested time freezes techno-futures as fascist, static worlds that are not just insipiently but totally totalitarian.9 Gadget love/pornography of flight arrives at glass spheres of absolute engineering; Cape Canaveral forms the point of departure for dreamworlds of pure technique which begin with the machine, that is, the rocket, operating according to a logic of refuge, ‘hollow and very high and far away’.10 Blicero’s Deathkingdom is a state of exception whose politics and machinery are inherited from Nazi Germany, a ‘being-with spectres’11 that always includes the ghost-soul of the rocket, vengeance weapon whose movement of penetration disappears in rhetoric emphasizing its power to shield or save: a vector of protection and escape. Survival machine, evasive system, the rocket occupies the centre – ground 0(0000) – of a condition of total peace/war established through deterrence, itself an order of freezing in which existence is indeterminably ‘balanced’ on the brink of blank death: death colony or empire sheltering/shrouding bleached cyborg-beings. Cape Canaveral is the moon-port from which to renew cycles of empire and death-like protection in glass coffins, closed spheres; here unfolds a landscape in the service of the monumental Saturn V, white whale prompting transformations way before Brennschluss – a becoming-ethereal for the loving, integrated subject – occurs. A moment in suspense, Brennschluss is the ‘zero point’, a ‘ritual of love’, at which the ‘feminine’12 rocket submits to gravity and another instance when the rocket reveals its fundamental duality: it is always two things at once, suicidal, auto-immunitary weapon and messianic saviour; all movement and still-standing, as architecture; both phallus and womb, from which the rocket-child emerges. Itself a hybrid being, the rocket gives rise to the cyborg, ‘all light and clean’,13 that Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline discuss in terms of an evolutionary process: If man attempts partial adaptation to space conditions, instead of insisting on carrying his whole environment along with him, a number of new possibilities appear. One is then led to think about the incorporation of integral exogenous devices to bring about biological changes which might be necessary in man’s homeostatic mechanisms to allow him to live in space qua natura.14

Published in 1960, Clynes and Kline’s paper anticipates things to come: man’s horizon – biological or otherwise, emerging out of the ‘prison of his . . . flesh’15 – as infinite in the four-dimensional ‘era of astronautics’ whose ‘tender philosophy’, according to Eugene M. Emme, might also yield ‘a new renaissance of the mind and spirit’.16 Emme’s ‘Carte de Tendre, the Map of the Land of Tenderness’,17 that is, an introductory article in a special 1963 issue of Technology and Culture on the history of rocketry, traces a ‘dynamic field’ of rocket intensities and ‘frontiersmen’ that ‘[have] influenced the entire structure and conduct of national and international politics and economics’.18

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Emme’s preliminary essay paves the way for an edition enthralled by ballistic missile r/evolution that, throughout the special issue, is configured as a forward momentum of mythical dimensions: a mobile, unrestrained, accelerated, endless expansion into, and acquisition of, ‘new understandings’,19 themselves unbound in terms of subject matters, applications and operational, worldwide and world-surpassing systems. Robert L. Perry’s contribution to the same volume of Technology and Culture focuses on what Donald Mackenzie calls ‘technology creep’, meaning the internal logic of technological change engineered from within often resistant institutions, in this case the USAF, whose ‘love affair’20 with the manned bomber initially prevented the development of ‘such visionary devices as intercontinental rocket missiles or satellites’.21 Perry’s article particularly discusses the Western Development Division (WDD), later the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division, itself part of a special management agency supporting the ICBM project, whose responsibilities included establishing a weapon configuration or missile feasibility in order to arrive at a functioning design. WDD progressed by means of a programme management that had to consider technological practicability but also organizational structures and resistances, an administrative task of ‘inherent difficulty’ compounded, as it was, ‘by a need to invent, develop, prove, and incorporate new technology in a total system without compromising the operational objective’.22 Both discourse and work enterprise have to consolidate into an effective weapon – technology creep really is indicative of gadget love; a technological project has to be seen, lovingly, through to its realization – that right from the start (as spirit) but also as a concrete, operative device belongs to and evolves through systems, a ‘war of dreams’23 still waged after the machine has become matter: The concept of a weapon system approach was scarcely new in 1954, when WDD was first formed. [General Bernard A.] Schriever [the programme director] himself had been instrumental in its creation and was one of the first to appreciate that as originally conceived and applied it had some limitations. To the ICBM effort he applied a refined system technique – the “program package” concept. It was designed to insure that all major factors in the ballistic missile effort were traced in terms of their complex interrelationships and not in isolation. The “weapons system” approach had seen that theory applied to the integration of individual subsystems to produce a total-system technical design.24

Perry’s discussion is exclusively framed in terms of a ‘program package’ embrace restricted to the ICBM’s creeping realization – the systems approach refers to practicable machinic subsystems but also to management, funding and operational (so-called human) considerations – but the creation of a ‘total-system technical design’ influences every other field of existence: technique does not just begin or end with the machine.25 Incorporation into complex structures, in which the difference between ontological stages (spirit/matter; dreams/realization) is variable, occurs prior as well as subsequently to the ICBM’s establishment as ‘visionary’ vehicle altering national security strategy, the nature of threats and, beyond that, the state of beings, territories,

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temporalities. The production of the weapon, occurring in a ‘total system’, also yields a cultural environment as system that ‘houses’ the new device; this environment/ system is in turn subject to the machine’s impact or intensities that relay a (totally) technologized world. Cape Canaveral, a ‘Map of the Land of Hardness’,26 unfolds as a site where technique, as a matter of policy in the 1960s, progresses beyond the machine, whose ‘empire of meaning’27 is invariably bound up with modifications, the ‘task of adapting man’s body to any environment’28 and, conversely, to adapt the United States to the designs of a weapon or, more precisely, to the politics of engineering: the ballistic missile as nucleus and soul of a ‘total-system’ dream state. This is where Blicero’s new Deathkingdom is launched from, at the test stands of the gods – titans, all – evolving through technical designs to culminate in the ‘birth’ of Saturn,29 ‘child’ of the V2. Here, at the Cape, an ‘evolutionary’ process takes place, evident in ballistic missile development approached, in the special issue of Technology and Culture, through a metaphorically organic succession of holy trinities – the Redstone, Jupiter, Juno (the latter an ‘infant Saturn’)30; the Atlas, Thor and Titan – but also with respect to biological incorporations, manas-machine integrated/fading into the operational systems of the ICBM. The moon rocket exceeds, in power of adaptation, individual subjects – like Gottfried, ‘giant white fly’31 thrust into the mechanism of the rocket – and in conjunction with its ‘manned’ elements, that is, policy-makers, politicians and managers, seeks to optimize an entire state of ‘life’ or death colony as culture of evacuation: a terminal, bleached dreamworld of absolute security, tranquillity.

Report from an obscure planet In August 1961, Cape Canaveral, preferred to competing spots in Hawaii, California, Texas, islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific, was picked as the operational basis for manned space flights and missions requiring high-thrust rocket systems such as Saturn or Nova-class vehicles. The area’s existing infrastructure, a complex arrangement of platforms and ramps whose construction dates back to 1947, formed one component of a sprawling military installation scattered across the south-eastern shore of the Atlantic. The Army’s previous, and first, missile testing range, located at White Sands in New Mexico, proved too small for modified V2s going off-course and crashing into adjacent graveyards,32 thereby raising the dead into the white light of a notoriously silent device. The Cape’s selection was influenced and ultimately decided upon by factors of climate – the base had to be operational all year round – and accessibility to waterways, considering that the rocket’s largest components needed to be transported via barge from the manufacturing to the launching site.33 The wedge of land that, midway between Jacksonville and Miami (Figure 5), extends into the Atlantic also provided an isolated, relatively uninhabited region and sufficient distance, both in terms of the ‘noise and explosion hazards’,34 from (living; lifeless) population centres. Separated on the one hand by the sea and, on the other, by the Banana River, and forming the outer edge of Merritt Island, itself removed by another

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Figure 5 The wedge of land that, midway between Jacksonville and Miami, extends into the Atlantic . . . body of water from Florida’s mainland, Cape Canaveral permitted, in its loneliness, the detonation of titans, as well as the construction of their required assembly arenas, giant hangars and service structures able to wrap around the gleaming technology placed at its centre. In the early 1950s, the formations here were minimal, the layers of concrete shaped finite courses that spun around a solitary launch pad whose steel scaffolding and timber platforms seemed ‘rickety’, its whole ‘framework . . . ready to fall down’.35 As is so often the case, the martial assemblage began simply, with a single defence outpost, the Banana River Naval Air Station commissioned in October 1940 before expanding voraciously to provide administrative and logistical support to the Cape’s subsequent launching pads; the compound’s umbilical annexes and extensions, developed for a long-range missile testing site operated by the USAF, press blindly into the territory. By the late 1950s, the range, which for the most part overlies marshland, included an array of towering gantries, skeletons of support for the lift-off of ICBMs, alongside other arrangements of sustenance: assembly and checkout buildings, transport possibilities, ‘network[s] of power, fuel, and communication links that . . . bring [the rockets] to life’.36 Developed ‘primarily to handle very large launch vehicles’, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s ‘Advanced Saturn [,] which will boost the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon’, Merritt Island built up the ‘site of an immense launch complex, including a 52-storey Vertical Assembly Building [VAB] as well as an industrial support area of some 40 buildings’.37 This installation not only performed ‘the program already approved’ for the space agency, but was also ‘so established and has such services as to make it available for any use the nation may require, including a possible expansion of military space activities’,38 according to James E. Webb, NASA’s administrator throughout the majority of the 1960s: the space agency, from the start, was a paramilitary organization whose installations look ahead towards a future of pure war.

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The Cape works as a subsystem of geographies insinuated into ‘total-system’ discourses accommodating the ballistic missile, which Norman Mailer in A Fire on the Moon – a book, narrated under the name of Aquarius, about occupations by machines – perceives as filling up ‘all the lonely spaces’39 of the United States, already ‘overdetermined signifiers’ of American history, mythology.40 Mailer spatializes the twentieth century in terms of ‘the great and empty territories (the Saharas, the Siberias, and the Minuteman in the buried silos of the West)’ in what he describes as an investigation of the rocket, colossus assembled in ‘mammoth cube[s]’41 whose windowlessness reflects NASA’s disastrous self-sufficiency. By the time of the book’s publication in 1970, Apollo I had already exploded which, along with the rest of a decade that Mailer refers to as ‘fin de siècle’ – he had, of course, also reported on the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 – might account for the sense of catastrophe at work everywhere in this study, that ‘awful air of America on its perpetual edge, nihilisms gathering at the poles, dreams of extermination in all the camps’.42 The rationality of technique perpetuates an order that, wherever he goes in his history of the early space programme – the Manned Spacecraft Centre (MSC) in Houston, Cocoa Beach and Cape Canaveral – is articulated through huge, closed, cool, ‘milkof-magnesia white’43 assembly buildings all catering to the monolith of the rocket. At Launch Complex 39, where the components of the missile came in by ship, the VAB exists amid other constellations of support situated at a little distance from the launch towers, offering protection to control consoles and accompanying instrumentation; the predominating geometries are those of circles, reinforced steel cylinders and boxlike shapes linked up through runways pointing towards the horizon, past the limits of sight (Figure 6).

Figure 6 The predominating geometries are those of circles, reinforced steel cylinders and box-like shapes linked up through runways pointing towards the horizon.

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This ‘vocabulary of curves’44 extends into infinity while its pathologies – bureaucratic, but also environmental – concern the vegetation it uprooted and interred beneath layers of gravel and wide plots of concrete; as projectiles increased in size and explosive faculty, the Cape’s existing facilities became inadequate, its installations unable to provide for the rocket’s ‘growth’ and development potential. Titans, though employed for NASA’s Gemini programme, were rapidly superseded in dimension and thrust capability by Saturn V, fuelled with a liquid-oxygen propellant able to reach the moon; the missile’s complex design required extensive amendments, facilities of ‘gargantuan’45 proportions whose scaffolds and VAB matched the vehicle’s mass. Work platforms climbed further into the sky while ground support equipment, compact mounds embracing the booster and its maintenance operations, advanced further into the Cape’s ‘scenic’ but ‘comparatively unsettled’ tracts.46 This type of topography, disturbed not only in terms of its wreckage, resurfaces throughout Mailer’s book: Cape Canaveral, port to the moon, Mars, Venus, solar system and the beyond is a first clue to space, for it is surprisingly empty, mournful beyond belief for the tropics, and its roads through the Air Force base and the Space Centre pass by empty marshes, deserted dune grass, and lonely signs. Every quarter-mile or so along that low grassy ridge towards the side of the sea is a road sign pointing to an old launch complex . . . for rockets no longer fired. . . . To Aquarius the early history of the Space Program is contained in these empty launch towers, now as isolated and private as grain elevators by the side of the railroad tracks in the flat prairies of Nebraska, Kansas, the Dakotas. . . .47

It functions, then, as ‘empty’ space in coexistence with other open, read abject, areas – the Midwest sustaining missile plants – indicative of an accomplished apocalypse evident in abandoned, ‘mournful’ sites and gadgets ‘explosively’48 replaced by enhanced ‘families’ of weapons. A ‘terrain of marshland and scrub where racoon, bobcat and alligator are still reported’,49 the Cape’s predominating features are those of an ancient desolation, ‘uninhabited by men in normal times and normal occupations’ because as ‘ravaged and scabby as the matted backside of a monkey’.50 In many ways, this area functions as a penumbral zone – rational and Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD); earthly yet extraterrestrial; a future affirmed through sublime technologies and architectures that are ‘white as toothpaste’51 or else glassy, pure, neutral, and a postapocalyptic present, itself weirdly prehistoric. It is as if the Cape, like ‘America on its perpetual edge’, was held at a tipping point at which the contradictions of the space age touched: a zone haunted by the future, its fascist past and a technological order at once static and dynamic, a motor for dreams of (deathless) refuge or auto-immunitary annihilation. A Fire on the Moon examines such boundary phenomena, dreams like nightmares because blotted by psychosis: Aquarius ‘hardly knew’ how to define the space programme, either functioning as the ‘noblest expression of the Twentieth Century’ or else as the ‘quintessential statement of our fundamental insanity’, whose ‘mode of

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operation’ so often is ‘distinguished by its logic’.52 It is (nuclear) technology and the ‘rationality’ of its mechanisms that Mailer accuses, ‘[opening] in every mind the real possibility of global destruction’ and conceiving a Janus-faced world in which the ‘halfconvinced’ prospect of future death simultaneously yields ‘half-aroused’ impressions of an exceptional future still to come.53 ‘Half-convinced’, ‘half-aroused’, these words themselves are indicative of the schizophrenia of the space age whose bifurcations are most apparent in the Gemini appellation, the constellation of the twins, with its one side bathed in light, while the other remains in darkness. The concerns that surface time and again in Mailer’s book relate to muted threats issued through technological devices, the circuitry of computers always at the risk of ‘going awry’ and of propelling the world, already ‘in danger of some final collapse into crime’,54 towards its end; the curious paradoxes of this ICBM-occupied State, however, also affect – like in Kansas – topographical descriptions, abundantly verdant and, conversely, bleached, bare-boned.55 In The Right Stuff, exploring moonmen, the rocket boys in ‘metal bondage’56 with the rocket for Project Mercury, Tom Wolfe comments mainly on the ugly beaches, store fronts with their painted signs that, in capital letters, proclaim ‘SPACE AVAILABLE’.57 In Wolfe’s book, the low-rent housing estates plunked along the coast, the ‘little boxes with front porches’ and the ‘De Soto coupé[s] . . . rusting in the salt air out back by the septic tank[s]’, become the objects of analysis along with the shoreline, especially Cocoa Beach, located on a stretch of land immediately leading up to Cape Canaveral’s wing (Figure 5). Cocoa Beach hosts Launch Complex 39, itself in the vicinity of Patrick Air Force Base, now managing the take-off of unmanned vehicles transporting surveillance satellites for the National Security Agency; the beach, in this rocket state, is ‘about three hundred feet wide at high tide and hard as a brick’, stunting the development of trees growing only to the height of 15 feet and further dwarfed by the towering gantries ascending out of the flattened, interminable landscape. Bugs come into, and evade, the view; they resemble ‘some sort of prehistoric chiggers or fire ants’, all of which invisible, voracious and creating/razing, through ingestion, or so Wolfe seems to imply, the Cape, ‘this poor godforsaken afterthought in the march of terrestrial evolution’.58 The Right Stuff follows a process of regression, as it were, in the terms or myths of the profession, relapsing from aviator-ace – the body as pure trajectory – to ‘redundant component’, a passive subject in a pod: ‘any pilot’ recruited to Project Mercury, a ‘human cannonball approach’ to space travel, ‘would no longer be a pilot. He would be a laboratory animal wired up from skull to rectum with medical sensors’.59 Abjectly hooked up to computers ‘built into [rocket] engines and connected to accelerometers, for monitoring the temperature, pressure, oxygen supply’, the ‘human’ element, rather than a cyborg being in complete control who, in exchange with the machine, enhances both constituents, is reverse-engineered: merely an object of knowledge or romantic function, ‘man’ means ‘animal’, trained to ‘lie there peacefully’.60 The metamorphosis of the species that Clynes and Kline advocate in their paper on ‘Cyborgs and Space’ leads less, in this instance, to a reconfiguration of man as ‘Stahlgestalt’61 impervious

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to outside pressures, that is, dominance, but instead to fish-like, jelly-like organisms shrouded in the ‘bubble’ of the machine: The environment with which man is now concerned is that of space. Biologically, what are the changes necessary to allow man to live adequately in the space environment? Artificial atmospheres encapsulated in some sort of enclosure constitute only temporizing, and dangerous temporizing at that, since we place ourselves in the same position as a fish taking a small quantity of water along with him to live on land. The bubble all too easily bursts.62

According to Clynes and Kline, space travel ‘invites’ an active evolutionary development past ostensibly ‘insurmountable’ obstacles like breathing – a ‘resourceful’ fish upgrading into a self-regulating man-machine system63; this process/myth of a cyborgic figure, according to Wolfe’s analysis however, does not come to pass in Project Mercury, encapsulating fish, chimpanzees, lab rats, fly-boys. The latter, Glennis Yeager’s nickname for her husband in Philip Kaufman’s 1983 movie version of The Right Stuff, is no designation, this time, for a test pilot par excellence but rather a reference to Gottfried, caught in ‘Deathlace’, a ‘bridal costume’/burial garment that is also his cocoon: yet there is no ‘next higher assembly’64 in The Right Stuff but only a fall from grace – the military man as submissive laboratory animal in a capsule operation. Active species enhancement, despite Mercury’s automations that anaesthetize ‘man’ to machine as lesser constituent, forms part of the space programme and agency’s discourse articulating a will to superpower: ‘clear-eyed and bullet-eyed’ NASA officials embodying a ‘blue-eyed’65 agenda. If Wolfe suggests otherwise, that argument is more focused on the direction the space programme took post-Sputnik, when the Air Force’s rocket plane development as a logical extension of their experimental X-aircraft was downgraded in favour of an urgent deployment requiring technology already past the project phase. This change in policy affected the performance of the test pilot – most NASA trainees were military officers – who were, in skin-tight jet fighter cockpits, worn like armour, ‘masters’ of the sky. Once on Project Mercury though, active control was replaced with placid acceptance at the hands of loved/loving machines – ‘the pioneering part of space flight . . . was the technology’.66 Wolfe, in a way, intimates that an ‘evolutionary crime’67 had been committed in a process of unmanning; this notion of a ‘crime’, if not articulated as such in Wolfe’s work, gestures towards J. G. Ballard’s writings, whose perspective on the space age is nonetheless radically different from The Right Stuff. Ballard’s short stories on the subject are explorations of transgression that pervert the discourse of metal fetishism propagating a Cold War desire for supremacy – military, political, biological – that remains in evidence in Stanley Kubrick’s bi-faced 2001: A Space Odyssey. Although the movie in the first half – in which a cut from bone to bone-coloured satellite is indicative of a ‘giant leap’ – charts a ‘psychological regression’68 instigated through technological ‘progress’, always ultra-white, the second part concludes with an enhanced specimen ‘rarefying Caucasian pallor’ and floating towards earth, thereby

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returning the evolutionary myth, a promise, also, of immortality: inside the sphere, a spectre of future perfection. As imperial endeavours relating to the conquest of space, planetary as well as geopolitical, NASA projects operate on the basis of dream-body redesign, ‘Man Plus’ – in Frederik Pohl’s novel made of ‘steel, copper, silver, plastic, aluminium and glass’69 – moving into different environments without needing to breathe. The deliberate incorporation of exogenous devices into the ‘organizational system’ of ‘man in space’ leads to automatic functioning and ‘robot-like’ problem solving, leaving ‘man free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel’.70 The verb that is missing in this enumeration is the act of dreaming, perhaps because it is, in a sense, indicative of passivity: to dream of glass enclosures, sheltering fascist politics, in which ‘the colonists have learned to do without air’ – they are phantom-images, ‘hardly solid’,71 in a dream/death-world that the rocket state, at Cape Canaveral, engineers. In Ballard’s short stories, the moon port lingers as ghost-resort: the space age is an era prematurely terminated, though its ruinous consequences continue to affect the few remaining figures that, atrophying, live on in a sublime but decaying landscape of ‘diamond hardness’.72 The focus, in these stories, often zeroes in on Cape Canaveral, an obvious locus suspectus in which to trace the residues of crimes: in ‘News from the Sun’ and ‘Memories of the Space Age’, Ballard describes the space endeavours as ‘cosmic misdemeanours’73 whose consequences disperse outwards, into space, but also inwards, disrupting the ‘fragile continuum’74 of consciousness. The ‘crime’ scene of the launching site is singularly unstable, despite attempts to encode it as a sealed space – ‘The Cage of Sand’ gives an indication of the measures of containment put in place – and varies in degrees in these stories: the Cape, or its effects, radiates outwards, encompassing the whole of Florida and, from there, the rest of the United States. ‘Cape Kennedy,’ as NASA’s launching grounds were known during a 10-year interval following the assassination of the President, ‘and the whole of Florida . . . became a poisoned land to be forever avoided like the nuclear testing grounds of Nevada and Utah.’75 It is an effort, then, in which the component members of the nation-state are implicated, similarly reflecting the rocket’s means of production interlacing with the body of the union; the place of death, as Anthony Vidler writes in a slightly different context, is ‘ever-transitory’,76 constantly eluding means of detection and coordinated systems of determination. In relation to Cape Canaveral, the processes of aggression/ lunacy are equally disturbed; human remains in ‘The Cage of Sand’ fall out of the sky into a ‘sand-sea’ extending, in heat and light, under a ‘molten sun’.77 The landscape flows like wax, like water, tides of sand flooding in ‘solid wave[s] across the half-submerged hotels’78; here, relic hunters or beachcombers – the revenants in Ballard’s stories – lie in wait, ‘scouring the burning saw grass for instrument panels and flying suits and – most valuable of all – the mummified corpses of the dead astronauts’.79 Because occupying this weird space, the scavengers are radically altered, frequently beastly – likened to hares or to insatiable, nervous birds: ontology is problematized in this zone of crisis, implying ‘unintelligibility’, as Jean Baudrillard notes, a ‘radical strangeness to reason’.80 Not rational to begin with – because technological projects are products of love; they are hybrid beings retaining aspects of a dream state – the space flight programme reveals

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its inherent disturbances in Ballard’s stories: it is an epidemic, a fugue, an expulsion from the known perimeters of the world and familiar ontologies. Never mind, for now, the reciprocity between species – animal and so-called human – the point is the prospect of mutation that rather than, at first, ‘advancing’ to approach a cyborgic techno-sublimity, begins by approximating ‘man’ to crabs, birds, giant arachnids and only then seeking a rendez-vous with the machine. In ‘Myths of the Near Future’, Dr Roger Sheppard merges with the mirrored surfaces of a Laundromat, ‘charged by his own bloodstream’81; every space, invariably jewelled, opens up possibilities of amalgamations – glassy fly-boys freed from flesh – that, passing over bestiality, dream of occupying an endless present in which the ‘reborn ghosts of . . . once and future selves’82 crowd around a disappearing corporeality. There are suggestions of vampirism, here: the washing machine in blood exchange with Sheppard, the ‘space sickness’ prevalent in these stories inducing a steady incentive to move indoors: At first touching only a small minority of the population, it took root like a lingering disease in the interstices of its victims’ lives, in the slightest changes of habit and behaviour. Invariably there was the same reluctance to go out of doors, the abandonment of job, family and friends, a dislike of daylight, a gradual loss of weight and retreat into a hibernating self.83

These symptoms are aggravated manifestations of the Apollo astronauts’ relapses into ‘mysticism and silence’84 while they also relate to ‘malfunctions of the temporal sense’85; above all, however, what happens across Ballard’s stories is a ‘carrying of whiteness to ultra-white’: subjects growing translucent in a space that is itself spectral, attracting ‘space travellers’ whose pale eyes match their interior coldness. The revenants are whitehaired and thinning, their skin a ‘leprous whiteness’ or of ‘arctic pallor’, thereby coming to resemble the men in their capsules, all possessing the ‘same cold gene’.86 Looking up into the sky to trace constellations of corpses, the figures below observe and await the failures of spacecraft that are only visible because of the ‘slow disintegration’ of their shells: rather than catching sight of the actual space pod, observers on the ground see ‘local field[s] of vaporised aluminium’,87 the ghostly trails of dissolving metal. This loss of substance endows both ground-based and airborne subject/objects with little more essence than an apparition; though the dead space travellers stay solid up until the moment their capsules come crashing back to earth, they nonetheless embody, in their remote, decaying systems, the spirit of a terminated/terminating project. What started off during the early days of the space age as ‘Disneyland East’, an ideal environment of flight, has become a ‘death camp’ in which recluses wither towards disappearance; their pallid skin, from which has ‘leached all trace of iron salts’, is blanched yet further and shimmers almost ‘silver in the wind’.88 The evolutionary development, gradually bleaching the body in order to approach a pure, luminous essence, leaves a hulk seemingly exsanguinated and on the verge of death or a timeless afterlife: the mirror of the skin returns Cape Canaveral’s gleaming dead zone. Dreamworlds like Disneyland/Cape Canaveral disguise death colonies whose glass/ steel landscapes perpetually replicate the rocket’s fascist politics: Mercury astronauts

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resisting ‘degeneration’ into chimpanzees; white fly-boys stuffed into ‘silver thing[s]’89 tracing an ideology of the zero – ‘Blicker, Bleicheröde, Bleacher, Blicero’. In Primate Visions, Donna Haraway argues that HAM, the ‘astrochimp’, an acronym for the facility that created him, ‘rode an arc that traced the birth path of modern science – the parabola, the conic section’ forms a curve that the ‘human’ astronauts later ‘transcend’ in the ‘ellipse of orbital flight’, the ‘open trajectories of escape from earth’s gravity’.90 The bio-mechanical unit however, whether ape or human, bred and brought into existence in and for the interior of a rocket, is never able to ‘transcend’ or ‘escape’ gravity, nor are they engaged in any ‘open trajectories’ that take them beyond Cold War procedure. The space age develops a pod-life which instigates an ice-cold, ultra-white techno-order evident in Cape Canaveral’s inertia or rigour mortis, which thereby also comments on one of the space age’s fundamental tensions between motion and immobility.

Vorrichtung für die Isolierung If the Vorrichtung, that is, the device and precondition for the establishment of a sublime, englobing machine aesthetic is the rocket, its operational capacity cannot be separated from its technological fictions, whose texts keep interweaving with hard matter: the missile is also mythical, divine and space flight a project drawn to departure, aiming upwards, ‘as if the sky [offered] some kind of escape’.91 This element of spectacular flight relays an aspiration to break with established patterns of thought and policy but in Gravity’s Rainbow an exchange between Leni and Franz Pökler, a young German engineer developing a plastic fairing for the special rocket, serial number 00000, integrates the rocket back where it belongs, into ground-locked strategy: “They’re using you to kill people,” Leni told him, as clearly as she could. “That’s their only job and you’re helping them.” “We’ll all use it, someday, to leave the earth. To transcend.” She laughed. “Transcend,” from Pökler? “Someday,” honestly trying, “they won’t have to kill. Borders won’t mean anything. We’ll all have outer space. . . .” “Oh you’re blind,” spitting it as she spat his blindness at him every day, that and “Kadavergehorsamkeit,” a beautiful word he can no longer imagine in any voice but hers. . . .92

At the Verein für Raumschiffart’s rocket field, an abandoned Army storage facility in the northern suburbs of Berlin, Pökler resists the ‘superimposition’ of ‘lusts’ on a ‘technologique’ which in his view is pure, angelic, developed by dreamers part of a ‘monastic order’ set among ‘pine and fir forests’.93 But even as an idea, in R&D, before it becomes a fully functional ‘rocket-in-being’,94 the device is subject to geopolitical lusts that Pökler is too blind to see: technologique is about interests no less ‘real’ at the project stage that, while necessarily fictional, is ‘seeking to come true’,95 meaning it requires chains of translation transposing it into the world. Already an ‘extension

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of the rocket’,96 Pökler has become a closed system, numbed to accept the missile’s neutrality whose long axis, the development from spirit or paper to matter, is fraught with the dead weight of fascist politics. In this light, although the ‘prelude’ to the space age began in the 1920s and 1930s during the Depression through the emergence of Rocket Societies grouping together ‘small numbers of star-struck men’,97 the dreammachine is brought to life through strategies designed ‘to kill people’. The spectre of future catastrophe is implied in the ‘Kadavergehorsamkeit’ or the ‘Folgsamkeitfaktor’ of rocket and rocket engineer – already enjoined – in the attempt to get them both to ‘follow the tangent, at all points, to [their] trajectory’,98 so as to arrive at the same dead thing: the corpse which precedes but is then obliterated in the aftermath of the rocket’s ascent and subsequent fall to earth. It is the mythology of the rocket – a thing of transcendence – that makes it suitable, precisely, for the political machine of Senator John F. Kennedy, already a myth himself, movie star, campus king,99 when he arrived at the National Democratic Convention in Los Angeles in 1960; the New Frontier, likewise, is a vertical endeavour manipulating technology into philosophy. Platform as launch pad, it is the emergency climate of Sputnik I, visible to the naked eye, that emphasized the ballistic missile and, by extension, the satellite as instrument of political strategy as well as of spectacle; RAND, a think tank first formed by Douglas Aircraft Company in 1946, had investigated ‘preliminary designs’ for ‘world-circling spaceships’ in that same year, and had concluded that ‘the utility of a satellite probably would reside in its potential for . . . an imaginative strategy designed to register maximum impact on the leaders of the Soviet Union’.100 R. Cargill Hall, a historian and Operations Research Analyst at Lockheed, contributed an article on early US satellite proposals to the special Technology and Culture issue on rocketry; his essay begins nostalgically, with a comment on the (following Sputnik, waned) pre-eminence of US military and technological power. The rest of his argument is concerned to establish the efforts of a working group, the beginning of satellite studies, set up at the Army-Air Force Project RAND, whose experimental programmes received no significant support until the mid-1950s, by which point the ‘imaginative strategy’ of the Soviet Union had eclipsed the ‘ruling hierarchy’ of the United States.101 In his memoirs The Vantage Point, Lyndon Johnson, a staunch space enthusiast, quoted a letter to JFK dated 31 July 1963 in which he wrote that ‘the space program is expensive, but it can be justified as a solid investment which will give ample returns in security, prestige, knowledge and material benefits’.102 Having lost none of his fervour by the early 1970s when he compiled his retrospective on the presidency – whose legacy was not a ‘timeless’, ‘universal’ undertaking space programme but the war in Vietnam – Johnson expanded in a lengthy passage: Space was the platform from which the social revolution of the 1960s was launched. We broke out of far more than the atmosphere with our space program. We escaped from the bonds of inattention and inaction that had gripped the 1950s. New ideas took shape. If we could send a man to the moon, we knew we should be able to send a poor boy to school and to provide decent medical care

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Rocket States for the aged. In hundreds of other forms, the space program had an impact on our lives. . . . Within another decade the spin-offs from space will be improving life in ever-increasing ways, from medicine to urban planning. We will use the vantage point of space to locate new supplies of food and new resources on earth. Weather control will save lives and crops and cattle. New concepts of communication will banish ignorance.103

This statement, developing an exponential curve of anticipated improvements, interprets the space programme’s projected and accomplished outcomes as a ‘thing for the little man’,104 to refer to Pop Angstrom, echoing Neil Armstrong’s surname, from John Updike’s Rabbit Redux, set in 1969 against the backdrop of the Apollo 11 moon landings. Rabbit Redux mentions the space flights in a discussion about the advantages of Medicare, which Angstrom had been paying since 1966, relieving him of a ‘ton of anxiety’105 – the correlations between Apollo and medical benefits do not, in fact, diverge from the patterns that spell out at least some elements of the space age that LBJ, who unlike Kennedy had the opportunity for a review of his administration, adopted and disseminated. What spins off into hyperbole in Johnson’s self-assessment actually starts off as hysteria, the response with which LBJ also opened his chapter on space; prior to any attention directed at ‘the little man’, America’s space project pulls itself off the ground due to a ‘frustration, bordering on desperation’,106 as Johnson notes. At his ranch in Texas where they were entertaining some guests when the ‘news of Sputnik flashed across the globe’, LBJ and Mrs Johnson went out for a stroll after dinner: they walked with their ‘eyes lifted skyward, straining to catch a glimpse of that alien object which had been thrust into the outer reaches of our world’.107 Standing ‘on the lonely country road’ that split the farm from the Pedernales River, Johnson records that he felt ‘uneasy and apprehensive’, and continued that ‘in the open West, you learn to live closely with the sky. It is part of your life. But now, somehow, in some new way, the sky seemed almost alien’.108 James Killian, special assistant to the president for Science and Technology under Eisenhower, similarly described Sputnik’s impact in conjunction with fears about orbital A bombs and US vulnerability, though he also admitted to a ‘sense of wonder’ and astutely, if not impartially, remarked that the ‘[overnight] crisis of confidence’ allowed ambitious officials to ‘ride rockets to [a] higher political ground’.109 The reference and Killian’s allegiance are clear: both Kennedy and Johnson, the latter senate majority leader and vice presidential contender, charged the outgoing Eisenhower administration with negligence and complacency – a ‘small’ metal ‘ball’110 functions as harbinger of disaster but also of personal/political ascendancy. Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy rejected what he interpreted as the holding patterns of the Eisenhower administration in favour of a necessary ‘forward movement’, progressing at a ‘breathtaking pace’111: Because we failed to recognise the impact that being first in outer space would have, the impression began to move around the world that the Soviet Union was

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on the march, that it had definite goals, that it knew how to accomplish them, that it was moving and that we were standing still. That is what we have to overcome, that psychological feeling in the world that the United States has reached maturity, that maybe our high noon has passed . . . and that now we are going into the long, slow afternoon.112

Although the motives for the space flights, identified as ‘four factors which give importance, urgency, and inevitability to the advancement of space technology’, were related to the ‘thrust of curiosity’; the ‘compelling urge of man to explore and to discover’; to increase national prestige and further scientific investigation according to the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) established in November 1957, PSAC’s ‘Introduction to Outer Space’ included another feature that, though mentioned, tended to be kept secret, paradoxically, by the pledge to conduct a transparent, peaceful programme.113 The ‘defence objective’, ensuring that ‘space is not used to endanger our security’,114 is second on PSAC’s list but stays hidden in a realm just outside the founding, on 1 October 1958, and functioning of the civilian agency, NASA. The most compelling rationale for the space programme prior to Kennedy’s election was, then, that absence through which Sputnik navigated, a 184-pound device technologically surpassing the United States, whose three-and-a-half-pound satellites – the ‘mechanical [children]’115 the Army’s Vanguard missile carried – repeatedly failed on nationwide television. America’s military-technological supremacy, emerging at the end of World War II, was destabilized through a sequence of events: the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee chaired by LBJ, conducting extensive hearings on missile and satellite programmes,116 followed by Sputnik and the Gaither Report, leaked to the press in late 1957, which speculated that the Soviet Union had a significant, expanding operational ICBM capability.117 These occurrences compelled the United States, earth-bound, to commit to a number of advanced rocket programmes ‘animated’118 by requirements for national security, whose political ‘reality’ – like that of the nuclear weapon – is a phantasm and myth, shrouded in ‘tender philosophy’. On 25 May 1961, Kennedy announced the lunar landing decision to Congress; his determination to use a spectacular feat as an instrument of ‘imaginative’ strategic foreign policy-making was set up and maintained by technological systems, dreammachines to reinstate US techno-supremacy whose impact, psychological or otherwise, also influenced ‘underdeveloped’ nations. NASA’s administrator James Webb, systems manager hoping to instigate the space agency’s coordinate technological development as a model for the nation, was ‘deeply troubled’ about ‘President Eisenhower’s decision to permit the Russians to make every major, spectacular if you wish, space exploratory flight for the next five years’.119 In a letter to James Killian, Webb expressed concern ‘about how we can get into use in continents like Africa and South America’ – areas he associates, elsewhere, with ‘vacuums’120 – ‘the tremendous benefits of our burgeoning science and technology for utilisation in the development of those continents if the Russians pre-empt completely leadership in space’.121 Inherent to this matter is an impending menace to US national security, though Webb remained alert

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to the sense of potential associated with rocketry which, already prior to the Apollo project’s successes and ‘sacrifices’, suggested ‘possibilities that stagger the imagination’.122 Committed to a large-scale effort, Webb advocated the ‘fullest possible utilisation of industry resources, technical competence, ground installations, and organisational know-how’,123 an endeavour whose dimensions he compared to those of the Marshall Plan, the Manhattan Project and the development of the hydrogen bomb124 – in such assessments also lie indications of NASA’s paramilitary nature. Webb imagined the space agency’s programme, of an astounding magnitude and consequence, forming the shield of security culture, whose merit he calculated to exceed its expenses/sacrifices: this is a dream/state of siege whose strategic manoeuvres bring into being utopian machine living. NASA’s particular elegance of vision, if not always evident in the language – which became Webb’s major source of aggravation125 – though in many ways a collaboration between a succession of bureaucrats, was nonetheless largely a product of his work, the energy with which he managed the agency’s mission, circulated in public declarations, private correspondences and internally circulated memorandums containing messages or myths of global implications. As such, Webb’s appointment by President Kennedy as head of the space agency – a surprising selection, not least to Webb himself, who, with no background in science or engineering, ‘[felt] quite out of [his] field’126 – proved to be an excellent choice, his political rhetoric and convictions combining degrees of urgency with ambitious prospects of ‘terraforming’ put into practice by meticulously designed and widely utilized applications of space technology. He expected a functional integration of the latter into everyday life relating to the coordination of sectors of industry and university in order to ‘develop the [nation’s] intellectual and other resources’ and to ‘strengthen’ centres of research127; the ‘throw-off ’ or fall-out of ‘technology into the economy’, so far ‘neglected’, further ‘[permitted] constant driving emphasis on incremental improvement’,128 a progress towards a ‘comprehensive picture of the concept of . . . total community’ resisting ‘being engulfed by communism’.129 This ‘total community’, built up at regional level from which it would feed successful defence strategies to the national stage, is a state of exception whose ‘strong technological underpinning’ yields a system with ‘survival qualities’.130 The transferral of benefits therefore depends on the prolonged investment of ‘very advanced science and technology’ into regional areas ‘[learning] to feedback the results’ of ‘modern’ investigations and machinery ‘into the activities selected for the state of the future’.131 The ‘state of the future’ is a closed world of systems coordination forming a network of security consumption and preservation that exists in ostensible opposition to the proposed intentions of the space programme, by all accounts also generating infinitely extending perspectives. Effectively, however, it remains an imperial project, an ‘impulse to empire’ expanding the national security perimeter relying on ‘vacuums’ to sustain its mission/impulse that, if anything, is misrepresented by Kennedy’s ‘phrasing’132 of NASA’s planned venture into space and the restrictions placed on the project by limiting its scope to the moon, a ‘chip’ ripped off the earth because of ‘rotational stresses’.133 Anxious from the start that the United States and NASA

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specifically – whose manned space flight is not ‘rational’,134 as if technological projects ever were – was ‘squeezed in the program ahead’,135 which might fail or be delayed, Webb sought to dispel the single thought and purpose of a simple return journey to a ‘blob of earth’.136 What gets lost in a space ‘race’ to the moon is not only the ‘rationality’ of the programme, but also its ambitious scale, a remaking of the world as momentous as the Manhattan Project’s and realized by a dreaming bureaucracy: the United States as total system. A case in point is a December 1961 memorandum about a meeting at the University Club in New York where Webb told an audience ‘of widely diversified interests’ that ‘to understand the space environment, the space program, and the problems and factors involved, you must stretch your mind – from the microcosm to the macrocosm, from the idea of an aircraft to a rocket or space vehicle’.137 Such perspectives, deceptively refuting a narrowness of vision, repeatedly manifest themselves in Webb’s writings, registering an unshakable confidence in success pertaining to the ‘feedback of the knowledge gained [in space] into our national, and, indeed, world economy’.138 He often mailed out propositions of assistance including newspaper clippings or fragments of other correspondences dealing with, for example, difficulties ranging from terrestrial transportation and the conglomeration of metropolitan areas to techniques of counterinsurgency carried out, by the mid-1960s, in Vietnam. A typical suggestion would ask his recipient to consult the work undertaken at NASA, to break from reliance on ‘the more conventional items’139 and to instead emulate the space agency’s ‘forwardlooking’ enterprise and systems engineering in order to achieve the ‘broadening’ of the nation’s ‘industrial base’.140 There is no limit to NASA’s function and participation in ‘worldwide studies’, whether relating to commerce, traffic, urban redevelopment, ‘nutrition, crop improvement, harvesting the sea, arctic and tropical agriculture, [and] vegetation mapping’.141 Although NASA’s programme affects in the first instance space flight, Webb distinguished a direct link between outer space and the understanding and modification, read terra-forming, of the world below, attainable through a revolution in thought: ‘one of the things we need to get across in the space program is the fact that the idea of having feet firmly fixed on terra firma as an unmoving thing must give way to an understanding of the dynamics of the universe’.142 ‘[P]art of a dynamic system’,143 Webb advertised the integration of space technology into the terrestrial environment ‘at the most rapid rate possible’144; his outlines frequently were weird, far-flung designs plotting to ‘draw our work in aeronautics closer to the practical user problems such as the circulation of people and materials’145 or that detect conjunctions between the space effort, street extensions and sewer lines.146 What Webb imagined is an atmosphere as an intricately planned and engineered structure functioning on all levels, modified to ‘man’s advantage’147 and where, from the groundwork up, all building blocks integrate to complete a ‘final product’.148 Particularly the ‘idea that man can now create his own environment must somehow be linked to the creation of the kind of environment that brings out the best in us instead of the worst’, a condition achieved through a state of existence safe from the ravages and ‘waste products of our civilisation’, in whose ‘immediate proximity no living organism’149 can, over time, subsist or evolve. The distinguishing features of such

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designs of total security – the sewer lines, as it were, of this ‘final product’ – relate to their paranoid origins and strategies of survival directed against ‘the kind of whirl we are in’.150 As a refuge, the conditions of the envisaged infrastructure are, of course, the ‘whirl’s’ exact opposite: it is an ordered, insulated space where every potential problem or newly arising difficulty is anticipated and met before eruption or expansion, where undisciplined factors such as the weather are to be monitored and, through targeted efforts, regulated. Despite the focus on dynamics then, on the interlocking and politically indispensable mechanisms of movement, the ‘final product’ emerging out of NASA’s integrative practices exists as an arrested site, still-standing because flawless: ‘paradise’, as Ballard observes, ‘always present[s] a static world’.151 Blicero’s glass sphere is the idealization of rocket programme outcomes, a technologique expressed in an aesthetics of the sublime that is at once deadly and deathless. This philosophy of functional, technicized beauty is evident in NASA’s architecture that Mailer visits for his exposé on Apollo 11; the first facility he ‘discovers’ is MSC, the training grounds for astronauts and centre for Mission Control close to Houston. He describes MSC as a ‘geometrically ordered arrangement of white modern buildings, severe, ascetic, without ornament’, out of which emerge ‘no smells’; the structures, in their ‘insulation from odour’,152 hold a refusal of, and defence against, mortality. ‘ They had divorced themselves from odour in order to dominate time, and thereby see if they were able to deliver themselves from death!’,153 writes Mailer, who repeatedly comments on NASA’s facilities in terms of their processes of removal. The bulk of the edifices, their lack of windows, the concrete blocks in ‘stone’ or bonecoloured ‘tans’154 define the general forms and disposition of the space programme, whose functions are articulated as closed constructions, blind exteriors perforated with a minimum number of openings. Entire buildings are designed to perform a single function – the quarantine of astronauts, test subjects that are, as in The Twilight Zone’s first episode (aired on 2 October 1959), wired up and alone in a box.155 In this first broadcast, titled ‘Where Is Everybody?’, an Air Force sergeant spends 484 hours in a five-foot-square grey-metal cube located in a vast, dim hangar – a detention experiment devised to simulate a (return) flight to the moon. NASA isolation comes in lighter colours and in glass, a symbolic material that implies the agency’s agenda to conduct a transparent operation; at MSC and similar installations, shields are realized through ‘plate glass partition[s]’ that run from ‘floor to ceiling’.156 Transgressions, that is, ‘open trajectories’, here seem impossible, and communication between panels is equally as ‘proper and well-insulated as the plate glass’157 that separates one box from another. Tom Wolfe, another visitor at MSC, remarks on that same, closed and ice-cold, atmosphere that awaits astronauts within the centre: A bone-splitting chill hits them. They shudder and shake their heads. They are down inside some vast underground parking lot. The place is air-conditioned Houston-style, which is to say, within an inch of your life. There is a whole army of frozen people waiting down there in the gloaming, endless rows of marching bands in uniform, standing there like ice sculptures, politicians waiting in yet

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more convertibles, too cold to open their mouths, police-men, firemen, National Guard troops, stiff and still as lead, and more bands.158

This environment of icy relations is sepulchral, congealing astronauts, police force, marching bands, visitors into a frozen order that literalizes the Cold War; here, NASA trainees are hooked up to (and dream of) computers in endless simulations that prepare them for the corporeal insertion into the rocket. They are emotionally frozen: conditioned, desensitized and subjected to hypnosis, whose application, as a Daily Press article from 16 December 1962 states, ‘may have important overtones in keeping astronauts operating effectively and efficiently during prolonged periods of orbital or interplanetary flight’.159 The article continues: ‘[j]ust as this useful tool of therapeutic medicine is used to relieve stresses generated in our society, so this same tool may be used to provide a tranquil environment in space’160 – an ‘experienced zombie’161 is the preferred entity or component to successfully travel to the moon. The movement, therefore, from MSC and its training sessions conducted in a series of very small, soundproof units to the spacecraft happens in a capsule culture articulated in NASA architecture and self-sufficient agency logic: the space programme is implemented through quarantines, so as to prevent infection, envelopes of code language and antiseptic vocabulary all indicative of the desired outcomes, the ‘final product’, of a totally engineered, evacuated future. At every stage of the astronaut training sessions, contact is prohibited, an injunction communicated through restricted access requirements, the plastic or glass cubicles into which trainee subjects are constantly ushered: great spheres of exclusion and protection attained via, and around, the ‘holy place[s]’162 of the rocket. The space programme, then, manifests itself in a particular style, architectural and technological, that inspires the design of training/living machines modelled on, or surrounding, the moon ship and the self-contained universes of ‘computeroid’163 complexes as dream-machines – these capsule projects return Blicero’s glass sphere and are architectures for the state of emergency: domeland security. Rocketry becomes architecture and environment in NASA’s space programme that is also a production of space, developing an aesthetics of ultra-white enclosure and rescue as an ‘escape hatch from environmental conditions’164 through which ‘Man in his Container on the edge’165 navigates in anticipation or aftermath of disaster. The dream of refuge has already arrived at the end of the world.

Terminal designs The myth of a sheltered future emerges out of rocket systems operating as both the symbol and vehicle of the space age whose cool, glass spheres are crystals of MADness; glass, of course, is indicative of a fundamental ambiguity – between presence and absence, proximity and distance166 – and which on the metaphorical level draws attention to NASA’s bifurcations. Although ostensibly a civilian organization committed to the peaceful exploration of space, NASA’s origins and continued

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existence subsumes a military programme apparent already at Cape Canaveral, under Air Force management; USAF acts as ‘an agent for NASA’.167 America’s space strategy is a policy of dual thrust whose subsystems encompass Samos, a reconnaissance satellite programme which went underground in the spring of 1962, but kept on taking pictures of, and intercepting radio and radar transmissions issued by, the ‘Communist World’.168 Other mechanisms such as Midas and Bambi, infrared sensing devices conceived to detect nuclear missiles, as well as Corona,169 a satellite reconnaissance project secretly hitched to Apollo, were objectives that remained classified through elaborate security protocols. A ‘backbone of facilities . . . utilised not only in the manned lunar landing program’ but that ‘can also be used for military purposes’170 had been set up at NASA in a ‘splendid relationship with the Department of Defence (DoD) and with the Air Force’.171 Even if Webb insisted on ‘quite specific assignments of responsibility’ like ‘something in the nature of a subcontracting arrangement’172 so as to preserve some autonomy, he nonetheless forwarded a series of memos and enclosed articles, for example, to Admiral W. Fred Boone, NASA’s liaison officer to the Pentagon. In this correspondence, Webb reflected on ‘how some of our areas of technology could fit in with the counter-insurgency or other problems of land forces’,173 and of ‘how we [at NASA] could find out the areas within which our developing technology could apply to so-called unconventional warfare’.174 In his letter of 29 January 1963, he added that he ‘[has] some feeling that the Army may really be the greatest beneficiary’ of NASA’s innovations by drawing attention to the global tracking and data acquisition network sites, the test stands and large rocket assembly structures, all installations that ‘could become indispensable elements of military power’.175 After all, the ‘availability of a family of boosters is necessary for both military and civilian space programs’ according to the ‘Preliminary Paper on the National Booster Program’ in 1958, when the rocket’s accelerated development was a pressing issue requiring consolidation of the resources and funds of NASA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and DoD. ‘[W]ork has been started on the development of an engine designed to deliver one to one-half million pounds of thrust. Clustering of these units should provide six million pounds of thrust and place seventy-five tons in orbit and permit the landing of a man on the moon’176 stated the paper, drafted in the aftermath of Vanguard’s spectacular failures that were the result of US military policy adopted during, and maintained immediately after, World War II. An undated, unsigned document, wedged into May 1960 in Franklyn Philips’ Papers at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and entitled ‘Rationale Supporting Separate NonMilitary and Military Activities in Space Research and Development’, records that while the Russians assembled ‘powerful [missile-carrying] rockets’ to drop their ‘very large, heavy, and relatively inefficient’ nuclear warheads, the United States concentrated on the manned bombers – the B-36, B-47, and the B-52 – as the basis for delivery of our nuclear warheads. Only after we had solved the problem of producing lighter, smaller, and enormously more efficient atomic and hydrogen bombs did we start a determined, all-out program to produce a rocket to carry these bombs to the target.177

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A missile gap, of sorts, is acknowledged here; the argument for missile development is formed on the basis of the ‘efficiency’, ‘reliability’ and ‘accuracy’ of nuclear weapons, but it is size, for once, that matters: ‘[w]hen used as the base booster in a space launch vehicle system’, the Soviet Union’s ‘more powerful rockets . . . can lift into satellite orbit or propel into deep space to the moon and beyond much heavier instrumented payloads then we can. . . . Until we develop more powerful launch vehicle systems, we cannot exactly duplicate these Soviet achievements in space’.178 The subsequent process of missile development replaced one vehicle with another; Vanguard, a lean, volatile design, was followed by Juno, launching Explorer 1, itself succeeded by the ‘mighty white shaft’179 and slender nose of Atlas D used for Project Mercury. Titan II, deployed for Gemini, was superseded by Saturn V, now retired, the first vehicle capable of ‘interplanetary’ space travel; a three-stage rocket, whose multistaging allows the missile to shed its dead weight – the spent engines and empty fuel tanks – Saturn V, a cathedral and whale,180 stands 363 feet tall, ‘six stories higher than the Statue of Liberty’.181 Saturn’s valves are ‘as big as barrels’, its fuel pumps ‘bigger than refrigerators’ and its pipes spacious enough ‘for a man to crawl through’182 or towards – the inner seclusion of these self-contained engines, the plastic insulation for the tanks, pipes and valves induce a submission to, and integration into, the silvery and freezing183 insides of the embracing ICBM hardware. As projectiles really started to lift off by the mid-1960s and ‘families’ of rockets assembled, their coats of lead and layers of metal encase, and reflect yet again, the real nature of the space programme, that is, the ‘voyage through predetermined patterns’.184 The controlled environment of Webb’s ‘final product’ mimics and necessarily arrives at the circumstances out of which it arises in the first place: every space flight prerequisite prevents divergences, as journeys are computer-encoded plots and instrument panels translate the world outside into sequences of data bathed in the green light of display monitors. Rather than reaching a ‘New Frontier’, the ballistic missiles, like the other physical manifestations of the Space Age – the moon suit, whose ‘passive sealing liner . . . close[s] any puncture’ and furnishes temperature control185; NASA’s closed, odourless, colourless industrial complexes, soundproof rooms and sensory deprivation chambers where astronauts are trained to compress their emotions; the ‘tight little world of the capsule[s]’186 – return auto-immunitary containment culture. In ‘The Cage of Sand’, the dead astronaut’s burning spaceship ‘filled the sky with incandescent light’; moments later, explosions erupt: ‘[a]ll over the desert fires flickered briefly where fragments of the capsule had been scattered. Then the noise subsided, and an immense glistening pall of phosphorescent gas hung in the air like a silver veil, particles within it bending and winking’.187 The astronaut finally returns, 15 years after his death, to Cape Canaveral’s ‘satellite graveyard’188 where he ‘had been killed testing a new lightweight launching platform’.189 The use of ‘lightweight’ propulsion elements, a research and development (R&D) process emerging in the late 1950s and early 1960s – sustained by a desire for manned flights to other planets – comprised joint NASA and AEC projects to build nuclear engines, fuel systems that, according to the ‘Preliminary Paper on the National Booster Program’, are of ‘[l]onger range, [and] of great importance to the vehicle program and to space exploration in the future’.190

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A shared office – set up within an AEC building later referred to as the Nuclear Rocket Development Station191 – managed R&D issues concerning atomic rocket proposals, even if tasks remain allocated: funding and development responsibility for the atomic reactor belonged to AEC while NASA’s functions affected non-nuclear matters, the engine, pumps, nozzle and, ultimately, the vehicle and test flight agenda, though there remained considerable anxiety over the hazards involved. Webb, in this context, expressed the necessity to make use of the ‘foundation structure’ of the assembly building’s enormous dimensions, the blockhouse’s deep pile groundwork, as a ‘refuge from fall-out’ in the event of nuclear stage ‘mishaps’.192 The propulsion systems programmes – far from ‘running smoothly’ due to the usual obstructions like the difficulties of ‘free interchange and rapid response to management problems’193 – operated under the designation of Project Rover. A nuclear-thermal upper stage that ‘will give greatly expanded capability to . . . long-range lunar and planetary exploration’ journeys,194 Rover included Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application (NERVA), an investigation considering the possibilities of atomic superrockets, forming part of the constant effort to reduce the weight of heavy boosters and scheduled to be operational by 1967. Atomic energy and its spectacular applications, however, generated not simply visions of expeditions to Mars and Venus or of the partial settlement of the polar regions through ‘[p]ortable, compact and powerful nuclear reactors’ – ‘[m]aybe some people would like to live there’ according to Glenn Seaborg, Chairman of the AEC, adding that they might ‘[tend] to food caches’195 – but operate as the ultimate articulation of sublime techno-power. As strategies for the perfection of atomic explosions ‘for peaceful use in mining, chemical production, reservoir construction and possibly for the excavation of a new Panama Canal’196 were considered as AEC projects, the awe of nuclear technology spins away into hyperbole, while its function really is of a parabolic disposition, continually attempting to approach formats of enclosure. In many ways, the 1962 appointment of Dr Brainerd Holmes as the head of the American lunar endeavour attested to and further executed the motif of the parabola. An electrical engineer, his previous employment at an Air Force installation concerned the development of a missile-watching radar network designed to give some 15 minutes warning of a possible Soviet rocket attack. The Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS), advocated as ‘a shield protecting the free world against potential aggression’,197 not only evokes those other sheltering techno-forms – glass spheres, world-circling spaceships – but also draws attention to the era’s unwanted side effects. In 1963, in the upper atmosphere, a new radiation belt caused by an atmospherically tested hydrogen bomb damaged satellites and prevented space flights while rocket fumes, upsetting the ‘electron density in these high regions’, interfered with ‘the “radio mirror” of the ionosphere’ and ‘blanketed’ the earth with ‘once-alien gases’.198 A closed world – this time abject, an arc of pollution not a clear, cool sphere – keeps being worked out by the space programme, whose thrust is reversed, forcing it downwards, into the direction it has been facing all along. ‘As the dead capsules lost orbital velocity’, their ‘burned-out hulks’ smash into the vacuity of Cape Canaveral, at once the launch and crash site of the space project’s

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ambitions; its inert ‘phosphorescence’199 acts as a ‘beacon’200 towards which Ballard’s spacecraft/revenants unfailingly gravitate. The Cape’s wasted expanses plot the bleak, interminable realms and petrified conditions of a political culture orbiting around the glare of a device, acquiring its radiance from the ‘star’ created by the explosion of a nuclear warhead. As such, considering that the moon’s cratered, forbidding territory is but a reflection – one part in a ‘double planet [system]’201 and a ‘mirror to our own condition’202 – Cape Canaveral’s irradiated ground indicates that the culture of the Cold War and National Security State has already rocketed past the brink of disaster, or else is always standing at the point of ignition. The ‘final product’ of a totally technologized dreamworld, the terminal design of rocket states, disperse into blankness, ‘Blicker, Bleicheröde, Bleacher, Blicero’, into the white-lit expanses of Cape Canaveral’s ground 0 (0000).

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4

Transmission: New York

Being-in Once in flight, the rocket is extra-sensory, as Thomas Pynchon writes in Gravity’s Rainbow: Imagine a missile one hears approaching only after it explodes. The reversal! A piece of time neatly snipped out . . . a few feet of film run backwards . . . the blast of the rocket, fallen faster than sound – then growing out of it the roar of its own fall, catching up to what’s already death and burning . . . a ghost in the sky. . . .1

The novel is, in many ways, concerned with programmed commands engineered into the subject/slave – starved, traumatized, shocked, castrated, sent over ‘into one of the transmarginal phases, past borders of their waking selves’2 – in order to try and predict the trajectory of the missile. Slothrop’s particular endowment is a hardon, ‘an instrument installed, wired by Them into his body as a colonial outpost’3; the strategy refers to the humming erections of defensive mechanisms seeking to find shelter, an effort that begins by tracing the missile’s paraboloid descent to its target. It is this idea or myth of protection against spectral agents that, in this book, determines New York as a State, also indicative of the Nation at large, dreaming of enclosure: a great sphere fencing off a finite world. The strategic metaphor of the Cold War was containment, articulated through high-tech weapons systems whose ‘archetype is the siege’; as Paul N. Edwards claims, these techno-strategic developments form a closed world which simultaneously works as technology, political system and ‘ideological mirage’.4 In his book, Edwards investigates the ‘fantasy of global control through high-technology’, which concurrently functions as fiction of ‘global closure’5: dream-like siege-systems operating according to an infolding order or what Derrida describes as an auto-immunitary process. The ‘erections’ of ostensibly self-preserving but in actuality self-annihilating mechanisms protect the emergency state to death; the spell-binding technologized environment of security culture – marked out against a permanent, undying threat – constitutes a death-world. On a conceptual level, it is initially thermonuclear explosions that expedite proposals for an inviolable defence: their existence, not simply detonation, clearly sits at the heart of schemes that comprise technologized enclosures obliterating the distinctions between offensive and defensive measures, all considered ‘shields’.6

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If the ‘dawn’ of the nuclear age – the Trinity detonation on 16 July 1945 – produced an aesthetics linked to glass/spheres, then efforts to raise a defensive perimeter are frequently expressed in those same terms: englobing fictions, grounding Blicero’s moon colony, in which the nuclear device functions at once as weapon and armour. The outcome of nuclear explosions consequently also exists as countermeasure fantasy – the ‘undreamt-of possibilities for automated, centralized command and control’ centres7 – designed to deflect catastrophe. In America, Jean Baudrillard approaches the ‘centre of the world’, that is, New York, where the sky takes off, by way of the jet: space, here, ‘is the very form of thought’.8 He equates the city with hard technologies, exaggerated dimensions, a myth of verticality, mirrored stages; the glass facades of skyscraper-spectacles exemplify the centrifugal forces of American capitalism as fetishistic performance and dream of conquering space.9 At the same time, ‘sublime verticality’ decays – Baudrillard compares New York to Los Angeles, the city of the future, ‘[burying] itself in the ground’ in a process of ‘horizontal dismantling’; according to Baudrillard, New York ‘acts out its own catastrophe’ by way of its centrality/eccentricity creating ‘a crazed sense’ of its implosion.10 He particularly relates this impression to the expenditure of energy, a protecting voltage like a skin devised to shelter the spaces below from external threats but not from ‘internal accidents’11; if Buckminster Fuller’s 1969 ‘domed-over cities’ project (Figure 7) exists as a reference in Baudrillard’s analysis of New York, then its purpose – to reduce energy losses – leads to the domed environment’s collapse: an airless world regulated or modulated to its end.12 The World Trade Centre attacks on 11 September 2001 haunt discussions of ‘vertical’ – read economic, political, military – dominance: Derrida talks about the ‘implacable law’13 of the auto-immunitary process in relation to a date/thing that has to remain in quotation marks – ‘9/11’ as an ‘event’ of force directed against itself. In Falling Man, Don DeLillo writes about the Twin Towers in terms of a doubled act of

Figure 7 Courtesy of the estate of R. Buckminster Fuller.

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provocation: fantasies of wealth and power that one day turn into, or have always been, fantasies of destruction – an interfering, occupying, sublime superpower that ‘becomes the centre of its own shit’.14 The counter-conduct that emerges in DeLillo’s novel and, even more so, in Derrida’s interminable ‘deconstruction’ as well as in Slavoj Žižek’s essays on the attacks occurs on the basis of a dismantling of internal/external causes, a distinction that cannot exist, or not for long: us/them is a false opposition whose main function is to sustain an innocence itself disguising complicity, more specifically the empire’s own excesses.15 Derrida perceives ‘9/11’ as an act of double suicide, on the one hand committed by the hijackers and, on the other, by the superpower whose ‘head’ is attacked in a process of suicidal autoimmunity, from the inside, by American-trained/ armed combatants to oppose the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979: Right at the level of the head (cap, caput, capital, Capitol), this double suicide will have touched two places at once symbolically and operationally essential to the American corpus: the economic place or capital “head” of world capital . . . and the strategic, military, and administrative place of the American capital, the head of American political representation, the Pentagon, not far from the Capitol, the seat of Congress.16

The city of New York, symbolic ‘head’ of ‘hard technologies’, functions as representative image of excess, (the desire for) unlimited power manifested in the skyward movements of titans which, simultaneously, express a ‘dream of annihilation’.17 New York is both triumph and ruin of an overbearing technological and ideological order containing – training, supplying – the means of its own destruction: ‘democracy is démocrassouille’,18 whose ‘centre of shit’ is, time and again, located in New York. Though by no means the only metropolitan area to come under fire, the imagination of disaster has – besides LA, where Pynchon’s time-travelling rockets descends – frequently concentrated on New York, particularly since the advent of aviation transformed the art of war, allowing for spectacular bombing campaigns whose monstrous power is also captured on film: the Statue of Liberty, for example, lying half-submerged in the sand of what used to be the United States in The Planet of the Apes; the cinema, like the bombs, produces dematerializations.19 Most famously, however, the air age and New York City as target selection initially concur not in film, but in radio – lurid technicolour comes later – in Orson Welles’ adaptation of H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds, which draws attention to the end of security in space: territory loses its significance in favour of speed/time.20 ‘For many generations New York had taken no heed of war, save as a thing that happened far away,’ an event removed through an ‘iridescent mist’ as Wells writes in a different novel, The War in the Air, similarly concerned with bombing campaigns from above: ‘monsters’ hover ‘in the evening light’,21 supremely indifferent to insect-like swarms below. The War of the Worlds is an account of an invasion by creatures with ‘tentacular appendage[s]’ and of a ‘fungoid’ mass that, once on Earth, wield an ‘invisible, inevitable sword of heat’ releasing ‘blinding flash[es] of light’.22 In Wells’ 1898 version, the heat rays ravage southern England and are subsequently directed

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northwards, towards London; when Orson Welles aired his interpretation of the text on 30 October 1938 over the Columbia Broadcasting System’s radio network, he switched the location – Woking is replaced by Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, and the weird, shifting organisms inexorably advance into New York.23 Terror from the air directed at New York has, since ‘9/11’, collected together a growing supply of images; the ‘event’ itself is already cinematic, nonetheless an image that can never be quite captured – a ‘thing’ indicative of just this failure to contain ‘something’ ineffable.24 Derrida considers the date at length, a ‘bare act’ suggesting that there is ‘no concept and no meaning available to us to name in any other way this “thing” that has just happened’; there is danger in ‘something’ that remains ‘out of the range of language’ and that subsequently becomes akin to a ‘ritual incantation’, endlessly pronounced in a blind obedience to the powers that be.25 If the ‘event’ is articulated ‘like an intuition without a concept, like a unicity with no generality on the horizon or with no horizon at all’,26 then this lack of a limit similarly applies to the state of exception, licensed to operate beyond the horizon of international law and itself so difficult to define. Derrida links the repetition of the date to the televised images, similarly deadening, the information apparatus proliferating a political discourse of permanent siege, a ‘lifetime of alertness’27 against an enemy that though described as absolutely evil, is also formless, ephemeral. The enemy blends into the environment, disappears on American soil, in United/American passenger planes transformed into war machines ‘aimed at the nation’s vision of itself ’,28 the world-defining, credit-bearing US superpower capital that is New York City: [The US] is supposed to assure credit in general, credit in the sense of financial transactions but also the credit granted to languages, laws, political or diplomatic transactions. . . . The United States still retains the power of accrediting before the world a certain self-presentation: it represents the ultimate presumed unity of force and law, of the greatest force and the discourse of law.29

Yet this ‘greatest force’, marked out in the ‘aeronautic’ thrust of New York City, is also supremely vulnerable because Cold War strategies of defence providing armaments/ credit to ‘insurgents’ – the concept of terrorism depends on a shifting logic, and always applies to the other30 – also constitute the instruments of terror targeted against the techno-economic power funding ‘terrorism’, against the occupying force of the Soviet Union, in the first place. The auto-immunitary process means that ‘defensive’ formations, no longer distinguished from offensive actions, end up ‘producing, reproducing, and regenerating the very thing it seeks to disarm’,31 that is, the threat, total or otherwise, emanating from nation-states or non-state actors, whose attacks are similarly interpreted, on the ‘other’ side, as self-defensive. In Terror from the Air, Peter Sloterdijk argues that the ‘leit-phenomenon’ of terrorism, as well as of total war, is a ‘kind of military climatology’, a strategy of battle whose target is not the body but the environment: the manipulation of air and therefore of the conditions of existence in which ‘life-worlds’ become unliveable.32 It is the potential destruction of the ‘silent’ means of life through ‘atmoterrorist’ warfare

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that yields a climate of fear and, by extension, a consumption of security in which the state of being can only ever be determined as ‘being-in’ the world.33 This state at once refers to generalized circumstances – life in an atmosphere that allows breathing but whose silence/innocence can no longer be assumed – as well as to tactics of retreat into privileged, air-conditioned spheres that purport to function as ‘life pods’. To live, then, is defined by enclosures, ‘being-in’ closed systems that if conceived as utopias are idyllic, provisional, temporized and ultimately catastrophic: deadly cell climates that seek ‘stabilization through self-enclosure’.34 Considering that New York functions as centre of attack, imagined or fantasized about and subsequently transposed into actuality, it is also here that local/ized integrity is sought, though this integrity is not ‘obtained through devotion to the benevolent surroundings’ but, rather, instigated by way of an effort of demarcation35 through totalizing enclaves like ‘domed-over cities’ (Figure 7). According to Buckminster Fuller, domes might ‘suggest the vault of the sky’ and give an impression of limitlessness,36 but their real function is a suspension from an environment experienced as asphyxiating, which has become synonymous with an illimitable warzone dominated by the ‘air force’37 but, beyond that, by ballistic missiles (which are not air-breathing) and the stealth tactics of ‘silent’, ‘civilian’ technology. The devastation of the New York lifeworld – vanishing inside clouds of black dust – burns up the atmosphere with ‘toxic gases’ dissipating into shelters becoming ovens38; against this ‘extensive atmoterrorism’, in which no (counter) attack is ever a ‘singular act’ with ‘an absolute beginning’,39 exist cell structures imagined as benevolent but which are, in reality, of an auto-immunitary nature. This environment of constant threat, conceptualized as a rainbow-coloured scale of codes indicative of present levels of danger, articulates itself, in New York, in a paradoxical art of space-building that is simultaneously defiant/provocative and a movement of removal; this Janus-faced practice remains catastrophically privileged.

Steel machines In The Fate of the Earth, a volume focused on absences, the ‘emptiness of . . . minds and souls’ that ‘prefigures the emptiness in the world’ left by the atom bomb, Jonathan Schell beholds New York City in rubble and dirt, as if from the vantage point of a corpse, an entity that seldom remains in the pulverized landscapes following nuclear explosions.40 Schell writes that ‘[o]ne way to begin to grasp the destructive power of present-day nuclear weapons is to describe the consequences of the detonation of a one-megaton bomb’ dropped on a ‘large city, such as New York’,41 whose wreckage spreads outwards as the payload increases; the Empire State Building, its verticality a target here and elsewhere, functions as Designated Ground Zero: a symbol flattened in unremitting attacks as the impact centre of a growing radius of destruction. Concurrently associated with disaster and an infinite future, the skyscraper ‘has something to do with the machine’42 – its history traces back to the Civil War as a response to intensive land use and expenses as well as to the possibilities of rapid transit, such as regional rail networks, but also the ‘vertical railway’43 allowing travel

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into the sky. The elevator is one among many technologies that permit and sustain the skyscrapers whose varied heights give the impression, according to the American architect Claude Bragdon, of the skyline as a ‘jaw [,] with some teeth whole, some broken, some rotten, and some gone’.44 His short 1918 book on Architecture and Democracy is, in many ways, homage to Louis Sullivan, by and large credited with the establishment of the modern skyscraper which, according to Bragdon, represents ‘a true image of the thing that produced it’: the ‘thing’ of democracy emergent after World War I.45 He describes architecture as reflective of a political system that, preWorld War, can only be described as feudal, articulated in the ‘skyscraper shouldering itself aloft at the expense of its more humble neighbours, stealing their air and sunlight’ and a ‘symbol, written large against the sky, of the will-to-power of a man or a group of men’.46 He perceives a difference between these buildings, indicative of a ‘transitional social state’ that had not quite managed to struggle free of the ground, the stunting, load-bearing walls, and Sullivan’s ‘poetic’, ‘prophetic heights’, whose comparatively light steel-framed structures – the Prudential Building, for example – bring into being the beauty of order: the ‘force of altitude’ of the machine age and the spirit of (so-called) democracy.47 Bragdon’s book is an easy target for an analysis attentive to what Dale Carter calls ‘incipient’ totalitarianism48 in which the world is given over to the politics of the machine; a democratic state as symptomatic of a ‘militant nation’49 whose conquest of space, made possible through steel endoskeletons, nonetheless begins below, in the earth’s sunken, glaciated bedrock upon which the skyscraper rests and into which it also finally disappears. Foundation holes – several feet deep, whose depths depend on the altitude of their overlying structures – are filled with brick and caisson piers carrying granite caps on top that, in turn, hold the weight-bearing frames of the skyscraper. Once standing, the building further depends on what lies underneath: the elaborate systems of heating, ventilation and water supply; the plumbing and lighting arrangements that coil inside it, possessing the essential functions relating to the topside’s maintenance and animation. These wiring and pipe runs develop closed circuits, a defined volume with a controlled atmosphere – the skyscraper is an introverted, world-enclosing structure folding into itself, prompting the architect A. D. F. Hamlin to claim that, [it] is a huge labour-saving and time-saving device. Not only does [the skyscraper] make possible the concentration within a small geographical area of an amount and variety of business which otherwise would be spread over five or six times the same extent of territory, but it gathers into a simple edifice an extraordinary number of activities, which otherwise would be widely separated. Each building is almost a complete city, often comprising within its walls banks and insurance offices, post office and telegraph office, business exchanges, restaurants, clubrooms and shops. The businessman can provide himself with clothes, shoes, cigars, stationary, and baths; receive and dispatch his mail and his telegrams; speculate on “change [the exchange],” consult his lawyer and his architect in their offices; and transact his own business, – all without leaving the building in which his office is located.50

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Inside exists a total space that disappears the exterior which remains evident, barely significant, only through windows removing outlying areas from touch – glass is a container, an isolator51 creating an atmosphere of transparent partition that supplies, in these circumstances, an element of transportation too, away from street levels and towards the possibilities of the sky. Less architecture than machine or engineering project, the skyscraper is indicative of a divided consciousness: it thrusts upwards while it also reaches ‘all the way down through to the other side of the world’.52 A launch into space and emptiness, its doubled directions are suggestive of the apparatus/environment as both dreamworld and terminal system. Even though Bragdon remains deferential to Sullivan – ‘potent influence’53 to a new generation of men – his book is, at times, a curious composition with a latent content that becomes noticeable in his discussion of the four-zoned, multi-staged Prudential Building, designed by Sullivan: This rude, rectangular bulk is uncompromisingly practical and utilitarian; these rows on rows of windows, regularly spaced, and all of the same size, suggest the equality and monotony of obscure, laborious lives; the uprising shafts of the vertical piers stand for their hopes and aspirations, and the unobtrusive, delicate ornament which covers the whole . . . is like the very texture of their dreams.54

A weird passage, suggestive of ‘democratic’ principles – ‘liberating’ the powers of otherwise ‘slothful civilians’55 – the perspective, here, is also one of condemnation: the beauty, though regular and functional, also ‘obscures’ a totalitarian order, as if Bragdon suspected an act of correlation between the ‘thing’ of democracy and feudalism or tyranny. When considered in the larger context of his book, however, such buried misgivings amount to little against what still functions as a triumph of construction, announcing the birth of the nation; it is another architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, who spoke at greater length about ‘The Tyranny of the Skyscraper’ in a lecture delivered at Princeton in 1930. Wright’s comprehensive project is one of ‘organic’ architecture blending into its surroundings – he only built one skyscraper, the Price Tower in Oklahoma, a trunk with a tree at its origin – which explains his hostility to ‘machinemade solutions’ realizing ‘shrieking’ verticalities that he also regards as unethical: a practice of crowding in the service of a monstrous commerce.56 Seen from a distance, Wright refers to skyscrapers in terms of ‘something like paralysis’ that stultifies the buildings,57 and describes New York as a ‘disappearing city’, vanishing in an ‘overpowering sense of the cell’.58 Exterior sheaths bury, within their shimmering fronts, an impulse of destruction; the gradual accumulation of matter, climbing into the sky but growing like ‘potato sprouts in a cellar’, includes its own ruin behind a thin disguise – skyscrapers are ‘gigantic tombs’ jamming subjects into steel skeletons.59 There is nostalgia at work here, in a present taken over by machines whose upward gestures crush the citizen below and inside; the characteristics of a living organism are missing in an architecture that stakes out spaces of death. What Wright is mostly concerned with is a politics of profit masked as ‘progress’, unconcerned with dwelling; everything that surrounds the subject, in these cell-worlds, is a real estate

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plot with no regard for either the environment or interrelationships: these structures predict the ‘ultimate extinction’ of ‘man’.60 In a subsequent talk, likewise delivered in 1930 at Princeton and simply titled ‘The City’, Wright considers urban ruin, remarking that ‘the civilisations that built the city invariably died with it’, before asking if ‘the civilisations themselves die of it? Acceleration invariably preceded such decay’.61 The technology of city space, then, does not reflect or realize democracy but ‘dromocracy’, the logistics of speed that not only neglects but terminates being: If the machine conquers, it is conceivable that man will again remain to perish with his city, because the city, like all minions of the machine, has grown up in man’s image – minus only the living impetus that is man. The city is itself only manthe-machine – the deadly shadow of sentient man. Thus is the sentient individual factor – the citizen – appropriately disposed of in the cavernous recesses of a mechanistic system. . . .62

Rather than organic, these ‘living’ machines are engines of death, ‘cavernous’ and cadaverous, producing (future) destruction; a mechanistic system disposes of the citizen – ‘struggling to maintain, artificially, teeth, hair, muscles and sap’63 – as abject machine, conquered by his/its mirror image. This type of architecture or technological production of space consequently is not a ‘milestone’ – of ‘progress’, democratic politics, functional beauty – but forms ‘Twentieth Century gravestones!’,64 marking the end of a city-‘thing’ that self-destructs. Wright’s vision of disaster expands across his writings, in which he keeps looking to the wreckage of a future analysed, in one instance, by archaeologists; they might find, here and there, ‘whole machines’, a ‘loom, a linotype, a cash register, a tractor, a dynamo, a passenger elevator’, all ‘relics of a faith in devices’ that failed.65 For the most part however, these ‘antiquarians’66 find nothing to even suggest the shape of the things destroyed; the great quantity of glass fragments strewn across the surface area give no indication of their use in skyscraper buildings, the latter ephemeral, after all, and indicative only of an excessive, decimating technological power. William Langewiesche opens his account of the World Trade Centre (WTC) attacks with the instant in which each tower briefly ‘left its imprint in the air, a phantom of pulverised concrete’ before dissolving in a ‘rain of steel’: as a ‘bomb of sorts, a repository for the prodigious energy originally required to raise so much weight’, the buildings, in ‘twin ten second impulses’ expel ‘that energy back into the city’.67 The WTC planning stage originated in the 1960s; frequently associated with JFK and the space project, the towers were invested with an analogous upward thrust, an attenuated release into space – though their collapse is, according to Baudrillard, writing on demolition spectacles more generally, ‘the opposite of a rocket launch’.68 The passenger planes that carried out this act of violence proved, however, that US mastery of the air/space was illusory69; the Boeing machines entered New York City in stealth – the air ‘force’ quite clearly resides in the ability to go undetected. Switching off their transponder beacons and as a result ‘degrading [their] display on the radar screens and extinguishing [their]

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altitude readout’,70 the aircraft – ‘eagerly alive’ as Martin Amis describes ‘[t]hat second plane’ – delivered a megatonnage of destruction which produced, in the city below, ‘vampiric reds and blacks’: the ‘pink mist’ caused by exploding bodies.71 Converted into missiles, the planes shattered the beams of the WTC sinking into an underworld or ‘final frontier’,72 an unbreathable space whose death-world conditions also exist up above, in an atmosphere of oppressive emptiness affecting language: the ineffable ‘event’ that, in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, can only be captured on blank pages. The environment created is one of an advancing void – terrorism as an ideology of the zero – and lethality in which New York becomes ‘a time and space of falling ash and near night’,73 a zone of ‘breathing-onto-death’.74 In Falling Man – a novel that interrogates the rhetoric of ‘aggrieved tenancy’, the laws and limits that the state of exception sets and justifies in the name of security cell-culture – this atmoterrorist reconfiguration of the world as natura morta yields sleepers dreaming of unliveable space/time: ‘These were the days after and now the years, a thousand heaving dreams, the trapped man, the fixed limbs, the dream of paralysis, the gasping man, the dream of asphyxiation.’75 Even before ‘the planes’76 though – DeLillo’s attempt to avoid citing the date of ‘September 11’ and to thereby raise questions concerning its representation, repetition – New York exists as poised on the brink of dissolution or disaster. Hugh Ferriss, the American delineator and architect, draws the city, buried in an early fog, from the vantage point of his work room in The Metropolis of Tomorrow, a collection of delicate sketches in which he pictures the city as a ‘nebulous panorama’: Literally, there is nothing to be seen but mist; not a tower has yet been revealed below, and except for the immediate parapet rail (dark and wet as an ocean liner’s) there is not a suggestion of either locality or solidity for the coming scene.77

As the fog disperses, a ‘subtle differentiation is beginning to occur below in the monotone of grey’: the light starts to catch the vertical lines and blocks of skyscrapers, so that the metropolis – an (un)sleeping titan – finally appears, causing Ferriss to probe the city’s origins and to ask ‘[w]hat apocalypse is about to be revealed?’78 He senses imminent risk, a catastrophe waiting to happen but that has also already taken place, as if New York was an ‘experiment in psychic research’, a ‘spirit [to be] summoned at a séance’.79 The surges of the buildings announce the ‘coming of a new order’ – a final frontier of spatial domination and colonization – against which Ferriss directs his drawings that, ‘far from being intended as an inspiration’, actually serve ‘as a warning’.80 New York consequently gives the impression to perennially stand on the verge of something else, likely to dissolve into emptiness, zero space; the latent content of the city is death – it is a realm of echoes repeating threats, which it receives and disseminates, in a Gestalt of corporation and disembodiment. The target and aggressors are skyscrapers, whose main stages, ‘base, shaft and crowning member’,81 form yet another link to the rocket’s multi-stage design: the technology of the skyscraper functions as both prehistory of missiles and their designated ground zero.

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Totalizing eyes In counter-opposition to (imagined) disasters exist strategies of defence seeking refuge in space; against the immensity of the sky act fantasies of terrestrial occupation like the protective measures of ‘domed-over cities’ (Figure 7), blimp-like constructions that hover above an environment of total insecurity. Buckminster Fuller’s conceptions – flying or anchored objects, dirigibles/dwellings that are machines for the ‘efficient and comfortable conduct of family life under shelter’82 – constitute one such effort to develop ‘umbrellas’ of protection, yet explorations for spectacular technological enclosure rooted in New York occurred prior to Fuller’s regulated dome-worlds. In the light of what is to come, that is, missile defence dream-systems combining ‘livingry’ and weaponry,83 the project that most accurately articulates this purpose is Nikola Tesla’s Wardenclyffe, a wireless transmission tower that stood, at the turn of the twentieth century, on the edge of the city on a stretch of land extending into the Atlantic. A 200-acre tract situated on Long Island, in an isolated parcel of wooded land bordering on a few farms, Wardenclyffe’s development was never completed; it was demolished in 1917 but, like many successive air defence proposals, it produced compelling visions of global command-control systems closing off lifeworlds. Construction of the World Telegraphy Centre began in the summer of 1901, over the course of which an octagonal formation started rising into the sky, while it also pushed a telescopic steel shaft of 120 feet deep and 12-feet square into the earth. The project even now remains shrouded in mystery; on 27 March 1904, the New York Times referred to locals’ convictions that the shaft’s entrance, an ‘affair very much like the companionway on an ocean steamer’, led into an ‘excavation as deep as the tower is high, with walls of mason work and a circular stairway leading to the bottom’.84 Here, according to the article, the tunnels gradually enlarged and progressed back towards the surface to develop, at their end points, into ‘brick, igloo-shaped mounds’ arising at the periphery of Tesla’s property.85 Though the exact dimensions of the underground installation varied because reports differed – some correspondents conceived of 500foot-deep gaps – such conjectures relate to the latent content forced beneath the manifest levels of scientific endeavours as belonging to an enlightened and apparently rational discourse. Wardenclyffe, by far Tesla’s most ambitious and monumental project, marks a disquieting slippage between what is seen and what remains buried, particularly considering the tower’s function – to end ‘old worlds’ and create others in fantasies of supremacy: Man could alter the size of this planet, control its seasons, adjust its distance from the sun, guide it on its eternal journey along any path he might choose, through the depths of the universe. He could make planets collide and produce his sun and stars, his heat and light; he could originate life in all its infinite forms. To cause at will the birth and death of matter would be man’s grandest deed, which would give him the mastery of physical creation, make him fulfil his ultimate destiny.86

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The exercise/desire of superpower, though detectable in hyperbolic rhetoric, concurrently occurs in plain sight and out of sight, off-limits, on grounds patrolled by armed guards; the tower’s architecture stands for total oversight and centralized management that, moving beyond the planetary, operates at once visibly and invisibly. It is, as such, a control scheme and system devising full spectrum dominance, a spectacular technology that, in time, becomes a strategic weapon/network of defence aiming to realize a process of enclosure: an eternal, worldwide and world-surpassing cell climate whose air-conditioned integrity develops into one of the central dreamscenes of the Cold War. A space designed to provide unlimited vision is science fiction spectacle, a poetics of techno-sublimity that evokes the mastery of supermen: man-bats like Tesla (he lived in the dark)87 or the Batman operating in a city defined by its underworld: Gotham, a variation on New York, is a ‘concentration of hidden spaces’ traversed and read by someone equally as secretive and whose rationality is – like Tesla’s tower – uncanny.88 Gotham’s architecture, peaks ‘poised as a defence [,] a warning’, also points towards the roots of the city, the ‘serpentine maze of narrow streets and alleyways that trap every sin, . . . every murderous thought and deed’ and ‘[keeps] them secretly hidden to fester and rot and grow’; these routes provide a means of access ‘straight down into hell’.89 This is not a transparent space but a dark urbanity, a text that eludes visibility for the Wandersmann; it is only the ‘totalizing eye’ – not celestial but interred – that can make it out: the ‘immense texturology’ of Gotham City assembles into a w/hole in the Batman’s centre of command.90 The early stages and drawings of the Batcave in the 1940s present a relatively modest arrangement, especially if compared to the subsequent elaborations; the beginnings of the Batman’s hideout underneath Wayne Manor, by this point still more of a farmhouse, include spiral stairs twisting down into a clandestine, ancient space accessed by way of an opening behind a clock.91 By the 1980s, however, having passed through an interlude in the Seventies when the Batman’s base of operations was transferred into the high-rise of the Wayne Foundation92 – all whitewashed and spacious, located in Gotham City’s business district – the Batcave functions on added planes and has been converted into a maze of partitions, each containing an assemblage of high-tech equipment supplying an ‘erotics of knowledge’: an ‘ecstasy of reading’ and constant readiness.93 The regions beneath Wayne’s residence spread out horizontally as well as vertically; this scopic regime is one of subterranean command, a technologized, interiorized system reacting to threats outside. Here, in a space of localized if not global hegemony, computers – relaying information into supplementary systems – organize and enclose Gotham into a fantasy of order and frame of abstraction in which every scene of conflict is apparent and recorded, though not necessarily prevented or pre-empted. The central unit – an outpost in deep space – develops yet further in the decades to come; by the 1990s, the Batcave is a fully automated environment suggesting the gliding, uninterrupted flow of data further transferred into satellite command centres established in strategic locations under Gotham’s ‘massed solidities’.94 Severed lines, like the phantom trails that float and rip through Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, form cracks in the fabric of the world, as if a

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different existence lay just beyond; this dimension of latency is also indicative of the dichotomous temperament that structures Miller’s graphic novel in which the Batman, a political liability, stands in nocturnal opposition to Superman, Ronald Reagan’s crony and government lackey. Book One draws the Batman’s resurgence prompted by, or coinciding with, the release of a reconfigured Harvey Dent, a former District Attorney whose face, in one part, had been scarred by acid and who consequently developed a fixation with split sides. Facially restored, his shaved head a model of blankness, Dent locates deception in the smooth surface of his face; with eyes closed, the Batman similarly sees beyond unexpressed deformity – ‘both sides’, inner and outer, ‘match’95 in a portrait with teeth, a totality of horror with one eye bulging, the other one gone missing in a socket filled with darkness. In this sequence of events, the Batman observes a reflection in Dent’s polished face: a close-up of a bat whose eyes – slits of yellow-green radiance – lie in a frame occupied only by the creature’s facial aspects, by its mouth, all fangs, opened in a shriek providing a passage into fire. Yet it is not the Batman but Superman who comes, in the course of Miller’s book, to be associated with a great inferno; invariably an instrument at the hands of ‘Ronnie Ray-Gun’ – false hair and teeth, in Steve Bell’s cartoons, shaped like missiles and with death-ray hat – Superman swoops into prospective areas of disaster at the command of a corpse, or of a defect automaton.96 In Miller’s novel, Superman, glowing in colour, is dispatched to divert the explosion of a nuclear weapon programmed to detonate over the island of Corto Maltese, where Soviet and American forces have been engaged in direct combat. Reagan, undying American president degenerating as the story progresses – his features melt, disappear into a mass of wrinkles folding around bloodshot eyes and mouth where they, too, look like fangs – is contained only by the boxes that surround him, the television set and bio-protection suits rendering him as a severed head encased behind plastic and glass. At the moment of Reagan’s televised speech – ‘We’ve got to secure our – ahem – stand up for the cause of freedom’97 – Superman appears over Corto Maltese; he flies to meet an oncoming missile to divert it into a desert, ground zero whose name no one remembers. As the light of the bomb fills the pages, its flames eat Superman, returning a skeletal figure whose outfit, colours wilted, hangs in loose folds around his disintegrating body: Reagan’s ‘own little deterrent’98 nonetheless proves to be successful as well as regenerative – after a brief interlude of ruin, its protection, nearly constant, resumes. Little deterrents, in the state of New York, refer to figures of steel and all-seeing eyes creating fictions of total control and absolute visibility: Superman, the Batcave, Wardenclyffe, these are all manifestations of the same epistemology of vision, transmission and command. Wardenclyffe meant to fulfil the function of a sentinel; culminating in a half sphere at its extremity, the tower, mushroom-shaped, ostensibly was a system of wireless telegraphy in which the transmission of energy ‘is effected by rays akin to light’.99 Bearing in mind Tesla’s exuberant articles on supreme mastery and reconfiguration of the environment, however, as well as his efforts to eliminate ‘undisciplined’ elements – fogs at sea, the moisture of the air and the abundance, or very existence, of rodents and insects – his projects frequently were dreams or explorations of enclosure. The controlled environments creating the preconditions for scientific

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experiments, essentially procedures of isolation, also articulate their desired outcomes: Wardenclyffe, proposing transmissions to the ‘uttermost confines of the earth’,100 did double duty in helping to materialize a vision of global atmospheric control. In his novelization of Tesla’s life, Tad Wise quotes a fictitious letter composed by the inventor in 1914; addressed to Woodrow Wilson, the letter informs the President of a ‘secret experiment which [Tesla] hoped might protect this great country and prevent all nations from ever again experiencing the horrors of war’.101 The source of this ‘machine to end war’,102 the title of a magazine article published in February 1937, is Wardenclyffe, speculated to be the point of origin of an incident that occurred on 30 June 1908 in the Siberian region of Tunguska. On that day, a torrent of heat and light levelled about 500,000 acres of pine forest and razed several nomadic villages without leaving an impact crater or any other indication of its provenance; the spot of emission, though, might well have been Tesla’s World Telegraphy Centre, spawning a force field around, and way beyond, itself. In a letter to the editor of the New York Times a few months before the unexplained incident, Tesla implies a demonstration of a force – an ecologized warfare – capable of manipulating sovereign states if not, as yet, able to cause the willed collision of planets.103 Such intimations of administered political climates also surface in a 1904 essay, ‘The Transmission of Energy Without Wires’, published in Electrical World and Engineer on 5 March on the propagation of electric streams, thus presenting the possibility of a power grid in which electricity functions as both spectacle and means of empire. In a discussion on the ‘valuable application[s]’ of electricity, Tesla mentions the imposition of a ‘rigorously correct. . . . American time’,104 a suggestion permitting a glimpse of the world to come, defined, as it now is, through US air force and military ‘time-keeping’ technologies. In terms of its planned operations, Wardenclyffe – in Pynchon’s Against the Day and in various other (wacky) investigations of the Tunguskan episode used to send a ray-message, mistaking its aim ‘by a small but fatal angle’,105 to the explorer Robert Peary in the Arctic – was, like so many of Tesla’s initiatives, in pursuit of a blockade and invulnerable deterrent. ‘It will be possible to destroy anything approaching 200 miles,’ Tesla wrote in 1937 on the subject of a device providing ‘a wall of power’ against aggression: My apparatus projects particles which may be relatively large or of microscopic dimensions, enabling us to convey to a small area at a great distance trillions of times more energy than is possible with rays of any kind. Many thousands of horsepower can thus be transmitted by a stream thinner than a hair, so that nothing can resist.106

The World Telegraphy Centre, though dismantled by 1937, appears as an echo/revenant in this article; Tesla’s proposed installation, requiring a large plant, further functions as a magnified expression of his phobias relating to microscopic organisms and viral dimensions. High-frequency currents to rid the skin of dust and small particles, and ‘sterilisers of water, air, food and clothing’107 are precursors of his ‘death-ray’, a particlebeam weapon whose existence remains unconfirmed and, despite a time lag spanning

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twenty years, associated with Wardenclyffe, as well as with plans for worldwide radar and guided missiles, all programmed to develop an electronically shielded National Security State. In an illustration of the completed tower (Figure 8), Wardenclyffe is an air warfare installation illuminating the night sky in a corona of light projecting its radiance against airships like insects and the phantoms of future machines: jets, supersonic engines, stealth aircraft and ICBMs. Rather than functioning, as it does in Against the Day, as a formation responsible for interludes in thought through its ray-like emissions – in the novel, the habitual order of events suddenly, temporarily, overturns and is invested with the ‘sense of overture and possibility’108 – the tower becomes another weapon of war, designed not to end but to perpetuate and deflect combat. As battlegrounds shift elsewhere, the outcomes of such architectures/technologies inevitably produce cataclysmic explosions on the other side of the planet while it is, in a sense, in the city of New York – threatened by and fascinated with imminent dissolution under its

Figure 8 In an illustration of the completed tower, Wardenclyffe is an air warfare installation illuminating the night sky in a corona of light projecting its radiance. Thanks to the Tesla Memorial Society of New York.

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umbrella of (atomic) light – that the nuclear age begins; its ‘dawn’ at any rate, assuming the form of the Statue of Liberty at Trinity,109 is linked, in name and space, to the island of Manhattan. At 270 Broadway and Chambers Street in New York, the North Atlantic Division of the Army Corps of Engineers, responsible for building ports and airfields, operated out of a ‘nondescript building overlooking City Hall Park’110; in this colourless edifice, blending into the surroundings, the Corps established the headquarters for its hushhush project to assemble a nuclear bomb. According to its Director General Leslie R. Groves, the project’s first proposed name, an awkward designation – the Laboratory for the Development of Substitute Materials – attracted too much attention and recommended changing it into a less eye-catching name, simply noting the unit’s geographical location, the Manhattan Engineer District. If these words seem at odds with the spectacular effects of the bomb, William L. Laurence, a dual-personality reporter,111 frustrated dramatist and commissioned spiritualist of the atomic age, made use of a vocabulary fitting the gadget in its monstrosity and messianic potential; Dawn Over Zero records, in great detail, the bomb’s impact in, or with, the city of New York. The Atomic Bomb Base on Tinian – a small island captured from Japan by the United States in 1944 and subsequently transformed into a military installation encompassing the island’s entire land mass – is in size and shape equivalent to Manhattan. It was from the now overgrown airfields of this double that Little Boy and Fat Man, delivered to Tinian by sea on the USS Indianapolis, were launched against Japan in August 1945. ‘New Yorkers like myself ’ notes Laurence, find ‘themselves at home on Tinian’: [i]ts roads and streets were laid out (doubtless by some homesick seabee from New York) along the lines of Manhattan Island, with numbered broad avenues running north and south, and numbered cross-town streets east and west. The small “atom-town” of twenty-one raised tents, where I lived with the atomic bomb scientists during my month’s stay at Tinian, was located somewhere in the vicinity of “Times Square.” The flying-field from which the B–29s took off for Hiroshima and Nagasaki was located somewhere in “upper Manhattan.” “Broadway” and “8th Avenue” were the two main thoroughfares, along which at all hours of the day and night the atomic bombers rumbled in jeeps and trucks to and from the bomb assembly area.112

Out of a metropolitan space split in two emerged a gateway to the atomic destruction of Japanese cities and a portal into a nuclear order of existence, ‘hatched from . . . giant egg[s];’113 Manhattan’s mirror image gestates a state of lethal environmentality. Holding in place the origins of the atom bomb and simultaneously constituting one of its targets, Manhattan is bifaced, both victim and aggressor; one of its sides, the participation in schemes of extermination, is hidden in plain sight, in unremarkable architecture, so that the phantoms that subsist in New York are the products of its own secret manoeuvres, the air force devastation that it both helps to unleash and, at the same time, also meets.

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Our own little deterrent On 23 March 1983 Ronald Reagan delivered an Address to the Nation on television; the subject matter of his speech was national security and the restoration of US military strength by means of an ‘approach to stability’ that invested less trust in the ‘spectre’ of retribution than it depended on defensive measures to counter the ‘awesome’ threat of Soviet ICBMs: ‘[w]hat if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant US retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?’114 The address marked the beginning of Reagan’s SDI, that is, Star Wars, a designation pointing to SDI’s degrees of fictitiousness. Though Reagan claimed that in ‘recent months’ his advisers – who were, like the rest of the world, taken by surprise – had ‘underscored the necessity to break out of a future that relies solely on offensive retaliation for our security’,115 the proposal for a defence shield, despite the unexpected declaration of the programme, was not at all ‘recent’, but had interested administrations since the latter stages of World War II. In Gravity’s Rainbow, the V2, of which Slothrop finds, ‘as weeks wear on, no least fragment’, remains elusive, a clue to ‘how invisible is the act of death’: ‘it’s nothing that he can see or lay hands on – sudden gases, a violence upon the air and no trace afterward’.116 In order to capture the rocket’s essence and plot its trajectory or estimate the site of its impact, a series of efforts – séances around the ‘smooth blue light’ of gas flames, mathematical calculations and the manipulation of conditioned subjects to establish a ‘vocabulary of curves’117 in Pynchon’s novel – were complemented on the ground and ‘within a month’ of the first attacks by radar units able to detect the weapon once it rose above 5,000 feet.118 Methods of protection consequently seemed feasible by using data on target and time of contact so as to intercept the missile with batteries of anti-aircraft artillery, firing a ‘heavy barrage’, a wall of shells, ahead of the incoming rocket.119 Though ‘seriously considered’, such plans were nonetheless ‘abandoned as impractical’120 and the V2, though no longer in stealth, might as well be sensed and attempted to be stopped by means of the paranormal, through table-rapping or remote-viewing. The invading spirit, a ‘ghost in the sky’,121 avoids obstruction once in flight; the only effective courses of action available to the Allies were the bombardment or occupation of production facilities and launch sites, yet the suggestions of barriers of shrapnel and explosions triggered just prior to the rocket’s detonation inspired the US military to start an investigation into ballistic missile defence (BMD). In 1945, after a research trip by a party of military officials into the European theatre of war which recommended the initiation of a programme to oppose the threat of the V2, the Army Air Force (AAF)’s Scientific Advisory Group (SAG) released a report discussing ‘homing rockets armed with nuclear explosives and some form of energy beam[s]’122 to be directed at attacking missiles. In the following years, National Defence projects, in particular those aimed at assembling anti-missile missiles, were studied by contractors and universities across the United States. The developments that emerged out of these analyses – identified under the names of Wizard (recall Oz), for example, or Thumper, the latter a short-lived, dead-end suggestion

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cancelled in 1948 – progressed into the Army’s Nike-Zeus system. In 1958 Wizard merged with Nike–Zeus, a ‘three-staged, solid-propellant missile designed to carry a nuclear warhead of 400 pounds’ and comprising ‘advanced radar equipment and communications links to tie the subsystems together’.123 It was in the wake of Sputnik that models of defence were researched with a sense of urgency by ARPA, itself a corollary of the Soviet satellite. Argus, one of ARPA’s designs advocated by Nicholas C. Christofilos at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, involved the discharge of a number of atom bombs at a specific altitude in space so as to produce, by way of trapping electrons in the planet’s magnetic field, a type of fence in low earth orbit. Like so many other arrangements however, Argus, tested between 27 August and 6 September 1958, failed; the electrons, falling short of forming a barrier, dissipated too quickly and disbanded into deep space, pure fantasy, out of which the plan also appeared in the first place. Strategies of interception evolved; unstable appellations, absorbed or joined by others, referred to similarly shifting projects that folded but also to those that combined ground-based structures with components drifting in outer space, comprising tracking satellites relaying data back to earth, where they set off missiles meeting the incoming devices. As such, Nike-Zeus transformed into Nike-X, a method of layered defence employing a phased-array radar apparatus, which by the mid-1960s was modified into Sentinel. Unlike Nike-X – itself intended to uphold US cities and industrial areas in the event of an all-out Soviet attack – Sentinel was designed as a configuration of light deployment to be used in a limited intervention, in a strike directed at hard targets, that is, military installations, deriving from China, not from the Soviet Union. Even Sentinel though was ephemeral and replaced by yet another proposal, further registering a change in focus from the protection of biological targets to the preservation of nuclear missiles; the ongoing but faltering efforts to conceive of a viable practice of defence were, at last, interrupted, if only temporarily and in terms of operation not inquiry, by Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) in 1972, a treaty which placed severe restrictions on BMD and the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) programme.124 A solitary formation not far from Grand Forks, North Dakota, materialized another missile defence project named Safeguard: the complex – a ‘truncated pyramid’ intended to protect an adjacent Minuteman field – accommodated the antennas, each of circular shape, 13 feet in diameter and consisting of 5000 phased-array elements, for the missile site radar. The machinery resembles a ‘gigantic, multi-lensed insect eye’,125 whose persistent stare, repeated on the four sides of the building, searched for unscheduled flying objects adept at approaching from all directions. Bug-eyed radar, easily a target itself and working in conjunction with diverse types of missiles – Spartan and Sprint that are electronically blind without their accompanying detection and guidance system – form ‘a hedge against the uncertainties of the future’,126 as Major General Robert C. Marshall, the Army’s Ballistic Missile Defence Program Manager, stated at the Senate Hearings on Federal Year 1977. Though Safeguard was by then decommissioned, the BMD R&D programme, investigating not just radar but also optics, data processing and software development alongside interceptors and discrimination – the latter concerned with

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the isolation of decoys from warheads – maintained the quest for national closure. These visions of a sealed environment are overlooked by odd contraptions, giant creatures that float in earth’s atmosphere – like vehicles equipped with an ‘umbrellaribbed’ structure with outwardly extending arms so as to increase the ‘probability of collision’127 – or that sit, patiently, in desolate places, inside the planet. In The Closed World, Paul N. Edwards writes about radar technology and the sense of prospective safety conferred to its mechanisms, the ‘undreamt-of possibilities for automated, centralised command and control’ centres and their related metaphors of ‘leakproof containers’ and ‘integrated systems’ assuring total area defence.128 The model he picks as setting the ‘key pattern for other high-technology weapon systems’ is Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), the first large-scale infrastructure and envelope of protection.129 A facility bathed in a ‘strange blue glow’ illuminating consoles and operations rooms, whose walls are encompassed by big convex screens representing the ‘abstract electronic architecture of the world’,130 SAGE, a grey device with one great, centred, yellow glass eye, anticipated, among many other arrangements responding to the growing ICBM threat, the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS). Activated in 1960, BMEWS was a split installation monitoring the Arctic region, constituted of a trinity of long-range radar sites with elements at Thule Air Force Base in Greenland, the Royal Air Force (RAF) post Flyingdales and the USAF Clear Air Force Station in Alaska. Data on incoming missiles issued from Colorado, out of the depths of a mountain, the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD), which Ronald Reagan visited during the Republican presidential primary campaign in 1980 and described as ‘an amazing place’, a zone of closed, air-conditioned comfort, where American power, invisible to the world above, seems unlimited, a suggestion of boundlessness in a finite space. ‘They actually are tracking several thousand objects in space, meaning satellites of ours and everyone else’s,’ Reagan told an aide, ‘even down to the point where they are tracking a glove lost by an astronaut that is still circling the earth up there.’131 The distributed BMEWS facilities, equipped with either twofaced or three-sided phased-array radars – oversized insect eyes frequently operating out of vast golfball-shaped radomes – ‘detect, track and acquire’ missiles and other, unidentified flying objects.132 The white mushroom tops protecting the radar arrays from the weather, approximating the extraterrestrial, are indicative of total war, conducted by way of heat rays bringing about final disintegration. Throughout the 1970s, the DoD supported R&D programmes investigating the possibility of directed energy weapons (DEWs), the use of lasers (light amplification through stimulated emission of radiation) or particle beams as a defence against ballistic missiles. By the 1980s, according to Donald Baucom, the neutral particle beam, developed in the Army’s project Siapu, a native American word for sacred fire, constituted ‘one of the most promising technologies’; the beam – travelling ‘at nearly the speed of light’ and producing, when striking an aggressive enemy device, an almost ‘instantaneous destruction of the target surface’ – penetrates ‘deeply into the object, where it [does] further damage’.133 The ‘short-wave-length, novel and remarkable’134 X-ray laser, too, built and heavily promoted by Edward Teller, consisted of a ‘central

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nuclear explosive device surrounded by a ring of . . . lasing rods . . . each of which could be independently aimed’.135 The concentration of enormous amounts of power released out of a sphere of light, shining nuclear and forming into narrow rays, made the X-ray laser, a mechanism of ‘individual scope’ and of ‘sharply localised effect’, an ‘anti-weapon’ solely ‘designed for the use against weapons of mass destruction’.136 These promises of technological wizardry provided Ronald Reagan – starring in a 1940s movie titled Murder in the Air, which features an ‘inertia projector’ or ‘anti-weapon’ – with a vision of a shield against MAD and the balance of terror. SDI, a massive and long-standing, if up to the 1980s a relatively sub-surface project, would succeed to restore and preserve American integrity in the face of enemy air force violence. A way out, also, of the continuous and unresolved MX debate relating to the curious propositions for that specific rocket’s storage technology, acting as a substitute for Minuteman, SDI was established on the principle of the engagement or collision with enemy ballistic missiles along their entire launch-to-impact trajectories, right through the parabola of their itinerary. Its premise rests on the four stages of flight during which a ballistic missile, hypothetically, can be destroyed, beginning with the ‘boost phase’, during which the rocket boosters lift the gadget into outer space; the ‘post-boost phase’, the period immediately after the rocket motors burn out and during which the post-boost vehicle, the ‘bus’, dispenses its warheads to travel their separate arcs and releases any decoys or other penetration aids; the ‘mid-course phase’ throughout which these warheads and decoys streak towards their destinations; and finally the ‘terminal phase’, the moment the weapons enter the atmosphere and hit their targets.137 Previous BMD concepts, developed in the 1950s and 1960s, and coming to an end with the 1972 ABM Treaty, only conceived of intercepting Soviet missiles during the last two stages of flight, comprising all of some 20 minutes; the technological options that allowed the consideration, by the 1980s, of the other two phases did not, as yet, and unlike in relation to SDI, include the varieties of laser, particle beams and kinetic energy weapons, space-borne ‘rail guns’ firing pellets at incoming missiles.138 These developments were neither necessarily feasible with SDI; in many ways they stayed purely conjectural responses that, even if practical, were never going to be sufficient, while they were also dangerous to the delicate equilibrium of power. In a crisis, ‘defensive systems would give both sides a high incentive to initiate a nuclear attack, either in a deliberate, aggressive attempt to disarm the other side, or as a desperate, essentially defensive measure to “pre-empt”’.139 Providing a shield, therefore, from behind which to launch a first strike, SDI was a hazard as well as impracticable, regardless of the fact that it sought to grant protection only against ICBMs equipped with distractions and countermeasures – fast-burn and proliferate or spinning boosters with protective coating,140 metallic balloons and infra-red reflecting aerosols141 – not against bombers or cruise missiles, air-breathing devices that escape the scrutiny of a system for the most part based in, or else inevitably looking towards, outer space.142 Stations basing lasers, for one, are placed either in a geostationary orbit, in a constant and analogous loop around the planet where they permanently hover over Soviet missile silos, or in a lower orbit, a location requiring more battle posts.143 Conversely, lasers can also be situated on mountain peaks and beam their rays, from there, up to

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large relay mirrors similarly in geostationary orbits, which then transmit energy to a collection of smaller mirrors in lower orbits, with the objective to obliterate single missile boosters in quick succession.144 The ‘magical parentheses’ of the looking glasses impart prospects of lifeworld protection, inciting ‘all sorts of hallucinations’, mirages of a world of ‘light and clarity’145 altogether cleared of shadows, the approaching shapes of unerring missiles. As a ‘place of transfer’, as Sabine Melchior-Bonnet argues in her study, a ‘space of imagination in which the subject disguises his self and makes contact with his fantasies’,146 the apparitions in mirrors, however, do not always coincide with expressions for a mode of living in-being defined and contained by a leakproof shield, comparable to the transparent boxes that hold the near-dead President of such schemes in protective embrace. In the case of SDI, the emergence of bi-faced kill mechanisms promoted as an indispensable, moral choice – not avengers, but protectors147 – is, as mentioned earlier, destabilizing and their protection, at any rate, is intended not for ‘civilians’ but for warheads in their silos: ‘the first thing to be defended’ are ‘avenging nukes’.148 As the ‘means of war’ are ‘packaged as the means of peace’,149 SDI, having changed from an astrodome cover – an exercise in self-deception in which the entire population sits within a magic circle and great sphere of technological control – to point defence, the deadly machines that are forced into life obliterate the distinctions between offence and defence, becoming indistinguishable. There are, then, twin images within this looking glass, a ‘sonic death mirror’ investing the rocket – the device it reflects and against which it ‘throw[s] back a perfect shock wave to destroy anything in its path’ – with similar dualities or multiplicities: ‘the rocket has to be many things, it must answer to a number of different shapes in the dreams of those who touch it’.150 Nonetheless the fantasies, in contact with the body of the missile, though holding the promise of a ‘good Rocket to take us to the stars’, also contain an ‘evil Rocket for the World’s suicide’,151 investing the prospects of new living machines of plastic or glass and the galvanic domes of anti-missile missiles with the essence of death. Blicero’s refuge is exactly that, a vacuum inhabited by ghosts, functioning as yet another structure that reproduces within its enclosed emptiness the conditions, the death colonies, it seeks to evade. As such, nuclear deterrence by means of SDI, ostensibly a type of survival design, really is a death wish, prompting the acceleration of the arms race through endless and auto-immunitary weapons development.

Air death Though SDI, whose scale was reduced at the ‘end’ of the Cold War, was never formally abandoned nor fully implemented, it has nonetheless been adapted to suit the nature of threats now less clear in their provenance: regimes inferred as unstable or irrational, addressed as ‘rogue states’ and ‘states of concern’.152 The ‘question’ therefore, concerning missile defence, ‘appears not to be whether the US will deploy BMD’, a subject with growing numbers of bi-partisan support, ‘but when and what kind of systems it will use’.153 In his paper on strategic stability, Dean A. Wilkening explains the choice between, on the one hand, a limited design devised to protect the United States

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against ‘small accidental or unauthorised attacks by Russia, or accidental, unauthorised or intentional attacks by other states to which intercontinental ballistic missiles . . . might proliferate’ and, on the other, a theatre-missile defence aimed at shielding ‘allied cities and US troops from theatre-range missiles armed with NBC [Nuclear, Biological, Chemical] weapons’.154 The 1998 Rumsfeld Commission Report considered suspected programmes for weapons of mass destruction an urgent matter alongside general impressions of weaknesses in the US defence structure; on 13 December 2001 the United States unilaterally withdrew from the 1972 ABM Treaty, an accord that, ceasing to function as of 13 June 2002, ‘enshrines the past’.155 In the aftermath of ‘9/11’, the ‘enemy’, a sparsely used term in George W. Bush’s speech at National Defence University on 1 May 2001 because progressively more ephemeral and untraceable, escapes not simply definition but also detection. New York City, a target approached in stealth, and the ‘event’ of ‘September 11’ demonstrate that Full Spectrum Dominance, the idealized circumstances of total US military control extending over all territorialities, both actual and virtual, remains impossible. The dream of a sealed lifeworld inside or beyond the looking glass – the relay mirrors of fictions but also in reference to Strategic Air Command (SAC)’s plane of identical title, airborne at all times, and ‘[mirroring]’ ground-based C3I (Command, Communications, Control and Information)156 – maintains its dream-function without advancing towards realization. Instead the achievements, in terms of concrete formations – encompassing orbiting satellites, martial craft, bureaucratic organizations engaged in efforts to act against invisible threats from behind shrouds of secrecy – are limited to the creation of an environment that is radically armed but still not protected. Directed inwards, the state moves against its own subjects. Aside from the fantasies of total defence, the architectures and technologies interpreted as atomic shields and the equipment sheltering the weapons and their support mechanisms – BMEWS at the North Pole; the radomes designed by Buckminster Fuller, founder of two(faced) firms, Geodesics, Inc. for military contracts and Synergetics for civilian deals157 – carry possibilities of air warfare affecting US citizens. Speculations about subject interference initially emerged with the development of telegraphy and other electronic media devices, ‘[technologies] of the afterlife’158 that presuppose intersections between life and death-worlds until they coincide – murder in the air – by way of gas warfare and the air force of the ballistic missile. Involving a ‘very large transfer of energy’ and ‘breaking upward into this world’ in a ‘controlled burning’ before plummeting ‘downward again’ in an ‘uncontrolled explosion’, rockets indicate a ‘lack of symmetry’ that, in turn, ‘leads to speculating that a presence, analogous to the Aether, flows through time, as the Aether flows through space’.159 These special effects, bordering on the paranormal, as if violating or reversing the ‘natural’ order, form linkages to other bringers of light, energy systems like electricity which, in conjunction with X-rays at the turn of the nineteenth century, reveal dimensions of latency: the ‘long concealed, the unknown, the unconscious, the never-known, the never-noticed and the imperceptible’ put an end to conditions of innocent breathing and being.160 As the rocket, escaping perception, streaks through the air, it gathers adjoining spirits of correspondingly invasive (potentially atmoterrorist) technologies that, passing

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below the sightlines, are indicative of an environmental warfare entering the body and ‘streams’ of thought processes. These systems further offer extensions of the senses into the realm of the dead through codes of pounding; New York, after all, is epicentre both of disaster and of talking ghosts. The American Spiritualist Movement began in 1848 in Hydesville, New York; the practice of correspondence between the living and the lifeless also occurs by means of telegraph and telephone – the occult, according to Laurence Rickels, ‘dates from the onset of technologisation’, thus is ‘not as ancient or continuous as some . . . may think, but as far as our own reception goes, dates from the mid-nineteenth century, begins or is simulcast precisely with the invention of the new media technologies’.161 Such means of communication, whose very ‘liveness’ implies sentience, articulate technology as a locus classicus of haunting, capable of inducing death-like states, forms of paralysis or other such transitional, ‘transmarginal’ phases: fugues ‘past the borders of . . . waking selves’.162 Such systems constitute an atmosphere of radio waves and radiation penetrating a permeable, malleable corporality as zone of colonization: engineered or interfered subjectivities being-in a microwave world. Frequencies lying just below the infrared region on the electromagnetic spectrum, microwaves, ‘reflected by electrical conductors such as metal and by obstacles such as raindrops’, can be focused into ‘intense, compact, and highly directional beams by antennas and conveniently carried by waveguides’163; soon after their use in commercial broadcasting in the early 1930s, they find application in radar technology. Over the next few years, the S-Band, as the military radar’s initial range of 3,000 megacycles is termed, turned, with each increase in scope, each diminution in size, into X-Band, then K and K-2 Bands164; the changing designations are code words coordinating amplification – these obscure prefixes reflect the elusiveness of high energy transmissions. By the 1960s and 1970s a network of communications and surveillance satellites, tracking and scanning radars in addition to the various guidance systems for nuclear missiles and anti-missile missiles had come into existence; their electromagnetic emissions are for the most part invisible, their damages low level and long term. Instances of health hazards were initially neglected, then deliberately overlooked: the sterilizing effects of radar beams; headaches; dizziness; retinal pain developing, in due course, into cataracts, milky, opaque films that cover and blind the eyes; degrees of mental distress; and partial losses of memory that gather, like mist, about the brain. Yet under the ‘convenient umbrella’ of national security, such effects disappear into the data gaps of discontinued analyses, studies researching the ‘flaccid paralysis’ of irradiated rats, the ‘clouding of the sensorium’ observed in larger exposed animals; what remains are ‘subjective’ experiences in which radar interference, variously heard as a ‘buzzing, ticking, hissing, or knocking’ sound, comes to be the equivalent of a poltergeist.165 Air warfare includes ‘explicit-making military projects’166 creating an atmoterrorist climatology comprising brainwashing – CIA’s ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA researching processes of ‘depatterning’167 – through immobilizing drugs and electromagnetic fields generated by installations such as High Frequency Active Aurora Research Program (HAARP). A plant in South Central Alaska near the village of Gakona and ‘ostensibly a joint venture between the US Army and Air Force’,168

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HAARP’s website states that the facility studies ‘a small, limited portion of the ionosphere’ and is, consequently, ‘able to probe the nature of this dynamic medium, both in its naturally disturbed condition and when artificially stimulated, with the goal of being able to provide the fundamental understanding necessary to enhance the performance of [high-frequency communication] systems’.169 A planar array of antennas sketches ‘the parameters of future ionospheric warfare’170 through radiofrequency radiation spanning the 435-MHz range, supposedly the frequency of human consciousness; these militarily useful emissions expand the zone of warfare in which the environment itself is turned into a ‘super-wave weapon’.171 Totally militarized air is, according to Elaine Scarry, responsible for a series of plane crashes in the late 1990s: TWA 800, EgyptAir 990 and SwissAir 111 each got caught in an electronic battlefield shortly after their take-offs from JFK airport. On the evening of 17 July 1997, TWA 800, a Boeing 747 bound for Paris from New York, exploded into a giant fireball and fell into the Atlantic just off the coast of Long Island. In an article published in The New York Review of Books on 9 April 1998, Scarry considers a possibility that the inquiry into the fall of TWA 800 ignored, that is, the battle-space of the Long Island shoreline, whose ‘uniformity’ indicates that ‘the region itself – the environment external to the plane – should . . . be included among the causes to be investigated’.172 Over the course of a series of articles, Scarry discusses electromagnetic interference – the power levels of outside rather than internal sources also called High Intensity Radiated Fields, or High Intensity Radio Frequency (HIRFs) – emitted from either ‘huge ground transmitters such as radio, radar, and television antennas, or airborne transmitters such as high-powered radar and radio on military planes’.173 Of the latter, the ‘fixed’ transmitters, the masts and dishes stationed on earth, are easily avoided, because their locations are marked on aviation maps; ‘intermittent’ transmitters on the other hand, airborne devices on martial craft whose position is variable, can lead to disruptions in airplane navigation and communication mechanisms.174 Scarry argues that EMI ‘may also introduce a false command into the plane’s electrical system, suddenly instructing its rudder to move, or (at higher power levels) disrupting a plane’s control surfaces – its rudder and wing flaps – by burning out a circuit’.175 What happens here is the ‘explication’ of the background into the manifest,176 constituting a death-ray envelope: Directly overhead [TWA 800] was a Navy P3 Orion with its transponder turned off: it was 6,300 feet above the passenger plane and had intersected its longitude and latitude within seconds of the moment the catastrophe began. In the airspace beneath TWA 800 a Black Hawk helicopter and an HC-130 plane were flying at an altitude of 3,000 feet: they were five miles north of the commercial liner. A Coast Guard cutter rescue ship, the Adak, was somewhere on the sea below, its precise location in relation to the falling plane unspecified in the official record but given in news reports as nine to twelve miles south. One hundred and eighty-five miles to the southwest was an Aegis cruiser, the USS Normandy: that mileage places it off Maryland’s Eastern Shore. In addition to those five craft just named, five others were present, a fact first acknowledged in November 1996 by Rear Admiral

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Edward Kristensen who mentioned several military planes – other than the P3 – flying at altitudes above TWA 800 and one or more submarines eighty miles south, roughly midway between TWA 800 and the USS Normandy.177

In the subsequent articles, Scarry links up TWA 800 with Swissair 111 which crashed on 2 September 1998 and EgyptAir 990, whose fatal accident occurred on 31 October 1999, though the latter two flights present divergences from TWA 800’s system failure in terms of both the time and site of the crash.178 Nonetheless correspondences emerge between these disasters that are environmental: the aircraft carriers were unable to resist the assault of interfering stimuli taking place in military warning zones. Issued with the letter W and followed by a number, these pockets of air form rehearsal spaces in which the armed forces attend to littoral warfare in order to perfect the ‘ability to track a small flying object and, crucially, to hold the image of that flying object distinct from “the clutter” of civilian coastline life’.179 This ‘clutter’ includes civilian planes which are being monitored – particularly in relation to carriers like EgyptAir 990 – as ‘target[s] of observation’180 by, for example, the Fleet Area Control and Surveillance Facility in Virginia. An installation which examines ‘aircraft movements and coordinates assignments and [the] use of . . . offshore warning areas for air, surface, and subsurface units’, the facility’s ‘radar surveillance and radio communications provide air traffic control separation between high performance military aircraft and a high volume of commercial air traffic’.181 The plant’s abbreviation is often specified as FACSFAC VACAPES, but, throughout its internal documents and its communications with the Federal Aviation Authority, it identifies itself as ‘Giant Killer’, participating in ‘overthe-horizon’ assignments of targeting connected to satellite systems for Electronic Intelligence (Elint), whose task names tend to begin with the word ‘Radiant’.182 Elint creates a HIRF incident or death-ray atmosphere in which multiple vehicles ‘aspire to act as a single unified weapon’183; even ‘defensive’ networks – supersensory radars and sensing systems – become Luftwaffen in total war. Near the coast of New York, then, so often the site of reception/transmission for dream-shields, total environmental war generates the fatal character and terminal properties of the National Security State, still spectacularly unable to prevent stealth attacks. The enclosures, spherical or spectral, along the (nation) state’s borders, fail in their functions to protect what lies inside and instead turn against it in a process of auto-immunitary self-destruction. ‘9/11’ is a symptom of this impulse embodied, as Slavoj Žižek argues, in the figure of Colonel Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, presented not as the remainder of some barbaric past, but as the necessary outcome of Western power itself [.] Kurtz was the perfect soldier – as such, through his overidentification with the military power system, he turned into the excess which the system has to eliminate. The ultimate horizon of Apocalypse Now is this insight into how Power generates its own excess. . . .184

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What remains, in the end, in this metropolis of extreme visibility, is the invisible ‘explicated’ into the foreground, made apparent, paradoxically, by disembodied voices – John Adams’ opera On The Transmigration of Souls, composed to mark the first anniversary of the ‘9/11’ attacks, which, like Gerhard Richter’s September, refuses to embody185 – and the emptiness of ground zero, itself indicative of the empty centre of the state of exception. Whatever ‘defence’ mechanisms are at work to ‘safeguard’ US ‘democracy’ – a lethal confrontation abroad, where whole populations become insurgents, collateral damage – integrity is bound up with retreat into glass spheres or ‘domed-over cities’, an image which prompts, as ever, a return to Trinity. At 0.016 seconds and for a short while after, the first atomic bomb detonation (an implosion) yields a luminous globule, a dome of a smooth, opaque essence (Figure 1), before billowing out into a mushroom cloud. These techno-forms, physical and emblematic atomic shields, are conceptions of a dreamworld/death-world attempted to be achieved through dormant titans, capsuled in protective envelopes; essences that stage an invisible, immaterial attack disguised as protective armour; creations of a ‘shelter in time of disaster’186 all overlapping the logic of dreams with the imagination of total death. These auto-immunitary manifestations of so-called defence – technologized, fetishized, mythologized – refer to Freud’s pleasure principle, the wish to return to an inanimate state: underneath the glowing arcs of falling ICBMs exist only dead light, expressions of final inertia.

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Mobilization: Un/Endings

Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow ends with the ‘angelic visit’ of the 00000 at the Orpheus Theatre on Melrose, Los Angeles, but the ‘screaming [that] comes across the sky’1 and is heard at the start of the novel – coming after the blast because the rocket falls faster than sound – is inaudible now. The crash, this time, does not reverberate in the pages of the book, which finishes abruptly, with the following invitation or imperative: ‘Now everybody – .’2 The dash, as so often in this work, is indicative of disaster coming out of an ‘airless sky’; the detonation is framed by emptiness on both sides, by a screen that like a ‘dim page spread[s] before us, silent and white’.3 ‘We’ sit in the Orpheus Theatre when the ‘bright angel of death’ sweeps into the ‘darkening and awful expanse of screen’,4 page, space: the novel ends at a brink, with words and a dash plunging into an abyss. The movement from the blank tomb of the projection screen to blank page follows the arc of the rocket, the 00000, which instigates its designation in space – the device unfailingly approaches zero at the same time that it generates, in unending returns, stockpiles of text-machines, death machines. Pynchon’s dash, occurring at the end of his long novel, gestures towards that ‘critical place’ that Jacques Derrida talks about in relation to nuclear criticism, that is, the practice of deconstruction ‘watch[ed] over’ by the hypothesis of ‘remainderless destruction’, in whose ‘light, so to speak’, it becomes possible to recognize ‘the characteristic structures and historicity of the discourses, strategies, texts, or institutions to be deconstructed’.5 The point is not to declare (total) endings however; a conclusion would therefore be inappropriate as well as dangerous: to concur with premises of ‘endings’ is to adopt a vantage point which is oblivious to the continuum of war, perpetuated through the state of exception’s logic of open-ended, interminable military action. A philosophical discourse in response to, and reaction against, such implacable, limitless warfare – carried out through a ‘thanatopolitics’6 creating unliveable spaces by way of drones, ever-present, all-seeing and yet totally blind – has to call into question, interminably, the language that keeps legitimating war without end. If Rocket States is a book about ballistic dream-machines perpetuating the emergency state’s ‘ideology of the zero’, about the consumption of security and its technologized loving/haunting explored at hand of a Traum Deutung – thereby attentive to the swarming intensities that constitute technological projects – then what comes after its ‘end-point’ remains the dimensions of war, the ‘violent environmentality’7 of terrorism. All these words, war, terrorism, defence, security, democracy, demand interrogation, as it were, but not in terms of a practice that exists in the service of the ‘war on terror’, but resolutely against such scenes and instruments of torture: the limitlessness that is pursued in the restricted, ‘off-grid’ locations of detainee camps, in which the limits

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of law have fallen away,8 must be counteracted by an ethics of reading, a praxis of ‘uncompromising philosophical vigilance’,9 as Simon Critchley describes Derrida’s project: ‘deconstruction is justice’.10 That is Derrida’s injunction, justice beyond the law, because law, by necessity, is an ‘authorized force’ whose (international) authority is nonetheless circumvented in spaces of unaccountable power: a deconstructive interrogation/vigilance that always keeps ‘in mind the risks spread by [these] word[s], whether [they] be the risk of an obscure, substantialist, occulto-mystic concept or the risk of giving authorization to violent, unjust, arbitrary force’.11 It is violent, then, but its violence must not be silenced, and it is also an intervention resulting from the destabilizing process that forms a course of thinking/writing as endless critique, aware of its complicity, in the prevailing discourses – ‘I must be capable, up to a certain point, of understanding the contract and conditions of the law’12 – and from there begin its operations directed inside and against such systems as well as against itself. In his essay on ‘9/11’, Derrida writes that, [r]eflection (of what I would call a “deconstructive” type) should . . . , it seems to me, without diminishing or destroying these axioms and principles, question and refound them, endlessly refine and universalize them, without becoming discouraged by the aporias such work must necessarily encounter.13

Concerning the present study of nuclear missiles, this degree of appropriation consists of accepting the rocket’s fetishized mythology of shelter, the poetics of its techno-spatial dreamworlds doubling up as deathkingdoms, thereby engaging with the rhetoric of ‘defensive’ strategies articulated through weaponry. To ignore the discourse of shelter would be to absolutely accept that, according to Peter Sloterdijk, it is ‘too late to dream ourselves back to a place under celestial domes whose interiors would permit domestic feelings of order’,14 when Trinity’s orb (Figure 1) configures technology as cosmology: the nuclear weapon, ‘oh, so phallic’, promises ‘spheric’ protection. Phantasmal though it may be, this figure, immobilized shot of a technologized dome, epitomizes an emergency state imaginary dreaming itself into inertia: a techno-space of privilege and ‘white latitudes’15 for which the outside is resolutely other, a monstrous externality always configured as target. Trinity, and the nuclear missile by extension, is indicative of a dream of enclosure, whose impossibility, phantasm, hypothesis nonetheless guides strategic thinking: the fiction of the shield is what yields up an analysis of missile culture as at once present and absent, whose objective is precisely that, to return back to a future encasement, protected against stimuli from the ‘airforce’ of the other, outside. The focus on the auto-immunitary process or death drive that defines this nuclear order reflects the narcissistic closed-world strategies designed to vaporize the other and therefore an attempt to interrogate the fantasies of self-preservation that continue to endure and justify the constant upgrading of the Cold War nucleus. This investigation of inward-turning energies consequently functions ‘in the name of ’16 an ethical intervention made possible through an acknowledgement of complicity and responsibility, which is ours, ‘we’, who have ‘always been at the movies (haven’t we?)’,

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sitting ‘inside these walls’,17 this silence of dogmatic language, the ‘ritual incantations’18 that enforce the ‘degree zero’ of laws that are always unjust. ‘The justice of law, justice as law is not justice. Laws are not just as laws. One obeys them not because they are just but because they have authority,’19 exercised and executed through a superpower that masks and disperses itself but is nevertheless also monumental. Economic, political, technological, this (phantom) power commands space, endo-colonially and neoimperially: total visibility renders the world transparent, but this ‘totalizing eye’ relies at once on the recognition of its force and its invisibility. The machine that inaugurated the twenty-first century was the civilian airplane, homeland stealth technology aimed at its own war machine, the techno-sublimity of the skyscraper, read rocket, acting as provocation; the force it occupies in the imaginary, possessed by its fantastic violence, continues to be titanic. The ballistic missile has become a symbol of an order whose totality is, now more than ever, rhizomatic, deterritorialized, supremely mobile, a superpower that composes, decomposes as it keeps waging a war of dreams, a ‘war on terror’. Yet pure war – conducted under the pretence of preventing the assemblage of weapons of mass destruction, pre-emptive strikes against future enemies, those ‘civilians’ that are as yet uncommitted but already condemned20 – is no longer exclusively conducted by way of the ICBM, whose massive deployment fantasy structured the world even as it threatened to rip it apart. The tactics (elusive and spectacular; after the bomb, all technology refers to its ‘presence’)21 that named ‘September 11’ already indicates that this ‘thing’ of the persisting war is a ‘matter’ of the aircraft, as if effectuating a return to modernity or, rather, operating under the auspices to introduce modernity/democracy/the end of history to an enemy/other ostensibly living in the past.22 According to Sloterdijk, modernity began on 22 April 1915, when a German regiment launched the first large-scale gas attack against French-Canadian troops at Ypres and thereby introduced the environment into battle: the background became ‘explicated’.23 From then on, Sloterdijk argues, war involved targeting the physical surroundings, transformed into deadly cell climates through chemical extermination, ‘thermoterrorism’ (the Allied bombings of German cities between 1943 and 1945) and ‘radioterrorism’ ushered in by the atom bomb.24 This environment is totally catastrophic, an unliveable death-world that is now mainly generated through drone strikes in a global ‘war on terror’: drones are air-breathing, air-eating, not ballistic, devices bringing ‘modernity’ to ‘rogue’ states. The threat is no longer attributed to or carried out by the nuclear weapon, but by networked systems that refer to its mythology, its sublime technology: American superpower operating through multitudes of ‘defensive’ arrangements, disembodying or progressively phantomizing what is, regardless of its disappearance, an immensity, an immense violence. Bruno Latour talks about the ‘gestation’ of technological projects in terms of realizing, derealizing movements; they come into being or into view before vanishing again, a process particularly apt to describe drone technology, remotely piloted aircraft or unmanned aerial vehicles that ‘bond and circulate’25 in environments with which they engage in so as to turn them lethal. In Insect Media, Jussi Parikka suggests that a new mode of ‘being-in’ might emerge through a ‘functional circle’26 incorporating

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an entity, no longer defined as discrete, into its surroundings in a dynamic enterprise that does not articulate self-enclosure, but openness, a folding of inside and outside. His book is concerned with the possibilities of a ‘weird futurity’27 generated due to modes of perception that fuse so-called human and non- or inhuman perspectives, but whatever radical possibilities such perspectives might offer, this ontology of enmeshing characterizes the drone, not, after all, ‘unmanned’ but integrated with remote operators, interlinked with an environment as battlefield. Derek Gregory suggests that this type of warfare, conducted at a remove, rather than leading to modes of detachment actually gives rise to a ‘re-enchantment’ of the world: drones, ‘manned’ by personnel interpellated as warrior-pilots, cause ‘a special kind of intimacy’ – a dream of interconnectivity, of clean, total war and total vision in which the subject lovingly integrates with the predator-machine.28 As a networked, swarming entity, the drone acts in a ‘functional circle’ of love and death distribution; the ‘weird futurity’ that Parikka imagines is the ‘face’ of the American war-thing, the impassive face of the fly.29 In Afghanistan, villagers have their own name for predator drones, ‘unki’,30 meaning the buzzing of flies, an army of flies for which the proximity, and not the distance, of the enemy/non-combatant – ‘obdurately Other’31 – threatens a world order ‘friendly’ to US security principles and swarm capitalism. If Pynchon begins Gravity’s Rainbow with a ‘screaming’ that ‘comes across the sky’ and ‘cosmic bombs’ disappear the world in a flash of blinding light – ‘producing at once an optics and archive of annihilation’32 – the prevailing war is now guided by dreammachines that hum, ever-presently, in the air, carrying into practice apparently ‘surgical’ precision strikes. The angelic, transcendent, sublime ballistic missile – still invested with the promise of reaching the stars and/or the fantasy of a spectacular, messianic/ orgasmic annihilation – in many ways seems the opposite of the drone, ‘anti-angel’ because mundane, used in daily acts of terror.33 Anti-angelic though they may be, the resounding multiplicities of drones imply the rocket, regardless of how differently they appear out of, or forever hover in, airspace: their dynamics comes from superpower, full spectrum dominance, the limitless spatiality of war or perimeter of ‘defence’ that dictates that ‘everything is dangerous, all of life must be known and intervened in without limit or remainder’.34 Strategies of ‘remainderless destruction’ persist then, as does a ‘thanatopolitics’ in which the rocket functions as more spirit than matter, a ghost calling to the ghosts in which it is restructured and which continue to execute the state of exception’s ‘ideology of the zero’ and dome-land security.35 Rocket States, consequently, hopes to function in a critical ‘tradition’ or network of critical thinking without horizon – if war is illimitable, then critique cannot falter at some limit, a ‘solid front’,36 but must be equally interminable – whose primary concern is to engage with security culture, whether materialized through the nuclear-armed ICBM or antiangelic devices: ‘we’ are subjects and we challenge the law, beyond the law.37

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Notes Introduction 1 Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (London: Vintage, 2000), 566. 2 Ibid. 3 Jacques Derrida, ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides’, in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, eds. Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, and Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 94. 4 Walter Benjamin and Rolf Tiedeman, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), x and 152. 5 Ibid., 152. 6 Bruno Latour, Aramis, or, the Love of Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 18 and 23. 7 Latour, Aramis, 24, 85 and 222. 8 Ibid., 23. 9 Ibid., 22. 10 Ibid., 173 and 174. 11 It is actually Norbert H. who ‘speaks’ instead of Aramis, but the point is that this distinction between man and machine is not upheld: it vanishes in these sections. For the time being, I refer to these passages as if emanating from Aramis exclusively. 12 Ibid., 213. 13 Ibid., 297. 14 Ibid., 201. 15 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Knopf, 1964), 80. 16 Latour, Aramis, 149. 17 Ibid., 79 and 149. 18 Ibid., 249. 19 Latour, Aramis, 24. 20 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 46. 21 Ibid., 11. 22 Latour, Aramis, 149. 23 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 465. 24 It is interesting to note that in Pynchon’s case, the discourse marker ‘oh’ is deployed ironically, in opposition to how Millet uses it: in her title, ‘oh’ regains an element of romanticism that entirely fits with a tender (gadget) love whose consequences, nonetheless, are disastrous. I would like to thank Graham Williams for his thoughts on the subject. 25 Lydia Millet, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2005), 489. 26 Latour, Aramis, 29.

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27 Ibid., 28. 28 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 85. 29 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 1. 30 Ibid., 7. 31 Ibid., 5 and 7. 32 Brian Massumi, ‘Translator’s Foreword’, in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, eds. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, trans. Brian Massumi (London, New York: Continuum, 2004), xiii. 33 Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2004), 121. 34 Paul Virilio uses the word ‘domology’ in his work on the ‘insignificance of the territory’ in favour of speed. See Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006). Consumer capitalism of course also so easily maps onto this practice as a ‘vast, supple, endlessly fissile system’ as opposed to ‘holding the fort’, for example, recognizable in terms of an ‘immobilization model’. See, for example, Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (Winchester; Washington: Zero Books, 2009), 29 and 46. 35 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 181. 36 Jacques Derrida, ‘The Last Interview’, Le Monde, 19 August 2004. Accessible online: http://m.friendfeed-media.com/1a5bc7e65ea7a00a0fcfda2ad242360ed9f2d3c4, accessed on 27/07/13. 37 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 21. 38 Ibid., 20 and 109. 39 Michel Foucault, ‘Preface’, Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, xiv. 40 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 92. 41 Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 46. 42 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 540. On the correlation between three ‘phenomenologies of the inside’, for example, psychoanalysis, X-rays and cinema, see Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic light (Shadow Optics) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 43 Benjamin, Arcades Project, ix. 44 Latour, Aramis, 6 and 10. 45 Benjamin, Arcades Project, xi. 46 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 13. 47 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 84. 48 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 92. 49 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 13. 50 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 92. 51 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 37. 52 Jacques Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives)’. Diacritics, 14, 2, Nuclear Criticism (Summer 1984a): 23. 53 Latour, Aramis, 45. 54 See Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 55 Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’, 23. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 Paul Virilio and Sylve`re Lotringer, Pure War (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997).

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59 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 4. This is what they write: ‘A book is itself a little machine; what is the relation (also measurable) of this literary machine to a war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine, etc.—and an abstract machine that sweeps them along?’ 60 Latour, Aramis, 222–3. 61 Laurence A. Rickels, The Vampire Lectures (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), ix and xvii. 62 Ibid., ix. 63 Ibid., xii. 64 Latour, Aramis, 207. 65 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 50. 66 Ibid., 45–7. 67 Ibid., 26. 68 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 2. 69 Ibid., 2, 12 and 13. 70 Ibid., 12. 71 Jean Baudrillard, America (London; New York: Verso, 1988), 2. 72 Ibid., 30. 73 Sigmund Freud et al., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works (London: Vintage, 1953), 9. 74 Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, 62. 75 Baudrillard, America, 35 and 43. 76 Ibid., 2. 77 Virilio, Speed and Politics, 144. See also 142. 78 Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, 49. 79 Baudrillard, America, 7. 80 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 93. 81 Baudrillard, America, 24. 82 Virilio, Speed and Politics, 136. 83 Baudrillard, America, 30. 84 Ibid., 31 and 45. 85 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 3. 86 Ibid., 150, 218 and 760. 87 Virilio, Speed and Politics, 149. 88 Baudrillard, America, 27. 89 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 41 and 48. 90 Baudrillard, America, 7. 91 Ibid., 6–7 and 34. 92 Virilio, Speed and Politics, 145. 93 Baudrillard, America, 4. 94 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 258. 95 Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, 14. 96 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 363. 97 Ibid., 260.

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98 Baudrillard, America, 30. 99 Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 60. 100 Peter B. Hales, Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 301. 101 Agamben, State of Exception, 60. 102 Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), 1008. 103 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 159. 104 This is a reference to Don DeLillo’s Underworld, which traces correlations between nuclear weapons, and the ‘sleek metallic shimmer’ of condoms, or Jell-O, the ‘vividly attractive’ chemical processes that can all be linked back to the development of the atom bomb, in one way or another. Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997), 514. 105 Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 1. 106 Ibid., 8. 107 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London; New York: Verso, 1989), 4. 108 Edwards, The Closed World, 10. 109 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 728. 110 Edwards, The Closed World, 12. 111 Derrida, ‘Autoimmunity’, 94. 112 Ibid., 98 and 99. 113 Agamben, State of Exception, 1 and 3. 114 Ibid., 3. See also Ben Anderson, ‘Facing the Future Enemy: US Counterinsurgency Doctrine and the Pre-Insurgent’. Theory, Culture, Society, 28 (7–8): 216–40. 115 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 294. 116 Agamben, State of Exception, 24 and 51. 117 Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 673. 118 Ibid., 671 (emphasis original). 119 Hales, Atomic Spaces, 360. 120 Ezio Manzini and Antonio Petrillo, ‘Les Modes de la Transparence’, in Traverses 46 (Paris: Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou Centre de Création Industrielle, March 1989), 10 and 12. My translation. 121 Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilisation (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 127–8. 122 Ibid., 126. 123 Rickels, Vampire Lectures, 13. 124 Jacques Derrida, Glas, Collection Diagraphe (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1974), 7. 125 Lippit, Atomic Light, 4. 126 Claude Bragdon, Architecture and Democracy (Teddington: Echo Library, 2006), 3 and 19. 127 Baudrillard, America, 30. 128 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 723. 129 Ibid., 722. 130 Stephan Trüby, ‘5 Codes: On Architecture, Paranoia and Risk’, in 5 Codes: Architecture, Paranoia and Risk in Times of Terror, ed. Igmade, trans. Michael Robinson (Basel, Boston and Berlin: Birkhauser, 2006), 32. The term has a doubled meaning, that of protection, yet also of release.

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131 Agamben, State of Exception, 23. 132 The phrase stems from Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 133 Hales, Atomic Spaces, 3. 134 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 724. 135 DeLillo, Underworld, 514. 136 Jacques Derrida, ‘Of An Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy’. Oxford Literary Review, 6 (December 1984b): 22 and 23. 137 Ibid., 24. 138 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 760. 139 Esther Leslie, Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (London: Reaktion, 2005), 9. 140 Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’, 29. 141 Ibid. 142 Derrida, ‘Autoimmunity’, 92. 143 Ibid., 94–101. 144 Ibid., 86 and 100. 145 Ibid., 87. 146 Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London; New York: Verso, 2002), 27. 147 Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, trans. George Collins (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), 11 and 12. 148 Adam Piette, The Literary Cold War, 1945–Vietnam (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 2. 149 The reference, here, is to Louise K. Wilson’s A Record of Fear, in which Orford Ness, part of the UK’s Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE), ‘temporarily played host to a series of audio and video works exploring aspects of broadcast and transmission’. See http://www.lkwilson.org/, accessed on 14/08/13. 150 Latour, Aramis, 173. 151 Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, 38. 152 Ibid., 39. 153 Ibid., 46. 154 Piette, The Literary Cold War, 2. 155 Ibid. 156 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 16 and 19. 157 A word that appears in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake but whose appearance, here, is due to Warren Steele’s usage of the term in Body of Glass: Cyborgs and the Mirrored Self (PhD. Diss., University of Glasgow, 2007), 9. 158 Virilio, Pure War, 95. 159 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 566. 160 ‘Amber Waves of Grain Installation’ is actually the title of this exhibit. Robert Del Tredici, At Work in the Fields of the Bomb (London: HARRAP, 1987), 127. 161 Jonathan Schell, ‘Introduction’, At Work in the Fields of the Bomb, x. 162 Ibid. 163 Michel Foucault et al., Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78 (Basingstroke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 201. 164 Latour, Aramis, 81. 165 Tom Vanderbilt, Survival City: Adventures among the Ruins of Atomic America, 1st edn (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), 39. 166 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 297.

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167 Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 1. 168 See Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’, 28. 169 Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 17. 170 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 135. 171 Ibid., 521. 172 Ibid. 173 Herman Melville, Moby Dick (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1992), 160. 174 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 400. 175 Ibid., 166. 176 John Beck, Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power and Waste in Western American Literature (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 43. 177 Vanderbilt, Survival City, 206. 178 Gender politics, though never explicitly addressed, is clearly archived in the book as a whole, in which references to ‘man’, etc., are left in quotation marks, as signs, as it were, of silent deconstruction.

Chapter 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13

14

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (London: Vintage, 2000), 59. Ibid., 139. Ibid., 285. Ibid., 49, 145 and 167. Peter B. Hales, Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 1. William L. Laurence, Dawn over Zero: The Story of the Atomic Bomb (London: Museum Press, 1947), 3–4. Ibid., 10. Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997), 51. Ibid., 402. Jonathan Schell, ‘Introduction’, in At Work in the Fields of the Bomb, ed. Robert Del Tredici (London: HARRAP, 1987), x and xi. This is a reference to Charles Sheeler’s painting, Classic Landscape, whose still life aestheticizes the machine object. On Sheeler’s work, see Mark Rawlinson, Charles Sheeler: Modernism, Precisionism and the Borders of Abstraction (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007). Ibid., xi. In the movie The Thing from Another World (1951), which relocates John W. Campbell Jr’s story ‘Who Goes There?’ from Antarctica to the Arctic to tap into Cold War concerns of Soviet North Pole militarization, the alien entity is a vegetable matter that one of the scientists refers to as a ‘super carrot’. The linkage to the atom bomb is made via Dr Carrington, who works at the North Pole but also at Bikini; he plants and feeds the seeds of ‘super carrots’ with units of plasma from the outpost’s blood bank. The Thing from another World, dir. by Christian Nyby, 1951. (DVD, UCA, 2008). Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 48 and 138.

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15 See Latour, Aramis, 173. 16 Jacques Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives)’. Diacritics, 14, 2, Nuclear Criticism (Summer 1984a): 28. 17 Ibid. 18 Stephen King, Danse Macabre (London: Macdonald, 1981), 22. 19 Adam Piette, The Literary Cold War, 1945–Vietnam (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 3. 20 Ibid., 2. 21 Ibid., 12. 22 Ibid., 94–5. 23 DeLillo, Underworld, 88 and 287. 24 Stephen King, It (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1986), 505. 25 King, Danse Macabre, 15. 26 Ibid., 21 and 23. 27 Ibid., 25. 28 John Sears, Stephen King’s Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), 97. 29 Ibid., 83 and 96. 30 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 1. 31 Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’, 29. 32 King, Danse Macabre, 297. 33 Ibid., 298. 34 Roger Luckhurst, The Shining (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 11. 35 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 3. 36 Luckhurst, The Shining, 10. 37 Derrida, Archive Fever, 27. 38 Sears, Stephen King’s Gothic, 3 and 170–1. 39 Derrida, Archive Fever, 1. 40 Sears, Stephen King’s Gothic, 175 and 176. 41 Luckhurst, The Shining, 17. 42 King, The Shining, 228. 43 Derrida, Archive Fever, 87. 44 Ibid. 45 King, The Shining, 391. 46 Ibid., 164, 211 and 306. 47 Derrida, Archive Fever, 39 and 84. 48 Luckhurst, The Shining, 52, 56 and 73. 49 King, The Shining, 310. 50 Derrida, Archive Fever, 22. 51 Ibid., 7. 52 King, The Shining, 214. 53 Derrida, Archive Fever, 3. 54 Ibid., 11–12 and 20. 55 DeLillo, Underworld, 791. 56 ‘All the shit is transmuted to gold,’ writes Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow, 440. 57 Piette, The Literary Cold War, 97.

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58 Stephen King, The Shining (London: Hodder, 2011), 22. 59 Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 25. 60 Sears, Stephen King’s Gothic, 165. Sears talks about genre as monstrous, interstitial, always shifting. See, for example, 82–4. 61 Ibid., 83. 62 Stephen King, The Tommyknockers (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2008), 225. On ‘writing shit’, see Sears, Stephen King’s Gothic, 184. 63 King, The Shining, 146 and 251. 64 Ibid., 147. 65 Ibid., 169. 66 Derrida, Archive Fever, 91. 67 King, The Shining, 180 and 201. 68 Ibid., 176. 69 Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London: Verso, 2002), 79. 70 Henry James, The American Scene (London: Granville, 1987), 73. See also Jefferson Williamson, who agrees with James by writing that ‘our ornate hotels symbolize and typify the spirit of America’. The American Hotel: An Anecdotal History (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1930), 4–5. And see Siegfried Kracauer on the hotel lobby, a piece originally part of his analysis on the detective novel, in which he discusses both the unity, or totality, of aesthetic constructs and a dispersal into atoms – subject matters that emerge a little later in this chapter. ‘The Hotel Lobby’, in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 173–85. See also Marc Katz, ‘The Hotel Kracauer’. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 11, 2 (1999): 134–52. 71 Paul Groth, Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States (Berkeley, LA; London: University of California Press, 1994), 30. 72 Williamson, The American Hotel, 9. 73 Elaine Denby, Grand Hotels: Reality and Illusion (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), 33. 74 See Derrida, Archive Fever, 2–3. 75 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (London: Penguin, 1982), 269. 76 James, The American Scene, 73, 75 and 76. 77 Ibid., 77. 78 Ibid. 79 Groth, Living Downtown, 46. 80 King, The Shining, 25. 81 Ibid., 209–10. 82 Sigmund Freud et al., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works (London: Vintage, 1953), 9. 83 The Shining, dir. by Stanley Kubrick, 1980 (DVD, Warner Home Video, 2001). 84 Ibid., 282. 85 The sequence I am describing here – the father smashing his son into a ‘spongy, muddy ruin’ – is in fact Jack’s vision, not Danny’s, who in this instance sees a boy and a girl engaged in mutual fellatio (283). Jack’s hallucination occurs a little later in the novel, just after his discussion with Grady, the former caretaker, on the need for Danny and Wendy’s ‘correction’: ‘One of the figures [in the clockface] was a man standing on tiptoe, with what looked like a tiny club clasped in his hands. The other

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Notes

86

87 88 89 90 91

92 93 94 95 96

97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107

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was a small boy wearing a dunce cap. . . . The two figures slipped onto the opposing ends of a steel axis bar. . . . The steel mallet in the clockwork daddy’s hands came down on the boy’s head. The clockwork son crumbled forward. The mallet rose and fell, rose and fell. . . . A spot of red flew up against the inside of the glass dome.’ King, The Shining, 331–2. For references to Kubrick’s other movies in relation to The Shining, see Fredric Jameson, ‘Historicism in The Shining’, 1981. Available online: http://www.visualmemory.co.uk/amk/doc/0098.html/, accessed on 13/12/13. Jameson, ‘Historicism in The Shining’, 6. Ibid., 4. King, The Shining, 285. Ibid., 319. King, The Shining, 322. The sequence of a speeding up of time is made especially clear in Kubrick’s movie, which moves from months to days to hours. See Thomas Allen Nelson’s excellent essay on The Shining in Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 197–231. Danny initially divides ‘all things’ at the Overlook into ‘two categories. The elevator, the basement, the playground, Room 217, and the Presidential Suite . . . – those places were “unsafe.” Their quarters, the lobby, and the porch were “safe.”’ However, as the Hotel seeps into Jack, no place remains ‘safe’ (282). Sears, Stephen King’s Gothic, 178–9. Poe, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, 273. King, The Shining, 376. James, The American Scene, 73. Marc Katz, ‘The Hotel Kracauer’, 137. Katz notes that, ‘[b]eginning at the turn of the century and lasting well into the 20s, hotel construction had undergone a tremendous proliferation across Europe and the U.S. Hotels came to resemble cities in microcosm, vertical cities housing laundries, valet services, barbers, gymnasiums, travel offices, drug stores, libraries, music rooms, baggage rooms, automobile fleets, . . . swimming pools, clothing stores, banks, florists, gift shops, screening rooms, medical services, convention halls, newsstands, mail services, roof gardens, and ballrooms. . . . Like the self-contained superblock, the privatized space of the metropolitan hotel could be said to have turned its back on the city.’ Yet, so Katz continues, ‘[t]he hotel was not just an airbrushed city within the city; it also sold the city outside, the dirty city’ (137), thus linking them both. James, The American Scene, 71–2. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 72 and 73. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 77. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 87. Ibid., 93. King, The Shining, 25. Raye Carleson Ringholz, Uranium Frenzy: Saga of the Nuclear West, Rev and expanded edn (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2002), 5. Ibid., ix. Michael A. Amundson, Yellowcake Towns: Uranium Mining Communities in the American West (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2002), 2 and 8.

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108 Ibid., 7. 109 Ringholz, Uranium Frenzy, 2 and 5. 110 Eric W. Mogren, Warm Sands: Uranium Mill Tailings Policy in the Atomic West, 1st edn (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002), 2, 3 and 48. 111 Alex Keller, The Infancy of Atomic Physics: Hercules in his Cradle (Oxford; New York: Clarendon Press, 1983), 10. 112 Quoted in Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 151. 113 Ibid. 114 Frederick Soddy, The Interpretation of Radium ([S.I.]: John Murray, 1909), 10. 115 Ibid., 3, 27 and 41. 116 Ibid., 169. 117 Ibid., 169 and 185. 118 US Atomic Energy Commission, ‘Atomic Energy Act of 1946’, accessed (on 13/12/13) through the US Department of Energy website: http://www.ch.doe.gov/ html/site_info/atomic_energy.htm 119 On this note, see Eileen Welsome, The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War (New York: Dial, 1999). 120 See Mogren, Warm Sands, 117–25. 121 Ibid., 49. On the duplicity of the AEC and the ‘golden promises’ of the atom, see Stewart L. Udall’s The Myths of August. His book investigates the damages of uranium mining on the Navajo community, for which he acted, after leaving office in 1969, as a personal injury lawyer. Stewart L. Udall, The Myths of August: A Personal Exploration of our Tragic Cold War Affair with the Atom (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994). 122 Soddy, The Interpretation of Radium, 27. 123 Ibid., 174. 124 Ibid., 182. 125 Ibid. 126 Quoted in Mogren, Warm Sands, 19. 127 King, The Shining, 148. 128 Reyner Banham, Age of the Masters (N.p.: Architectural Press, 1975), 89. 129 Ibid. 130 King, The Shining, 148. 131 See Derrida, Archive Fever, 20. 132 See Sears, Stephen King’s Gothic, 53–79. 133 King, The Shining, 258. 134 Ibid., 377. 135 Ibid., 35 and 322. 136 See Sears, Stephen King’s Gothic, 187. 137 King, The Shining, 287. 138 Ibid., 319 and 400. 139 Ibid., 201 and 306. 140 Isabella Bird, Adventures in the Rocky Mountains (London: Penguin Books, 2007), 17. 141 King, The Shining, 35. 142 Luckhurst, The Shining, 12 and 16. 143 Ibid., 15. 144 Sears, Stephen King’s Gothic, 189.

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Notes 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152

153 154 155 156 157

158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167

135

Ibid., 243 and 326. Ibid., 345. King, Danse Macabre, 301. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 74 and 75. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 184. Derrida, Archive Fever, 12. King, The Tommyknockers, 660 and 810. King, The Shining, 116. Wendy’s sentiment recalls Friedrich Kittler’s analysis of the typewriter, a ‘discursive machine gun . . . whose basic action not coincidentally consists of strikes and triggers [that proceed] in automated and discrete steps, as does ammunitions transport in a revolver and machine-gun’. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 191. Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Network 1800/1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). King, The Shining, 392. See Derrida, Archive Fever, 22. King, The Shining, 150. Shirley A. Fry, ‘Studies of US Radium Dial Workers: An Epidemiological Classic’. Radiation Research, 150, 5, Supplement: Madame Curie’s Discovery of Radium (1898): A Commemoration by Women in Radiation Sciences (November 1998): S22–23. See also Welsome, The Plutonium Files, 47–50. King, The Shining, 123. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 397. Sears, Stephen King’s Gothic, 94. Luckhurst, The Shining, 91. King, The Shining, 223. Ibid. Ibid., 147 and 223. Poe, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, 273. King, The Shining, 223.

Chapter 2 1 Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (London: Vintage, 2000), 279. 2 Michael J. Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era (New York, etc: The Free Press, 1995), 202. 3 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 294. 4 Pynchon writes, ‘Is your IG to be the very model of nations?’ Gravity’s Rainbow, 566. The notion of ‘incipient totalitarianism’ comes from Dale Carter, The Final Frontier: The Rise and Fall of the American Rocket State (London & New York: Verso, 1988), 8. 5 Ibid., 294. 6 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 1. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 23 and 24.

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9 Ibid., 39. 10 Ibid., 6. 11 Derrida uses the word ‘disadjusted’ in Spectres of Marx, where he writes that it functions according to a ‘dys- of negative opposition and dialectical disjunction, but at the same time without certain joining or interminable conjunction’. See Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (New York; London: Routledge, 1994), 20. 12 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 559. 13 Thomas Pynchon, V. (London: Vintage, 2000), 70. 14 Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (London: Vintage, 1998), 141. 15 Agamben, State of Exception, 51. 16 China Miéville describes the ‘Weird’ as a genre of writing whose ‘nonpareil iteration . . . is the tentacle’, something formless, soft, yielding, excessively tactile, and notes that this type of genre/being problematizes ontology. See China Miéville, ‘M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire: Weird; Hauntological: Versus and/or and and/or or?’ originally published in Collapse IV, reprinted for Weird Fiction Review, 29 November 2011: http://weirdfictionreview.com/2011/11/m-r-james-and-thequantum-vampire-by-china-mieville/, accessed on 30/08/13. 17 Walter Benjamin and Rolf Tiedeman, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 87 and 88. 18 Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 20. 19 Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2004), 123. 20 Ibid., 96. 21 Ibid., 107. 22 Ibid., 107 and xiv. 23 Ibid., 100. 24 Craig Miner, West of Wichita: Settling the High Plains of Kansas 1865–1890 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986), 7. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. On the dividing line and its effects on settlers, see also Fred A. Shannon, The Farmer’s Last Frontier: Agriculture 1860–1897 (New York; Toronto: Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., 1945), 149 and Richard Lingeman, Small Town America: A Narrative History 1620–The Present (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980), who writes that the eastern parts the 98th meridian crosses are good farming regions, but generally the meridian mark[s] the beginning of a significant decline in rainfall. (239) Another set of lines, or tracks, promotes this area for settlement in the first place: since ‘land-grant railroads, somewhat more than other lines, were built through undeveloped areas and were financed in part by mortgages on their grants, which could be retired only through the sale of lands, the railroads undertook sale promotion and colonisation activities on an extensive scale to bring in purchasers for their lands and farmers to produce traffic for their lines,’ writes Paul W. Gates in The Farmer’s Age: Agriculture 1815–1860 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1960), 184–5. 27 O. E. Rölvaag, Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie (London: Ernest Benn Ltd., 1927), 3. For descriptions of the Great Plains as ocean, see Walter Prescott Webb’s The Great Plains (Boston, New York, Chicago, London etc: Ginn & Company, 1931) and Horace Greeley’s Recollections of a Busy Life (New York: J. B. Ford and Company,

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Notes

28 29 30

31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46

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1868). In America, Baudrillard writes that ‘the secret of this whole stretch of country is perhaps that it was once an underwater relief and has retained the surrealist qualities of an ocean bed in the open air’. Jean Baudrillard, America (London; New York: Verso, 1988), 3. See also Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, where Perry Smith, while staring at the Plains, keeps dreaming of ‘drifting downward through strange waters, of plunging towards a green sea-dusk’, towards ‘a drowned cargo of diamonds and pearls, heaping caskets of gold’. (London: Penguin Books, 1966), 28. Rölvaag, Giants in the Earth, 6. Ibid., 13 and 38. On the ‘wasteland’ imaginary, see, for example, John Beck, Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Literature, Postwestern horizons (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). See also Peter B. Hales, Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997). Jean Baudrillard, America (London; New York: Verso, 1988), 63. On subjectivity and space, see Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). See Beck, Dirty Wars, but also Hales, Atomic Spaces. Baudrillard, America, 5. Ibid., 7. Quoted in Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (Boston, New York, Chicago, London etc: Ginn & Company, 1931), 159. Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life (New York: J. B. Ford and Company, 1868), 362. Eugene W. Hollon, The Great American Desert then and now (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 4. ‘ The term “deficient” – at least in relation to the Great Plains – is “relative,” ’ notes Webb: it is ‘coined or adopted by a people from a wetter region. Had the Great Plains been taken over by a people from the desert, another term, expressing the opposite meaning, would no doubt have been applied. The Spaniards, for example, said less about the aridity of this region than the Anglo-Americans.’ Webb, The Great Plains, 19 (fn). Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 723. Rölvaag, Giants in the Earth, 32. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (London: Penguin Books, 1977), 12. Rölvaag, Giants in the Earth, 22. Tim Turner, ‘Sod Houses in Nebraska’. Bulletin of the Association for Preservation Technology, 7, 4 (1975): 20 and 21. For more information on sod house construction, see Richard Lingeman, Small Town America: A Narrative History 1620–The Present (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980), 241–2. Rölvaag, Giants in the Earth, 50 and 212. Loren Baritz, ‘The Idea of the West’. The American Historical Review, 66, 3 (April 1961): 618. Stephen King, The Stand (London: Hodder & Stoughton: 1990), 713. In this book that keeps referring to adjectives indicative of light and fire, Trashcan Man, a pyromaniac, imagines Cibola as well as a ‘Great Burning’, first of Chicago, next of the whole ‘country in flames [,] [c]ities going up like bombs [,] [c]ultivated fields drawn in lines of fire’ (714). In his dreams, which, in moments of ‘polar thought’ (712) he

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47 48 49

50 51 52

53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

Notes fears to be ‘a mirage’ (713), Trashcan Man sees ‘trucks loaded with pressure bombs and Teller mines and plastic explosive; flame throwers and flares and heat-seeking missiles; grenades and machine guns and rocket launchers’ (718). As Las Vegas disappears in a flash of atomic light at the end of this long novel, Trashcan’s visions of Cibola correspond to an underground military installation, whose gold, of course, is contained in a nuclear device. Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (London: Penguin Books, 1966), 28. See, for example, Bernard B. Smyth, ‘Observations on Mirages’. Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science, 19 (1903–04): 392–400. In ‘The Shore’, a short story part of The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury writes: ‘Mars was a distant shore, and the men spread upon it in waves. Each wave was different, and each wave stronger. The first wave carried with it men accustomed to spaces and coldness and being alone.’ (London: Flamingo, 1995), 116. Rölvaag, Giants in the Earth, 311. Webb, The Great Plains, 35. On the misnamed animals, see 39–40. Ferdinand J. Funk likens the plagues of insects to missiles in terms of their impact; Funk quoted in Charles C. Howe, This Place Called Kansas (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984), 166. On this note, see also Rölvaag, Giants in the Earth, 341–50. See also Fred A. Shannon, The Farmer’s Last Frontier: Agriculture 1860–1897 (New York and Toronto: Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., 1945) and Craig Miner, West of Wichita: Settling the High Plains of Kansas 1865–1890 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas: 1986). Sigmund Freud et al., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works (London: Vintage, 1953), 38. Hollon, The Great American Desert, 12. Ibid. Frank L. Baum, The Wizard of Oz (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 1–2. Ibid. Quoted in James H. Nottage and Floyd R. Thomas, Jr, ‘ “There’s No Place Like Home”: Symbols and Images of Kansas’. Kansas History, 8, 3 (Autumn 1985): 142. Ibid. Norman Mailer, A Fire on the Moon (London: Pan Books, 1970), 51. Lawrence, Studies, Foreword. Franklin, though never mentioned directly, emerges in criticism of Baum’s tale. See Karal Ann Marling, Civil Rights in Oz: Images of Kansas in American Popular Art (University of Kansas: Spencer Museum of Art, 1997), 30. Douglas Street, in ‘ “The Wonderful Wiz That Was”: The Curious Transformation of The Wizard of Oz’, brings up Edison, Kansas Quarterly, 16, 3 (Summer 1984): 93. Lawrence, Studies, 24 and 27. Stephen King, Pet Sematary (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2000), 228. Baum, The Wizard of Oz, 134. King, Pet Sematary, 229. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 48. Ibid., 283, 298 and 299. See Paul B. Jaskot, The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labour and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 299–300.

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Notes 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

82 83

84 85 86 87

88 89

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Ibid., 297 and 298. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 302. Ibid., 301 and 302. Allen Ginsberg, ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’, in Collected Poems, 1947–1985 (London: Penguin, 1995), Part II: lines 73, 341, 73 and 215–16. Ibid., Part I: 32. Ibid., Part I: 6–7 and 16 and Part II: 42–5. Ibid., Part I: 26. Ibid., Part I: 41–2; Part II: 256–7 and Part II: 190–2. Ibid., Part II: 477. ‘United States Objectives and Programs for National Security’, 14 April 1950. Available online through the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) website: http://ftp.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsc-hst/nsc-68-6.htm, accessed on 10/12/13. For more information on NSC-68 and the defence perimeter, which gradually ‘enclosed’, so Paul N. Edwards, ‘the Soviet Union within a circle of forward air bases and politicomilitary alliances’, see The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 11. Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006), 152. ‘United States Objectives and Programs for National Security’, 14 April 1950. Available online through the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) website: http:// ftp.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsc-hst/nsc-68-6.htm, accessed on 13/12/13. Ibid. Joyce quoted In Warren Steele, Body of Glass: Cyborgs and the Mirrored Self (PhD. Diss, University of Glasgow, 2007), 9. Claude R. Wickard, ‘Thomas Jefferson–Founder of Modern American Agriculture’. Agricultural History, 19, 3 (July 1945): 179–80. Leslie proceeds: ‘Nature was [Nazi ideology’s] justification, but, in fact, it was busy destroying nature. This happened not just through the synthesis of natural forms, but through the efforts to control it, to improve upon it, in various ways, including promoting the perfect Aryan muscular bodies of the superman and to purge from it those bodies that had been denatured, the Jews, the disabled, the weak. Such pains to tidy up and emend nature, the eternal Volk bound to its everlasting soil, relied on the efficient and brutish procedures of nature’s assumed opposite, the vast technical machinery that would carry out not only the work of substitution but also the operations, the elimination, the experiments.’ Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 183–4. Edwin Morris Betts (ed.), Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), viii. Thomas Jefferson, ‘First Inaugural Address’, 4 March 1801. Available through Yale Law School website: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/jefinau1.asp, accessed on 10/13/12. Monticello, for Jefferson, constitutes a further retreat, from the world of politics and public life. See Betts, and also August C. Miller, ‘Jefferson as an Agriculturalist’. Agricultural History, 16, 2 (April 1942): 65–78. Also refer to Maurizio Valsania, who quotes Jefferson as saying that Monticello is an ‘asylum from grief!’ in his article ‘“Our Original Barbarism”: Man vs. Nature in Thomas Jefferson’s Moral Experience’. Journal of the History of Ideas, 65, 4 (October 2004): 638.

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90 M. L. Wilson, ‘Thomas Jefferson–Farmer’. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 87, 3, Bicentennial of Thomas Jefferson (14 July 1943): 216. 91 Whitney A. Griswold, ‘The Agrarian Democracy of Thomas Jefferson’. The American Political Science Review, 40, 4 (August 1946): 672. Griswold writes: ‘Whether consciously or indirectly or unconsciously borrowed from Locke, Jefferson’s theory of property was essentially Locke’s’ (673). 92 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIX: 165–166. Available through the University of Virginia website: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/hns/ yoeman/qxix.html, accessed on 10/12/13. 93 Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 2 vols., vol. 2 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 206. 94 Qtd in Richard Bridgman, ‘Jefferson’s Farmer Before Jefferson’. American Quarterly, 14, 4 (Winter 1962): 569. 95 Ibid. 96 Wilson, ‘Thomas Jefferson–Farmer’, 179–80. 97 Maurizio Valsania, ‘ “Our Original Barbarism”: Man vs. Nature in Thomas Jefferson’s Moral Experience’. Journal of the History of Ideas, 65, 4 (October 2004): 629–30 and 634. See also Richard Slotkin, The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialisation, 1800–1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985). 98 For more on wastage, see Bridgman, ‘Jefferson’s Farmer Before Jefferson’, who quotes early tracts on the depletion of the land: ‘The inhabitants, who were confined to narrow farms in their native country, are many of them, insatiable in their desires after lands, and rather wast [sic] and impoverish, than improve them.’ He also quotes Jefferson, who notes that the ‘indifferent state of [agriculture] among us does not proceed from want of knowledge merely; it is from our having such quantities of land to waste as we please’ (572). 99 Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1997), 9 and 58. 100 Butz quoted in Stephen S. Rosenfeld, ‘The Politics of Food’. Foreign Policy, 14 (Spring 1974): 21. Rosenfeld begins his article by asking: ‘If food is becoming chronically short in the world, what does it mean for American foreign policy?’ and notes that it is ‘within this tradition of food diplomacy that administration officials now suggest that we may stop selling food to countries which won’t sell us oil’ (22). 101 Berry, The Unsettling of America, 14 and 83. 102 Security Resources Panel of the Science Advisory Committee, ‘Deterrence & Survival in the Nuclear Age’, 7 November 1957, iii. Available online through: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB139/nitze02.pdf, accessed on 10/12/13. Hereafter referred to as Gaither Report. 103 Ibid., 4. 104 Ibid., 5. 105 On Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Sputnik, see Adam Piette, The Literary Cold War: 1945–Vietnam (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). What distinguishes the Gaither Report from its predecessors was its impact, because the report was leaked to the Washington Post (though the leakage is a source of controversy) and, from there, into the public sphere. 106 ‘Gaither Report’, 5–6. 107 James R. Killian, Sputnik, Scientists and Eisenhower: A Memoir of the First Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), 71.

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108 Ibid., 99. 109 John F. Kennedy quoted in Desmond Ball, Politics and Force Levels: The Strategic Missile Program of the Kennedy Administration (Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 1980), 17. 110 Kennedy quoted in Ball, Politics and Force Levels, 18. 111 David Alan Rosenberg, ‘US Nuclear War Planning, 1945–1960’, in Strategic Nuclear Targeting, eds. Desmond Ball and Jeffrey Richardson (Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 1986), 44. Rosenberg also discusses Truman’s reluctance or inability to consider nuclear bombs as tactical weapons. He writes that Truman ‘viewed the A Bomb as last resort’, and that he ‘was unwilling or unable to provide clear policy guidance regarding how it should be integrated into war planning’. The Berlin crisis in the summer of 1948, according to Rosenberg, ‘forced foreign policy makers to think more seriously about the deployment of nuclear weapons. On 16 September 1948, NSC approved NSC-30, “Policy on Atomic Warfare” which finally authorised the military to plan for the use of nuclear weapons in war’ (38–9). 112 Donald Mackenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 44 and 128. 113 John Edwards, in his book Superweapon: The Making of MX, notes that ‘controlled response’, associated with counterforce targeting, is an idea that ‘make[s] uncontrollable war more likely’, because a ‘powerful force that [is] vulnerable to attack [is] an invitation to war rather than a deterrent’. (New York; London: WW Norton & Company, 1982): 39 and 43. 114 LeMay quoted in Rosenberg, ‘US Nuclear War Planning’, 41. 115 Desmond Ball and Jeffrey Richardson, Strategic Nuclear Targeting (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986), 63. See also Ball and Robert C. Toth, ‘Revising the SIOP: Taking War-Fighting to Dangerous Extremes’. International Security, 14, 4 (Spring 1990): 65–92. 116 Intelligence resources were very poor prior to the development of reconnaissance satellites. ‘In the 1940s,’ writes Rosenberg, these resources ‘consisted primarily of captured German aerial photographs, and pre-World-War II and even Czarist era maps. Beginning in the late 1940s, reconnaissance missions were flown along the borders of the Soviet Union, and occasionally CIA operatives were sent to the interior to check out particular targets of interest. The air force also participated in the CIA-sponsored ‘Moby Dick’ programme, which sent balloons equipped with high-altitude cameras drifting across the Soviet Union from Europe to Japan. The recovery pictures, however, were often difficult to interpret since it was impossible to tell precisely where the balloons had been’. ‘US Nuclear War Planning’, 40. 117 Mackenzie, Inventing Accuracy, 2. In his book, Mackenzie writes that the United States ‘had a love affair with the airplane’ (101), which, so he notes, results in a preference of cruise missiles, ‘pilotless planes’ over ballistic missiles; cruise missiles were also thought to be in service before ICBMs. (102) 118 Ibid., 105. See also Kenneth P. Werrell, The Evolution of the Cruise Missile (Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama: Air University Press, 1985), 106. Mackenzie further mentions another two causes for the ‘change in status’ of the ballistic missile, ‘the start of the Eisenhower presidency in 1953’ and ‘the growing realisation that the Soviet Union was pursuing a major long-range ballistic missile program’ (105). See Killian, too, Sputniks, Scientists and Eisenhower, who begins his memoir with Sputnik, which, he says, he ‘could not avoid thinking of . . . in the context of recent

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119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127

128 129 130 131

132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142

Notes warnings of US vulnerability to Soviet attack’. (6) As such, the missile revolution emerges out of a complex set of factors, some of which are mentioned above, in part triggered by ‘external events, most dramatically the launch by the Soviet Union of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, on 4 October 1957’, but that it is also ‘the result of the ballistic missile’s proponents own efforts in changing, well before 1957, US “insider” perceptions of the path of technological development being followed in the USSR’ (96). Mackenzie, Inventing Accuracy, 1. Ibid., 33–4. Hermann Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Westport: Greenwood Press, Inc., 1978), 613. Ibid., 613 and 614. Ibid., 614. Ibid., 618 and 619. Mackenzie, Inventing Accuracy, 130. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, 618. Edwards, Superweapon, 12 and 97. See also Mackenzie, Inventing Accuracy, who notes that ‘[w]hat for a long time seemed the most promising scheme was a massive “race track”: “transporter-erector-launcher” vehicles would carry MX missiles around specially constructed roads linking thousands of shelters in Utah and Nevada, if necessary dashing from one shelter to the next in the event of warning of an attack’ (228–9). Ibid., 11 and 57. Ball, Politics and Force Levels, 49–52. David K. Stumpf, Titan II: A History of a Cold War Missile Program (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000), 11. ‘Silos allowed farmers to engage in year-round dairying,’ which is ‘generally considered . . . a seasonal business’, as ‘[c]ows produced milk in the spring and summer and were dry for the rest of the year. Some farmers practiced winter dairying but, which meant keeping their cows in production throughout the winter. . . . But the main obstacle to winter dairying was finding sufficient succulent food to maintain cows’ milk production through the winter.’ Peggy Lee Beedle. Silos: An Agricultural Success Story: 1–2. Available online through the University of Wisconsin: http://learningstore.uwex.edu/Assets/pdfs/G3660-04.pdf, accessed on 13/12/13. King, The Stand, 512. Ibid., 807. Paul Virilio, Bunker Archeology, trans. George Collins (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009). 12. King, The Stand, 512. John Hodgen, ‘Two Silos’. The English Journal, 69, 5 (May 1980): 52. Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, 11–12. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 11 and 16. Ibid., 38. Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997), 51. There were, of course, shelter programmes for people, communal underground bunkers in cities, but Civil Defence was, for the most part, a private enterprise and

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Notes

143

144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153

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one associated with privilege; though some exercises happened on a public scale, most were the responsibility, like the actual shelter constructions, of individuals and their families, who ‘[produce] the conditions for [their] own survival’, as Guy Oakes writes. He continues that ‘ “Home Protection Exercises” required the family to train for a nuclear attack by scheduling regular practice sessions in which the execution of Civil Defence procedures would be rehearsed and tested.’ The Imaginary War: Civil Defence and American Cold War Culture (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 114 and 121. On the ‘eager commercialism’ of Civil Defence (Oakes, The Imaginary War, 48), see John Gregory Stocke, ‘“Suicide on the Instalment Plan”: Cold-War-Era Civil Defence and Consumerism in the United States’, in The Writing on the Cloud: American Culture Confronts the Atomic Bomb, eds. Alison M. Scott and Christopher D. Geist (Lanham; New York; Oxford: University Press of America, Inc., 1997). See, for example, Ann Markusen, Scott Campbell, Peter Hall and Sabrina Deitrick, The Rise of the Gunbelt: The Military Remapping of Industrial America (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) as well as Peter Wiley and Robert Gottlieb, Empires in the Sun: The Rise of the New American West (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1982). Stumpf, Titan II, 15. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 296–7. Stumpf, Titan II, 26. See also Wayne D. Cocroft and Roger J. C. Thomas, Cold War: Building for Nuclear Confrontation 1946–1989 (Swindon: English Heritage, 2004), 46. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 103–5. Ibid., 111. Ibid., 113. King, The Stand, 1268 and 1337. Berry, The Unsettling of America, 8. Transmutation, so prevalent in atomic bomb narratives, exists, for example, in relation to missiles, reminisced about with a great deal of emotion; Lieutenant General, USAF (ret.) Jay W. Kelley, introducing Stumpf ’s book, notes that he ‘will never forget the first time [he] saw and touched a Titan II. . . . Titan II had a crew, and the crew was directly in touch with the missile, its sortie. We operated it, tested it, occasionally fixed it; it was a great system for a crew member because there was a very direct relationship with the weapon system (qtd. In Stumpf, Titan II, xv).’ As weapons become humanized, ‘humans’ turn into automatons ‘diligently plotting death’ (Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 17), and incessantly repeating civil defence manoeuvres, based on a ‘comprehensive system of emotion management’, which, as Guy Oakes writes in his brilliant study, The Imaginary War, ‘may be understood as a strategy for the mobilisation, administration and control of emotional life’ (33–4). Eventually, Oakes proceeds, the ‘self-control that Americans learned in Civil Defence training would eliminate the moral deficits that made them such unsatisfactory weapons in the struggle against communism’ (46). On movies concerned with the atom bomb and mutation, see Joyce A. Evans, Celluloid Mushroom Clouds: Hollywood and the Atomic Bomb (Boulder; Oxford: Westview Press, 1998) and M. Keith Booker. Monsters, Mushroom Clouds and the Cold War: American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism 1946–1964 (Westport; London: Greenwood Press, 2001).

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154 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 297. 155 H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (London: Everyman, 2003), 5. 156 Whitney A. Griswold, Farming and Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), vii. 157 See Mackenzie, Inventing Accuracy, 152–4. 158 Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, 57. 159 The Beginning of the End, dir. by Bert I. Gordon, 1957 (DVD, Image Entertainment, 2003). 160 Them!, dir. by Gordon Douglas, 1954 (DVD, Warner, 2013). 161 DeLillo, Underworld, 402. 162 Lydia Millet, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2005), 489. 163 Colonel Edward N. Hall, a relatively low-ranking Air Force officer who, from 1956, was in charge of the solid-propellant research programme in General Schriever’s ballistic missile Western Development Division, and a key advocate of Minuteman, envisaged a ‘single site where as many as 1,000–1,500 missiles would be assembled, deployed in dispersed silos in constant readiness for firing’. In these constructions, the ‘need for human intervention was kept as low as possible’ – resulting in compounds that Mackenzie describes as ‘huge automated missile “farms”’ (Mackenzie, Inventing Accuracy, 152–4). This scheme, however, was never adopted, yet the missile configurations, variable in size, but often including up to 150 operational silos leave the description standing. See, for example, the popular resource ‘dedicated to preserving the heritage of [SAC]’ – generally an interesting source in terms of Cold War Nostalgia – Strategic Air Command.com: http://www. strategic-air-command.com/missiles/Minuteman/Minuteman_Missile_Deployment. htm, accessed on 10/12/13. 164 John Hersey, Hiroshima (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1946), 91. 165 Wickard, ‘Thomas Jefferson–Founder of Modern American Agriculture’, 179. 166 DeLillo, Underworld, 51. 167 Ibid. 168 Piette, The Literary Cold War, 1. 169 Another great source in terms of what Piette terms ‘weird desire’ in relation to Cold War relics is the Titan I Epigraph website: http://www.chromehooves.net/ Titan_Epitaph_main.htm, accessed 10/12/13. These websites, more below, provide a fascinating insight into the ‘spectral enchantment’ (Piette, The Literary Cold War, 1) ‘preserving the heritage’ of the Cold War. 170 Baudrillard, America, 34. 171 See, for example, Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann, Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). 172 Subterra Castle website: http://www.subterracastle.com/, accessed 10/12/13. 173 Ibid. 174 Silo Home website: http://www.silohome.com/, accessed 10/12/13. 175 Ibid. 176 Ibid. 177 Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: The Survivors of Hiroshima (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1967), 60. 178 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 167.

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Chapter 3 1 Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (London: Vintage, 2000), 723. 2 Dale Carter, The Final Frontier: The Rise and Fall of the American Rocket State (London; New York: Verso, 1988), 6. 3 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 249 and 250. 4 Ibid., 401, 750 and 754. 5 Ibid., 759. 6 Ibid., 322. 7 Donna Haraway conceives of the cyborg as a blasphemy. See ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’, in Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991). 8 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 723. 9 Dale Carter’s book is about the transfer of power from Nazi Germany to the United States, which he describes in terms of a ‘process of absorption facilitating the survival, transformation and reproduction of a partly obsolete imperial power structure in the form of its incipient totalitarian replacement’. Carter, The Final Frontier, 8. 10 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 723. 11 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), xviii. 12 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 223. 13 Haraway, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’, 154. 14 Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, ‘Cyborgs and Space’, in The Cyborg Handbook, ed. Chris Hables Gray (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 30. 15 William Gibson, Neuromancer (London: Harper Collins, 1995), 12. 16 Eugene M. Emme, ‘Introduction to the History of Rocket Technology’. Technology and Culture, 4, 4, The History of Rocket Technology (Autumn 1963): 378. 17 Bruno Latour, Aramis, or, the Love of Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 149. 18 Emme, ‘Introduction to the History of Rocket Technology’, 379, 381 and 383. 19 Ibid., 379. 20 Donald Mackenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 101 and 166. 21 Robert L. Perry, ‘The Atlas, Thor, and Titan’. Technology and Culture, 4, 4, The History of Rocket Technology (Autumn 1963): 467. 22 Ibid., 469. 23 Latour, Aramis, 28. 24 Perry, 472. 25 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Knopf, 1964), 3. 26 Ibid., 149. 27 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 137. 28 Clynes and Kline, ‘Cyborgs and Space’, 29. 29 Wernher von Braun, ‘The Redstone, Jupiter, and Juno’. Technology and Culture, 4, 4, The History of Rocket Technology (Autumn 1963): 464. 30 Ibid.

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31 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 750. 32 Charles D. Benson and William Barnaby Faherty, ‘The Making of the Cape’, in Moonport: A History of Apollo Launch Facilities and Operations, 1978. Available online through the NASA History Program Office: www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/ History/SP-4204/ch1-3.html, accessed on 09/12/13. 33 In a Memorandum to LBJ, dated 23 May 1961, James E. Webb, NASA administrator from 1961 to 1967, writes that ‘[o]n investigation, I find that we are going to have to establish some place where we can do the technology related to the Apollo program, and that this should be on the water where the vehicles can . . . be barged to the launching site’. Memorandum, James E. Webb to Lyndon B. Johnson, 23 May 1961, James E. Webb Papers Collection, John Fitzgerald Kennedy Presidential Library, Columbia Point, MA. 34 Letter, James E. Webb to Margaret Chase Smith, 17 August 1961, James E. Webb Papers. 35 Benson and Faherty, ‘The Making of the Cape’, http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/ History/SP-4204/ch1-3.html, accessed on 09/12/13. 36 Benson and Faherty, ‘Building a Launch Complex’, in Moonport, http://www.hq.nasa. gov/office/pao/History/SP-4204/ch1-4.html, accessed on 09/12/13. 37 NASA News Release, ‘NASA-DOD Atlantic Missile Range Agreement’, 22 January 1963, James E. Webb Papers. 38 Letter, James E. Webb to Edward Bell, 19 June 1963, James E. Webb Papers. 39 Norman Mailer, A Fire on the Moon (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1970), 52. 40 John Beck, Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power and Waste in Western American Literature (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 21. 41 Ibid., 52. 42 Ibid., 396 and 400. 43 Ibid., 13. 44 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 32. 45 Mailer, A Fire on the Moon, 52. 46 Benson and Faherty, ‘The Making of the Cape’, http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/ History/SP-4204/ch1-3.html, accessed on 09/12/13. 47 Mailer, A Fire on the Moon, 51. 48 In his introduction to the Technology and Culture issue on rocketry, Emme refers to a ‘technological explosion’, that is, ‘the ever-increasing acceleration of technical change’. Emme, ‘Introduction to the History of Rocket Technology’, 380. 49 Mailer, A Fire on the Moon, 50. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., 13. 52 Ibid., 19. 53 Ibid., 48 and 49. 54 Ibid., 330. 55 Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (New York, etc: Bantam, 1979), 135. 56 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 751. 57 Wolfe, The Right Stuff, 136. 58 Ibid., 135. 59 Ibid., 63 and 151. 60 Ibid., 150 and 151. 61 Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 2 vols., vol. 2 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 206.

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Notes 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

100 101

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Clynes and Kline, ‘Cyborgs and Space’, 30. Ibid., 29. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 751 and 752. Mailer, A Fire on the Moon, 15 and 289. Wolfe, The Right Stuff, 149. J. G. Ballard, ‘Memories of the Space Age’, in The Complete Short Stories (London: Flamingo, 2001), 1049. Thomas Allen Nelson, Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 116. Frederik Pohl, Man Plus (London: Gollancz, 2000), 54. Clynes and Kline, ‘Cyborgs and Space’, 31. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 723. J. G. Ballard, ‘The Cage of Sand’, in The Complete Short Stories, 357. J. G. Ballard, ‘News from the Sun’, in The Complete Short Stories, 1012. Ballard, ‘Memories of the Space Age’, 1049. Ibid. Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 124. Ballard, ‘The Cage of Sand’, 356 and 357. Ibid., 355. J. G. Ballard, ‘The Dead Astronaut’, in The Complete Short Stories, 762. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 129. J. G. Ballard, ‘Myths of the Near Future’, in The Complete Short Stories, 1074. Ibid. Ibid., 1064. Ibid., 1065. Ballard, ‘Memories of the Space Age’, 1039. Ballard, ‘The Dead Astronaut’, 760. Ballard, ‘The Cage of Sand’, 368. Ballard, ‘Memories of the Space Age’, 1047, 1050 and 1051. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 161. Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 2006), 138. Ballard, ‘Memories of the Space Age’, 1055. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 400. Ibid., 401 and 402. Ibid., 401. Latour, Aramis, 18–19. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 402. Frank H. Winter, Prelude to the Space Age: The Rocket Societies 1924–1940 (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983), 113. Ibid., 403. See Norman Mailer, ‘Superman Comes to the Supermarket’, Esquire, November 1960. Available at: http://www.esquire.com/features/superman-supermarket, accessed 15/09/13. R. Cargill Hall, ‘Early US Satellite Proposals’. Technology and Culture, 4, 4, The History of Rocket Technology (Autumn 1963): 431–2. Ibid., 433.

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102 Lyndon B. Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives on the Presidency 1963–1969 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972), 283. 103 Johnson, The Vantage Point, 285–6. 104 John Updike, Rabbit Redux, in A Rabbit Omnibus (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 185. 105 Ibid., 185. 106 Johnson, The Vantage Point, 273. 107 Ibid., 272. 108 Ibid. 109 James R. Killian, Sputnik, Scientists and Eisenhower: A Memoir of the First Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), 2 and 9. Killian, president of MIT, was also in charge of organizing and chairing the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), created in November 1957, which identifies two objectives in space, exploration and control. The panel, however, also suggests the establishment of a civilian agency to conduct the US space programme. See Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (Baltimore; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 110 Eisenhower’s description of Sputnik, in Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (Baltimore; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 146. 111 John F. Kennedy, ‘Address at Rice University on the Nation’s Space Effort’, 12 September 1962. Available through the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library website: http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKPOF-040-001.aspx, accessed on 09/12/13. 112 Qtd in Vernon Van Dyke, Pride and Power: The Rationale of the Space Program (London: Pall Mall Press, 1965), 23. 113 President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), ‘Introduction to Outer Space’, 26 March 1958. Available online through the NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.: http://www. history.nasa.gov/sputnik/16.html, accessed on 09/12/13. 114 Ibid. 115 Mailer, A Fire on the Moon, 204. 116 The Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee, established on 17 July 1950, exercises, as claimed in the group’s resolution, a ‘continuous watchfulness’ over matters of national defence, including ‘the determination whether (1) policies, programs, activities, requirements and practices (of the Department of Defence, the Armed Services, and related defence agencies) are the most effective possible in the interest of the national defence, and (2) the administration of such (activities) is characterised by maximum efficiency’. See Donald C. Cook, ‘Senate Preparedness Subcommittee’. The University of Chicago Law Review, 18, 3 (Spring 1951): 634. 117 For more information on the Gaither Report, see Morton H. Halperin, ‘ The Gaither Committee and the Policy Process.’ World Politics, 13, 3 (April 1961): 360–84. 118 Emme, ‘Introduction to the History of Rocket Technology’, 379. 119 President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), ‘Introduction to Outer Space’, 26 March 1958, http://history.nasa.gov/sputnik/16.html, accessed on 25/09/08.

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120 Webb actually refers to ‘vacuums like Korea, Vietnam, the Congo’, countries in which ‘we ourselves might . . . have a strong obligation to use our technology to begin to fill these vacuums’. Quoted in McDougall, 1985, 388. 121 President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC). ‘Introduction to Outer Space’, 26 March 1958. Available online through the NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA History Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.: http://history.nasa. gov/sputnik/16.html, accessed on 09/12/13. 122 Letter, James E. Webb to E. K. Gaylord, 6 March 1961, James E. Webb Papers. 123 Letter, James E. Webb to Matt Daniels, 1 May 1961, James E. Webb Papers. 124 Memorandum, James E. Webb, 22 May 1961, James E. Webb Papers. 125 Webb is constantly engaged to try and keep the language in check. In a Memorandum to Robert Seamans, on 14 May 1962, Webb writes: ‘We are in all of our actions engaged in the process of creating an image of NASA in the minds of the public and we want to be sure that this image faithfully represents the dynamic but responsible program that is our stewardship. We do not want to stifle creativity or motivation on the part of our scientists and engineers but I ask that you ensure that adequate attention is given to this matter so that all statements, speeches, reports, exhibits and other forms of information for the public . . . are factual and so designed that they leave little room for misinterpretation on the part of mass media representatives and the public in general.’ Memorandum, James E. Webb too Robert Seamans, 14 May 1962, Franklyn Phillips Papers. 126 Letter, James E. Webb to Thomas K Finletter, 28 February 1961, James E. Webb Papers. 127 In this memo, to LBJ, Webb talks specifically about the Southwest, encompassing Johnson’s home state, Texas, and wonders ‘[i]f it were possible to get a combination where the out-in-front technological research . . . done by [Dr Lloyd] Berkner [Chairman of the Space Science Board of the National Academy of Sciences] and his group in Dallas in such a way as to strengthen all the universities in the area, and if at the same time a strong engineering and technological centre could be established near the water near Houston . . . ’. To favour this region also brings the support of the oil industry. Memorandum, James E. Webb to the Vice President, 23 May 1961, James E. Webb Papers. 128 Memorandum, James E. Webb to Mr Siepert, 27 June 1961, James E. Webb Papers. 129 Letter, James E. Webb to Perkins Bass, 29 June 1961, James E. Webb Papers. 130 Letter, James E. Webb to E. F. Beryan, 18 June 1961, James E. Webb Papers. 131 Memorandum, James E. Webb to Hugh Dryden, 21 August 1961, James E. Webb Papers. 132 Letter, James E. Webb to Keith Glennan, 10 August 1961, James E. Webb Papers. See also Webb’s Memorandum for Dr Simpson and Mr Wyatt, of 10 January, 1963, in which Webb, clearly annoyed, complains that ‘[f]or the past eighteen months I have been correcting almost every speech and document that comes to me to change . . . language to say that our objective is manned exploration of the moon and not just a lunar landing and safe return. Further, our program is a much larger one than just this single objective, which seems sometimes to have become an obsession.’ Memorandum, James. E. Webb to Dr Simpson and Mr Wyatt, 10 January 1963, James E. Webb Papers. 133 ‘Is the Moon a Chip Off the Old Block?’, Washington Post, 31 March 1963, James E. Webb Papers: Current News.

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134 Letter, James E. Webb to Lee DuBridge, 1 December 1961, James E. Webb Papers. In this letter, Webb tells DuBridge, president of CalTech, that ‘we have definitely calmed down a great deal of the emotional excitement concerning manned space flight and have initiated a rational program’. 135 Letter, James E. Webb to James Killian, 18 September 1963, James E. Webb Papers. 136 John Noble Wilford, We Reach the Moon (New York, Toronto and London: Bantam Books, 1969), 26. 137 Memorandum, James E. Webb to Hiden T. Cox, 7 December 1961, James E. Webb Papers. 138 Letter, James E. Webb to Ethan A. Shepley, 25 August 1961, James E. Webb Papers. 139 Memorandum, James E. Webb to Mr Lingle, 17 October 1962, James E. Webb Papers. 140 Letter, James E. Webb to E. B Germany, 11 September 1961, James E. Webb Papers. 141 Memorandum, James E. Webb to Dr Charles H. Roadman, 27 June 1961, James E. Webb Papers. 142 Memorandum, James E. Webb to Dr Emme, 7 February 1963, James E. Webb Papers. 143 Ibid. 144 Letter, James E. Webb to T. Keith Glennan, 10 August 1961, James E. Webb Papers. 145 Memorandum, James E. Webb to Mr Abbott, 24 November 1961, James E. Webb Papers. 146 Memorandum, James E. Webb to Mr Lingle, 10 October 1962, James E. Webb Papers. 147 Letter, James E. Webb to Stuart Symington, 24 June 1963, James E. Webb Papers. 148 Memorandum, James E. Webb to Dr Simpson, 13 August 1963, James E. Webb Papers. 149 Memorandum, James E. Webb to Hugh Dryden, 30 March 1961, James E. Webb Papers. 150 Letter, James E. Webb to Lewis L. Strauss, 12 May 1961, James E. Webb Papers. 151 Ballard, ‘Memories of the Space Age’, 1039. 152 Mailer, A Fire on the Moon, 12 and 14. 153 Ibid., 14 and 15. 154 Ibid., 14. 155 ‘Where is Everybody?’, The Twilight Zone, dir. Robert Stevens, 2 October 1959 (DVD, Cinema Club, 2006). 156 Mailer, A Fire on the Moon, 39. 157 Ibid., 40. 158 Wolfe, The Right Stuff, 296–7. 159 ‘Hypnosis May Aid Astronauts’, Daily Press, 16 December 1962, James E. Webb Papers: Current News. 160 Ibid. 161 Wolfe, The Right Stuff, 151. On the following page, Wolfe writes that a ‘considerable part of [an astronaut’s] training’ consists of ‘what [is] known as de-conditioning, de-sensitising, or adapting out fears’ (152). 162 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 723 and 725. 163 Mailer, A Fire on the Moon, 17. 164 Peter Cook quoted in Simon Sadler, Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 110. 165 Peter Cook, Experimental Architecture (London: Studio Vista, 1970), 112.

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151

166 Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (London; New York: Verso, 2005), 42. 167 Memorandum, James E. Webb to Timothy J. Reardon, Jr, 26 December 1961, Franklyn Phillips Papers. 168 Van Dyke, Pride and Power, 37. On Samos, Midas and Bambi, see 37–48. 169 On Corona, see John Cloud, ‘Imagining the World in a Barrel: CORONA and the Clandestine Convergence of the Earth Sciences’. Social Studies of Science, 31, 2, Science in the Cold War (April 2001): 231–51. 170 Letter, James E. Webb to Lee DuBridge, 1 December 1961, James E. Webb Papers. 171 Letter, James E. Webb to James G. Fulton, 30 November 1961, James E. Webb Papers. 172 James E. Webb letter to James G. Fulton, 30 November 1961, James E. Webb Papers. JFK Library. 173 Memorandum, James E. Webb to Admiral Boone, 29 January 1963, James E. Webb Papers. 174 Memorandum, James E. Webb to Admiral Boone, 5 February 1963, James E. Webb Papers. 175 Memorandum, James E. Webb to the Vice President, 30 June 1963, James E. Webb Papers. 176 ‘Preliminary Paper on the National Booster Program’, 1958, Franklyn Phillips Papers. 177 ‘Rationale Supporting Separate Non-Military and Military Activities in Space Research and Development’, May 1960, Franklyn Philips Papers. 178 Ibid. 179 Wolfe, The Right Stuff, 174. 180 Mailer, A Fire on the Moon, 54 and 169. 181 John Noble Wilford, We Reach the Moon (New York, Toronto and London: Bantam Books, 1969), 134–5. 182 Ibid., 135. 183 Saturn V is fuelled with liquid hydrogen, which, in order to stay liquid, must be kept at −423°Fahrenheit (−253°Celsius), because it otherwise converts back to a gas and evaporates. 184 Mailer, A Fire on the Moon, 16. 185 ‘New Space Suit Tests Scheduled’, The Daily Press, 23 March 1963, James E. Webb Papers: Current News. 186 Wolfe, The Right Stuff, 205. 187 Ballard, ‘The Cage of Sand’, 370. 188 Ballard, ‘The Dead Astronaut’, 762. 189 Ballard, ‘The Cage of Sand’, 359. 190 ‘Preliminary Paper on the National Booster Program’, 1958, Franklyn Phillips Papers. 191 On the Nuclear Rocket Development Station, see the US Department of Energy’s site http://www.nv.doe.gov/library/factsheets/DOENV_1094.pdf, accessed on 09/12/13. 192 Memorandum, James E. Webb to Mr Hodgson, 20 September 1962, James E. Webb Papers. 193 Memorandum, Keith T. Glennan [to Kennedy], 10 January 1961, Franklyn Phillips Papers. 194 ‘Technological Development for Manned Space Exploration’ (Draft), May 1961, Franklyn Phillips Papers. Rover is cancelled in 1973, the result of the decision to abandon manned missions to Mars and beyond. 195 ‘Seaborg Depicts Atom Era In 80s’, The New York Times, 26 November 1962, James E. Webb Papers: Current News.

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152

Notes

196 ‘AEC to Press Tests for Useful Atom Projects’, The Washington Post, 31 January 1963, James E. Webb Papers: Current News. 197 ‘ATOMIC FORECAST: Vast Increases in Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Power Are Predicted’, The New York Times, 2 December 1962, James E. Webb Papers. 198 ‘Space Is Becoming Polluted’, Washington Daily News, 18 April 1963, James E. Webb Papers. 199 Ballard, ‘The Cage of Sand’, 1062. 200 Ballard, ‘The Dead Astronaut’, 762. 201 Wilford, We Reach the Moon, 20. 202 Mailer, A Fire on the Moon, 352.

Chapter 4 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12

13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (London: Vintage, 2000), 48. Ibid. Ibid., 285. Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in ColdWar America (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1996), 1 and 4. Ibid., 7 and 8. See, for example, Richard G. Hewlett and Francis Duncan’s history of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), whose second volume is called Atomic Shield, 1947–1952: A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, 2 vols., vol. 2 (University Park; London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969). Edwards, The Closed World, 82. Jean Baudrillard, America (London; New York: Verso, 1988), 14 and 16. Ibid., 16–21. Ibid., 21–2. Ibid., 22. See, for example, R. Buckminster Fuller, Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein, Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller, The Art of Design Science (Baden: Lars Mueller, 1999). Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida and Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 94. Don DeLillo, Falling Man (London: Picador, 2007), 116 and 191. Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London: Verso, 2002), 27. Derrida, ‘Autoimmunity’, 95–6. Thomas Pynchon, V. (London: Verso, 2000), 206. Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 79. See Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London; New York: Verso, 1989). Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006), 149. H. G. Wells, The History of Mr. Polly and The War in the Air (London: Odhams Press Ltd., n.d.), 263 and 267. H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (London; North Clarendon: Everyman, 2003), 5, 19, 20, and 22. Orson Welles’ version is accessible via youTube.

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Notes 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

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See Derrida, ‘Autoimmunity’, 86. Ibid., 86–7. Ibid., 86. DeLillo, Falling Man, 119. David Pascoe, Aircraft (London: Reaktion, 2003), 110. Derrida, ‘Autoimmunity’, 94–5. See Derrida, ‘Autoimmunity’, 107–8. Ibid., 99. Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 19. Ibid., 23, 28 and 108. Ibid., 110. Ibid. Fuller, Krausse and Lichtenstein, Your Private Sky, 386. Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 50. See, for example, Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth; and The Abolition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 49. Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 27 and 56. Schell, The Fate of the Earth; and The Abolition, xxvii. It is on page 26 of The Fate of the Earth, that Schell writes that ‘[t]he right vantage point from which to view a holocaust is that of a corpse, but from that vantage point, of course, there is nothing to report’. Ibid., 47. Jonathan Goldman and Michael Valenti, The Empire State Building Book (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), 9. Jason Goodwin, Otis: Giving Rise to the Modern City (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), 43. Claude Bragdon, Architecture and Democracy (Teddington: The Echo Library, 2006), 3. On the rise of the skyscraper, see, for example, Cesar Pelli, ‘Skyscrapers’. Perspecta, 18 (1982): 134–51; Jean Gottman, ‘Why the Skyscraper?’. Geographical Review, 56, 2 (April 1966): 190–212; J. Carson Webster, ‘The Skyscraper: Logical and Historical Considerations’. The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 18, 4 (December 1959): 126–39. Bragdon, Architecture and Democracy, 1. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 2, 5 and 40. Dale Carter, The Final Frontier: The Rise and Fall of the American Rocket State, The Haymarket Series (London; New York: Verso, 1988). Bragdon, Architecture and Democracy, 43. Hamlin quoted in Sarah Bradford Landau and Carl W. Condit, Rise of the New York Skyscraper 1865–1913 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 276. Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (London; New York: Verso, 2005), 42. Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘The Tyranny of the Skyscraper’, in The Future of Architecture (New York: Mentor Books, 1963), 167. Bragdon, Architecture and Democracy, 40. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 40. Wright, ‘Tyranny’, 167 and 169. Ibid., 179.

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58 Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘ The Disappearing City’, in Collected Writings, Vol. 3, 1931–39, ed. Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1993), 82. 59 Wright, ‘Tyranny’, 169 and 178. 60 Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘The City’, in The Future of Architecture, 182. 61 Ibid., 181. 62 Ibid., 182. 63 Wright, ‘The Disappearing City’, 71. 64 Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘Skyscrapers Doomed? Yes!’, in Collected Writings, Vol. 3, 207. 65 Wright, ‘The City’, 197. 66 Ibid. 67 William Langewiesche, American Ground (London: Scribner, 2004), 3–4. 68 Jean Baudrillard, America, 17. 69 Pascoe, Aircraft, 110. 70 Ibid., 78. 71 Martin Amis, The Second Plane. September 11: Terror and Boredom (New York; Toronto: Knopf, 2008), 3, 6 and 12. 72 Langewiesche, American Ground, 19. 73 DeLillo, Falling Man, 3. 74 Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 42. 75 DeLillo, Falling Man, 69 and 230. 76 Ibid., 8. 77 Hugh Ferriss, The Metropolis of Tomorrow (New York: Ives Washington, 1929), 15. On the subject of the skyscraper’s affinities with the ocean liner, see also Rickels, who, in ‘Mine’, notes that ‘Total war had entered relations between self and other or, rather, between the ego and its introjects. The bunkers that survived World War Two were the legacy of an architectural directive or phantasm beginning way down in the mines. Corbusier’s bunker-style designs borrowed air circulation and compartmentalization features directly from ship technology (another technology modelled after the projected survival of mine catastrophes) and suspension techniques from the means and proofs of shock or quake absorption underground and above.’ Laurence A. Rickels, ‘Mine’, available through UCLA website: http://vv.arts.ucla.edu/terminals/rickles/rickles-1.html, accessed on 10/12/13. 78 Ibid. 79 Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (London and Basingstoke: Picador, 1996), 441. 80 Ferriss, The Metropolis of Tomorrow, 36 and 62. 81 Ibid., 32. 82 Fuller, Krausse and Lichtenstein, Your Private Sky, 135. 83 Michael John Gorman, Buckminster Fuller: Designing for Mobility (Milan: Skira; London: Thames & Hudson, 2005), 70. 84 Qtd in Mark J. Seifer, Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (New York: Citadel Press, 1998), 283. See also Natalie Aurucci Stiefel, ‘Nikola Tesla at Wardenclyffe’. Available online through the Tesla Memorial Society New York: http://teslasociety. com/warden.htm, access on 09/12/13. 85 Seifer, Wizard, 291. See also Stiefel, ‘Nikola Tesla at Wardenclyffe’, http://teslasociety. com/warden.htm, accessed on 09/12/13.

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86 Letter, Nikola Tesla to the Editor of The New York Times, 19 April 1908. Available online through twenty-first Century Books: www.tfcbooks.com/articles/tunguska. htm, accessed on 09/12/13. 87 John J. O’Neill, Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla (London: Granada, 1980), 320. 88 Scott Bukatman, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 203–4. 89 David Lapham, Roman Bachs and Nathan Massengill, ‘In The Dark’, Detective Comics # 800, rpt. in Batman: City of Crime (New York: DC Comics, 2006), 14. 90 Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2004), 92. 91 Bill Finger and Jim Mooney, ‘The 1,000 Secrets of the Batcave’, Detective Comics # 48. August–September 1948, rpt. in Batman: Secrets of the Batcave (New York: DC Comics, 2007). 92 This also applies to the latest movie, The Dark Knight (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2008; Warner Home Video, 2010), because Wayne Manor is burnt down. See also Batman Begins, dir. by Christopher Nolan, 2005 (DVD, Warner, 2005). 93 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 92. 94 Bukatman, Matters of Gravity, 203. 95 Ibid., 55. 96 See Steve Bell’s The If . . . Chronicles (London: Methuen, 1983) and Another Load of If . . . (London: Methuen, 1985), where Reagan is portrayed, alternatively, as a piece of wood, a zombie and, borrowing the title of an Edgar Allen Poe short story, as a ‘man that was used up’. 97 Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, and Lynn Varley, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (New York: DC Comics, 2002), 119. 98 Ibid., 165. 99 ‘Nikola Tesla’s New Wireless’, The Electrical Engineer, 24 December 1909. Available online through twenty-first Century Books: http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/190912-24.htm, accessed on 09/12/13. 100 Nikola Tesla, ‘The Transmission of Electric Energy Without Wires’, Electrical World and Engineer, 5 March 1904. Available online through Public Broadcasting System: http://www.pbs.org/tesla/res/res_art08.html, accessed on 09/12/13. 101 Tad Wise, Tesla: A Novel (Atlanta: Turner Publishing, Inc., 1994), 306. 102 Nikola Tesla, ‘A Machine to End War’, originally published in Liberty in 1937. The article is available online through the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) website: http://www.pbs.org/tesla/res/res_art11.html, accessed on 10/12/13. 103 Letter, Nikola Tesla to the Editor of The New York Times, 19 April 1908. Available online through twenty-first Century Books website: http://www.tfcbooks.com/ articles/tunguska.htm#MR.%20TESLA%27S%20VISION, accessed on 10/12/13. 104 Nikola Tesla, ‘The Transmission of Energy Without Wires’, originally published in Electrical World and Engineer on 7 January 1905. Available online through twentyfirst Century Books: http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/1905-01-07.htm, accessed 10/12/13. 105 Pynchon, Against the Day, 794. 106 Nikola Tesla, ‘A Machine to End War’, Liberty, February 1937. Available online through the Public Broadcasting System: http://www.pbs.org/tesla/res/res_art11.html, accessed on 09/12/13.

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107 Nikola Tesla, ‘The Wonder World to be Created by Electricity’, originally published in Manufacturer’s Record, 9 September 1915. Available online through the Public Broadcasting System website: http://www.pbs.org/tesla/res/res_art03.html, accessed on 10/12/13. 108 Pynchon, Against the Day, 805. 109 Ibid., 9. 110 William J. Broad, ‘Why They Called It the Manhattan Project’, The New York Times, 30 October 2007. Available online through The New York Times: http://www.nytimes. com/2007/10/30/science/30manh.html, accessed on 09/12/13. 111 Stewart L. Udall’s observation: Laurence, he notes, ‘was a frustrated dramatist who believed that science had a sacred mission to “save” civilisation, and who saw an opportunity to embellish his eyewitness stories with millennial phrases that would make him the messiah of the new age. . . . One cannot read the “histories” Laurence wrote in the summer of 1945 without realising that although a journalist was hired by Gen. Groves, a dual personality reported for duty at the Pentagon.’ The Myths of August: A Personal Exploration of Our Tragic Cold War Affair with the Atom (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 26. 112 Ibid., 166. 113 William L. Laurence, Dawn Over Zero: The Story of the Atomic Bomb (London: Museum Press, 1947), 232 and 235. 114 Ronald Reagan, ‘Address to the Nation on National Security’, 23 March 1983. Available online through the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) website: http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/offdocs/rrspch.htm, accessed on 09/12/13. All subsequent quotes from this address are from this site. 115 Ibid. 116 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 25. 117 Ibid., 29 and 32. 118 Donald R. Baucom, The Origins of SDI, 1944–1983 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1992), 3. On the V2 and the starting points for ballistic defence, see also William E. Burrows, ‘Ballistic Missile Defence: The Illusion of Security’. Foreign Affairs, 62 (Spring 1984): 845. 119 Baucom, The Origins of SDI, 4. 120 Ibid. 121 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 48. 122 Baucom, The Origins of SDI, 4. 123 Ibid., 6–7. Nike-Zeus itself develops out of an earlier programme simply titled Zeus, a system intended to obstruct bombers and air-breathing rockets, such as cruise missiles. 124 Both SALT I and the ABM Treaty are signed in Moscow on 26 May 1972, and enter into force on 3 October 1972. The ABM Treaty’s provisions state that: ‘[i]n the Treaty on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems the United States and the Soviet Union agree that each may have only two ABM deployment areas, so restricted and so located that they cannot provide a nationwide ABM defence or become the basis for developing one. Each country thus leaves unchallenged the penetration capability of the others retaliatory missile forces. The Treaty permits each side to have one limited ABM system to protect its capital and another to protect an ICBM launch area. The two sites defended must be at

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125 126 127

128 129

130 131 132

133

134 135 136 137

138 139

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least 1,300 kilometres apart, to prevent the creation of any effective regional defence zone or the beginnings of a nationwide system.’ R&D programmes, however, are not affected. Available online through FAS website: http://www.fas.org/nuke/control/ abmt/text/abm2.htm, accessed on 09/12/13. Baucom, The Origins of SDI, 91. Marshall quoted in Baucom, The Origins of SDI, 98. Ibid., 104. The official title for this particular vehicle is the Homing Overlay Experiment (HOE), a design which ‘first demonstrated the concept of exoatmospheric hit-to-kill. The program, which spanned the period of Fiscal Years 1978 to 1984, consisted of four flights tests in February 1983, May 1983, December 1983 and June 1984. It demonstrated the principle of hit-to-kill using a very capable, albeit expensive, heavy and sophisticated kill vehicle. Each test involved launching a target from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, and a HOE interceptor from the Kwajalein Missile Range in the Pacific.’ Edwards, The Closed World, 82. Ibid., 103. Edwards notes that SAGE ‘was obsolete before it was completed’, but that ‘it unleashed a cascading wave of command-control projects from the late 1950s onwards, tied largely to nuclear early warning systems’ (75). He continues that ‘[i]t worked’, despite its practical and military failure, as ‘an industrial policy, providing government funding for a major new industry. Perhaps most importantly, SAGE worked as ideology, creating an impression of active defence that assuaged some of the helplessness of nuclear fear’ (110). Ibid., 106. Reagan quoted in E. P. Thompson, ‘Why is Star Wars?’, in Star Wars, ed. Thompson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd, 1985), 16. A description of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System can be found on the FAS website: http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/nssrm/initiatives/bmews.htm, accessed on 23/08/08. Baucom, The Origins of SDI, 109. On Beam Weapons, see also Jeff Hecht, Beam Weapons: The Next Arms Race (New York; London: Plenum Press, 1985); Brian Beckett, Weapons of Tomorrow (New York; London: Plenum Press, 1983) and Ashton B. Carter, ‘Directed Energy Missile Defence in Space’, Background Paper, April 1984. Available online through Princeton University: http://www.princeton. edu/~ota/disk3/1984/8410/8410.PDF, accessed on 09/12/13. Edward Teller, Better a Shield than a Sword: Perspectives on Defence and Technology (New York; London: The Free Press, 1987), 8. Baucom, The Origins of SDI, 112. Teller, Better a Shield than a Sword, 27. Stephen Van Evera, ‘Preface’, in The Star Wars Controversy: An International Security Reader, eds. Steven E. Miller and Stephen Van Evera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), xi. Van Evera, ‘Preface’, xii. Jerome Slater and David Goldfischer, ‘Can SDI Provide a Defence?’. Political Science Quarterly, 101, 5 (1986): 843. Slater and Goldfischer further quote Sidney D. Drell in their article: ‘An effective but imperfect ABM on one side would exacerbate the risk [of war] because the side that did have an ABM might calculate that it would be better off if it struck first and used the ABM defence to deal with the weakened response. . . . Similarly, the side that did not have ABM might calculate that its

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140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147

148 149 150 151 152

153

154 155

Notes situation would be better (however bad) if it struck first and avoided being caught trying to retaliate with a weakened force against the ABM defence’ (843). Van Evera, ‘Preface’, xii. Ben Thompson, ‘What is Star Wars?’, in Star Wars, ed. E. P. Thompson, 38. ‘All “Star Wars” concepts depend heavily on pre-positioned satellites, both as ABM weapons and as sensors, data processors and transmitters.’ Ibid., 29. Ibid., 32. See also William E. Burrows, ‘Ballistic Missile Defence: The Illusion of Security’. Foreign Affairs 62 (Spring 1984): 849–51. Thompson, ‘What is Star Wars?’, 32. See also Burrows, ‘Ballistic Missile Defence’, 849–51. Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: A History (New York; London: Routledge, 2001), 98, 105 and 133. Ibid., 182. In his Address to the Nation on 23 March 1983, Reagan asks: ‘Wouldn’t it be better to save lives than to avenge them?’ Available through the FAS website: http://www. fas.org/spp/starwars/offdocs/rrspch.htm, accessed on 09/12/13. E. P. Thompson, ‘Folly’s Comet’, in Star Wars, ed. Thompson, 100. Ibid., 96. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 727 and 728–9. Ibid., 727. On those designations, see the Advisory Council on International Affairs’ Analysis of the US Missile Defence Plans: Pros and Cons of Striving for Invulnerability, The Hague, No. 28, August 2002, 12–15. These pages contain a discussion on ‘irrational’ regimes, like, for example, Iraq, Syria, Iran that ‘would be prepared to commit suicide’. Thus, ‘[f]ear of nuclear retaliation could not stop these countries from using weapons of mass destruction’ (15). See also George W. Bush’s National Defence University speech, delivered on 1 May 2001, in which he observes that ‘this is still a dangerous world, a less certain, a less predictable one. More nations have nuclear weapons and still more have nuclear aspirations. Many have chemical and biological weapons. Some already have developed the ballistic missile technology that would allow them to deliver weapons of mass destruction at long distances and at incredible speeds. And a number of these countries are spreading these technologies around the world. Most troubling of all, the list of these countries includes some of the world’s least-responsible states. Unlike the Cold War, today’s most urgent threat stems not from thousands of ballistic missiles in the Soviet hands, but from a small number of missiles in the hands of these states, states for whom terror and blackmail are a way of life.’ Originally accessed through the White House website: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/ releases/2001/05/20010501-10.html, accessed on 26/08/08. This speech is no longer accessible through this link. It can be accessed through the Federation of Atomic Scientist’s website: http://www.fas.org/nuke/control/abmt/news/010501bush.html, accessed on 09/12/13. Dean A. Wilkening, Ballistic-Missile-Defence and Strategic Stability (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2000), 6–7. Ibid. Bush’s 1 May speech at the National Defence University is available at: http://www. fas.org/nuke/control/abmt/news/010501bush.html, accessed on 10/12/13.

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156 George W. Bush, ‘Speech on Nuclear Strategy’, National Defence University, 1 May 2001. Available online: http://www.fas.org/nuke/control/abmt/news/010501bush. html, accessed on 09/12/13. 157 On Buckminster Fuller, see Michael John Gorman, Buckminster Fuller: Designing for Mobility (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2005); Thomas T. K. Zang (ed.), Buckminster Fuller: Anthology for the New Millennium (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001); Krausse and Lichtenstein (eds), Your Private Sky. 158 Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2000), 12. On the relation between the media and the occult, see also Laurence A. Rickels, The Vampire Lectures (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) and Linda Simon, Dark Light: Electricity and Anxiety from the Telegraph to the X-Ray (Orlando, Austin, New York, San Diego, Toronto and London: Harcourt Books, 2004). 159 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 726. 160 Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 58. 161 Rickels, The Vampire Lectures, ix, xii and 53. 162 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 48. 163 Paul Brodeur, The Zapping of America: Microwaves, Their Deadly Risk, and the Coverup (New York: Norton, 1977), 5. 164 Ibid., 6. 165 Ibid., 24, 36, 51, 121, and 153. 166 Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 63. 167 John Marks, The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’: The CIA and Mind Control (London: Allen Lane, 1979), 57. 168 Mick Farren, CIA: Secrets of the Company (London: Chrysalis Impact, 2003), 209. 169 High Frequency Active Auroral Research Project (HAARP); originally accessed through http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/haarp/gen1.html, accessed on 29/08/08. This website is no longer available. 170 Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 64. 171 Ibid., 67. 172 Elaine Scarry, ‘The Fall of TWA 800: The Possibility of Electromagnetic Interference’, The New York Review of Books, 9 April 1998. Available online: http://www. nybooks.com/articles/archives/1998/apr/09/the-fall-of-twa-800-the-possibility-ofelectromagn/, accessed on 09/12/13. 173 Ibid. 174 Ibid. 175 Ibid. Scarry further writes: ‘The antenna on the outside of a plane is designed to be sensitive to small signals so that pilots can locate themselves and adjust to a steadily changing environment. The antenna picks up navigation information, radar images of weather in the air or on the ground, and the voice of the air controller. If a signal comes along in the same frequency as the one the antenna is looking for, the antenna will pick that up and may be confused by it. . . . In an airplane, such [an interfering] signal may begin to throw off the compass or misinform the pilot about the plane’s direction or distance from a certain location. Such misinformation is unwelcome at any altitude; but at critical moments – takeoff, landing, moving through dense air traffic – it is potentially fatal. The unwanted signal, if sufficiently intense, can also bring about dire effects more directly.’ 176 Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 58.

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177 Scarry, ‘The Fall of TWA 800’. 178 Swissair falls into the sea off the coast of Nova Scotia at 9.31 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, about an hour after TWA 800, moaning ‘like a homesick angel’ (Scarry, ‘The Fall of TWA 800’), begins its final descent, Swissair’s MD-11, a type of plane made by McDonnell-Douglas and derived from the DC-10, is a construction able to ‘[carry] out tremendous feats of self-repair’. Accordingly, argues Scarry, ‘[i]t may well be that Swissair 111’s problems began at 9:14’, when the pilot requests to make an unscheduled landing at Boston and the cockpit fills with smoke, with false information, ‘and that the plane’s systems far from correcting themselves or buying time, simply surrendered to the ever-accelerating decline. But it is also possible that Swissair 111’s electrical problems began much earlier and that for a time the plane did carry out acts of self-repair.’ Indeed, Swissair’s northbound flight does not proceed uneventfully along New England’s coastline: the passenger flight loses radio contact, for 13 minutes, starting at 8.33 p.m., with all of the eastern seaboard controllers while travelling along the rim of Long Island. Elaine Scarry, ‘Swissair 111, TWA 800, and Electromagnetic Interference’, The New York Review of Books, 21 September 2000. Available online: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2000/sep/21/swissair111-twa-800-electromagnetic-interference/, accessed on 09/12/13. 179 Ibid. 180 Ibid. Unlike TWA 800 and Swissair 111, EgyptAir 990 does not take off on a Wednesday at 8.19 p.m., nor does it travel along the ‘Bette Route’, the direction assigned to commercial flights when the adjoining exercise zones, W-105 and W-106, are either in, or reserved for, military use; taking off in the middle of the night, at 1.19 a.m., EgyptAir, an unexpected apparition on some computer screens, flies directly into W-106, then crosses over into W-105, where, deep within its expanse, it also crashes. The crash is usually interpreted as a deliberate act, a suicide mission, on the part of the relief first officer. 181 Scarry, ‘Swissair 111, TWA 800, and Electromagnetic Interference’. 182 See US Navy Fleet Area Control and Surveillance Facility, Virginia Cape website: http://www.vacapes.navy.mil, accessed on 09/12/13. 183 Scarry, ‘The Fall of TWA 800’. 184 Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 27. 185 Robert Storr, September: A History Painting by Gerhard Richter (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 8. 186 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 67.

Mobilization: Un/Endings 1 2 3 4 5

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (London: Vintage, 2000), 3 and 145. Ibid., 760. Ibid., 8 and 760. Ibid., 760. Jacques Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives)’. Diacritics, 14, 2, Nuclear Criticism (Summer 1984a): 27. 6 Achille Mbembe quoted in Ben Anderson, ‘Facing the Future Enemy: US Counterinsurgency Doctrine and the Pre-Insurgent’. Theory, Culture, Society, 28 (7–8) (December 2011): 235.

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7 Anderson, ‘Facing the Future Enemy’, 231. 8 I am indebted, here, to James Purdon’s fantastic paper, ‘“Off record, miss, remember?”: Cold War Interrogations’, delivered at the Cold War Unlimited symposium held on 20 September 2013 at the University of Sheffield. 9 Simon Critchley, ‘Derrida: the reader’, in Derrida’s Legacies: Literature and Philosophy, eds. Robert Eaglestone and Simon Glendinning (London; New York: Routledge, 2008), 6 and 9. 10 See Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: the Mystical Foundation of Authority’, in Cardozo Law Review 11, 945. The paper is also accessible via http://pdflibrary.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/ derrida_force-of-law.pdf, accessed on 16/11/13. 11 Ibid., 929. 12 Ibid., 925. 13 Jacques Derrida, ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides’, in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, eds. Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida and Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 114. 14 Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres I (Cambridge, MA; London: Semiotext(e), 2011), 28. 15 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 723. 16 Derrida, ‘Autoimmunity’, 114. 17 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow. 760. 18 Derrida, ‘Autoimmunity’, 86. 19 Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, 939. 20 See Anderson, ‘Facing the Future Enemy’ on this note. 21 In Underworld, Don DeLillo notes that, ‘All technology refers to the bomb’. Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997), 467. 22 See, for example, Don DeLillo, ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, The Guardian, 22 December 2001. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/dec/22/fiction. dondelillo, accessed on 16/11/13. 23 Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 10. 24 Ibid., 57. 25 Jordan Crandall, ‘Ontologies of a Wayward Drone: A Salvage Operation’, C-Theory, 2 November 2011. Available online: http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=693, accessed on 09/12/13. 26 Jussi Parikka, Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 66. 27 Ibid., 24. 28 Derek Gregory, ‘From a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern War’. Theory, Culture, Society, 28 (7–8): 192, 193 and 197. 29 Steven Connor, Fly (London: Reaktion, 2006), 31. 30 Anas Karzai, Digital Inflections: Drone Warfare Seminar, 20 June 2013. Accessible through the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture website: http://pactac.net/ series/digital-inflections-drone-warfare/, accessed on 17/11/13. 31 Gregory, ‘From a View to a Kill’, 201. 32 Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 5. 33 Steven Connor talks about the fly as the opposite of the angel; see Fly, 166.

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34 Anderson, ‘Facing the Future Enemy’, 235. 35 In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon writes about the sound of the rocket coming too late, ‘after the blast, the rocket’s ghost calling to ghosts it newly made’. (138). It is Derrida who, in Paper Machine, notes that new technologies are ‘restructurations’ of older ones: each new form is, therefore, also an archive in which previous incarnations survive. Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 9. 36 Derrida, ‘Autoimmunity’, 90–1. 37 This is a modified reference to Shakespeare’s Richard II, where Henry Bolingbroke utters the following imperative: ‘I am a subject, and I challenge the law.’ William Shakespeare, Richard II, Act II, Scene III. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 380.

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Archival research Franklyn Phillips Papers, John Fitzgerald Kennedy Presidential Library, Columbia Point, Massachussetts. James E. Webb Papers and Current News, John Fitzgerald Kennedy Presidential Library, Columbia Point, Massachussetts.

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Websites I’ve accessed the following government documents through these websites: ABM Treaty October 1972 through Federation of American Scientists (FAS): http://www.fas.org/nuke/control/abmt/text/abm2.htm. Accessed 08/12/13. Ballistic Missile Early Warning System description through FAS: http://www.fas.org/spp/ military/program/nssrm/initiatives/bmews.htm. Accessed 10/12/13. High Frequency Active Auroral Research Project (HAARP): http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/ haarp/gen1.html. Last accessed 29/08/08. This website is no longer available. Nuclear Rocket Development Station, through the US Department of Energy: http://www.nv.doe.gov/library/factsheets/DOENV_1094.pdf. Accessed 09/12/13. Security Resources Panel of the Science Advisory Committee, ‘Deterrence & Survival in the Nuclear Age’, (Gaither Report) 7 November 1957, through: http://www2.gwu.edu/ nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB139/nitze02.pdf. Accessed 10/12/13. US Atomic Energy Act of 1946 through the US Department of Energy: http://www.ch.doe. gov/html/site_info/atomic_energy.htm. United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, 14 April 1950 through FAS: http://ftp.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsc-hst/nsc-68-6.htm. Accessed 10/12/13. US Navy Fleet Area Control and Surveillance Facility, Virginia Cape: http://www.vacapes. navy.mil. Accessed 09/13/12. I further accessed less reputable, but still interesting sources in terms of Cold War nostalgia projects: Chromehooves.net [a website dedicated to the Titan missile] Strategic Air Command.com [‘preserving the heritage’ of SAC] Silohome.com [selling retrofitted missile/home installations] Subterracaste.com [selling silo homes]

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Index abject 34, 35, 48, 77, 78, 92, 102 Agamben, Giorgio 1, 11, 14, 20, 45, 46 agriculture 53–6, 60, 65, 66, 87 angels 10, 23, 27, 42, 82, 121, 124 archive 24, 30–3, 35, 41–4, 124, 130n. 178 Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) 29, 33, 39–40, 91–2, 134n. 121 autoimmunity 1, 13, 14, 17, 18, 21, 24, 72, 77, 91, 95, 96, 98, 99, 114, 118, 119, 122 Ballard, J. G. 79–81, 88, 91, 93 Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) 110, 111, 113–14 Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) 92, 112, 115 Batman 25, 105–6 Baudrillard, Jean 1, 9–12, 15, 48–9, 80, 96, 102, 136–7n. 27 Benjamin, Walter 1, 2, 6, 7, 20, 47, 52 blind 11–13, 18, 28, 50, 59, 60, 62, 75, 82, 88, 97, 98, 111, 116, 121, 124 7, 16, 17, 23, 27, 29, 30, 53, 66, 68, 71, 80, 89, 91, 99, 116 coldness 2, 8, 9, 16, 24, 38, 42, 48, 52, 59, 63, 67, 68, 71, 72, 81, 88, 89 control 13, 16, 20–1, 29, 33, 35, 41, 54, 56, 58, 62, 67, 69, 76, 78, 79, 84, 91, 95, 96, 100, 104–7, 112, 114, 115, 117, 139n. 87, 141n. 113, 143n. 153, 148n. 109 cyborg 24, 72, 78, 79, 81, 145nn. 7, 13, 14, 28

defence 10, 11, 25, 30, 41, 49, 54, 55, 56–8, 61, 62, 75, 85, 86, 88, 95, 98, 104–5, 110–12, 114–15, 119, 121, 124, 139n. 81, 142–3n. 142, 148n. 116, 156–7n. 124, 157n. 129, 158n. 152 Deleuze, Gilles 1, 5, 6, 8, 20, 21, 123 DeLillo, Don 28, 33, 66, 96, 97, 103, 128n. 104, 161n. 21 Derrida, Jacques 1, 5, 7, 13, 15, 17, 18, 20, 29, 30–3, 43, 95–8, 121–2 dome 12, 13, 16, 36, 43, 44, 53, 62, 89, 96, 99, 104, 114, 119, 122, 124, 132–3n. 85 double 13, 36, 39, 41, 52, 53, 93, 96, 97, 101, 107, 109, 128n. 130 dream-work/world/text/machine 1, 2, 4–10, 15, 16, 17, 20–5, 27, 31, 38, 39, 41, 43, 50, 53, 62, 63, 65, 67, 68, 71–4, 76, 77, 80–3, 85–7, 89, 93, 95–7, 101, 103–6, 112, 114, 115, 118, 119, 121–4 drone 19, 121, 123, 124

codes

death cult/colony/drive 8–12, 16, 17, 20–5, 27, 29, 30, 33, 36, 40–4, 50, 52, 53, 61, 64, 65, 68–9, 71–2, 74, 77, 80, 81, 88, 95, 102, 103, 110, 115–19, 122, 123 death ray 24, 25, 30, 106, 107, 117, 118 De Certeau, Michel 6, 47

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Edwards, Paul N. 13, 95, 112, 139n. 81 Eisenhower, Dwight 39, 56–8, 61, 84, 85 empire 15, 16, 24, 28, 49, 55, 65, 72, 74, 86, 97, 99, 107 empty, emptiness 2, 10–12, 14–17, 19, 21–4, 27, 29, 33, 42, 46–9, 52, 53, 66, 67, 71, 76, 77, 91, 99, 101, 103, 114, 119, 121 endless 6, 10, 18, 35, 39, 42–4, 49, 73, 81, 88, 89, 98, 114, 122, 126n. 34 escape 13, 35, 36, 37, 50, 55, 60, 61, 69, 72, 82, 83, 89, 113 fantasy 2, 6–9, 13, 16, 19–22, 30, 38, 52, 56, 67, 68, 95, 96, 105, 111, 123, 124 fascism 4, 16, 45, 52, 71, 72, 77, 80, 81, 83

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178

Index

father 32–3, 36, 41–2, 52, 132–3n. 85 Ferriss, Hugh 103 Foucault, Michel 1, 5, 6, 20–4 Freud, Sigmund 1, 9, 11, 32, 36, 40, 119 future 1, 2, 11, 18, 32, 33, 36, 39–41, 43, 56–8, 60, 65, 67, 72, 75, 77–8, 80, 81, 83, 86, 89, 91, 96, 99, 102, 108, 110, 111, 117, 122, 123 Ginsberg, Allen 53–4, 56 glass 10, 14–17, 23, 36, 42, 44, 71, 72, 77, 80, 81, 88, 89, 92, 96, 101, 102, 106, 112, 114, 115, 119, 132–3n. 85 Guattari, Félix 1, 5, 6, 8, 20, 21, 123 Haraway, Donna 3, 82, 145n. 7 haunting 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 12, 21, 29, 31, 32, 52, 116, 121

Latour, Bruno 1–8, 20, 28, 29, 123 Laurence, William L. 28, 109 law 1, 5, 7, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 21, 28, 32, 33, 42–6, 49, 55, 96, 98, 103, 122–4 Lawrence, D. H. 42, 49, 52 Lefebvre, Henri 37–8, 42 light 4, 6, 9, 11–13, 15–17, 23, 24, 28, 30, 31, 33, 34, 41, 43–4, 48–50, 52, 61–4, 67, 78, 97, 100, 103, 106–15, 119, 121, 124, 137–8n. 46 love 3–4, 8, 9, 11, 16, 23, 32, 36, 39, 41, 66, 68, 71–3, 79, 80, 124, 127n. 59, 141n. 117 Mailer, Norman 52, 76–8, 88 map 3–6, 21, 46, 51, 66, 72, 74, 87, 117, 126n. 34, 141n. 116 mushroom 12, 24, 50, 62, 65, 69, 106, 112, 119

illimitable 10, 14, 18, 22, 44, 45, 62, 99, 121, 124 immobility, inertia 9, 10, 16, 23, 24, 32, 36, 50, 53, 59, 61, 62, 68, 82, 113, 116, 119, 122, 126n. 34 implantation, inhabitation 1, 2, 5, 16, 17, 20, 21, 34, 46, 47, 51, 61, 66, 68, 69, 114 implosion 13, 28, 37, 96, 119 inanimate 10, 36, 39, 50, 119 insectile 41, 42, 48, 50, 65, 97, 106, 108, 111, 112, 123, 138n. 52 invisibility, invisible 3, 9, 11, 13, 15, 19, 22, 28, 29, 32, 42, 43, 49, 50, 52, 59, 61, 64, 66, 78, 81, 97, 105, 110, 112, 115, 116, 119, 123

nests 32, 34, 41, 44 NSC-68 54, 65

Jefferson, Thomas 54–6, 65, 66 Johnson, Lyndon B. 83–4

Reagan, Ronald 25, 106, 110, 112–13, 155n. 96 realization/derealization 2, 4, 7, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 27, 68, 73, 115 returns 2, 5, 9, 11, 14, 17, 19, 27, 31, 32, 36, 40, 41, 43, 50, 65, 67, 71, 80, 81, 83, 87, 88, 89, 91, 106, 119, 121, 122, 123, 149n. 132 Rickels, Laurence A. 8, 116, 154n. 77 ruin 2, 6, 12, 20, 24, 66, 67, 80, 97, 101, 102, 106, 132–3n. 85

Kadavergehorsamkeit 23, 82, 83 Kahn, Herman 59–60, 62 Kennedy, John F. 58, 83–6 King, Stephen 24, 30–7, 41–3, 52, 60, 137–8n. 46 Kittler, Friedrich 7, 135n. 152 Kubrick, Stanley 24, 31, 34, 36, 41, 42, 64, 79, 133n. 91

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ontology

3, 16, 19, 22, 29, 47, 73, 80–1, 124, 136n. 16 Oz 43, 45, 51–3, 62, 63, 110 palimpsest 32, 34, 37, 46, 51, 69 parabola 12, 52, 82, 92, 113 plastic, plasticity 11, 36, 47, 71, 80, 82, 89, 91, 106, 114, 137–8n. 46 Poe, Edgar Allan 35–6, 42, 44 Pynchon, Thomas 1, 3–4, 10–12, 14–17, 21–4, 27, 31, 29, 42, 45–7, 52, 62, 71–2, 74, 82, 88–9, 93, 96, 97, 107, 110, 114, 121, 124

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Index Saturn V 72, 74, 75, 77, 91, 151n. 183 Scarry, Elaine 117–18, 159n. 175, 160n. 178 Schell, Jonathan 22, 29, 99 security 2, 10–13, 16, 18, 20, 22–5, 30, 31, 35, 38, 43, 45–7, 54–5, 61, 66–9, 71, 73, 74, 83, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 95, 97, 99, 103, 104, 110, 116, 121, 124 September 11 18, 96, 103, 115, 119, 123 shield 19, 24, 40, 50, 56, 61–3, 68, 72, 86, 88, 92, 95, 108, 110, 113–15, 118–19, 122 shroud 17, 65, 68, 71, 72, 79, 85, 104, 115 silence 3, 8, 31, 48, 72, 81, 99, 122, 123 silo 22, 24, 59–66, 68, 76, 113, 114, 144n. 163 skin 17, 27, 33, 37, 38, 40–4, 79, 81, 96, 107 sleep 6, 9, 10, 34, 59, 62, 103 Sloterdijk, Peter 98, 122, 123 Soddy, Frederick 39–40 spectres, phantoms 8, 9, 11, 12, 16, 19, 22, 32, 33, 39, 71, 72, 80, 83, 102, 106, 108, 109, 110, 123 Sputnik 19, 57, 79, 83–5, 111, 141–2n. 118 stockpile 7, 17, 31, 121 storage 17, 32, 45, 46, 53, 56, 60–2, 66, 67, 82, 113 Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) 25, 110, 113–14 sublime 8, 13, 17, 27, 29, 41, 67, 77, 80, 81, 82, 88, 92, 96, 97, 105, 123, 124 tentacular, tuberous 45, 46, 52–3, 62, 97, 101 terror, terrorism 13, 14, 16, 18, 20, 24, 30–1, 41, 49, 50, 51, 60, 69, 98, 99, 103, 113, 115, 121, 123, 124, 158n. 152

Rocket States.indb 179

179

Tesla, Nikola 25, 104–8 textuality 6, 7, 8, 11, 15, 17, 20–4, 30–7, 42, 43, 46, 50, 105, 121 threshold 2, 14–16, 24, 46–8, 50, 53, 69 Titan, titanic 1, 20, 21, 30, 61–7, 74, 75, 77, 91, 97, 103, 119, 123, 143n. 153 Trinity 11, 12, 14–17, 21, 27, 35, 67, 96, 109, 112, 119, 122 undead 8, 9, 11, 16, 23, 33, 50, 69 underground, mines 27, 28, 30, 33, 38, 40, 42, 45, 52, 58, 59, 60, 62, 66, 88, 90, 104, 137–8n. 46, 142–3n. 142, 154n. 77 Updike, John 84 verticality

32, 36, 42, 60, 75, 83, 96, 99, 101, 103, 105, 133n. 96 Virilio, Paul 5, 10, 11, 18–20, 54, 61, 65 waste 10, 30, 33, 34, 36, 38, 48, 56, 87, 93, 137n. 30, 140n. 98 Webb, James E. 75, 85–7, 90–2, 146n. 33, 149nn. 120, 125, 127, 132, 150n. 134 Wells, H. G. 39, 65, 97 Wolfe, Tom 78–9, 88 Wright, Frank Lloyd 101–2 zero

10–12, 14, 15, 16, 21–3, 28, 29, 30, 43, 45, 46, 53, 60, 66, 71, 72, 80, 82, 99, 103, 106, 109, 119, 121, 123, 124 Žižek, Slavoj 18, 97, 118 zone 10, 14, 17, 24, 33, 41, 45–6, 48, 50–3, 58, 66–9, 77, 80, 81, 99, 101, 103, 112, 116–18, 156–7n. 124, 160n. 180

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