In his essay Bad Weather, Joseph Masco attempts to identify
a linear continuity between Cold War-Era atomic discourse and contemporary
climate change awareness in US security discourse and American public
consciousness. Using the method of discourse analysis, he relies on disclosed
or public documents/speeches by American authorities, from which he quotes
excerpts and stresses the sentences that are most revealing of the US state
security apparatus creed, and, analogously, he uses pictures of the representation
of an atomic experimental test, Hollywood post-apocalyptic films, photographs
of the Earth from the Apollo mission (and a modified version where “only the
southern tip of South America remains visible to sunlight”) and satellite
photographs of Hurricane Katrina as the matter forming cultural representation
of catastrophe. In the very beginning of the text, a nuclear test conducted
against a synthetic forest in the Nevada desert is evoked as a parable embedded
with aesthetic force. The idea of the sublime can be traced back to German
romanticism, especially in Schopenhauer’s definition of the sublime as the
visual experience containing a potential violence to destroy the viewer; for
Schopenhauer, the stronger the sublime potential of an image, also more magnificent
is nature’s predominance over humans. But the atomic sublime is “uncanny”, that
is, in Freudian understanding, unprecedented yet familiar: ironically, the
atomic sublime as understood by Masco operates in an inverse way as
Schopenhauer’s sublime, for the main thesis defended in the article is that the
destructive force of nature, present in climatic disasters, is in fact a direct
consequence of industrialization. Therefore, to reverse this scenario and
ensure the biosphere’s security, national security should be replaced with a
“planetary vision of sustainability.”
The main focus of
Masco’s attention is US state security policy. Ultimately, it’s the only field
endowed with enough power to perform change. As stated in the last phrase of
the article, which I find revealing and paradoxical, “securing the biosphere
requires nothing less than a post-national
vision of American power.” Even if
Masco denounces the limitation of US security to fully acknowledge the
international dimensions and implications of climate threat, he still cannot
move away from American power as only possible realm or agent capable of
transformative action. Other limited understandings of causality and power mark
the whole text and are, in my view, prejudicial to his arguments. The view that
military enterprise is the force behind: progress, technology, science and industrialization
feels too simplistic. His idea of “state” is that of a formless evil entity,
devoid of people and with no other rationale than the maximization of its own
power. That said, regardless of the great influence of Foucauldian vocabulary
and concepts that abound in the text, Masco still shares a realistic view of
international relations of Hobbesian, Machiavellian, Clausewitzian tradition. But,
contradictorily, he expresses an anti-Western, anti-Enlightenment,
anti-technology disregard for technology present in many contemporary
post-Foucauldian theorists or ecology activists. In sum, Masco retained the
worst part of realism as well as the worst part of Foucault. He portrays two
types of science, an evil one described as “geophysics”, serving the interests
of the national state, and a good one, understood as “biology”, anti-industrial
and defending the general survival of humanity. Even if this tension between
national interests and planetary (i.e., humanity’s) interests is at the core of
the article, Masco’s exclusive focus on America is a structural problem. The
insistence on Cold War mentality as a total signifier still present in
contemporary American politics is not convincing; similarly, the at certain
points evoked analogy or equivalence between terror threat, atomic threat and
climate threat is not sufficiently explored, taken as granted or itself subject
to the propaganda paranoia that seems to exist in Western nations of the
Northern Hemisphere.
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