Shiloh R. Krupar. Hot Spotter’s Report: Military Fables of Toxic Waste. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 2013. 360 pages, 66 b&w photos. $25.00 paper ISBN 978-0-8166-7639-2 $75.00 cloth ISBN 978-0-8166-7638-5.

Nuclear Topographies

The American nuclear imaginary is a strange and busy place. Fueled by an expanding archive of texts and tropes, victims and perpetrators, histories and art, images, landscapes, ghosts and other invisible visibilities. Commencing, we might say, a little over 68 years ago, west of Alamogordo, deep in the New Mexican desert, the contemporary transformation was set in motion – the Great Acceleration as Morton (2012) puts it. The piously named Trinity detonation of July 16, 1945 – perhaps the apogee of all imaginable Anthropocenic performance art – changed things forever.[1] Of course this was merely an opening salvo, as we know – “ushering us in,” as it’s often put; laying bare a persistent spectatorial theme. But the point is not so much to tell an origin story, as it is to signal the kind of domain we’re dealing with here. That is, a nuclear present figured as a model of history in which the past does indeed signal a moment of danger; one that very much makes claims upon the present.[2]

A very incomplete survey of recent work would move from Eric Schlosser’s atlas of catastrophic close-calls, Command and Control: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats (2013); to the unheimlich-ish irradiated family dramas of Kristen Iversen’s Full Body Burden (2012), and Kate Brown’s Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (2013);to the oral histories of women workers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Kate Keirnan’s The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II (2013), Ray Monk’s 850 page biography of the bomb’s putative father, Robert Oppenheimer: His Life and Mind (2013); to David Seed’s tracking of American cold war narratives, Under The Shadow: The Atomic Bomb and Cold War Narratives (2013), and the edited collection, The Nuclear Age in Popular Media: A Transnational History, 1945-1965 (2012). And, most recently, the arrival of Elaine Scarry’s Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing between Democracy and Doom (2014). And add to this the dozens of articles, essays and reviews that have appeared in numerous domains, all within the mise en scène of a triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station in 2011, and the very recent (February 2014) fire and subsequent radiation leak at the USA’s only geological repository for nuclear waste. Krupar’s book thus enters the scene at a moment of renewed (again) interest – and anxiety – around the cultures, histories, practices, landscapes, politics, memories and futures of the nuclear.[3]

Hot Spotter’s Report: Military Fables of Toxic Waste (2013a) is a playful and meticulous investigation, something quite unlike anything within the recent, or not so recent cohort of topically related works. Free of the methodological melancholy that so often, and perhaps rightly, can come to inflect this kind of work, Hot Spotter’s Report is an unusual text. It is an utterly unique assessment of the American initiatives to remediate, resignify and manage, conceal and green, the chemical and radiotoxic remainders of cold war military nuclear production – with particular reference to facilities at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, and Rocky Flats, and the biopolitical management of the work force that supported these sites of production.

It is, in part, a collection of essays, several of which are drawn and revised from previous publication,[4] and, in part, a complex curatorial object seeking to explain itself. But it is also a near virtuoso performance of how one comes to work with figures, and likewise a methodological experiment in form and voice – one with impressive archival thickness – in writing the nuclear. None of it is staged as a lament on the end(s) of nature – yes, fabulously textual, but not only that. Nor does it join the unremitting chorus in a rehearsal of nature’s social construction; rather, it is an attempt to carefully chart its “ongoing composition” (page 14). It is a call, she says, “to experiment with a different aesthetics,” utilizing “various technologies of form, such as performative techniques, material figures, documentary play, and the absurd” (page 283).

Perhaps, most of all, Hot Spotter’s Report invents – which is to say, performs – a transnatural ethics by unraveling truth claims, and attending to the residual – “not simply to affirm it but to explore the ways that remains persist within the conditions of the present” (page 14). As she puts it elsewhere, her hope is that “the performative aspects of the book – particularly the use of irreverence – offer different ways to access the materials and issues than that permitted by a traditional approach – even, perhaps, encouraging a more diverse and creative ecological politics and more rigorously messy theory.” (Krupar, 2013b)

“Hot spots,” she writes, “are areas where something remains unassimilated and nagging; they are reminders of the “stickiness” of radiation and the impossibility of pure spaces, pure categories, or a pure self.” Furthermore, they are “unidirectional, irreversible, and contextually unique” (page 281). Hot spots are about the ongoing transgression of boundaries and mechanisms of containment, they are sites of “stubborn ambiguity” (page 281). They leak, in sometimes unimaginable ways.

But hot spotting itself implies more than an act of witness to the residual and ongoing sites of techno-military production; it seeks, she says, “to cultivate ethical relations with the remains of war” (page 282). And those remains – that is, waste – are a “figure for what remains ‘possible’ in the aftermath of catastrophe” (page 157); a possibility that calls upon a transnatural ethics; a call for humans to “take responsibility yet relinquish the certainty of knowing what justice looks like before hand, in order to explore more experimental coalitions” (page 15). This is a key piece of the itinerary here. This is an experiment.

Hot Spotting, the activity, or preoccupation perhaps, is both figure and device in Krupar’s work. As device, hot spotting is a kind of “artful forensics,” (page 280) a mode of criticism that arises “under conditions of toxicity, uncertainty, partial knowledge and secrecy” (page 12). Its aim is to bring to light the contemporary biopolitical implications of military (post-cold-war, post-nuclear) reorganization around what she calls “green war” (page 2).

Here, green war refers to the techno-military disavowal of war’s ongoing and residual impacts in the United States. As she figures it, it is a “powerful reorganization of social life that occludes the domestic impacts of war through tactical spectacles of nature, and that produces a slew of military remains caused by restructuring, remilitarization, and new demands for military efficiency and accountability” (page 4) It is the trick – powerfully rhetorical and irreducibly material – whereby proving grounds permute into calving grounds, where the barely visitable becomes naturally habitable; where ruins of war, the myriad pathways of toxicity and contamination, tip into the spectacle of green war.

It is as a figure that Hot Spotter’s Report gathers its critical and creative force, calling into presence a lively parliament of objects and personae (conceptual and otherwise):

A fictitious front company – E.A.G.L.E. – Environmental Artist Garbage Landscape Engineers;

testimonies;

a table-top reactor, and a nuclear waste sculptor – the woefully underappreciated James Acord;

a PowerPoint presentation with “exhibits,” delivered to the U.S. Department of Energy Spoofs;

animals – principally the bald eagle and the bison – as fetishes, metonyms and cold war totemic companions;

an allegorical bureaucratic drama;

a near abécédaire of apocryphal acronyms;

typographic conceits, bureaucratic typefaces, with nested notes;

a confabulated hearing before the Subcommittee on Satirical Appropriations;

the chilling tale of the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Act (EEOICPA);

and, the radioactive, triple-nippled drag queen, Nuclia Waste – “the Princess of Plutonium radiates her joy and belief that you should never take life too seriously” (Nuclia Waste, 2014).

Beginning with what one might reflexively call the Kafkaesque, but this is by now much too shelf-worn and normal, so let’s stick with the astonishing history of the decommissioning, decontamination and remediation of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, and its transformation into a wildlife refuge – the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge. Here we begin to understand the complex relations between military greening, cultural disavowal, the residual (and persistent) American frontier ideology, and the rubrics of military-to-wildlife conversion (“M2W”). The writing proceeds “through bricolage of official quotations, collected images and artifacts, academic references, journalistic accounts, ethnographic documentation, popular discourses, creative writing, and critical annotations” (page 28).

The classification of former arsenals as nature refuges has also been a popular strategy; abetted by private industry to externalize cleanup costs, the conversion of military into nature preserves serves to limit human contact with sites and environmentally reinterpret the history of the vast U.S. nuclear and military landscape – areas of secrecy and exception, military testing weapons production and, subsequently, contamination (page 28).

From here – in the guise of a PowerPoint presentation before the Subcommittee on Satirical Appropriations, Committee on Postnuclear Environmental Productions, United States Senate – we move to the “cleanup” of the notorious Rocky Flats nuclear production facilities, the Department of Energy’s invention of the Office of Legacy Management[5], and the greenwashed (re)naturalization of the site through tricks of remediation standards, and liability containment. And then in the following chapter, to the above mentioned EEOICPA – an nightmarish epidemiological shell game produced by the bureaucracy of displacement and denial on questions of occupational illness associated with nuclear workers.[6] In the final chapter, Krupar moves to a consideration of the political and ethical potentials of the counterspectacle as modes of aesthetic practice that seek “tactical means of drawing people in, interrupting routinized responses, and compelling action (page 222). Her aim here is to set out the terms for what she calls a transnatural ethics – a “tactical and relational ethics” (page 225). Naturecultures, she says (pace Haraway) “as a term put to practical use, calls the binarism it critiques back into being. By contrast “transnatural” seeks to simultaneously mark the natural and the indeterminate operation of “trans,” as that which is always questioning and undoing the natural as a thing or category, and that which is emerging beyond the natural but still in relation to it” (page 226-7) Transnatural is also a call for a “persistent irreverence” (page 269).

She puts it thus:

The larger theoretical aim of implementing the transnatural… is not to invoke figures of transgression metaphorically or a temporal utopia of mutinous indeterminacy, as theoretical intervention to surpass humanist ontology but to reveal the material work that produces the separation of nature as pure and to attend to the remainders of this separation, such as subjugated knowledges, “impure” cancerous bodies, perforated land, and abject materials, such as nuclear waste (page 227).

This is a probing and playful ethics she proposes – one that asks difficult questions around issues of waste subjectivities:

“Who or what will be a subject here? What will count as a life? Who or what is made possible or sustained, and who/what is sacrificed, contained, or rendered insignificant to preserve the vitality of other bodies? (page 229).

As she puts it, “the task is not to refine a representation in relation to a preexisting truth, but to produce representation upon representation with the aim of rearranging affect and building collective responses…” (page 282, my emphasis) And it is, I think, the very preponderance of representation upon representation that gives this book its gravitas. Yet there are points where the anxiety provoked by its own performance seems to require that Krupar over-justify, explain, and account for – in a curatorial and pedagogical mode – the project, the writing and its form. This is satire. This is citation. This is fictitious. This is where we explain our motives. Surely the performative and experimental qualities of a text like this are precisely aimed at invoking a kind of epistemological disturbance within scholarly and academic modes of knowledge-making and practices of knowing. But one may wonder if the very disturbance sought through the text’s performance, in seeking to account for itself – in what amounts to a didactic doubling – thereby diminishes the capacity for, and the potency of that very disturbance.[7]

In any case, this may all speak in some interesting ways to the challenges involved in inventing a mode of theorization, of experimentation, and maybe too the pragmatics of scholarly publication, and the not unrelated politics of promotion in the context of the University. As she puts it elsewhere:

“While some peer reviewers have relished the opportunity to engage with a creative format on its own terms, other reviewers don’t have the time to confront unfamiliar formats. People also have assumptions about what scholarly work should look like and can find it off-putting when a manuscript doesn’t adhere to these visual norms” (2013b).

Of course we realize that the norms are not only or strictly visual, but she continues, “I now try to balance different types of prose within the same manuscript and/or give instructions to the reader about how to approach the piece…”(2013b).

I have heard of this book being referred to as a work of creative non-fiction. I find the term unsettling in its begging of too many questions simultaneously, and too easily transforms into a precious category for writing that seeks to question formulaic norms of knowledge production. If naming is important, I might prefer to think of Hot Spotter’s Report as what we would call, in Canada at least, research-creation; elsewhere known as practice as research, or practice-led research, or arts based research.[8] A mode of work, in this instance, where the writing itself is part of the inquiry, part of the production, and not merely understood as a report of the already thought. In the end, Hot Spotter’s Report is all about a kind of performance, all the way down.[9] An anxious performance, but nonetheless.

Notes

[1] One could locate this differently. For example, December 2, 1942, with Fermi’s uranium pile under the abandoned Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. However, all such dates we might propose coalesce around a particular set of practices, so perhaps one can be a bit agnostic on this.

[2] This is the case whether we figure the Angel of History pointed forward, e.g., van Wyck’s Signs of Danger (2005), or backward – e.g., Trevor Paglen’s The Last Pictures, (2012). See Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” and in particular Thesis VI (Benjamin, 1968).

[3] See also the recent dissertation by Lindsay Freeman (2013).

[4] See her “Transnatural Ethics: Revisiting the Nuclear Cleanup of Rocky Flats, Co, through the Queer Ecology of Nuclia Waste”; “Where Eagles Dare: An Ethno-Fable with Personal Landfill”; and, “Alien Still Life: Distilling the Toxic Logics of the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge” (Krupar, 2007a, b; Krupar, 2011).

[5] I recently attended the staggeringly huge Waste Management Symposium in Phoenix. At a panel devoted to the recognition of the first decade of activities of the DOE’s Office Legacy Management, the first speaker introduced herself by chirping “I work for the Office of Forever!”

[6] Note that as of January 2014, former Rocky Flats workers have been made part of a Special Exposure Cohort, by designation of the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Such workers are “now eligible for a less-cumbersome claims process under federal law.”

[7] Now I’m going to tell you this really great joke. Here’s the joke… Now I’m going to explain the punch line, and then tell you why I needed to do so. If this is a bit uncharitable, replace the word joke with allegory.

[8] There is a lot of writing on all this, but I note (Chapman and Sawchuk, 2012) as a significant contribution from Canada.

[9] And a final word, below the line, directed perhaps at the author, but also the University of Minnesota Press. For all its remedial devices, and all its explanatory gestures, the book is actually not very easy to use. The book’s index is untrustworthy at best – making it hard to have the kind of mobility – relationship, really – that the text otherwise invites – and,in the absence of a full bibliography, it’s extremely hard to get a good picture of the constellation of citation within which she operates. 

References

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Brown K (2013) Plutopia : Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapman OB and K Sawchuk (2012) Research-Creation: Intervention, Analysis and "Family Resemblances." Canadian Journal of Communication 37(1).

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van Lente D (2012) The Nuclear Age in Popular Media: A Transnational History, 1945-1965. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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