Signs of dangerdangerous signs : responding to nuclear threat

This doctoral thesis ("Signs of Danger/Dangerous Signs: Responding to Nuclear Threat") is a poststructural, interdisciplinary exploration of the social, political and cultural workings of nuclear threat. Drawing extensively on a nuclear waste burial initiative being undertaken by the United States Department of Energy, this work is a detailed critical analysis of the relationships between the threats posed by nuclear wastes, and the responses provoked in relation to such threats.Working through such theorists as Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Zˆizˆek (the second death, and le Reel), Francois Ewald (thresholds), Ulrich Beck (risk society), and Felix Guattari (ecology of the virtual), this work demonstrates the manner in which ecological threats, such as that posed by the nuclear, are (paradoxically) "creative" forces; that is, they have a propensity to cut through traditional social divisions (e.g., class, race), assembling news lines of affinity, and new constituencies of those at risk. Indeed, it seem that nuclear threat constitutes a novel form of threat. A form of threat that is irreducibly material, yet admits of no objective ground upon which decisions may be made. A form of threat that threatens the very biological foundations of life, yet whose ontology is to be determined through social and cultural responses.The principle critical figure I use to analyse and illustrate the movement of threat is the vast monument/sign which is to be constructed above the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in the desert near Carlsbad, New Mexico. If constructed, this monument will be one of the largest public works project in history. The purpose of this monument is to signify the danger which is to be buried below and thereby deter---for a legislated period of 10,000 years---inadvertent human intrusion into the site. Through analyses of the semiotic issues raised by the desert monument, the appropriation of the practice of burial and its relations to cultural conceptions of death, and the use of the desert as the mise-en-scene of waste, this dissertation shows how the larger context of waste burial demonstrates an extreme and unexamined field of cultural trauma and disavowal around issues of nuclear threat