Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear ThreatA rising ocean. A falling building. A toxic river. Species extinguished. A nuclear landscape. In a world so configured, the state of contemporary ecological thought and practice is woefully--and perilously--inadequate. Focusing on the government's nuclear waste burial program in Carlsbad, New Mexico, "Signs of Danger begins the urgent work of finding a new way of thinking about ecological threat in our time. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad began receiving shipments in 1999. With a proposed closing date of 2030, this repository for nuclear waste must be secured with a sign, the purpose of which will be to keep people away for three hundred generations. In the official documents uncovered by Peter van Wyck, we encounter a government bureaucracy approaching the issue of nuclear waste as a technical problem only to find itself confronting a host of intractable philosophical issues concerning language, culture, and history. "Signs of Danger plumbs these depths as it shows us how the problem raised in the desert of New Mexico is actually the problem of a culture grappling with ecological threats and with questions of the limits of meaning and representation in the deep future. The reflections at the center of this book--on memory, trauma, disaster, representation, and the virtual--are aimed at defining the uniquely modern status of environmental and nuclear threats. They offer invaluable insights into the interface of where culture ends and nature begins, and how such a juncture is closely linked with questions of risk, concepts of history, and the cultural experience of time. |
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accident activity atomic Battelle Memorial Institute become berm burial buried capsule Carlsbad Chernobyl concepts concern construction containment contemporary cultural danger death decay Deleuze Department of Energy desert disaster disavowal disposal ecological threats Environmental ethical event example Figure Freud future Gilles Deleuze global Guattari high-level waste Ibid idea Isolation Pilot Plant Jacques Lacan Jean Laplanche kind Lacanian language material meaning memory ment meters Mexico monument nature nuclear threat Nuclear Waste object operate Paul Virilio perhaps political possible problem production Psychoanalysis question radioactive waste reactor reality relation repository response retroactively risk salt secret semiotic sense signifier simply Skull Valley Slavoj Žižek social structure symbolic technological temporal THEORY things thought Three Mile Island tion trans transuranic trauma Trauth U.S. Department Ulrich Beck understanding ununoctium virtual Waste Isolation Pilot weapons WIPP York Žižek