Post by Admin on Mar 12, 2024 11:09:05 GMT
Prehistory in the atomic age
To understand the terrifying futures unleashed by nuclear weapons, we urgently need to return to the deep past
aeon.co/essays/only-the-deep-past-can-make-sense-of-terrifying-nuclear-futures
On the morning of 16 July 1945, at exactly 05:29:21, an unparalleled bomb was detonated in a United States desert and the world entered the ‘atomic age’. No other period in human history has dawned so explosively or so precisely. No other period has been calculated down to the second. Instead, the dating of cultural periods becomes less and less exact as we move backward through our past toward the fuzzy edges of prehistory, the period in which our species emerged. While the Middle Ages begin sometime around 476 CE, and classical antiquity begins sometime during the 8th century BCE, the prehistoric period emerges over hundreds of thousands of years, possibly 2.5 million years ago.
And while the atomic age starts with a sudden explosion, prehistory begins without a sound. It starts as a mute dawn stretching across geological time, heard only by those excavating landscapes and tombs for traces of our distant hominin ancestors. No two eras from human history began more differently than the atomic age and the prehistoric period. And yet, despite the difference in their temporal constitution and their positions at the extremities of human time – one in the deep past, the other in the 20th century – a reciprocal analogical relationship exists between them. We have learned to imagine one through the other. This analogical relationship has left a lasting mark on the Western historical consciousness, which appears across politics, art and culture, philosophy, and the human and social sciences.
Today, the two ages remain bound together, continuing to illuminate each other’s complexities. And there are indeed complexities, for these two major ‘discoveries’ of modernity remain deeply ambivalent. Both are products of a world becoming more open to human knowledge, unveiled through science and technology, yet the discovery of both periods has also shattered the very premises and operative modes of that knowledge: those who ‘found’ prehistory had to confront a time before (and therefore without) history; and those who learned to split the atom now had to confront possibilities that were difficult to predict or tame. The forms of knowledge that made these discoveries possible, including breakthroughs in quantum physics and anthropology, have not taken us far toward fully understanding these periods. And we do need to understand them, for both prehistory and the atomic age continue to coexist as charged historical figures in the global political imagination, whether through the deep time anxieties surrounding the Anthropocene, or through ongoing fears of nuclear accidents, and nuclear war. As always, to make sense of these concerns in the long term, we must leave the present.
One of the first metaphors that built the imagination of atomic energy was the story of the first mastery of fire, the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus. Through this narrative, the atomic explosion on 16 July 1945, known as the Trinity test, became another ‘great moment in history’. At least, that is how the journalist William L Laurence, one of the few privileged witnesses to the nuclear test, described the explosion in an article for The New York Times in September 1945:
At that great moment in history, ranking with the moment in the long ago when man first put fire to work for him and started on his march to civilization, the vast energy locked within the hearts 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.
For Laurence, the detonation marked the apogee of human civilization. But not everyone agreed with this evolutionary vision of history or this framing of the test as an exalted Prometheanism. For some, the new atomic age was far too radical and strange to simply be an extension of our past technological successes. To these observers, it was a rupture with the past. And yet, confronted with the puzzling experiences of the atomic age, they found themselves also seeking metaphors or precedents that could help them assimilate the bewildering changes. Unexpectedly, they too turned toward the ancient human past to understand the world that arrived on 16 July 1945, at 05:29:21. They turned toward an age whose cultural vestiges are striking and enigmatic, a period documented by no written sources and no direct survivors, with a duration whose boundaries are indistinct with natural evolution, fossilisation and geology. In the 20th century, prehistory constituted a symbolic field that never ceased to nourish the anxious thinking of the atomic age.
To Bataille and other intellectuals, Hiroshima became the inverted image of Lascaux
In a lecture delivered on 18 January 1955, the French writer and philosopher Georges Bataille noted the coincidence between the discovery of prehistoric paintings in the Lascaux cave in September 1940, and the ‘atomic experiments’ that took place five years later. To Bataille, the paintings inside Lascaux – depicting fauna living in the area roughly 17,000 years ago, including now-extinct aurochs, deer and other animals – were so astonishingly well preserved, so untouched by the erosion of millennia, that he thought they looked fake. The cave was like a time-capsule, and the time separating the creation and rediscovery of the paintings inside it (by teenagers living near Lascaux) had been so compressed that it was as if prehistorians and moderns were communicating directly.
Through these paintings of animals, ancient humans were able to deliver a message to their modern descendants. For Bataille, the message was clear: the paintings showed the ‘decisive moment’ that the human species emerged from animality, a moment that finds its symmetrical complement and cancellation in Harry Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb over Hiroshima on the morning of 6 August 1945. If the sumptuous paintings at Lascaux were expressions of our ancestors ceasing to be mere animals, then the double explosion in Japan had brought the species back toward its animal state as the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were struck by baffling, horrifying bolts of lightning from the sky that eluded their understanding. The extreme violence of the bomb had produced complete unintelligibility, reducing those it struck to death and stupor, and returning human creations and life to dust and stone. Bataille believed that, in the wake of Hiroshima, ‘an avaricious, staggering, interminable revelation began for everyone’; or rather, ‘the opposite of a revelation’. The bomb’s only communication, its only message, was that of annihilation. To Bataille and other intellectuals, Hiroshima became the inverted image of Lascaux.
This inversion involved more than the relationship between ‘animality’ and ‘humanity’. It also involved a relationship between different ways of using energy and resources. Both the sumptuous frescoes of Lascaux and the atomic bomb involved a gratuitous expenditure, a symbolic surplus. Just as the cave paintings represented a symbolic surplus for our prehistoric ancestors, who chose to use their excess energy to paint images rather than hunt or forage, the bombing of Hiroshima represented a different kind of expenditure. The atomic bomb, though inextricably linked to the capitalist production chain and the generation of gigantic profits (the Manhattan Project cost close to $35 billion in today’s currency), was nonetheless the only collective expenditure of its time that was likely to generate no profit at all.
The bomb defied the profit logic of the 20th-century economics. ‘We, in the middle of the 20th century, are poor,’ Bataille said, ‘we are very poor, we are incapable of undertaking an important job if it has no return. Everything we undertake is submitted to the control of profitability.’ There was, however, one exception: ‘the engineering and materials of destruction, works that today threaten to exterminate the species, and even to end terrestrial life.’ The surplus of the bomb produced the pure and simple eradication of meaning. And the Japanese shock and stupor in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was only a taste of things to come. As the atomic age deepened, the possibility of human extinction grew in parallel with the stockpiling of nuclear weapons. Loud excitement about the future began to turn toward the geological silences of prehistory.
It was not only European philosophers who saw parallels between the atomic and prehistoric ages. Eventually, this analogical relationship was also observed by those responsible for the smooth running of the nuclear chain in the US, and the anti-nuclear intellectuals who analysed the operations of that chain. As the Cold War intensified and nuclear waste proliferated in the late 20th century, the US federal government began to consider analogies between prehistoric monuments and nuclear megastructures. A series of ‘futures panels’ were convened across the country in which experts discussed how to communicate with future societies about the enduring radioactive dangers of the nuclear facilities being built in the 20th century – even if those societies may not share the same languages or cultural references as ours.
rest in link.
To understand the terrifying futures unleashed by nuclear weapons, we urgently need to return to the deep past
aeon.co/essays/only-the-deep-past-can-make-sense-of-terrifying-nuclear-futures
On the morning of 16 July 1945, at exactly 05:29:21, an unparalleled bomb was detonated in a United States desert and the world entered the ‘atomic age’. No other period in human history has dawned so explosively or so precisely. No other period has been calculated down to the second. Instead, the dating of cultural periods becomes less and less exact as we move backward through our past toward the fuzzy edges of prehistory, the period in which our species emerged. While the Middle Ages begin sometime around 476 CE, and classical antiquity begins sometime during the 8th century BCE, the prehistoric period emerges over hundreds of thousands of years, possibly 2.5 million years ago.
And while the atomic age starts with a sudden explosion, prehistory begins without a sound. It starts as a mute dawn stretching across geological time, heard only by those excavating landscapes and tombs for traces of our distant hominin ancestors. No two eras from human history began more differently than the atomic age and the prehistoric period. And yet, despite the difference in their temporal constitution and their positions at the extremities of human time – one in the deep past, the other in the 20th century – a reciprocal analogical relationship exists between them. We have learned to imagine one through the other. This analogical relationship has left a lasting mark on the Western historical consciousness, which appears across politics, art and culture, philosophy, and the human and social sciences.
Today, the two ages remain bound together, continuing to illuminate each other’s complexities. And there are indeed complexities, for these two major ‘discoveries’ of modernity remain deeply ambivalent. Both are products of a world becoming more open to human knowledge, unveiled through science and technology, yet the discovery of both periods has also shattered the very premises and operative modes of that knowledge: those who ‘found’ prehistory had to confront a time before (and therefore without) history; and those who learned to split the atom now had to confront possibilities that were difficult to predict or tame. The forms of knowledge that made these discoveries possible, including breakthroughs in quantum physics and anthropology, have not taken us far toward fully understanding these periods. And we do need to understand them, for both prehistory and the atomic age continue to coexist as charged historical figures in the global political imagination, whether through the deep time anxieties surrounding the Anthropocene, or through ongoing fears of nuclear accidents, and nuclear war. As always, to make sense of these concerns in the long term, we must leave the present.
One of the first metaphors that built the imagination of atomic energy was the story of the first mastery of fire, the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus. Through this narrative, the atomic explosion on 16 July 1945, known as the Trinity test, became another ‘great moment in history’. At least, that is how the journalist William L Laurence, one of the few privileged witnesses to the nuclear test, described the explosion in an article for The New York Times in September 1945:
At that great moment in history, ranking with the moment in the long ago when man first put fire to work for him and started on his march to civilization, the vast energy locked within the hearts 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.
For Laurence, the detonation marked the apogee of human civilization. But not everyone agreed with this evolutionary vision of history or this framing of the test as an exalted Prometheanism. For some, the new atomic age was far too radical and strange to simply be an extension of our past technological successes. To these observers, it was a rupture with the past. And yet, confronted with the puzzling experiences of the atomic age, they found themselves also seeking metaphors or precedents that could help them assimilate the bewildering changes. Unexpectedly, they too turned toward the ancient human past to understand the world that arrived on 16 July 1945, at 05:29:21. They turned toward an age whose cultural vestiges are striking and enigmatic, a period documented by no written sources and no direct survivors, with a duration whose boundaries are indistinct with natural evolution, fossilisation and geology. In the 20th century, prehistory constituted a symbolic field that never ceased to nourish the anxious thinking of the atomic age.
To Bataille and other intellectuals, Hiroshima became the inverted image of Lascaux
In a lecture delivered on 18 January 1955, the French writer and philosopher Georges Bataille noted the coincidence between the discovery of prehistoric paintings in the Lascaux cave in September 1940, and the ‘atomic experiments’ that took place five years later. To Bataille, the paintings inside Lascaux – depicting fauna living in the area roughly 17,000 years ago, including now-extinct aurochs, deer and other animals – were so astonishingly well preserved, so untouched by the erosion of millennia, that he thought they looked fake. The cave was like a time-capsule, and the time separating the creation and rediscovery of the paintings inside it (by teenagers living near Lascaux) had been so compressed that it was as if prehistorians and moderns were communicating directly.
Through these paintings of animals, ancient humans were able to deliver a message to their modern descendants. For Bataille, the message was clear: the paintings showed the ‘decisive moment’ that the human species emerged from animality, a moment that finds its symmetrical complement and cancellation in Harry Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb over Hiroshima on the morning of 6 August 1945. If the sumptuous paintings at Lascaux were expressions of our ancestors ceasing to be mere animals, then the double explosion in Japan had brought the species back toward its animal state as the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were struck by baffling, horrifying bolts of lightning from the sky that eluded their understanding. The extreme violence of the bomb had produced complete unintelligibility, reducing those it struck to death and stupor, and returning human creations and life to dust and stone. Bataille believed that, in the wake of Hiroshima, ‘an avaricious, staggering, interminable revelation began for everyone’; or rather, ‘the opposite of a revelation’. The bomb’s only communication, its only message, was that of annihilation. To Bataille and other intellectuals, Hiroshima became the inverted image of Lascaux.
This inversion involved more than the relationship between ‘animality’ and ‘humanity’. It also involved a relationship between different ways of using energy and resources. Both the sumptuous frescoes of Lascaux and the atomic bomb involved a gratuitous expenditure, a symbolic surplus. Just as the cave paintings represented a symbolic surplus for our prehistoric ancestors, who chose to use their excess energy to paint images rather than hunt or forage, the bombing of Hiroshima represented a different kind of expenditure. The atomic bomb, though inextricably linked to the capitalist production chain and the generation of gigantic profits (the Manhattan Project cost close to $35 billion in today’s currency), was nonetheless the only collective expenditure of its time that was likely to generate no profit at all.
The bomb defied the profit logic of the 20th-century economics. ‘We, in the middle of the 20th century, are poor,’ Bataille said, ‘we are very poor, we are incapable of undertaking an important job if it has no return. Everything we undertake is submitted to the control of profitability.’ There was, however, one exception: ‘the engineering and materials of destruction, works that today threaten to exterminate the species, and even to end terrestrial life.’ The surplus of the bomb produced the pure and simple eradication of meaning. And the Japanese shock and stupor in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was only a taste of things to come. As the atomic age deepened, the possibility of human extinction grew in parallel with the stockpiling of nuclear weapons. Loud excitement about the future began to turn toward the geological silences of prehistory.
It was not only European philosophers who saw parallels between the atomic and prehistoric ages. Eventually, this analogical relationship was also observed by those responsible for the smooth running of the nuclear chain in the US, and the anti-nuclear intellectuals who analysed the operations of that chain. As the Cold War intensified and nuclear waste proliferated in the late 20th century, the US federal government began to consider analogies between prehistoric monuments and nuclear megastructures. A series of ‘futures panels’ were convened across the country in which experts discussed how to communicate with future societies about the enduring radioactive dangers of the nuclear facilities being built in the 20th century – even if those societies may not share the same languages or cultural references as ours.
rest in link.