1. The End of Imagination
European philosophy has had a long and messy divorce from imagination. There have been many failed reunions and embarrassing photos where we can see someone clipped out, with a floating hand still on the shoulder—think Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, first edition (1755) to second edition (1781).1 Or look at the table of contents of the Encyclopedie, where imagination lingers, but is reduced to a sole category: poetry. By the time we arrive at Gilbert Ryle’s Concept of Mind (1949), imagination, when it appears at all, is cognitive make-believe. We have moved from divorce to annulment: a fierce defense that there was never any marriage at all.
But I take imagination’s side: you never belonged in that relationship. You deserved better. Still, it’s a part of your past, and there’s something to be learned from those court records. For instance, I was captivated by Descartes’ argument on the chiliagon the first time I came across it in his Sixth Meditation:
When I imagine a triangle, for example, I don’t merely understand that it is a three-sided figure, but I also see the three lines with my mind’s eye as if they were present to me; that is what imagining is. But if I think of a chiliagon, although I understand quite well that it is a figure with a thousand sides, I don’t imagine the thousand sides or see them as if they were present to me. When I think of a body, I usually form some kind of image; so in thinking of a chiliagon I may construct in my mind – strictly speaking, in my imagination – a confused representation of some figure. But obviously it won’t be a chiliagon, for it is the very same image that I would form if I were thinking of, say, a figure with ten thousand sides. So it wouldn’t help me to recognize the properties that distinguish a chiliagon from other many-sided figures.
Note how the limitation of the imagination follows from a limitation upon sense discrimination: even when we have a computer generated image of a chiliagon, it still appears to us like a circle.
But Descartes’ purpose here was to distinguish between understanding and imagination, with the latter getting the recent breakup treatment: “Being able to imagine isn’t essential to me, as being able to understand is; for even if I had no power of imagination I would still be the same individual that I am.” (That’s it—walk away René.) Despite this short shrift, we may learn that this division between understanding and imagination goes both ways. Where we cannot imagine, we may understand, but where we cannot understand, there we imagine.
2. The Imagination of the End
One of the great modern explorations of this is in the work of feminist scholar Carol Cohn. Her 1987 paper, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals” is a report on a summer—and then a year—spent in close contact with the “defense intellectuals,” men—uniformly men—engaged in casual discussions of thermonuclear apocalypse scenarios on their coffee breaks. It is a surprisingly sympathetic account of these individuals while also a probing investigation of their imaginations, revealed not in their calculations of payloads and casualties, but in the casual, loaded language that accompanied their rational undertaking. Her report—very much worth reading— is filled with the “the astounding chasm between image and reality that characterizes technostrategic language.” Her analysis of the images of “clean bombs,” “missile size,” “nuclear virginity,” “penetrators,” the mild-sounding “footprint” of bombs dropped in succession, goes beyond the most obvious connotations of this language and does not suggest that this is all a highly-funded, highly-dangerous way for powerful men to sublimate sexual fantasies and power trips into geopolitics—at least not only that. She writes:
If the imagery is transparent, its significance may be less so. The temptation is to draw some conclusions about the defense intellectuals themselves-about what they are really talking about, or their motivations; but the temptation is worth resisting. Individual motivations cannot necessarily be read directly from imagery; the imagery itself does not originate in these particular individuals but in a broader cultural context.
But, of course, you say, this is 1987—approaching the ending of the Cold War, though no one knew it yet. We are no longer in that context where nuclear weapons occupy our imaginations, where images of sublime violence are accompanied by pep band music on newsreels or are used as advertising copy in political campaigns. Nuclear weapons still shape our politics and the possibilities of the future, but if we imagine them at all it is as a hangover from the 20th century, the Cold War, from problems that, however great, do not seem like our own.
Given this, it may at first seem strange that the most powerful contemporary exploration of the imagery of nuclear weapons appears in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. But Twin Peaks and really all of Lynch’s work consistently interrogates American imagination and its mediation. (Famously, the film prequel of the series, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, sets the credits on what we come to see is a background of television static. The camera then pulls back, and a sledgehammer destroys the set while a woman screams off-camera.) The eighth episode of the much-beloved series “reboot”—a description both unjust and peculiarly apt—is its centerpiece (almost literally: there were 18 episodes in total). It defies summary, as any allegorical work would. To say what an emblem book is “about” would be to misread it, but so also would be a failure to interpret it.
In the central sequence of this central episode, Lynch repurposes the well-known footage of the Trinity explosion. Trinity has a doubly unique relationship to film, since it was the film industry that discovered the extent of the strontium-90 radiation while the nuclear testing was still secret. Kodak, headquartered in Rochester, New York, found through complaints that its film was radioactive when it arrived at hospitals and medical centers, later discovered to be contaminated by the cornhusks the film reels had been packaged in for safe travel. It is not only film, but the mass media in general, that comes to feature as a sort of character in this nightmare.
Men, covered in what may be oil or tar, emerge (as it seems) from the aftermath of the explosion. We follow one as he wanders through an American town, first asking (in a mechanically modulated voice) some passing-by drivers whether they “Gotta light?” before proceeding to murder them unceremoniously. Then we find him wander into a radio station, crushing the skulls of the receptionist and the deejay. He takes the mic and begins to enchant a strange sort of poetry. We watch as those tuned in to this program die mysteriously, though no hand has touched them. Only the broadcast.
Note the call-sign on that mic: this was clearly an intentional choice, whether it was conscious or not. The founder of KPJK, Jacob H. Wiens, worked on the Manhattan Project from 1943-5. This association between atomic engineers and mass media is not a standalone. Strange stories abound, as that of Otto Frisch, who was also a highly-trained pianist whose performances were broadcast over Santa Fe’s radio station KRS while he was working on the Project, although “he was introduced simply as ‘our pianist,’ as even the mention of his name was seen as giving the game away.”2 Robert Oppenheimer was reported to have loaned the station records from his personal collection. But there is a much broader and more significant relationship between radio programming and the development of nuclear weapons. The Atomic Energy Commission created the Division of Public and Technical Information in 1947 to handle "the press, the radio, schools, organized groups and others."
Although bomb making was by far its major priority, the AEC promoted a "peaceful, civilian image" in the words of its official historian. In 1947 and 1948, the AEC estimated that four million visitors attended exhibits that it or its corporate contractors sponsored.
One of the most absurd of these creations is effectively an advertising for paint. Called The House in the Middle, it shows footage from the Nevada Proving Grounds as an experiment that shows the tidy house burns less quickly (!), and intends with an apparently straight face to use this to intimidate children and housewives to clean their neighborhoods and invest in a new coat of paint. It is ultimately an ad—however well-disguised. Its use of fear is both condescending to its audience but also dangerous. It suggests that the normal course of consumer life, the morality of the proper upkeep of domesticity, is protection from world-ending power.
It may be easy to laugh at this old-timey fear-mongering. I’ll admit I turn to it whenever I need to express a bout of dark, splenetic laughter. But is our own condition so different? Have we learned to see through the “peaceful, civilian image” of our life that serves as a prosthesis for our imagination? Or is it, rather, that there is no place for these images to occur: the humming of thousands of nuclear weapons is not news. Their arsenals no longer contribute to an epic narrative of good and evil. The fact that nearly every—or perhaps every—nuclear power station in the United States contains counterfeit parts is a story that gets no radio time.
Nor were the 50s entirely devoid of individuals, often scientists, who tried to actively imagine the meaning of the atomic future in light of the atomic past for a mediated public. In 1957, Max Born wrote a piece called “Man and the Atom.” Here was a genuine luminary of technical progress: as the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists introduces him, he is “not only the founder of modern physics but also the former teacher of many brilliant physicists of our times.” It is a fascinating piece, arguing both that the development of atomic fission was inevitable as well as the defense of describing the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a collective crime—a position that, however obvious to us, in its time still required courage. He argues that these positions are complementary, and goes so far as to see it endorsed by Niels Bohr’s interpretation of complementarity in quantum mechanics. This, he argues in a remarkably brief span, is the solution to the dilemmas of freedom and necessity: “Bohr's idea of complementarity is a justification of the common people's attitude, because it directs attention to the fact that even a rigorous science like physics has reconciled itself to the use of complementary descriptions, which provide a true image of the world only when they are combined.” No single image of the world will do, not for physicists, not for us. Truth is only available through the cut, the montage, the splicing together of images that are partial, limited, concrete.
Here is a return from our divorce of imagination and understanding. Not only is understanding often irradiated with images it does not fully account for, as Cohn shows with her study of the chit-chat of defense intellectuals, but true understanding relies upon the combination of images that is imagination’s unique power. It is worth considering this in light of Born’s conclusion:
Even if the specter of the atomic bomb is successfully exorcised, the specter of the exponential growth will see to it that a completely carefree and restful life will never be achieved. In the background, there will always be the danger of self-destruction through the release of nuclear energy, as punishment for relapse into political barbarism.
On one hand, it is certainly true that the threat of nuclear self-destruction has not at all disappeared. Indeed, in terms of the number of warheads, megatonnage of yield, and proneness to broken arrows of the currently active nuclear arsenals around the world, we are far and away in a more precarious and dangerous position than Born was in 1957. Eric Schlosser’s 2014 Command and Control should be more than enough to cause public concern. Yet, Born’s prediction that the “carefree and restful life” would be impossible with this radioactive background of possibility seems wrong today. We are told we live in a post-nuclear age. Even as war rumbles on the borders of nations with hydrogen bombs, we are told that Russia has moved from “deterrence” to “compellence” with nary a mention of what deterrence was supposed to mean, once upon a time. (The irony that Foreign Policy’s podcast is called Chain Reaction seems lost on everyone.)
But Lynch’s emblematic journey through the imagery of the Trinity test, weaving it into the bizarrerie of his televisual lore, shows a way of imagining this complementarity between the nuclear world and the so-called post-nuclear now. After our long descent through the fireball, there is a fade-in on a timelapse of a convenience store: we see the door opening and closing, jerkily, and then smoke emerging. The fire is there now. Then the Woodsmen emerge, walking across the facade of the store, through its outdoor gas-pumps, lit by stage-effect lightning flashes. The sound has become static, like the end of a record, perhaps. Or the sound of a Geiger counter. Lynch imagines these malicious entities, the Woodsmen, who seem to have been released in the Trinity test, as moving aimlessly around the convenience store. Here we have an emblem of our own condition: the demand for a convenient life places life itself below an ever-present—if unimagined—threat. But this is not merely the threat of nuclear detonation: that fire already burns in this life. Life is already taken in the deadening of our imagination through the passive consumption of media images—whether transmitted by radio, television, or the multimedia hall of mirrors of the Web.
The “radiopassivity” that Lynch powerfully imagines in these scenes is the complement of the radioactivity unleashed by the bomb. The series itself also gives us this path. There is the goofy, deus ex machina, absurdly contrived ending to the multitudinous “plots” the fans have loved for over two decades: an evil blob gets punched by a powerful arm. But the show continues past this—past itself. It shows an attempt by the investigator Dale Cooper to take Laura Palmer, the mystery of whose murder was the original premise of Twin Peaks, out of the show’s world into ours. What we find there, in her old house, is its actual current inhabitant—there is no place for her in this world, the real one. We are left with her blood-curdling scream. The genuine, and genuinely horrifying, way back from a passively imagined world of media images is not the assumption of a rationality that disowns the imagination. It was that rationality whose capstone was the atomic bomb itself. The only way back to reality, whatever we may discover that to be, is to actively imagine it. Who dares let others imagine our end?
From the Preface to the Second edition: “I am conscious through inner experience of my existence in time (and consequently also of its determinability in time), and this is more than merely being conscious of my representation; yet it is identical with the empirical consciousness of my existence, which is only determinable through a relation to something that, while being bound up with my existence, is outside me. This consciousness of my existence in time is thus bound up identically with the consciousness of a relation to something outside me, and so it is experience and not fiction, sense and not imagination, that inseparably joins the outer with my inner sense; for outer sense is already in itself a relation of intuition to something actual outside me; and its reality; as distinct from imagination, rests only on the fact that it is inseparably bound up with inner experience itself, as the condition of its possibility, which happens here.”
Ferenc Morton Szasz, British Scientists and the Manhattan Project: The Los Alamos Years, p. 34.