TY - JOUR
T1 - At the Interface
T2 - The Loaded Rhetorical Gestures of Nuclear Legitimacy and Illegitimacy
AU - O'Gorman, Ned
AU - Hamilton, Kevin
N1 - Ned O’Gorman is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Kevin Hamilton is Associate Professor and Chair of New Media in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. An early version of this essay was presented at the Visual Democracy conference at Northwestern University in 2007. Thanks to Robert Hariman for the opportunity to present there, and for his early encouragement. We’d also like to thank Ian Hill and Rohini Singh for excellent research help, as well as Cara Finnegan and the graduate students of her 2010 Visual Rhetoric class for the opportunity to share this work and receive feedback. Finally, thanks to Greg Wise, Bryan Taylor, and the anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments in the review process; and to Sohinee Roy for helping fine tune our prose in the editorial process. Correspondence to: Ned O’Gorman, Department of Communication, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 325 Communication Building, MC-456, 1207 Oregon St., Urbana IL 61801, USA. E-mail: [email protected] and/or Kevin Hamilton, E-mail: [email protected].
PY - 2011/3
Y1 - 2011/3
N2 - This essay examines an important icon of American nuclear modernity, the operator at the interface control panel, to show how the logic of nuclear legitimation in the Cold War has perdured into the contemporary world, and that nuclear terrorists and bombwielding "rogue states" can function as inventions that rationalize America's claim to nuclear hegemony. Through a critical account of the "competent" gestures of the statesanctioned nuclear operator at the interface, and the "incompetent" gestures of the staterepudiated nuclear terrorist, we argue that that the rationalization of nuclear weapons, in a psychoanalytic sense, has depended on rationalization in the Weberian sense.
AB - This essay examines an important icon of American nuclear modernity, the operator at the interface control panel, to show how the logic of nuclear legitimation in the Cold War has perdured into the contemporary world, and that nuclear terrorists and bombwielding "rogue states" can function as inventions that rationalize America's claim to nuclear hegemony. Through a critical account of the "competent" gestures of the statesanctioned nuclear operator at the interface, and the "incompetent" gestures of the staterepudiated nuclear terrorist, we argue that that the rationalization of nuclear weapons, in a psychoanalytic sense, has depended on rationalization in the Weberian sense.
KW - Interface
KW - Nuclear legitimacy
KW - Rationalization: terrorism
KW - Rogue states
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=79952023006&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1080/14791420.2010.543986
DO - 10.1080/14791420.2010.543986
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:79952023006
SN - 1479-1420
VL - 8
SP - 41
EP - 66
JO - Communication and Critical/ Cultural Studies
JF - Communication and Critical/ Cultural Studies
IS - 1
ER -