SDI Aesthetics

Investigations beyond apparent endings interrogate conceptions of historical time and narrativization; the secret continuities between the Cold War as a system of state, military and techno-strategic operations and current globalized military–industrial governance require different periodization operations alert to “afterlives.”Footnote ⁴⁶ If the Cold War entered an era of renewed vigor in the 1980s – ”Cold War II,”Footnote ⁴⁷ a term that Edwards adopts from Fred Halliday – then Infinite Jest suggests the persistence of the conflict that has, since 1989, come into yet another Reconfiguration: Cold War III. The strategic framework of this war might no longer be a final, world-ending confrontation with the Soviet Union, but the continued pursuit of American superpower domination still occurs through defensive formations alert to “foreign” threats that come from within: its own abjections. “[E]ssentially an aesthetic affair,”Footnote ⁴⁸ the American clean-up operation remains a Cold War enterprise because the waste-displacement machinery in the book refers to SDI, which, though technologically unfeasible and therefore never implemented, was an ideological victory. Infinite Jest's border mechanisms are automated shields founded on SDI's political success as a “defensive” arrangement that gave its supporters the moral high ground,Footnote ⁴⁹ but the US President in the novel, Johnny Gentle, further models his “strategic defense initiative” on the aesthetic properties of Reagan's proposal and, beyond that, of the atom bomb, the threat that SDI was meant to guard against.

SDI's fantastical articulations – spectacular as well as unrealizable, including projects for “ground-based lasers bouncing off orbiting ‘smart mirrors’”Footnote ⁵⁰ – imagine a space-based missile defense operating by way of satellite detection whose tracking information then feeds into computer systems, in turn launching the counterforce. On a conceptual level, thermonuclear explosions expedite proposals for an inviolable defense: their existence, not simply detonation, clearly sits at the heart of schemes that comprise high-tech mechanisms whose shrouding functions are conceived in terms of particle beams “bouncing off” mirrors. The relationship between weapons and mirrors, however, stretches beyond SDI death ray reflections: a fantasy dreamt up by Reagan, not a “Man … of Glass”Footnote ⁵¹ but Teflon President, SDI's mirrored enclosures also return the image of the ultimate Cold War “deterrent,” the atom bomb. Prior to any investigation alert to the obliteration of distinctions between offensive and defensive measures – they are all considered “shields”Footnote ⁵² – the splendor of these weapons systems already aligns them: they seek to raise a defensive perimeter that congeals into transparent architectures. Along with mirrors, the aesthetic dimensions of glass and plastic operate as a holy trinity of strategic defense linked up to the bomb which, from its first deployment – codenamed Trinity – yields a glass sphere.

Tested on 16 July 1945 at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, Trinity's luminous mass ascends to form a “thick parasol of a … bright but spectral blue.”Footnote ⁵³ As the shock front subsequently “cools into visibility,”Footnote ⁵⁴ the residue on the ground, directly beneath the blast, consists of sand and the remainder of the bomb's metal tower superheated into bits of green glass: trinitite reflects and congeals the gadget's radiant energy. Beyond the utopian possibilities both were invested with,Footnote ⁵⁵ the analogy that unites bomb with glass extends to the mythology of the device. Before it was consecrated by a pile of black rocks – as much a memorial to the world that just ended as to the one that exploded into existence – there was talk of preserving the site as a national park, accessed through a “sheltered walk” and containing an “atomsite exhibit in place under glass.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Finally proved unfeasible – the intransience marking Ground Zero was already present radioactively, preventing the construction of such a monument – an atomic aesthetic nonetheless materialized. The heat and blinding light of superpower cool into glass and the translucency of related techno-forms, the “shiny, silky” plasticity so evocative of weapons systems.Footnote ⁵⁷ “[G]reat, glass sphere[s],”Footnote ⁵⁸ the outcome of nuclear detonations, however, also exist as countermeasure fantasies: shields like mirrors designed to deflect catastrophe.

It is the “undreamt-of possibilities for automated, centralized command and control” centers and their related metaphors of “leakproof containers” and “integrated systems”Footnote ⁵⁹ assuring total area defense that inspired Reagan's SDI. As a technological “mirage,” it was preceded by earlier air-defense shielding programs like SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment), which antedated the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS), itself activated in 1960. These systems all hung together, technologically but also in terms of their shared dream-worlds, projected across the US from within subterranean command centers like the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) in Colorado, which Ronald Reagan visited during the Republican presidential primary campaign in 1980. Reagan described NORAD as “an amazing place,”Footnote ⁶⁰ a zone of closed, air-conditioned comfort where American power, invisible to the world above, seemed unlimited, a suggestion of boundlessness in a finite space. Subsequently, on 23 March 1983, Reagan announced his Strategic Defense Initiative, a fully automated upgrade of those former, rapidly obsolete, defensive arrangements; in many ways, it represented a culmination of research projects into one overarching fantasy of C³I.

What happens in Infinite Jest – published and set after the “end” of the Cold War in an ostensibly “post-Soviet” era where “Dems and GOP” have dismantledFootnote ⁶¹ – is an adjustment and realization of SDI into a waste-projecting facility (as if to comment that threats are internally produced).Footnote ⁶² Johnny Gentle's Clean United States Party (CUSP) now holds a “white-gloved finger on the pulse” of an end-times superpower:

CUSP consequently sweeps to victory, and Gentle is inaugurated as US President in a “Fukoama microfiltration mask,”Footnote ⁶⁴ a reference to the particular manifestation of the future that the party hopes to instigate: “American renewal”Footnote ⁶⁵ through crystalline/polymerized fortifications. ONANite modernity – because it is an expression that, for all of Gentle's millennial rhetoric to “[t]orch the past,”Footnote ⁶⁶ is decidedly modern – means shields of transparency put in place by a technology that is invisible yet also tangible, a symbol of infinity and omnipresence as much as it stands for tantalizing remoteness.Footnote ⁶⁷ Glass, mirrors, plastic: these are the materials of choice to articulate the Reconfiguration, a treaty that is forced into being through the threatened detonation of “UPSIDE-DOWN MISSILES IN U.S. SILOS.”Footnote ⁶⁸ This holy trinity of substances suggests the existence of a “moral order,”Footnote ⁶⁹ a Clean US Party whose mandate is purity, hygiene, whiteness, the “twinkle of the USA.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The radiance of such sublime techno-forms belongs to a system of aesthetic meaning, Cold War-style, that keeps reflecting the image of the bomb (and of fascism) while it also creates arcs of circularity pertaining to the endless returns bouncing off annulation gadgetry.

In her article on the postmodern carnival in Infinite Jest, Catherine Nichols uses Bakhtin's notion of the grotesque as a circular figure which “meant to evoke nature's constant state of renewal” to argue that Wallace replaces this image of regeneration with images “of thinly veiled redundancy.”Footnote ⁷¹ The most obvious example of this shift is annulation – the “energy of waste”Footnote ⁷² – that also reconfigures the territory of the United States:

Despite the ambiguity in this passage – the Concavity/Convexity as two distinct regions when they articulate different (US versus Canadian) perspectives of the same place or phenomenon – Nichols's argument is, otherwise, convincing: it focusses on a Janus-faced practice that “warps” and enfolds space in a system that “only perpetuates stasis.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Her comparison of annulation to a “self-reflexive mirror” is an appropriate metaphor in a text so concerned with formations or deformities of the self; these two words, concave and mirror, reflect another self-portrait that neither Wallace nor Nichols mentions, but which raises a tradition of work on reflected abnormalities. In Parmigianio's 1524 painting Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which stretches the subject's proportions over the curvature of the looking glass, the artist's “fingers hang insect-like from the end of a monstrous appendage.”Footnote ⁷⁵ This work – “dominated,” as Warren Steele remarks in a discussion on the mirrored reflections of the cyborg, “by deformation and obscurity”Footnote ⁷⁶ – is indicative of an entity that has been broken, the united states of a body overshadowed by an enormous white-gloved hand and ringed by the reflective surfaces of clear, “protective” walls.

Infinite Jest, though, has its own fictional analyses of mirrored distortions; Nichols's “self-reflexive mirror” is not simply a figure of speech, selected because it so frequently occurs in the book, but a concrete manifestation of annulation, a process that continues the politics of the Cold War. This association between annulation/Cold Containment and the Cold War is indicative of the prevailing political order at work in the novel, so aware of the still functional closed and enclosing world of the emergency state, despite being set in a “post-Soviet” environment. Mirrors form closed circuits, the “Cage[s]” of James Incandenza's pentalogy of movies (Cage, Cage II, Cage III, Cage IV, Cage V) that variously utilize “four convex mirrors [and] two planar mirrors,” returning the image of a soliloquizing actress, or else are set in “solitary confinement” or at carnival shows where spectators are transformed into gigantic, translucent, eyeballs.Footnote ⁷⁷ The achieved objective, in Cage III, is not transcendence but endless replication, the “mirror-cult”Footnote ⁷⁸ also exceeding the domain of individual subjectivity, expanding to the geopolitical situation of the premillennial and still Cold War-like United States. The Reconfiguration's “new look” recycles US history through the perversion of the Gentle administration's presidential tactics that instigate ONANite mutually assured (but bogus) dependency. In space, this “new look” is apparent as the “glass-walled” Concavity/Convexity fitted with ATHSCME fans, “Air-Displacement Effectuators”Footnote ⁷⁹ that delineate new American borders. These are further marked by outposts of catapult facilities that “fling great twine-bundled waste-vehicles into the subannular regions of the Great Concavity.”Footnote ⁸⁰ As an arrangement, this line of “defense” ostensibly safeguards the “considerably tidier Experialist U.S. of A”Footnote ⁸¹ and resembles antimissile missile projects researched since the closing stages of World War II and, in particular, Ronald Reagan's SDI.

In the novel, SDI turns into a defensive perimeter furnished with Lucite walls, “Air-Displacement Effectuators” and “les trébuchets noirs, spectacular block-long catapults” – whose “slings are of alloy-belted elastic” – that stand in “this like blimp-hangarish thing.”Footnote ⁸² The system is supported by “transformers and high-voltage grids” hooked up to a “monstrous mega-ohm insulator-cluster”Footnote ⁸³ to the north of Boston; its resemblance to that other technological fiction, SDI, emerges by way of its functioning on both material and metaphorical levels. Parallels exist through the rhetoric of defense against contaminants but also in terms of its concrete, or translucent, expressions: the fortifications are reflections of SDI's mirrored stages, just as they return every other measure and machine of containment at work in the novel.

As the Reagan administration proposed it, SDI was imagined on the principle of engagement with enemy ballistic missiles along their entire launch-to-impact trajectories; its premise rested on the four stages of flight during which an ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) could, hypothetically, be destroyed.Footnote ⁸⁴ It is a system that was for the most part based in, or else looking toward, outer space: stations basing lasers, for one, are either placed in a geostationary orbit, in a constant and analogous loop around the planet where they permanently hover over Soviet missile silos, or in a lower orbit, a location requiring more battle posts. Conversely, however, lasers can be situated on mountain peaks and beam their rays, from there, up to large relay mirrors similarly positioned in geostationary orbits; these then transmit energy to a collection of smaller mirrors in lower orbits, with the objective to obliterate single missile boosters in quick succession.Footnote ⁸⁵ SDI is a dreamworld-deathwish of imaginary full control set up against chaos; Gentle's checkpoints attempt to ward off, at the same time that they create, an apocalypse of toxic waste through an arrangement of facilities that is similarly mirror-bound and mirror-like. All these polished shields at redrawn borders only replicate the conditions of Janus-faced Cold War power, at once targeting an “external Menace” and “[turning] on itself” in a process of total war – defined through “the infinite development of weaponry” – that results in “endo-colonisation,” meaning the “colonization of one's own territory.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Gentle tries to force the consequences of the nation-state's “hideous redolent wastes”Footnote ⁸⁷ onto Canada, but the resulting deformities of such “experialist” politics nonetheless affect United States internal dispositions: the energies expended are inward-tending.

If Johnny Gentle borrows and subsequently warps the campaign slogans and self-mythologizing shout-lines of former Presidents, then the appropriation of Teflon Man's model of strategic defense for once suspends this practice of systematic deformation. Instead, Gentle's adoption of the ballistic missile shielding system is precisely that, an embrace and retrofitting of a mirrored structure designed to guard against invisible invasions that shift, in form or formlessness, from rocket to antigens. Cold War weapons delivery systems now function as mechanisms to parabolically displace waste in trajectories that mirror the arc of intercontinental ballistic missiles. The giant fans, standing at the cusp of the reconfigured United States and blowing stenches northward, act like a retooled SDI. It is telling that ATHSCME checkpoints no longer even mask as “protective” measures, but function as aggressive formations whose “Concavityward” deliveries of toxic material sound like tennis ball bombs that go “WHUMP” and can also turn nuclear: “a little mushroom cloud of green fuss hangs in the air.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Tennis fixtures are occasionally played as modified versions of a “nuclear-conflagration game”;Footnote ⁸⁹ the “shot heard around the world” that opens Don DeLillo's 1997 novel Underworld, aligning baseball and the Soviet bomb, here comes to indicate the sustained interplay of nuclear gadget and strategy, creating an atomic loop between ATHSCME – the “whole fusion/fission waste-annulation thing”Footnote ⁹⁰ – tennis and movies.

There is, then, a “fusion … thing” between the “super-secret-formulaic composition materials”Footnote ⁹¹ that produce tennis racquets, Incandenza's fatal entertainment cartridge and ONAN's American “defense” perimeter. Incandenza, filmmaker, ETA founder, “AEC [Atomic Energy Commission] optics man,”Footnote ⁹² links all three through polymerized, metonymic chains that display high-tech plastic gleam. Tennis racquets are made of “high-modulus-graphite-reinforced polycarbonate polybutylene resin [that] are organochemically identical I say again identical to the gyroscopic balance sensor and mise-en-scène appropriation card and priapistic-entertainment cartridge implanted in [James Incandenza's] anaplastic cerebrum.”Footnote ⁹³ Incandenza is further instrumental in annulation evolution:

Cold Containment is, clearly, linked to the Cold War, but Incandenza consolidates the association: he was formerly an “applied-geometrical-optics man in the ONR [Office of Naval Research] and SAC [Strategic Air Command],” who designed “neutron-scattering reflectors for thermo-strategic weapons systems” before becoming “celluloid-bound.”Footnote ⁹⁵ He proceeds to make a movie that imitates (in good plastic form) the consequences of atom bomb detonations: push-button command creates the living dead. Incandenza's “Infinite Jim” function, then, which one actor relates to the director's practice of filming at “multi-lensed length,” in fact refers to his ability to form chains of alliance that, to follow Mike Pemulis's lead in the novel, can be conceptualized as a “huge right triangle”:Footnote ⁹⁶ cold fusion → fatally entertaining cartridge → tennis. This triangulation/trinity interlinks technology, the unconscious and war games, which conditions subjects into total immobilization. The triangle points geographically northward, towards Canada, but its outward projections are, even so, flung back to the place of origin: ATHSCME mirrors of strategic defense launch back that which “you hope will not return.”Footnote ⁹⁷

The trajectory of the “WHUMP” expulsion, after all, boomerangs back as one of homecoming, a ricochet movement that becomes apparent when looking at what happens to both movie viewers and tennis players. Incandenza is not the only figure to align cold fusion and Cold War nuclear strategy sports. Gerhardt Schtitt, ETA coach, with “skin so clean-sheet white it almost glows,” is one of the “earliest sign-carrying faithful” supporters of Johnny Gentle's CUSP because he “was swept away with the athletic-Wagnerian implications of Gentle's proposals for waste.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Tennis, according to Schtitt, opens up, or rather inwardly unfurls, a

Schtitt's teaching philosophy, centered on the submission of the will and subsequent incorporation into the “larger imperatives of a team (OK, the state),” is less about transcendence than it is about containment, a condition he keeps repeating; play really remains a closed system, a conditioning program that trains (“post”-) Cold War subjects to participate in the apparatus of the game, the state, the Law.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The curved glass of the tennis court already indicates this “infoliating” order; nets and fences, as well as opponents, so thinks Hal Incandenza, act as mirrors, the entire court a mirror further encased within panels of glass.Footnote ¹⁰¹ “[Aquarium] glass” manifests the concentric cycles of “systems inside systems” – mirrors within mirrors within mirrors; like the movie Infinite Jest, tennis carries out an inward vector, arriving at a “final enclosing isolation.”Footnote ¹⁰²

If play leads to self-erasure,Footnote ¹⁰³ then the tennis court's encagement, which itself mirrors the Concavity's “glass palisades” and Johnny Gentle's flights into an “oxygenated Lucite portabubble,”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ is but a variation on a theme: transparent superdomes drape over already vanishing entities in order to progressively disappear them. This itinerary, also apparent in end-time war-games like Eschaton as played by ETA students, is one of self-destruction, not simply on an individual level, but nationwide. The chain of association between cold fusion → fatally entertaining cartridge → tennis forms a “triangular horror”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ that is finally one of implosion. Triangulation develops a “post-Soviet” mode of imprisonment that hardly differs from its precedent, the Cold War state of emergency executed by way of the outputs of closed systems. After the imagined end of the Cold War, the United States remains a culture of containment, armed to the teeth against waste and chaos: the “Tighter, Tidier” USA, as Marathe states, is a “murated nation,” the “one-time World Policeman” who “retire[d]” to “have its blue uniform deep-dry-cleaned and placed in storage in triple-thick plastic dry-cleaning bags.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Isolationist and infinitely inward-bound, the United States, still seeking to occupy an inviolable sphere, is “bent in on itself” by way of the “obliterating trinity” of strategic defense articulated through glass → mirrors → plastic.

USA Plasticity

Beyond the mirrored perimeter of the waste displacement system, ETA war games and conditioning programs all joined up in an agenda designed to wipe clean United States geography and psychosphere, Cold War III aesthetics also materialize in the “soft-skulled” representation of MIT's student union. The results of Cold Containment R & D are already in evidence in the institution's plasticized student union/giant brain, whose bendable texture implies the “soft-skulled” deformities spawned in the Concavity/Convexity and ETA's hollow citizen-shaping practices, but what the building further exemplifies is a practice of molding and substitution that is at work throughout the book. The political project instigated by the Gentle administration constitutes an effort to totally reshape the physical reality of the United States, made “new” in synthetic form; these policies invariably are practices of plastic transformation applied to both nation-state and citizenry. The many skull-modeling references belong to this same rhetoric of synthetic production and Reconfiguration: Concavity governing presupposes the world to be bendable, replaceable. This process of “renewal,” though, is one of polymerization that is first and foremost in evidence at MIT, mimicking life but actually part of a deathly process; polymerization is not, as Thomas Pynchon writes in Gravity's Rainbow (1973), “resurrection” but, instead, a movement that leads from “death to death-transfigured.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

While the union signals (via its function as part of a larger whole; that is, MIT) SDI upgrade into “the whole fusion/fission waste-annulation thing,” it also acts as a “reinforced concrete and polymer” expression of the “soft-skulling” operations that occur both here and elsewhere. This practice is, to a certain extent, laid bare in this building, which exemplifies Gentle substitution techniques switching the living with the lifeless in one “magical operation,”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ as Roland Barthes notes: plastic articulates Concavity strategies of creating (giant) bending and hollowed-out skulls. A soft, plastically finished thinking or thoughtless machine, MIT's union approximates biological life forms and functions as the seat or “nest”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ of Cold Containment operations. It is here that ONANite modernity is most palpable, though the building's aesthetics remain associated with Cold War dream weapons through annulation research whose outcomes yield the “Lucite portabubble[s]” that function as both personal and national defense matter. Configured as a fully plasticized, flexible superbrain, the student union and, by extension, MIT more generally finally realize the “flawless, funereal”Footnote ¹¹⁰ – because death-like, empty, “soft-skulled” – comfort for US citizens that computerized systems of protection sought to cause through SDI-type shielding technologies. As a doubled project, annulation consolidates particularly at MIT's union; on the one hand, the “whole fusion/fission waste-annulation thing” is designed to provide full-area coverage to “defend” the United States against (its own) waste, while on the other it operates as a policy of subject drainage.

In the novel, the narrative enters the building by way of a “student engineer, a pre-doctoral transuranial metallurgist”Footnote ¹¹¹ whose passage through the union resembles a trip through space in J. G. Ballard's terms; that is, by overlaying geometries of buildings and geographies of apocalypse with human organisms.Footnote ¹¹² The journey is a “fantastic voyage,” a reference to the 1966 movie of that title, in which a miniature submarine enters the blood stream of an injured Eastern bloc scientist working on nanotechnology and defecting to the United States; the navigation is one of mastery – Cold War micro-/macro-technology presiding over, and inside, the subject and thereby saving lives.Footnote ¹¹³ MIT's union becomes corporeal, a body to be traversed by the engineer passing through extensive “interneural stairways,” “little-used many-staired neuroform way[s]” and up to the “artery-red fire doors”Footnote ¹¹⁴ leading to the Union's rooftop. What happens here is an entry into polymerization, into the production of plastics and plastic utopianism in which MIT, “in bed with Defense,”Footnote ¹¹⁵ participates.

The student's course through the union ends on the building's “soft latex-polymer roof,” which “is cerebrally domed … and everywhere textured … with sulci and bulbous convolutions.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Neurological vocabulary interfaces with the language of space travel – “deorbited balloon eyes” – and the materials gradually developed over the course of World War II:

To look at this building, the “North American seat of Very High Tech”Footnote ¹¹⁸ and nerve centre of superpowers, is to notice a plastic narrative in terms of both the institution's construction material and the material's plasticity and shapelessness, this matter which, at least in “some stage of its history[,] is capable of flow.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ To enter the union is to pass into the ONANite plastic age, stretching elastically beyond yield-points – the moment when a body is permanently deformed – so as to include, yet again, paradoxical attributes: the rhetoric of impermanence and ephemeralization as opposed to its million-year survival rate; its hardened molding that, in particular cases, never again softens; its rounded, tubular, bulbous forms that disguise complicity with terminal technologies through the adoption of warm, living biomorphic systems.Footnote ¹²⁰ This building is the result of a process that, despite its apparent mobility, also desires to attain conceptions of shelter to alleviate dangers of falling, great plastic spheres that drape around the United States and keep it safe from death, from dirt or mould that speak of death.Footnote ¹²¹ MIT's student union materializes, in its “soft-skulled” reproduction, a pocket utopia and dream of immortality achieved through plastic enclosure – eternal life implied through Tupperware vampirism.Footnote ¹²²

Johnny Gentle's mandate, the “Tighter, Tidier” United States, is in evidence at MIT, superbrain engaged in enhancing strategic defense initiatives that, on the rooftop of the building and as an individual protection kit, are configured as “nest[s]” made of latex.Footnote ¹²³ The “nest” is “industrially soft,”Footnote ¹²⁴ a promise of US power offering a sanctuary against the forces of nature/chaos: the technological refinement at MIT is a consequence of the politics of Gentle-ness. Yet this paradise of MIT plasticity, stretching to encompass the rest of the United States, operates on the basis of a technology that, for all of its softness, remains lethal. It is an embalming process that protects to death and hides its “death-transfiguration” through the replication of living organisms: at MIT's union, the passage over nature occurs under cover. Colors feign the natural; they encompass the “off-white of living skull”Footnote ¹²⁵ – the bone-colored tans that are remade in labs and injected into chemical compounds – and the “venous-blue” emergency ladder dyed in the color of deoxygenated blood, running in the systemic veins from organs to the heart. The terminology used suggests life-giving properties, the sustenance of living things through “safety-balcony” and “emergency ladder” supplied by plastics: better living through chemistry, through polymer embrace. Any danger of falling is balanced by soft landing, a “[shimmying] down” towards “ground zero,” the atom bomb's designated target.

It is this effortless movement towards the nuclear hypocenter that further indicates the triangulations between glass, mirrors and plastic so apparent in the book, also bearing in mind that corporations like Du Pont pioneer in both synthetic fibers and atom bomb components.Footnote ¹²⁶ Such triangulations, aesthetic as well as relating to means of mass production, expound the correlations linking up “soft” or Gentle technologies and the nuclear weapon. Never mind that the Reconfiguration comes about as the result of threatened atomic self-immolation whose fallout is then blown northward through “ATHSCME HELL-FANS”; the link between “nest[ing]” technology and military hardware is apparent, at a glance, by looking at the “great hollow brain-frame”Footnote ¹²⁷ of the skull-colored union building. The skull, a reminder of death, also functions as a reference to James Incandenza, whose master copy of his fatally entertaining movie Infinite Jest, instigating the zombification of its viewers, is contained in his interred head. As such, the association between MIT's student union and the “hollow brain-frame” of the skull implicitly suggests the instigation of a death-world that establishes itself through imitation, repetition.

Mimicry of life occurs at the level of metaphor and color, the artificial substances that take on the hues of the living, like the circulation of blood pumped to the heart; from the very beginning, the development of plastics corresponds to processes of substitution. Products like wood, marble, ivory are duplicated by what Paul T. Frankl, an American architect and furniture designer, called “materia nova”Footnote ¹²⁸ in 1930: it surpasses the limitations of nature. Even though the patent on celluloid, the oldest plastic, was taken out by Alexander Parkes in 1855, the “Plastic Age” was not proclaimed until much later. Industry insiders, so claims Jeffrey Meikle, began to announce it in 1927, and in the following years, dreams of technological utopia – similarly evidenced by the formation of rocket societies working to achieve a functional escape vehicle – really took off.Footnote ¹²⁹

In his book Form and Re-form, Frankl notes that the new materials “speak in the vernacular of the 20th Century” and articulate “the language of invention [and] synthesis”:

Frankl echoes the Futurists, even more so in his 1932 publication titled Machine-Made Leisure, where he announces, “We love [the machine]” in “breathless adoration,”Footnote ¹³¹ in the rapture of the techno-sublime; he holds out the promise of a future that is configured in terms of the constructions of modernity – the skyscraper, the department store and the airplane. The device that lurks in the shadows, however, and is developed under the auspices of a German dictatorship, is the rocket, outfitted, in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, with a new plastic, Imipolex G, “an aromatic heretocyclic polymer” devised by Wallace Carothers at Du Pont.Footnote ¹³²

Plastic consciousness expanded in the 1930s, the decade when “materia nova” no longer simply fake nature but “bring to the service of industry an array of new properties – the new gifts,” according to John Gloag, “of lightness, translucency, transparency, texture and color.”Footnote ¹³³ While he remained ambiguous about the substances and their transforming technologies, he was nonetheless seduced by their aesthetic brilliance exhibited at World Fairs in New York and San Francisco in 1939. Like Henry Adams, who visited the Paris exhibition in 1900, Gloag stood awed when confronted with the “remarkable ideas about the alliance of light with transparent and translucent materials,” and commented on “the enclosing of objects in irregular masses of transparent plastic, so that they interrupted and distributed a beam of tinted light.”Footnote ¹³⁴

They perform, then, tricks of light, transmit it in an “infinity of variations” for the purpose of consumption,Footnote ¹³⁵ yet what also happened, and helped to swell public awareness of the material, was the development of thermoplastics, forming “a galaxy of new materials”Footnote ¹³⁶ encompassing, for example, polystyrene and polyethelene. Though the definition of plastic – “anything which possesses plasticity, that is, anything which can be deformed under mechanical stress without losing its cohesion, and is able to keep the new form given to it”Footnote ¹³⁷ – also applies to thermosetting plastics, most common in the interwar period, these are, once subjected to heat and pressure, converted into “insoluble, infusible masses, which cannot be further re-formed.”Footnote ¹³⁸ They are stable, inert and immortal, and retain the shape of their first, and only, molding. Thermoplastics, on the other hand, capable of being softened and resoftened indefinitely, suggest, as Barthes writes, “the very idea of … infinite transformation,” so that plastic is “less a thing than the trace of a movement,”Footnote ¹³⁹ a means by which to “torch the past” and boost a paradoxical culture of im/permanence through the mobility of molecules. These curious oppositions – between lightness and strength, durability and transience – unite into one form or, rather, to follow Barthes, converge into one CUSP movement: the age of Gentle strategic defense and “soft-skulling” annulation.

Considering Gentle's mission statement, which twists Jack Kennedy's inaugural address out of shape, plastic is the proper substance to articulate America's “new look,” itself a cheap imitation of “original crystals”;Footnote ¹⁴⁰ that is, the national policies of former US Presidents. Gentle politics – masked and “rubber-gloved”Footnote ¹⁴¹ – invariably are devised in sterile venues and implemented through white-suited government agents: its experialist, endo-colonial procedures belong to a fascist aesthetic.Footnote ¹⁴² What comes into being through such processes, a triumph of the will passing over nature, is Plastic Man, a.k.a. Johnny Gentle; another fictional figure, Plastic Man is a revenant, a comic figure launched in 1941. In the strip plasticized during an accidental exposure at Crawford Chemical Works, Plastic Man also appears in a booklet titled Plastics (1941) by V. E. Yarsley and E. G. Couzens as well as in Gravity's Rainbow. In Pynchon's novel, Plastic Man is a tainted hero, because associated with the chemical and rocket cartels that widen across the planet; in Yarsley and Couzens's account, he belongs to a similar order of total dominance. Control, however, in this case, does not lie with Plastic Man, who is no Übermensch but instead fragile, a delicate being coming into a “world of color and bright shining surfaces, where childish hands find nothing to break, no sharp edges or corners to cut or graze, no crevices to harbor dirt or germs.”Footnote ¹⁴³ He is “surrounded on every side” by plastics, “this tough, safe, clean material” used in the coating of the walls, the floors, “silent and dustless,” to form “the universal plastic environment.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Plastic Man takes up the concluding stages of Yarsley and Couzens' book; encased in plastic, the man-child himself is no longer purely flesh but plastically finished. He cleans his teeth with plastic brushes before replacing them with artificial dentures, “with ‘silent’ plastic teeth” and plastic spectacles so as to watch plastic films – the end entails a lowering into the grave “hygienically enclosed in a plastic coffin,”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ though this might be what he has lived in, undead, from the very beginning. It is the creation of a synthetic universe, or, at any rate, of a plastic nation that motivates Johnny Gentle's CUSP in Wallace's Infinite Jest; the territorial Reconfiguration is fenced by convex walls of anodized Lucite to keep chaos “north of order,”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ north of the United States. Lucite, a transparent thermoplastic, was made up and promoted in the late 1920s by, amongst other firms, Du Pont; its properties were itemized by Grace Fraser in 1945 in a sequence of traits that seem to point towards the plastic's boundlessness: “Great transparency and light transmission: strength: rigidity: water and weather resistance: dimensional stability: dialectic strength: light in weight: unlimited color range: non-flammable.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ The obsessive colons, like polymerized chains, imply a continuity, the diffusion or piping of light, “strength, stability and whiteness” past obstacles like full stops; the material is used in aircraft construction, bomber noses, cabin and cockpit enclosures and escape doors as well as for dental instruments.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ In a novel so attentive to teeth and hygienic cavities, Lucite is a material at once associated with gleaming teeth stretched into a cold smile, ready to bite, and the polymer components of military hardware.

The plastification of the United States of America, however, goes beyond Johnny Gentle, white-gloved Plastic Man, though his party certainly exacerbates a trend that gradually replaces America's cotton flag, which carries earlier white crimes, with “crisp nylon”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ national colors. The transformation of the United States into a superpower – because, as Barthes notes, plastic “gives man the measure of his power,”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ which explodes beyond the limits of nature into a “galaxy” of high-tech twinkles – begins and continues with the transmutation of elements and the diffusion of artificial and atomic light. The objective that motivates Cold waste Containment is that “Tight, Tidier” nation that Gentle heralds in his Inauguration Address: a “murated nation” walled in through SDI-like gadgetry and soft technologies that, like the narrative glide in the passage on MIT's student union, slip towards (physical, psychical) ground zero. The union functions as the archetypal model of an ONANite “autoimmunitary” order of existence that embodies a techno-aesthetic whose movements only ever “shimmy down” to the blankness of superpower explosions, the cold and Cold War stasis of an overwhelming and inward-turning technological power. This arc or orb similarly describes the “thing” of the state of exception, in that it conceptualizes its spheres of operation: absolute interiority; death-like protection; captured being-in; subjectivity shelled, entranced, in an immersive, disastrous security state.