Proliferations of indistinction: Nuclear spectacle, sovereignty and the sensuous politics of national security in America

This dissertation considers the bodily politics of sovereignty from within the context of atomic and nuclear heritage efforts and touristic encounters in the United States. I begin with the assertion of a gap in the sovereign enterprise of power. This gap manifests as a zone of pure violence or as the philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls it, a "zone of indistinction." I argue that through the ethnographic exploration of the ways in which bodies move through sites commemorating nuclear heritage a politics of indistinction can be deciphered in which nuclear spectacles act as sites of violent capture and easily reproduce and amplify the politics of nuclear fear in the face of an official narrative in which nuclear weapons are merely historical entities. I also demonstrate that nuclear indistinction is incomplete and waffles and decays in light of intense and affective bodily becomings. By exploring the affective body, this ethnography complicates the understanding of sovereignty by demonstrating the ways in which it is always in motion, between indistinction and its undoing, between presence and absence, between violence and hope. Ultimately, this ethnography challenges distinctions by which we have traditionally understood and compartmentalized, sovereignty, war, memory and the body by making an argument for their mutual entanglement and virtuality, their mobility across time, space and form. Finally, this ethnography attempts to resist re-presentational strategies in favour of forms of writing that participate in relationships of mimesis, amplification and unfolding with the cultural forms it addresses.