Responsibility and the Non(bio)degradable
Michael Peterson
. . . one transforms while exhuming.
—Jacques Derrida, “Biodegradables”
“Biodegradable” typically designates products that are disposable—in a good way. We don’t complain that they are flimsy. Rather, we know that they will “return to nature.” This designation only makes sense when opposed to the “nonbiodegradable”: products that are durable—in a bad way. The nonbiodegradable will not “go” anywhere. It retains its artificial identity long after it is no longer useful. These words are recent additions to our language. Their artificiality announces itself in their combination of Greek (bios) and Latin (des-gradus). In his “Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments”—a text that I will privilege over the next few pages—Jacques Derrida reminds us that the word “biodegradable” seems to be something other: “It does not belong to the organic compost of a single natural language, this strange thing may be seen to float on the surface of culture like the wastes whose survival rivals that of the masterpieces of our culture and the monuments that we promise to eternity” (BSD 815). Here, we might pause and notice that “eco-deconstruction” echoes the Greco-Latin otherness and recent artificiality of “the biodegradable,” although what this means for the survival of our texts is not yet clear.1 Language, waste, masterpiece, culture, monuments, and the promise mark intersecting moments of the question of survival. What seems clear to Derrida at this point is that “like biodegradable, nonbiodegradable can be said of the worst and the best” (BSD 815).
Nuclear waste appears at several points in Derrida’s text as a representative or even a sort of ambassador for the nonbiodegradable. Derrida suggests nuclear waste as a candidate for that which could be thought as some “absolute” nonbiodegradable “in what is called the literal or strict sense” (BSD 863). It is crucial to note, however, that this waste’s apparent nonbiodegradability cannot be thought merely as the continued existence of inert matter. Indeed, it is precisely the radioactivity of this waste that forces us, in order to act responsibly, to bury it and keep it buried. A difficulty soon arises, however, when Derrida argues that it is precisely a “singular impropriety” that allows something to resist degradation. Nuclear waste’s intergenerational activity precludes the possibility of any essential appropriation while at the same time demanding that its handlers take it up as their responsibility. How, then, are we to be responsible for something whose very logic is prohibitory?
When we look closely at American nuclear-waste policy and attempt to read policy protocols and advisories philosophically, we avail ourselves of testaments from tasks forces and expert panels trying to think through precisely these problems. Derrida offers us the opportunity to engage in such reading while resisting the temptation to understand practical problems as merely technical problems. The claim that Derrida and whatever is meant when we refer to a kind of legacy of deconstruction can or even must orient us toward the environmental or ecological in all its material irradiance is less surprising when we take seriously the thought that the remainder—ashes, archive, trace, restant, waste—simmers beneath the surface of the discourse Derrida helped to inaugurate, erupting and interrupting again and again.
In the pages that follow, I take one particularly troubling passage from a report authored by the Human Interference Task Force—assembled to assess the likelihood of human interference with the underground waste-isolation facility that houses the United States’ mid- to high-level nuclear waste and recommend preventative strategies—as representative of a certain view of responsibility. The Human Interference Task Force states, “Future societies with knowledge of the existence and location of the [nuclear waste] repository, its contents, and the risks of interference, bear the full responsibility for any of their actions that can reasonably be expected to adversely affect the performance of the repository.”2
Thought in such a way, our responsible handling of the waste becomes intimately linked to the possibility of communicating adequate knowledge—whatever this designation might come to mean—to future generations. In fact, the very possibility of responsibility as it is being understood here hinges on the claim that, if certain conditions—in this case, the transmission of a bare minimum of knowledge—are met, a given society can become fully responsible for something, and, therefore, another society—even if this society is or is said to be the source of the inheritance in question—ceases to be responsible. Derrida flags the connection between textual transmission and the “ethico-ecological” most clearly in the following fragmentary remark: “enigmatic kinship between waste, for example nuclear waste, and the masterpiece.”3
To approach these questions responsibly, a brief survey of the practical issue at hand—the long-term disposal of radioactive or nuclear waste—is appropriate.4 Our use of nuclear fission as a source of energy for civilian and defensive purposes has left us with highly radioactive waste that will remain dangerous to organic life forms for thousands of years. No process capable of speeding up this waste’s decay exists today. Throwing the waste in the ocean risks contaminating the majority of the earth, and attempting to launch it into space risks poisoning whatever is left of our atmosphere. The only apparent solution is to bury the waste deep underground in a geologically stable area until such a time that it no longer poses a threat. This is the project currently underway in Carlsbad, New Mexico, at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). The question confronting those tasked with maintaining the WIPP’s titular isolation involves determining how best to ensure that the waste is not accidentally or irresponsibly handled for the “period of concern”: 10, 000 years.5 The challenge is in finding a way to maintain the ongoing isolation of a dangerous material and, at the same time, maintain the warnings required for this unimaginably long period of time.
Creating a warning system that could potentially last for up to 10,000 years is not a simple task, and many different suggestions have been made.6 From genetically modified blue glow-in-the-dark cacti—to suggest radioactivity and intentional human activity—to an enormous “landscape of thorns”—meant to communicate danger and inhospitableness—the message we send to the future ought to make future peoples understand that the land in question contains something artificial, deliberately isolated, and dangerous. Of course, our own more recent archeological efforts make it seem unlikely that any sort of monumentizing or marking will discourage investigation. There must, then, also be a system in place to communicate more complicated information: that the site is radioactive, what radioactivity means, and the dangers inherent in compromising the site’s isolation. A truly multidisciplinary team of linguists, archeologists, futurists, science fiction writers, historians, physicists, economists, and other specialists was assembled in 1991 to discuss the problems of and possible solutions to such an undertaking. This team’s findings are available to the public at large through the U.S. Department of Energy website, and I would strongly encourage those interested to review the document.7
The practical problems that arise from this project are enormous: how to ensure that our language is comprehensible to people whose identities and sociocultural context are necessarily unknowable to us? How to ensure that the information remains materially legible? How to preempt the varying levels of political and technological progression or regression that will occur in the next 10,000 years? The difficulty of properly handling nuclear waste lies at the intersection of writings on semiotics, sovereignty, materialism, and intergenerational ethics. The problem is that the half-life—the amount of time that must pass for one half of the original mass of radioactive material to decay—of nuclear waste is too long. It will survive, and when we deploy an ethical schema that hinges on transmission of information to the future, so must our warning.
The general strategy at work here follows a logic according to which our actions in the present—creating this hazardous waste and interring it—are justified because we will ensure that we have properly isolated the waste and that future societies are able to continue properly isolating our waste as well as, presumably, any additional waste that will undergo disposal in the future. That no such strategy to in fact transmit the information required to ensure continued isolation existed at the time that we began to produce nuclear waste or exists today is of secondary concern. Future peoples have been entrusted with stewardship over our waste as well as with developing the techniques required to make this stewardship possible. We are apparently justified in doing so because the resources our society accumulates through the production of nuclear waste are the conditions for future peoples to inherit this waste responsibly. This strategy is not one that we can charge with not caring about or counting future people as rational-ethical agents—in fact, the justification of our actions in the present depends on understanding future people in this way. Because future societies will inherit the earth as we have left it for them, and because future societies can inherit the earth, we, the present generation, can, in turn, bequeath it to them explicitly and as debt.
To take this further, it would appear that our nonbiodegradable waste- disposal strategy insists that this explicit bequeathal is the very height of responsibility. Indeed, although two teams assembled to assess the possibility of inadvertent human intrusion into these sites recommended that the EPA consider adopting a “no marker strategy,” “because markers might draw attention to the WIPP” and so compromise its isolation, this suggestion was not, it would appear, seriously considered.8 Having no markers at all would undermine the very basis upon which the decision to bury this waste was made. The logic of the EPA and its attendant task forces needs future generations to take responsibility for this waste so that our responsibility can come to an end.
To allow future generations to take up this risk, we must not only build sites capable of a degree of nonbiodegradability equal to the waste stored within them, but we must also communicate a message to future societies that resists erosion. The triple-survival of our waste, our site, and our message are deeply tied to the question of intergenerational responsibility. As other authors in this collection make clear, Derrida’s own engagement with environmental or ecological problems is often anything but direct. However, any careful reader of Derrida should, I would think, be prepared to admit that he was a careful thinker of textual survival. The question of nuclear waste reveals that this engagement with the survival of texts is at once a thinking through of waste. And so here it is worth thinking alongside Derrida as we consider the problem of the possibility of communicating a warning to future societies. The well-known mot d’ordre of “Signature Event Context” iterability will help us in this endeavor as we consider for ourselves the enigmatic kinship between nuclear waste and the masterpiece. Iterability can, I hope to show, be understood in terms of the pair “biodegradable/nonbiodegradable.”
We may begin to get a sense of what Derrida means when he uses the concept of biodegradability by contrasting it with its apparent opposite: nonbiodegradability. Derrida writes, “Everything that is ‘biodegradable’ lets itself be decomposed or returns to organic nature while losing there its artificial identity” (BSD 828). This preliminary understanding of biodegradability contrasts the artificial and the natural in the sense that returning to nature simply is losing one’s artificial identity and vice versa. On the other hand, we have the “perle” or “pearl,” a translation that brings to mind the expression “pearls of wisdom” but perhaps is more in harmony with our idiomatic English “gems.”9 Derrida describes the perle as similar to “a text, a verse, an aphorism, a bonmot [sic]” in that both are hard to digest” and “passed on” (BSD 832). The perle’s endurance guarantees that it will pass from the hands of its creators. The nonbiodegradable survives precisely because it resists decomposition, appropriation, or assimilation.
The masterpieces we inherit from our own cultural history are so inherited on a variety of contradictory conditions. They “belong” to our history, but without historic idiosyncrasy. Their meaning remains discoverable or comprehensible without settling into a meaning. They remain reinterpretable—and this formulation is both an avowal and disavowal of fixed identity. The danger of our waste lies in its continuing to act. Its isolation is required into the future because it is not inert. And so, just as “Biodegradables” has outlived Jacques Derrida, our nuclear waste will outlive us. The information that we would transmit to the future must outlive us as well if we are to make the reception of this information a condition for the responsible disposal of our waste. The monuments we would make to and for our waste must become pearls or masterpieces in their own right. What, then, of biodegradability?
To understand the sense in which writing “decomposes,” we will take a quick detour to a well-known passage from Derrida’s 1972 essay “Signature Event Context”:
Every sign, linguistic or non-linguistic, spoken or written . . . , in a large or small unit, can be cited, put between quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable.10
Signs are taken up by the addressee in the context of that addressee, not in the context in which they were written or spoken. This simple point allows us to understand what Derrida means when he writes that every sign can be—that is, necessarily has the possibility of being—taken up “outside” of its original context. As long as signs in general are understood differentially—which is to say that the meaning of a given sign is not imminent to the sign itself—then we can see that the new context in which a sign is encountered will, inevitably, alter the meaning of the sign. Furthermore, this inevitable alteration of meaning is not a defect. That a sign can acquire meaning in a radically new context is the condition for the transmission of meaning in general. If a sign could not be in-formed and taken up anew in a context other than its own, the sign would remain radically idiosyncratic and unable to communicate. That a sign can be read in a new context is a necessary condition for it functioning as a sign at all. Hence, the first point we should keep in mind when considering the project of ensuring adequate understanding of the warning for future peoples: we cannot know in advance the context in which the warning will be read and so can never, in principle, guarantee that the warning will be taken up in the way we need it to be.
Second, however, we must note that Derrida continues with the claim that a sign, in being encountered, will engender “an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable.” The sign itself becomes a part of the context in which it is encountered and, in this way, alters the context in which it is encountered. So the fact of being read or encountered makes a difference to the context in which something is read or encountered. Derrida is pointing us to the fundamental reciprocity between sign and context: the meaning of a context is determined by the encountered sign, and the meaning of the sign is determined by the context in which that sign is encountered. The language of biodegradability that appears in the essay “Biodegradables” seventeen years after “Signature Event Context” can be understood as an elaboration of the sense in which a sign engenders new contexts. What is biodegradable “loses its artificial identity”—the identity that is made for it through its being made (or uttered)—and “returns to organic nature”—which is to say that it actually takes part in making the world in which it is encountered meaningful. One of the reasons that we find the “bio” of “biodegradable” put in parentheses in Derrida’s text is to remind us that we should understand this concept not only in relation to the scientific-natural world of biologists. Rather, (bio)degradability refers us to a given utterance or text’s simultaneous constituting role with regard to context and the absolutely unfixed or decentered structure of its own meaning. Texts, events, meanings, and efforts are all, in this sense, (bio)degradable.11
The warning, then, will not only change in meaning as its surrounding context (inevitably) changes, but will also itself engender new contexts. At this point, we can see that the relationship between the (bio)degradable and the non(bio)degradable is not a simply binary. Rather, we should see the relationship between (bio)degradability and non(bio)degradability as one of necessary coimplication. That a sign is taken up in new contexts (and so undergoes shifts in meanings and engenders changes in context) is its survival. Only once it has stopped being taken up or encountered at all can it be said to no longer live—its identity would be completely dissolved. Likewise, the non(bio)degradable must continuously be taken up as meaningful (which would entail a displacement of what we would be inclined to call “its original meaning”) in order to endure. So the pair “(bio)degradable-non(bio)degradable” don’t oppose each other any more than the pair “life-death,” but simply name two different features of survival in general. The enigmatic connection between nuclear waste and the masterpiece is found in the fact that both the waste and the masterpiece remain, decay, and, in so doing, live. Nuclear waste lives not in spite of its half-life, its slow decay, but precisely because of this decay. This is equally true of the warning itself: the message will survive only in being encountered, transformed, exhumed, and dissolved.
Of course, we must also admit that both the warning and the waste will not simply appear for future people like a message in a bottle washing up on a shore. It is conceivable that over a period of 10,000 years there will be a break in continuity, due to war, climate change, disease, but, barring these sorts of situation, we can try to solve the problem of effective communication by appealing to the fact that our descendants are overlapping, and not discrete, units. That there will be overlapping and successive generations who can be taught about the waste and its dangers allows us to think about the waste as an inheritance. Future generations receive the radwaste from us and from the immediately preceding generation and from every generation in between. However, we must insist that continuity is not the same as stability. In fact, we find in iterability—the repetition that can break with any given context and, in doing so, engender new contexts—a logic that allows us to understand the sense in which continuity promises instability. This is to say that there is a break, if we want to continue to use this language, or a rupture or disjointure at the very site of inheritance. Not only can we think that over 10,000 years the probability of an explicit historical break in sociopolitical continuity approaches inevitability—and we have good reason to be suspicious of any political regime that would claim for this kind of uninterrupted regency—we must add that the condition of interruption is the structure in and through which recontextualization, and so inheritance in the most general sense—reading—takes place. So we must be careful not to simply alter or clarify the ethical guideline under critique. That is, it is not enough to say that future people are fully responsible so long as there is continuity, for this continuity does nothing at all to guarantee sufficient transmission of adequate knowledge of the waste.
More to the point, and on the question of the guarantee, if the EPA takes the version of responsibility cited at the beginning of this essay as the basis for the justification of the continued production of nuclear waste, we are forced to admit that this condition fails. Future generations cannot inherit from us a message equal to the task of endowing them with full responsibility for our waste. The logic of language and inheritance expounded by the writers of Reducing the Likelihood of Future Human Activities That Could Affect Geologic High-level Waste Repositories is, simply put, not adequate to the phenomena.
It remains true, however, that our remains will be taken up, and, necessarily, not by us. There will be a future, and this future contains within it the promise of (to quote Derrida in Rogues) “an unforeseeable coming of the other” (R 84/123)—an unforeseeable coming of the unknowable or absolute other. Our responsibility can be found in the encounter with—the response to—the mark itself: namely, that we take up the mark and interpret it in its manifold of possible readings. If our responsibility toward future peoples means recognizing that they too will approach the warning and the waste as something to be interpreted by them and in their unknowable future context—that is, in recognition of their capacity to act responsibly—we cannot decide in advance how they are to interpret whatever it is we will pass on to them. The decision—how a warning is to be read, how waste is to be handled, and who our inheritors will be—cannot be made in advance. There is a bringing together of the ontological and the normative in this move that is characteristic of texts that fall more or less closely within the parameters of what we can call “deconstruction more generally.” We must decide: there is waste, there is remainder. We cannot decide in advance: the future and our inheritors are to come. We must decide again and again. We must respond and ask or pray that the future recognize us and our remains. This is survival.
The claim that we must not act as though we could decide for future societies in advance of their coming might, under a certain light, provide us with reason to reconsider the no-marker strategy. We might look to reduce the violence we would be doing to future people by taking the possibility—or, as we may now want to say, necessity—of (mis)interpreting our warnings off the table. Indeed, the decision to leave any kind of warning at all commits us at least to a decision concerning what kinds of future Earthlings we hope to warn—anything that cannot read, in the broadest possible sense, or develop a Geiger counter would simply fall outside the purview of our warning. To avoid that exclusion, or that decision, we might find justification for leaving as little behind as possible. The very idea, though, that during our time on Earth we could take only memories and leave only footprints belies the superficial ontological “honesty” of leaving no markers. The waste is itself a marker of our having been here. Our footprints—radioactive as well as carbon—are also memories and so demand a response.
Because the future is unknowable in principle—all we know is that it is to come (à venir)—and yet, at the same time, our responsibility for this waste is indelibly linked with future peoples’ ability to adequately take up our remains, we must admit that no specific action or principle can fulfill our responsibility toward future peoples. We cannot even appeal to a regulative idea such as “act in such a way that maximizes the context-sensitive decision-making of future peoples” because we would then be positing this idea as binding across time. Rather, through our understanding that a mark’s survival is in its being taken up and transformed, we understand that the only way to preserve our warning is to constantly revisit our decisions, our method, and our obligations. The error, then, is made in thinking that our responsibilities have been or could ever be met once and for all. Rather than an indefinite deferral of all decisions, though, there is—and this “is” reveals to us the strength of Derrida’s analysis in its being both normative and ontological—a sort of unlimited decision that is always being made. Indeed, the strongest condemnation we could muster against the strategy currently in place for dealing with our non(bio)degradables is that it forces a certain tactic of reading on future people in order to make them our redeemers. In another context, we read Derrida affirming that “the only attitude (the only politics—judicial, medical, pedagogical, and so forth) I would absolutely condemn is one which, directly or indirectly, cuts off the possibility of an essentially interminable questioning, that is, an effective and thus transforming questioning” (PI 239/252). Here we find reason to question the continued production of nuclear waste. The burden we place on future societies in understanding them as the redeemers of our action commits these future societies to logics and material inheritances that we have decided for them. The survival of our wastes, their (bio)degradability/non(bio)degradability, erodes our ability to ever be finished with them. In Rogues Derrida writes, “plus d’États voyous”—more and no more rogue states. We, this we that was, is, and will have been responsible for our nuclear inheritance, can take up a generalized version of such a formulation in our present context and read “plus d’une fois pour toute”—both “more than one once and for all” and “no more once and for all.” (No) more once and for all, even with nuclear waste.
Notes
1. What this grafting means for eco-deconstruction is thought along and through other avenues in Michael Marder’s contribution to this very volume.
2. Human Interference Task Force, Reducing the Likelihood of Future Human Activities That Could Affect Geologic High-Level Waste Repositories, Tech. no. 6799619 (Columbus, Ohio: Battelle Memorial Inst., Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation, 1984), 8; NTIS no. DE84013725, Energy Citations Database, https://www.osti.gov/scitech/biblio/6799619, accessed November 27, 2012).
3. To borrow just one of many terms that Derrida suggests might fall under the title “biodegradable”; see BSD 845, 814.
4. For a more detailed and brilliantly accessible overview of deep geologic waste disposal, see, in particular, Chapter 1 of Peter C. van Wyck’s Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
5. Despite the fact that the U.S. Department of Energy admits that “the waste will remain dangerous for longer than 10,000 years” and that “government experts agree that ‘there is no doubt that the repository will leak over the course of the next 10,000 years’”; quoted in Kristin Schrader-Frechette, “Ethical Dilemmas and Radioactive Waste: A Survey of the Issues,” Environmental Ethics 13 (1991): 328. For example, the half-life of Uranium-236 is just under 24 million years. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years—much more manageable than Uranium-236, but still more than double the 10,000-year period for which we understand ourselves to be responsible.
6. I am indebted to Alan Bellows of http://www.damninteresting.comfor bringing these attempts—and the problems surrounding nuclear waste disposal in general—to my attention through his article “This Is Not a Place of Honor,” http://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of-honor, accessed October 20, 2012.
7. See Stephen C. Hora, Detlof von Winterfeldt, and Kathleen M. Trauth, Expert Judgement on Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, SAND90–3063 (Albuquerque, N.M.: Sandia National Laboratories, United States Department of Energy, 1991), http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-control.cgi/1992/921382.pdf; Human Interference Task Force, 1984. Again, Peter C. van Wyck’s Signs of Danger is an invaluable resource for those seeking to learn more about the technical and semiotic difficulties such a project presents
8. Hora, von Winterfeldt, and Trauth, Expert Judgement, ES-1.
9. I would like to thank Michael Naas for reminding me that when we open our Larousse, we see that the définition familier for perle is “a mistake [erreur], misunderstanding [méprise] or gross blunder [maladresse] grossière observable in someone’s speech or writing.”
10. Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, in Limited Inc., ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 12.
11. I would like to stress here that bringing the concept of biodegradability into relation with writing and survival more generally amounts to only one reason for the insertion of parentheses. Indeed, these parenthetical marks work to simultaneously underline and bury the valences of bios and that storied concept’s relation to writing. At stake is nothing less than the relationship between survival and decay—a relation whose elaboration I will, on the one hand, defer to some day in the future (it would be necessary to engage in a more sustained and careful reading of, among other texts, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Archive Fever, The Beast & the Sovereign, The Death Penalty Seminars, and many of Derrida’s other as of yet unpublished seminars and, on the other hand, continue to develop here in whatever partial way I can).