It May Be Useful to Assume the Policeman’s Perspective Now and Then

Abstract

From “Black Collectivities: A Conference,” held May 3–4, 2013, at Northwestern University’s Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the University of Chicago’s Arts Incubator. The text proceeds from the point of view of a fictional research consortium that seeks to leverage its role as a stakeholder in the aftermath of the earthquake, the tsunami, and the partial nuclear meltdown on March 11, 2011, on the northeastern coast of Japan. The consortium can be understood as a personification of the type of collective agent that constitutes the infrastructure of the global nuclear regime, as analyzed by the critic Sabu Kohso. The article adopts the perspective of a transnational scientific-corporate entity to unfold the implications of understanding the high scientific uncertainty of low-level radiation as a laboratory of financial and necropolitical calculation.