Matheson ’15 (Calum, Assistant Professor of Comm. @ U. of Pitt., “Desired Ground Zeroes: Nuclear Imagination and the Death Drive,” 2015, pp. 121)
If, as I have argued in the context of the sublime, the Lacanian unconscious should be understood as the sublimated but present tropes concealed by metaphors of unusual cathectic purchase, then the best starting point for an investigation of the connection between targeting policy and macrosocial (spatial) arrangements is the set of tropes that serve to conceal these connections through the intensity of affect invested in them. The social world is not ordered by preexisting signs speaking through their subjects. The sign is necessarily mutable, and its work is done largely by concealing metonymic connections that are overshadowed by powerful metaphorical ones. The Real does break through, but when it does, it is manifest only as overwhelming, alien contingency, everything but a coherent underlying logic for human affairs, let alone the universe overall. It is not just the subject formed by the attempt to weave the Symbolic over the Real, but even the material environments we build. The sign is thus material in a very real sense: it produces subjects, their practices, and their physical surroundings. The city is one such sign, built in part by the powerful attachments negotiated under the threat of nuclear war. The metonymic connections concealed by the city as a nuclear target are all of the other investments that contribute to its material structure. In Cold War America, racial and economic inequality were some of those investments operating alongside nuclear calculations.
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