ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 considers The Nuclear Enchantment of New Mexico by Joel Weishaus as Jungian arts-based research, the text of which forms Chapter 6. With “poetic inquiry,” the method of Nuclear Enchantment, the work offers a dialogue with Jung’s own visit to Taos, New Mexico. Moreover, it examines how the subject/object split, critiqued by Jung, achieved a Gothic materialization in nuclear weapons. Using Rolling Jnr.’s four modes of analytic, synthetic, critical-activist and improvisatory, the chapter explores the unique form of Nuclear Enchantment, framing scholarship as inside and outside the poetry. It provides Jungian individuation for readers. First exhibited in the 1990s, the work anticipates both the cultural complex theory of Thomas Singer and Samuel Kimbles and the argument of Lee Bailey in The Enchantments of Technology (2005). Nuclear weapons are shown to be produced by, and to reproduce, a perilous unconsciousness that such poetic inquiry can undo using indigenous myth, ecology, discourses of history and scholarship to form a transdisciplinary chalice. Nuclear weapons destroy words and meaning as well as bodies and cities. Nuclear Enchantment restores language by means of the Jungian symbol, joining Basarab Nicolescu’s transdisciplinarity where he says that science beyond the subject/object split must be written in symbols.
