Radioactive Temporalities

On 17 July, the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius hosted the closing symposium of the exhibition ‘If Disrupted, it Becomes Tangible. Infrastructures and Solidarities beyond the Post-Soviet Condition’ (curated by Antonina Stebur and Aleksei Borisionok). During the event, two renowned scholars, Svitlana Matviyenko and Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, engaged in an extensive conversation on topics of nuclear temporalities and nuclear infrastructures. In their research, both scholars delve into the wider implications of these infrastructures, considering their impact on communities, power dynamics, and social, cultural and environmental discourses of the past and present. Drawing on the artworks presented in the exhibition, such as Oleksiy Radynski’s film Studies for Chernobyl 22, the scholars focused on the post-Soviet space and regions that have experienced Soviet nuclear policy in the past and Russian imperialist war, the ‘nuclear terror’, and the political uprisings today. In this article, we are happy to present a transcript of Svitlana Matviyenko’s talk.

17 June 2023

Today, I want to approach the topic of radioactive temporalities through my older and new work. Let’s begin with the year 1986. This was the year of the Chornobyl catastrophe. A sad and tragic year. It also catalysed a new awareness that became known as the idea of risk society triggered by this catastrophic event. The sociologists Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck, in different works, introduced the concept of risk society, which had to do with modernity coming to a crisis: modernity that was always obsessed with securitisation and control, and the prediction and prevention of catastrophes and accidents, suddenly had a major accident that for ever divided it into before and after.

In parallel, philosophers and historians of technology were rethinking the nature of accidents. The discussion has been going on for quite a while. The Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking traced the changing nature of accidents to the 19th century in relation to statistical mathematics and probabilistic thought. And, most recently, the Chinese philosopher Yuk Hui has been writing about non-accidental algorithmic accidents, accidents that are part of the system. And, of course, we must mention the work of the French philosopher Paul Virilio, whose theory of accidents also considers the systemic and structural nature of accidents. The Chornobyl catastrophe is ‘the original accident’ of modernity for Virilio. He tells us that we can only understand what technology is about when it crashes. This may seem like an old idea. For Virilio, however, technology is ‘invented’ when it is broken. He says that ‘the shipwreck is consequently the “futurist” invention of the ship, and the air crash is the invention of the supersonic airliner, just as the Chornobyl meltdown is the invention of the nuclear power station.’ Virilio argues that the crash not only gives us an understanding of technology, but that the crash finalises its invention. There is a very interesting play with temporality here: 1986 is when the nuclear power plant was invented, when it comes to its full realisation.

In some of my early writings last year I engaged with Virilio’s theory, but disagreed with it. I disagreed, and suggested that the ‘invention’ of the nuclear power plant, if we take the Chornobyl NPP as representative, did not happen in 1986, but rather in 2022. The invention, I argued, happened not with the catastrophic disaster, but with the occupation of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant by Russian forces on the first day of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The reason behind this disagreement has to do with imperial legacies. While Virilio, great thinker as he is, really overlooked the context where he was at the time that he was working, today, with our current heightened attention to coloniality, colonial legacies and imperialisms, we think about technology and infrastructures in a very different way; we cannot forget that infrastructures come to us with such legacies, and often embody old values. So for me, 2022 was the year that demonstrated the mobilisation of such legacies embodied by the nuclear power plant, the nuclear power industry, and the spread of that infrastructure in different parts of the Soviet Union.

However, even though I disagree with Virilio about 1986 as the year of ‘the original accident’, there was still something very important that happened that year. I argue that in 1986 radiation became a mass medium. What does that mean? Of course, it means several things, and probably more things than I am going to mention now. First, the awareness of disseminating radiation after the accident gave a new sense of the global world. Some scholars like to say that radiation made the world global before the internet. Historians even like to mention a particular time and place, when and where it happened: 7am on 26 April, 1,257 kilometres away from the Chornobyl nuclear power plant. That was when the Swedish chemist Cliff Robinson (at the time, he was working at the Forsmark nuclear power plant) went to brush his teeth, and when he came back, doing a regular check, the radiation monitoring machine suddenly went off, and it appeared that he was radioactive. That is the moment, we could say, that localised this globality of radiation. That is how radiation travelled, it travelled fast, and the world learned about it. We could also say that the world learned the meaning of risk society, even if the term was not introduced at that time, but several months later, with Ulrich Beck’s book.

Now I would like to go through different understandings of media and the way we see it. When we think of the mass media, we think of some kind of object. Recent scholarship on elemental media, such as water or air, shows that if a mass medium is an object, elemental media might be understood as a milieu or an environment. And, of course, radiation is such an environment. It is more an environment or a milieu than an object. The imperial legacies that were mobilised in 2022 are seen if we take radiation as an elemental medium.

What does the notion of elemental media give us? Why should we be interested in seeing something as a medium? Because the medium lets us see something else. In the Soviet Union, the nuclear power industry was very much prioritised. There was a lot of fantasy, funding and ambition attached to it. The nuclear power infrastructure and industry were one of the means by which the Soviet Union exerted control over the Eastern Bloc. So the nuclear power infrastructure is a tool. In 2022 and now, it is also used as a tool for mobilising imperial legacies and forces.

Since the beginning of the construction of the NPP, there have been continuous instances of pollution, and later leaks of radiation that have never been reported. So even though it is hard to compare with what happened in 1986, the area that is currently known as the Chornobyl zone had already been contaminated by constant leakages before 1986; it was already a contaminated zone. And this zone was delineated: it was a securitised and militarised zone. So basically, the imperial ‘invasion’ happened much earlier than 2022. Radiation as an elemental medium allows us to see it.

The construction of the Duga radar and the Chornobyl nuclear power plant started in the early 1970s. Both were Cold War infrastructures. One was for detecting ballistic missiles, and the other, in addition to producing energy for civilian purposes, also produced weapon-grade plutonium. So in a certain way, it is very much Virilian logic here. What happened in 1986, with all this contamination, is precisely the area that was delineated and securitised, and the lives of people who lived there before the construction were changed for ever. We know that this area was inhabited by traditional communities of people who spoke a dialect of the Ukrainian language that is sometimes quite difficult to understand. They had managed to keep their traditional methods of agriculture and pre-Christian religious rituals. In some ways they were quite unique, and it was precisely in close proximity to that traditional way of life that Soviet high-tech modern technology was installed.

Here I want to disagree with the arguments by the Russian scholar Alexander Etkind in his latest book called Russia against Modernity. There is nothing, I argue, against modernity in this war. This war is an original accident of modernity. This war is modernity.

To understand this, I find the work of the theorist Robert C.J. Young very helpful and important. In the book Empire, Colony, Postcolony, he distinguishes between different types of colonies, which helps to make a complex analysis of the Chornobyl zone. He speaks about colonial settlement, exploitation, and garrison. And of course, when we think about the Chornobyl zone, we can see features or characteristics of a colonial garrison settlement, because there were military settlements for the families of military workers who were there for the construction of the nuclear power plant and to control the Duga radar. The convergence of military and civilian military technology, practices and experiences is typical of modernity. The Chornobyl zone is the result of such convergences. I see the Chornobyl zone as the remains of a garrison colony of the Soviet military-industrial complex. And in this sense, that is precisely what we can see through radiation as an elemental medium. It outlines this realm, and makes it visible to us.

Svitlana Matviyenko is assistant professor of critical media analysis at the School of Communication of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Her research and teaching focus on information and cyberwar, media and the environment, and infrastructure studies. She writes about the networking drive, user complicity, and practices of resistance. She is a co-author of Cyberwar and Revolution: Digital Subterfuge in Global Capitalism (Minnesota UP, 2019). Her publications include The Imaginary App (co-edited with Paul D. Miller, MIT Press, 2014), and articles in (Re)Turn: A Journal of Lacanian Studies, Harvard Journal of Ukrainian Studies, Fibreculture Journal, Digital Creativity, and other publications.

This project is financed by Lithuanian Culture Council
Partner: European Humanities University (EHU)
Sponsor: Goethe-Institut*
*The project was incorporated into a comprehensive package of measures for which the Federal Foreign Office provided funding from the 2022 Supplementary Budget to mitigate the effects of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine.