Art and Nuclear Power: The Role of Culture in the Environmental Debate (Environment and Society) 1666900222, 9781666900224

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Art and Nuclear Power

Environment and Society Series Editor: Douglas Vakoch As scholars examine the environmental challenges facing humanity, they increasingly recognize that solutions require a focus on the human causes and consequences of these threats, and not merely a focus on the scientific and technical issues. To meet this need, the Environment and Society series explores a broad range of topics in environmental studies from the perspectives of the social sciences and humanities. Books in this series help the reader understand contemporary environmental concerns, while offering concrete steps to address these problems. Books in this series include both monographs and edited volumes that are grounded in the realities of ecological issues identified by the natural sciences. Our authors and contributors come from disciplines including but not limited to anthropology, architecture, area studies, communication studies, economics, ethics, gender studies, geography, history, law, pedagogy, philosophy, political science, psychology, religious studies, sociology, and theology. To foster a constructive dialogue between these researchers and environmental scientists, the Environment and Society series publishes work that is relevant to those engaged in environmental studies, while also being of interest to scholars from the author’s primary discipline.

Recent Titles in the series Contesting Extinctions: Decolonial and Regenerative Futures, edited by Luis I. Prádanos, Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan, Suzanne McCullagh, and Catherine Wagner Global Capitalism and Climate Change: The Need for an Alternative World System, Second Edition, by Hans A. Baer Ecological Solidarity and the Kurdish Freedom Movement: Thought, Practice, Challenges, and Opportunities, edited by Stephen E. Hunt Ecomobilities: Driving the Anthropocene in Popular Cinema, by Michael W. Pesses Embodied Memories, Embedded Healing: New Ecological Perspectives from East Asia, edited by Xinmin Liu and Peter I-min Huang Wetlands and Western Cultures: Denigration to Conservation, by Rod Giblett Sustainable Engineering for Life Tomorrow, edited by Jacqueline A. Stagner and David S. K. Ting Nuclear Weapons and the Environment: An Ecological Case for Nonproliferation, by John Perry Portland’s Good Life: Sustainability and Hope in an American City, by R. Bruce Stephenson Conservation, Sustainability, and Environmental Justice in India, edited by Alok Gupta Environmental and Animal Abuse Denial: Averting Our Gaze, edited by Tomaž Grušovnik, Reingard Spannring, and Karen Lykke Syse Living Deep Ecology: A Bioregional Journey by Bill Devall, edited with an introduction by Sing C. Chew Environmental and Animal Abuse Denial: Averting Our Gaze edited by Tomaž Grušovnik, Reingard Spannring, and Karen Lykke Syse

Art and Nuclear Power The Role of Culture in the Environmental Debate

Anna Volkmar

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2022 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-66690-022-4 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-66690-023-1 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

To Clara

Contents

List of Figures

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Acknowledgmentsxiii Introduction1 1 Ironic Encounters in Nuclear Landscape Photography

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2 Snapshots from the Zone

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3 The Art to Remain Exposed

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4 How to Care for Nuclear Waste?

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Conclusion185 Bibliography189 Index201 About the Author

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List of Figures

Figure 1.1 Jürgen Nefzger, Penly, France, 2003 (Fluffy Clouds), 2003, photograph. © Jürgen Nefzger, courtesy Galerie Françoise Paviot, Paris Figure 1.2 Jürgen Nefzger, Gorleben, Deutschland, 2005 (Fluffy Clouds), 2005, photograph. © Jürgen Nefzger, courtesy Galerie Françoise Paviot, Paris Figure 1.3 Jürgen Nefzger, Nogent-sur-Seine, France, 2003 (Fluffy Clouds), 2003, photograph. © Jürgen Nefzger, courtesy Galerie Françoise Paviot, Paris Figure 1.4 Jürgen Nefzger, Wylfa, Wales, 2005 (Fluffy Clouds), 2005, photograph. © Jürgen Nefzger, courtesy Galerie Françoise Paviot, Paris Figure 1.5 Jacob van Ruisdael, View of the Dunes near Bloemendaal with Bleaching Fields, Late 1660s, Oil on Canvas, private collection. Public domain Figure 1.6 Jürgen Nefzger, Gorleben, Deutschland, 2009 (Fluffy Clouds), 2009, photograph. © Jürgen Nefzger, courtesy Galerie Françoise Paviot, Paris Figure 2.1 Jane and Louise Wilson, Atomgrad (Nature Abhors a Vacuum), 2010: Atomgrad 4 (the swimming pool), c-print, Diasec mounted with aluminium and Perspex, 180 × 228 cm. © Jane and Louise Wilson, courtesy 303 Gallery Figure 2.2 Donald Weber, Bastard Eden, Our Chernobyl, 2008, photograph. The forests of the Zone can be lethal. Radiation loves to settle into tight pockets with little wind. © Donald Weber, courtesy of the artist ix

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List of Figures

Figure 2.3 Donald Weber, Bastard Eden, Our Chernobyl, 2008, photograph. Valentina Sabenok with her nine-year-old daughter, Tanya, who has cerebral palsy. Valentina lives alone, existing on a pension of $60 per month. She takes pride in having to buy very little, virtually living off the land. © Donald Weber, courtesy of the artist 65 Figure 2.4 Rena Effendi, Chernobyl: Still Life in the Zone, 2014, photograph. Hanna Zavorotnya (78 y.o.) helped to scrub and gut a pig that was butchered by her visiting son for the New Year holidays. Kapavati village, Chernobyl, Ukraine. December 2010. © Rena Effendi, courtesy of the artist 77 Figure 2.5 Donald Weber, Bastard Eden, Our Chernobyl, 2008, photograph. Ludmila. At least here the snow is white, said Ludmilla’s husband, an ex-coal miner from the Donbass. © Donald Weber, courtesy of the artist 78 Figure 2.6 Donald Weber, Bastard Eden, Our Chernobyl, 2008, photograph. Breakfast, or lunch. Time is fluid around the Exclusion Zone. © Donald Weber, courtesy of the artist 81 Figure 2.7 Donald Weber, Bastard Eden, Our Chernobyl, 2008, photograph. Evgeniy, 14, eats his lunch of potatoes and meat while Julia Timoshenko runs for president. Evgeniy moved with his mother and sister and brother from a village outside Kiev to a village on the edge of the Exclusion Zone. A year after moving in, contracted heart disease. © Donald Weber, courtesy of the artist 83 Figure 2.8 Donald Weber, Bastard Eden, Our Chernobyl, 2008, photograph. February, 2006. Gutting a wild boar after a hunt in the woods. The legal hunting season is two months in the fall, September and October. Many residents say the best hunting is in the winter. This was some of the best tasting meat I have ever had. © Donald Weber, courtesy of the artist 85 Figure 3.1 The Otolith Group, The Radiant, London: LUX, 2012, BluRay. Play of light at an access road into the Fukushima exclusion zone, TC 00.43.05. Screenshot 108 Figure 3.2 Anonymous, Pointing at Fukuichi Live Cam, 2011, CCTV recording uploaded to YouTube. After pointing for twenty minutes at the camera (left image), the worker climbs onto the scaffold on which the camera is mounted and continues pointing for another minute before he leaves the site (right image). Screenshot 117

List of Figures

Figure 3.3 Vito Acconci, Centers, 1971, Open Reel video, black and white, 4:3, mono. Screenshot Figure 4.1 Scientific illustration of the marker proposal Landscape of Thorns. Concept by Michael Brill, drawing by Safdar Abidi. Source: Trauth, Hera, and Guzowsti 1993, F-61 Figure 4.2 Robert Williams and Bryan McGovern Wilson, Ulpha—Wolf Pissing a Repository, Cumbrian Alchemy, 2013. Source: Williams and Wilson 2013, 48. © Robert Williams and Bryan McGovern Wilson, courtesy of the artists Figure 4.3 Book cover of Cumbrian Alchemy, depicting a so-called alchemical host, Williams and Wilson’s version of Sebeok’s atomic priest. © Robert Williams and Bryan McGovern Wilson, courtesy of the artists Figure 4.4 Example for an AI-generated image on the Instagram page of Viral Fictions, set up by Agnès Villette under the account @viralfictions. © Agnès Villette, courtesy of the artist Figure 4.5 Grit Ruhland, A Marker for Halde Stolzenberg, 2019. Abstracted map of the mirror space. The black area designates the contaminated waste rock pile, the white area represents the non-contaminated mirror space. The figure in the middle of the white area represents the three-legged badger that is to be placed on an altarpiece in the Ruhland’s envisioned cultural centre at the bottom right corner of the area. The sign on the black area is a deconstructed trefoil and was designed by the artist to signal a former nuclear site. © Grit Ruhland, courtesy of the artist Figure 4.6 Grit Ruhland, A Marker for Halde Stolzenberg, 2019, paper, cardboard, wood, metal pins, ribbon. Collage of open street map images and excerpts from folktales from the area around Halde Stolzenberg. Photo: the author

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Acknowledgments

Writing a book is an exercise in muddling that can only succeed with the help and inspiration of colleagues and friends. Above all, I would like to thank my PhD supervisors Dr. Isabel Hoving and Prof. Dr. Robert Zwijnenberg for their copious support and diligent guidance, as well as the intellectual freedom they granted me in writing the dissertation from which this manuscript evolved. I also wish to warmly thank my colleagues at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society Dr. Tessa de Zeeuw, Dr. Lieke Smits, Dr. Looi van Kessel, Dr. Lisanne Wepler, Dr. Tingting Hui, Dr. Didi van Trijp, Robbert Striekwold, Bareez Majid and Amaranth Feuth for always lending me an open ear and giving me valuable feedback on my writing. A special thanks goes to Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou and Ruby de Vos for the inspiring events on nuclear aesthetics we organized together that fundamentally helped to sharpen the ideas presented in this book. Similarly, I wish to thank the members of the nuclear culture research group and the nuclear heritage group, especially Prof. Dr. Eleanor Carpenter, Dr. Sven Lütticken, Prof. Dr. Cornelius Holtorf, and Marcos Buser, for giving me access to a network of researchers and artists working on similar ideas. Without this network and the doors it opened for me, this book would not have materialized. I am also grateful to the Environmental Humanities Center of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and especially its board members Dr. Kristine Steenbergh and Prof. Dr. Katja Kwastek, who encouraged me to organize several events related to nuclear waste. My special thanks go to Agnès Villette, Dr. Grit Ruhland and Elise Alloin for collaborating with me and offering me a glimpse into artistic research in the making. In the same vein, I would also like to thank the students of the 2019 KABK practice seminar Speaking Across Deep Time and my co-tutors xiii

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Prof. Dr. Alice Twemlow and Marthe Prins for sharing their thoughts on design and deep time. With respect to the publication of this book, I want to thank Prof. Dr. Robert Williams and Bryan McGovern Wilson, Rena Effendi, Donald Weber, Jane and Louise Wilson and Jürgen Nefzger for giving me permission to reproduce their artwork. Last but not least, my heartfelt thanks go to my family for their loving and unconditional support. My thanks go especially to Benjamin for being so incredibly supporting, patient and caring throughout the process of writing this book.

Introduction

Literary scholar Timothy Clark (2015) concludes his book Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept with a critique of the Humanities and the field of ecocriticism in particular with its ambition to engage with ecological issues from a cultural perspective. He argues that there has been an “overinvestment in the power of cultural representations, of the social importance of art and literature” in the face of planetary ecological threats like climate change (196). He calls claims about “ecocriticism’s own centrality and power” “escapist fantasies” that are highly disproportionate to the kind of existential threats the field seeks to address, and suggests to commit to “more direct kinds of activism” (198). I agree with Clark that art and literature by themselves cannot offer an adequate response to the pressing social and ecological issues that current and future generations face. Yet, upon reading his lines, I feel urged to add: nor are any other disciplines, or any one discipline to be precise. Art does not solve society’s problems, but does that justify devaluing artists’ (and ecocritics’) persistent efforts to create a better understanding of these problems? What are Clark’s assumptions about the role of art (and in fact the Humanities) in society when he so quickly abandons it for activism as a supposedly more effective agent for change? What, then, is art’s social relevance in a time marked by unprecedented ecological challenges and, as Clark claims, a concurrent loss of “ethical and political coordinates” to navigate them (196)? The question of art’s social relevance has been posed many times, and I think Clark’s hasty answer underlines that cultural scholars need to keep posing it as the challenges that society faces change. This book explores the question again, but with a different set of assumptions than Clark. Unlike Clark, I suggest that the question is not which discipline or form of engagement to give priority (activism over art for 1

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instance), but, following philosopher Gilles Deleuze, what answers one discipline offers to a similar question raised in another discipline and context. In a widely read interview about his thoughts on cinema, Deleuze (2014) suggests: The encounter between two disciplines doesn’t take place when one begins to reflect on the other, but when one discipline realizes that it has to resolve [résoudre], for itself and by its own means, a problem similar to one confronted by the other. . . . The same tremors occur on totally different terrains. . . . I was able to write about cinema, not because of some right of consideration, but because philosophical problems compelled me to look for answers in the cinema, even at the risk that those answers would suggest other problems.

If interdisciplinarity is understood as different disciplines responding to the same “tremors,” I think it is paramount to look for answers across these disciplines, even if those answers “suggest other problems.” The tremors that caused me to start this inquiry emanated from a technology that has defined, like few others, those ethical and political coordinates that Clark sees faltering in the twenty-first century: nuclear power. More specifically, it was the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster and the wave of artistic responses to it that compelled me to raise the question of art’s social significance again. Why, I wondered, do so many artists feel the need to respond with their work to this technological disaster? What could art possibly contribute in the face of such urgency? Again, I think no discipline alone can address the challenges posed by a disaster of this scale. Thus, any informed response to nuclear events like Fukushima must be an interdisciplinary effort, a chorus in which I believe art, too, claims a voice. To avoid the common misconception of interdisciplinarity consisting in one discipline ‘solving’ a problem defined by the other, which leads to the kind of hierarchization between disciplines that informs Clark’s argument, this study follows Deleuze’s understanding of interdisciplinarity. As stated in the quote above, for Deleuze interdisciplinarity consists in one discipline “resolv[ing] [résoudre], for itself and by its own means, a problem similar to one confronted by the other . . . even at the risk that those answers would suggest other problems.” As the added subclause indicates, to ‘resolve’ here does not mean to solve a given problem. The French expression résoudre un problème means to address a problem or to raise an issue which signals an open outcome. Thus, to my mind, what Deleuze is saying here is that interdisciplinarity means to accept, even embrace, the risk of raising new questions when the aim is to find an answer or solution to a previously defined problem. The aim of this book is to explore art’s role in the risky undertaking of addressing the complex societal issues raised by nuclear technology.

Introduction

3

As Clark points out, in the cultural disciplines, art is often presented as an answer to ecological questions, a visionary practice that experiments with alternative ways of relating to the world and oneself that raises uncomfortable questions and challenges the status quo—a view traditionally applied to Western avant-garde art but which found a new object with ecologically concerned art. Examples abound. In the Netherlands, one of the boldest proclamations of this sort I have come across was an exhibition in The Hague’s Kunstmuseum from 2013 that carried the hyperbolic title Yes Naturally: How Art Saves the World.1 Within the scholarly debate, art historian and critic T. J. Demos (2017) advocates various forms of art activism as an effective weapon against petro-capitalism, while Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (2015) find in art’s inconclusiveness a productive force for redefining our ‘broken’ relationship with nature. As lofty as these proclamations appear, if one takes the effort to read further, most of them evolve into nuanced arguments. In the catalogue to the Yes Naturally exhibition, for instance, I read that art, actually, “won’t save the world, but . . . does offer a reliable compass for striking out in the new directions of our collective journeys” into an anthropogenic future (Gevers 2013, 13). Similarly, Davis and Turpin (2015) highlight art’s “ability to sustain contradiction while interrogating the very modes of its production” as “especially valuable” when engaging current ecological issues (14). Or, as art historians Claudette Lauzon and John O’Brian (2020) put it, discussing nuclear culture, “images help to shape both our perceptions and our actions. But . . . artists equip us with the capacity to perceive and act otherwise” (3). In the nuclear context, curator and artist Ele Carpenter’s (2016) take on art as exploring the “mid-ground” between nuclear fear and the technical, detached language of science particularly helped me think through some of the issues I encountered in my research. What is largely missing (and has probably contributed to Clark’s dismissive stance towards this sort of proclamations) are close readings—detailed analyses of artworks that demonstrate how such claims play out in practice and connect to societal questions. The aim of this study is to fill this gap and generate a more detailed understanding of art’s relevance in a society facing the complex challenges created by nuclear technology, both with respect to art’s contribution to societal debates but also more specialized disciplinary debates. By doing so, it discusses a small selection of recent artistic practices that respond to issues ranging from nuclear energy, over nuclear disaster to the disposal of long-lived radioactive waste. It should be noted that the kind of art discussed in this book does not fit the widespread idea of ‘autonomous art’ which assumes that artworks exist independently from the social and historical context from which they emerge. Instead, following literary scholar Ernst van Alphen’s (2005) suggestion that art is embedded in society and must be interpreted as an active agent in it

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Introduction

(which is another form of autonomy as having an agency of its own), this book is concerned with art that is invested in societal and environmental issues linked to nuclear power. Most artworks I discuss employ lens-based media, including video, photography, animation and digital media. This is no coincidence since photography has been instrumental to nuclear research and how it was used from the outset, a fact that artists continue to reflect upon through their choice of medium. To acknowledge the relevance of lens-based media in nuclear culture, reflections on how the mediality of an artwork contributes to meaning-making will be offered throughout this book, helped where appropriate with insights from media theory and media history. To set the stage for this book’s discussion of art’s relevance to the nuclear debate, it is helpful to first establish a conceptual vocabulary that allows me to talk about the kind of complexity nuclear technologies generate and its societal and psychological implications. 1.1 WE’VE MADE A WORLD WE CANNOT CONTROL . . . I start from the assumption that nuclear technology produces a degree of complexity for which society does not have yet the tools to respond. With that, I do not refer to the technical complexity of a nuclear reactor or atomic bomb, which operates on a scale that can be comprehended with the right technical training. The kind of complexity that this book grapples with is revealed in the plumes of radioactive dust that drifted across the Eurasian and North American continent when atmospheric testing of atomic bombs was still allowed; in the large amounts of contaminated water being released into the Pacific Ocean after three of Fukushima’s nuclear reactors exploded; and the used fuel rods from nuclear energy production that require sheltering for thousands of years. The kind of complexity I am concerned with consists in nuclear technology’s so-called by-products or side-effects, that is, the heaps of waste and other contaminated materials that are generated during regular energy production, and the unintended, yet expectable system failures that in hindsight often become more relevant than a technology’s intended function. Unlike the terms ‘by-product’ and ‘side effect’ suggest, this complexity is integral to nuclear technology which to acknowledge has significant implications. In a short opinion piece for the science magazine New Scientist, Braden R. Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz (2011b), two scholars who look at the interaction of science, engineering, society and the environment, claim that “[w]e are in fact an ignorance society, continually creating more and more ignorance as we busily expand the complexity of the anthropogenic Earth. But,” they concede, “our ignorance is not a ‘problem’ with a ‘solution:’ it

Introduction

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is inherent in the techno-human condition” (29). The piece carries the title “We’ve Made a World We Cannot Control” and comments on the triple disaster that destroyed the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan in 2011, causing the largest nuclear disaster in human history since Chernobyl in 1986. Their claim is that the techno-human condition, which they define as the inseparable entwinement of humans and technology, is a condition of growing ignorance instead of (or, as I gather from their example, alongside of) growing knowledge. It is the introduction of modern technologies like genetic engineering or atomic power, which themselves often consist of complex systems, to other complex systems, like the Earth’s system, that Allenby and Sarewitz see as the root cause of this growing ignorance. The Fukushima disaster, they suggest, illustrates this condition because it is the result of several complex systems (nuclear reactors and plate tectonics) interacting in unpredictable ways. Allenby and Sarewitz differentiate between three levels of complexity on which every technology performs. At the simplest level, a technology is designed to perform a particular function: a nuclear reactor delivers baseload electricity with high reliability. At Level II, the complex network in which a technology is embedded is considered: the nuclear reactor is linked to the electricity grid, which in turn is connected to other complex networks for manufacturing, transportation or communication. If interactions on this level challenge human thinking, Level III, the most complex level, can according to the authors never be fully understood. At this level, the nuclear reactor intersects with the Earth system in the form of shifting tectonic plates, and social and cultural forces such as the fear of global warming and demands for rising standards of living (28). According to the authors, it is in the Level III-kind of complexity that ignorance is most extensive and, in fact, overrules the amount of existing knowledge of a technology. Allenby and Sarewitz’s analysis of technological complexity is useful, but to do justice to the kind of complexity generated in the event of a nuclear disaster, it is necessary to look beyond the factors that led to the event itself. In the modern techno-human condition, there is no option to swipe the slate clean and start again if something went wrong. To be sure, there never was such an option, but with modern technology the world becomes increasingly interconnected so that with every disruption the web of relations only pulls tighter. I, therefore, suggest that Allenby and Sarewitz’s model can be extended to account also for the aftermath which, in turn, further complexifies the relations that have led to the disaster in the first place. A good illustration for this complexification is feminist scholar Aya Hirata Kimura’s (2016) critical study of food contamination and citizen empowerment in post-Fukushima Japan. Kimura defines the systemic nature of the problem in even wider terms than Allenby and Sarewitz. In a passage that reflects on the lacking link

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between political activism and the many citizen radiation-measuring organizations that emerged across post-Fukushima Japan in response to the crisis of confidence in the government, Kimura highlights the connecting role that food could have played in mobilizing political resistance in Japan: Because food was one of the few tangible ways in which the radiation threats became visible, and its circulation was not limited to the reactor’s immediate vicinity, food could potentially have made an effective rallying point for social movements. Food is also an intimate commodity, which could have been a rich emotional resource for social movements to use to build affective connections among diverse groups of people. But radicalization through food politics did not take place in post-Fukushima Japan. (4)

What Kimura suggests in this passage is that food in post-Fukushima Japan could be more than a medium to make the extent of radioactive contamination visible. It could serve as an interface for political analysis to spur activist movements and an overall ‘radicalization’ of Japanese society. In Kimura’s own words, food in post-Fukushima Japan could have been a tangible way not only to reveal radiation threats, but also trace the political and economic power relations that have led to obscuring the threat in the first place and spur political action against it. Contaminated food, then, is presented by Kimura as a medium that could make tangible the complex, impersonal mechanisms that expose Japanese citizens continuously to the threat of radiation. The hesitation that her use of the conditional clause expresses in this passage is owed to the fact that despite initial grassroots movements and large-scale protests, a larger and more enduring social movement has not materialized in Japan. Instead, food so far has thus served the government to act on the citizen through food policing and not the other way around (7–14). The usefulness of Kimura’s study lies in its broad scope, adding system after system to be able to define what has originally been described as a technological disaster. She argues that the reasons for this lack of radicalization are not to be found merely in “effective government information control that silenced citizen scientists,” but in much broader “forces of neoliberalism, scientism, and postfeminism” that “reinforced notions of citizenship that largely excluded political activism, rendering activism inappropriate for an ideal citizen” (5). Her claim is that these forces produce “an ideal citizen” on which governmental campaigns like Eat to Support capitalize to undermine political resistance in Japanese society.2 By drawing on such large narratives as neoliberalism, scientism and postfeminism, Kimura’s analysis to me suggests that the complexity of disasters like Fukushima, challenge disciplinary boundaries, even when dealing with such a specialized subject like food politics in post-Fukushima Japan. By implication, any effective response to

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strategies like food policing requires forms of political and social engagement that incorporate the impersonal scale of the problem and take into account the interaction of complex, seemingly unrelated systems even after the technological disaster has happened. In this sense, research like Kimura’s on female citizen scientists in Japan illustrates some of the surprising consequences of Level III complexity, supplementing Allenby and Sarewitz’s heterogeneous list of factors that led to the disaster with an equally heterogeneous list that demonstrates the difficulty of responding to the disaster in a politically effective way. The list includes things like cultural ideas about the appropriate behavior of women in Japan, or the strong interdependence of one’s economic and social standing that makes people hesitant to engage in political protest as they could risk their job. The list of factors to be taken into account could go on, creating an unpredictable and overwhelmingly complex situation that ridicules any attempt to create a comprehensive understanding of the implications of the techno-human condition for society. As Kimura’s findings demonstrate, then, on this level of complexity the common impulse amongst experts to ‘return to the numbers’ is of little use to grasp the situation and effect change. This is, however, what most often happens. According to Allenby and Sarewitz, the exposure of Level III complexity as it happened in the case of Fukushima, usually does not result in measures that would adequately acknowledge and balance human limits of understanding. Instead, the focus is solely put on what we do or can know, an approach that they situate in the Enlightenment mindset of applied rationality and which comes down to turning complexity into a ‘problem’ that must be ‘solved.’ And most of the time, solutions are developed on the simplest level of complexity, because it is the most tangible. Japan, for instance, has decided to respond to the Fukushima nuclear disaster by improving on reactor safety. The problem is that such Level I solutions touch only weakly on Level II complexity and can have effects on Level III that can cause even more harm than they are helpful, such as the repeated occurrence of major nuclear disasters due to problems that remain unaddressed in institutionalized control systems (Level II) or, that simply ignore the unpredictability of earthquakes (Level III).3 Therefore, Allenby and Sarewitz propose that technological complexity and the ignorance that it necessarily entails (because the outcomes of complex systems interacting cannot be fully predicted), should be approached not as a problem but as a condition. The difference is that unlike with a problem, there is no such thing as a solution. A condition is something that changes, and hence asks for an ongoing engagement that defies closure. In their book, The Techno-Human Condition, which came out just a month after the fateful events of March 2011 that led to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Allenby and Sarewitz (2011a) describe it as follows: A condition needs continuous attention, which importantly involves “confronting and working with

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(we would say ‘managing,’ but it isn’t clear that we can actually do that in any strong sense with such complex and powerful systems) that which is incomprehensible” (119). A condition, then, clearly requires a practice that is processrather than product- (or solution-) oriented to continuously adjust to emerging insights from what remains ungraspable as a whole. The strength of Allenby and Sarewitz’s (2011b) claim that we are “an ignorance society” (28), that is, that ignorance is in-built to our condition rather than an arbitrary side effect to be neglected or eradicated, lies in removing the argumentative basis for dismissing Level III effects like nuclear disasters as unintended consequences we can do nothing about. Following Allenby and Sarewitz, Fukushima is the result of conflicting levels of technology: What worked on Level I, a reactor reliably providing electricity, and on Level II, a reliable infrastructure to distribute the electricity, had unpredictable consequences on Level III, the Earth system, when said reactor technology and distribution system interacted with geological forces, causing the catastrophic failure of the reactor. The Fukushima disaster, in other words, is the result of ignoring the reactor’s Level III complexity. It might have been unpredictable in the way that earthquakes are, but it should not have been unexpected. In that sense, nuclear power as a combination of complex systems qualifies as what Allenby and Sarewitz (2011a) call “wicked complexity” with reference to design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber’s idea of wicked problems. “Complexity,” they write, is wicked when a system’s makeup and dynamics are dominated by differing human values and deep uncertainty not only about the future but even about knowing what is actually going on in the present. Any solution to a wicked problem should be expected to create unanticipated but equally difficult new problems. (109)

If nuclear power, for instance, is framed as a solution to the problem of climate change, or economic dependency as in Japan, the Fukushima disaster is an unanticipated, but equally difficult new problem emerging from it, resulting in a societal condition that is itself catastrophic (I explore this argument in more detail in chapter 3). But if the occurrence of disasters like Fukushima are not problems that can be solved as Allenby and Sarewitz claim, what, then, can be done about it? 1.2 . . . THUS, MUDDLING THROUGH IS THE BEST WE CAN DO Before I move on to Allenby and Sarewitz’s proposed strategies to work with the techno-human condition (an approach that, as I argue below, reveals a

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more fundamental problem), let me dig a little deeper into the psychological implications of their claims by drawing insights from a related debate. The way in which Allenby and Sarewitz describe the wicked complexity of the techno-human condition has strong similarities with the emerging debate on the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene, a term that translates to the ‘human now’ or the ‘age of man,’ was proposed by the atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen and his colleague Eugene Stoermer (2002) to describe a new, still informal, geological epoch in which the human impact on basic ecosystems has become so significant that it shows as a distinct layer in the Earth’s geological strata. Regardless the fact that the Anthropocene has not been formally recognized yet as a subdivision of geological time by the International Commission on Stratigraphy nor by the International Union of Geological Sciences, the term was quickly taken up by other disciplines as a cipher for humanity’s (self-)destructive impact on the planet.4 One of the central contributions of the Anthropocene concept to environmental discourse is that it addresses challenges like climate change or overpopulation on a planetary scale while stressing their roots in collective human activity. While generally this is seen as a step towards changing unsustainable ways of inhabiting this world, Clark, with whom I opened this book, sees herein a problem. Phenomena like climate change, he argues, are too vast and too distributed to be traced back to single actions like driving a car with a combustion engine, and yet it is mundane actions like driving a car which, in their totality, are said to have caused the change of something vast like the climate. This discrepancy between a phenomenon said to exist and its intangibility in lived experience causes according to Clark a sense of disconnection. The angle from which Clark chose to join the debate is that of a literary scholar who finds the complexity of the issues subsumed under the concept of the Anthropocene “intellectually liberating” as “the breakdowns of inherited demarcations of thought can still become a means of disclosure and revision” (as he demonstrates in his own contribution) (xi). But, more importantly for him, it is also “frightening”: The uncertainty and incalculable complexity of the issues, especially in forecasting likely future climates or the effects of human action or inaction [create] . . . the sense of being overwhelmed, of paralysis, even despair—how can you engage issues that are implicated in multiple events and behaviours and natural processes across the whole planet? To deny this is to evade the nature and urgency of the situation. (xi)

Similar to hazards like climate change, the problem of radioactive contamination is more systemic than the effects through which it becomes an observable phenomenon. For instance, the effects of radiation on health and

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the environment manifest themselves in observable phenomena such as cancer, increased mutation rates in plants and animals, or social discrimination as has been shown for atomic bomb survivors of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings during World War II who are known as hibakusha. And yet the problem itself cannot be grasped through these isolated instances of visibility (which, even if taken for themselves, are not as clear-cut as my list suggests), just like rain is not climate change, although climate change is implicated in extreme weather events that can also involve rain. Clark calls these “scale effects” (140) because the problem only arises on a different (i.e., the planetary) scale than what can be experienced by humans. The problem that Clark identifies with these scale effects which characterize the Anthropocene is that they produce what he nicknames the “Anthropocene disorder,” which is a psychic disorder, inherent in the mismatch between familiar day-to-day perception and the sneering voice of even a minimal ecological understanding or awareness of scale effects; and in the gap between the human sense of time and slow-motion catastrophe and, finally, in a sense of disjunction between the destructive processes at issue and the adequacy of the arguments and measures being urged to address them. (140)

Complexity of the kind experienced in the Anthropocene leads to forms of ‘social denial’ rather than effecting change, because if it is impossible to grasp the phenomenon, the only ‘liveable’ option is to deny it in everyday spheres of action. Referring to Allenby and Sarewitz’s concept of the technohuman condition, Clark suggests that the “Anthropocene disorder . . . is the emotional correlate of the kinds of cognitive overload described by Allenby and Sarewitz” (143). Following from that, he attributes to their account of the techno-human condition an “air of excessive resignation” that “can seem morally evasive,” because it implies that “in the face of all these alarming future scenarios triggered by human action, there was absolutely nothing anyone could do” (11). However, what Clark fails to mention is that Allenby and Sarewitz (2011a) also come up with pragmatic advise on how to engage more productively with the wicked complexity they describe, or as they phrase it in their book, how to “muddl[e] through” it (93). Detailing their approach, they draw up a list of principles that, if followed, increases human adaptability to the challenges arising in Level III complexity by creating what they call “option spaces” (162), a set of options that are readily available before a challenge arises. Overall, their strategy is to diversify and democratize decision-making processes rather than relying on stable (‘expert’) solutions to identified problems. For instance, they advise to accept and nourish productive conflict, engage in continual learning, or lower the amplitude and increase the frequency of

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decisions rather than rely on a few big ones. Thus, unlike Clark suggests, their book is not merely a critical gesture to signal that current planetary phenomena like climate change are bound up in wicked complexity, nor are they interested in dismissing all existing solutions to the specific challenges arising from it as useless. Allenby and Sarewitz spend a good part of their book to outline possible features of an intelligent, messy, adaptable practice that responds to the complexity of a changing condition and the concrete challenges arising from it. They call this practice provocatively “muddling through” (93) or to “muddle forward (but intelligently)” to signal a turn away from the impulse of “seeking knowledge and certainty (either scientific or metaphysical) when what is needed most is the courage and wisdom to embrace contradiction, [and] celebrate ignorance” (160). Muddling is thus a method specifically tailored to the kind of wicked complexity that modern technologies like nuclear reactors create—a method, moreover, with no alternative if one is to accept the radical uncertainty of a wickedly complex reality. “[M]uddling through,” they insist, “is not a second-best process to be dropped when appropriate optimization techniques are developed: it is the best we can do” (110). Although privileging incremental learning over theory, to muddle means not to dismiss theoretical models and hence a more holistic thinking per se as the concept’s more common use in the field of public administration suggests (Lindblom 1959).5 Allenby and Sarewitz (2011a) concede that “some muddling is more effective, and more informative, than other muddling” (130), a distinction they signal with the qualifier ‘intelligent.’ Intelligent muddling is carried by a general suspicion towards grand narratives and technical fixes, a suspicion that in its leaning towards multiplicity may be called postmodern.6 When Allenby and Sarewitz (2011b) provocatively propose to “embrace contradiction” and “celebrate ignorance” in dealing with challenges like the Fukushima nuclear disaster (29), what they signal is a departure from the modern belief that such challenges could at all be fully understood and mastered. In this sense, Clark’s allegation that Allenby and Sarewitz ultimately motivates the reader to engage in forms of social denial is misleading, because social denial, as described by Clark, appears as a specifically modern ailment that responds to the Anthropocene as a new master narrative promising to bridge the gap between lived, localized experience and the abstract knowledge of planetary phenomena like climate change or radioactive contamination. It is a promise, as Clark argues (and I agree with him on this point), that inherited modes of reading and interpreting can only fail to fulfil, if only because the phenomenon at some point becomes too complex to grasp. An example from the nuclear context is sociologist Olga Kuchinskaya’s (2014) experience of studying the health consequences of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, an experience she describes as Kafkaesque. She reports

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“feeling overwhelmed and discouraged by complexity—that of the phenomenon itself, but also scientific and bureaucratic complexity” (3). In the case of studying the health consequences of radioactive contamination, then, another kind of complexity needs to be added to the phenomenon itself, which is the bureaucratic and scientific complexity emerging from the efforts to render it knowable. I would argue that this twofold complexity that is commonly found in (but not exclusive to) the nuclear context increases the risk to produce the kind of cognitive overload that render efforts to ‘know’ a technologically produced phenomenon potentially “self-defeating” (3). Thus, while I disagree with Clark’s allegations against Allenby and Sarewitz to leave the individual empty-handed in the face of wicked complexity, his doubts unwittingly reveal a radical streak in their reasoning of which even the authors seem unaware. Asking their readers to resist the impulse to seek knowledge and certainty when facing complex problems and instead embrace uncertainty and ignorance, Allenby and Sarewitz ask them to distrust their own judgment. In their own words: “What we believe most deeply, we must distrust most strongly” (29). However, while their list of principles provides cognitive guidance to some extent, there is no equivalent tool to reconcile the psychological rift this implies. I think this is not because they have missed a step in their reasoning, but because it is a radical thing to do for which there simply is no template or blueprint. How to reconcile our allegedly rational Enlightenment selves with the insight that there is ignorance at the heart of every decision we make? How to live with the disconcerting insight of not being in control while, in many ways, the modern technological condition we inhabit, especially in its techno-capitalist variant, still thrives on the fantasy of human mastery over nature? In sum, while Allenby and Sarewitz (2011a) define a clear destination, to answer the question of how to arrive there when “our Enlightenment instincts” keep sending us in “the wrong direction” (160) requires more than a list of principles; it requires practice. So, returning to Clark’s dismay about the Humanities setting their hope in “the social importance of art” (196), I think that art indeed does not offer a solution to the ecological challenges we are facing, but as Allenby and Sarewitz make abundantly clear, a solution is not what we seek. The disorder Clark describes is not, as his pathologizing terminology suggests, some modern disease to be cured, it is an effect of outdated beliefs and expectations that include the belief that there is a solution to wicked complexity. To accept that there is no solution, means to be prepared for a leap into the unknown, which is a terrifying leap because there are no coordinates to hold on to. Thus, intelligent muddling may look like a pragmatic approach, but its implications are radical. It is here, I suggest, that art enters the equation. So, let me offer a first, tentative answer to the question of art’s social relevance in an age defined by

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wicked complexity. Allenby and Sarewitz (2011a) do mention in passing the “unrecognized and subtle role” of literature and the arts (164). By “play[ing] with scenarios,” they suggest, literature (especially science fiction) and the arts can provide experience in adjusting to unpredictable and rapidly changing situations (164). While including art in a book on societal questions is not the rule and, therefore, laudable, their vision of art as a repository of “scenarios” to “play with” is a far cry from what I think can be a radical contribution to learn how to live with, or indeed survive, the complexity of the modern techno-human condition. What art offers, I suggest, is something of existential significance in the face of wicked complexity. It offers an experimental space to dare this leap into the unknown and explore kinds of subjectivity other than the modern with which to muddle intelligently through the condition that we (some of us more than others) helped create. A recurring touchstone for these explorations are the specific experiences of class, gender, and race of marginalized communities. I have already mentioned Kimura’s study on women-led citizen science initiatives in postFukushima Japan that details the struggles of women, specifically mothers, engaging in acts of resistance in a deeply patriarchal society. Other communities that feature in this book include the inhabitants and informal workers of the Chernobyl exclusion zone (chapter 2), the clean-up workers of Fukushima, a self-sacrificing farmer from Japan’s contaminated rural North (chapter 3), and a small, rural community on the territory of the former German Democratic Republic struggling to come to terms with their Cold War nuclear legacy (chapter 4). The aim of this study is to explore the experimental space opened by art with the critical tools available in the Humanities (specifically art history, cultural studies, media theory and philosophy) and offer an in-depth analysis of how art, for itself and by its own means, addresses societal problems related to nuclear technology. 1.3 APPROACH The following chapters explore a number of contemporary artistic practices that engage with the wicked complexity produced by nuclear technology in a time when modern political and ethical coordinates are faltering. Mud will be my sticky companion in this inquiry, not as material but as a conceptual tool that allows me to reflect on the ambiguities of the techno-human condition. Mud is a compound of sticky matter that is often perceived to be dangerous (think of quicksand as a special kind of mud, or radioactive sludge which is a common by-product of the generation of nuclear energy). As a metaphor, mud stands for the murky, the heterogeneous, that which is entangled in

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ways we do not—and perhaps, following Clark, do not want to—fully understand. It is trivial and complex at the same time. Its triviality comes from its omnipresence; its complexity demands that in order to study it disciplinary boundaries are torn down if needed. Most importantly, as a metaphor, mud’s stickiness does not allow for a disengaged perspective of the outsider, the modern critic. To muddle, following Allenby and Sarewitz, means to accept that there is no closure to be achieved, no essential truth to be revealed, no technical fix to wicked complexity. There are always a range of truths and possible practices that contribute to work intelligently, and ethically, with complex technologies like nuclear reactors. Taking my own subjective experience of art as a pointer, this book is an exercise in muddling through nuclear complexity, guided by the artworks I discuss. Part of this exercise was to leave my own disciplinary comfort zone and confront my own beliefs and opinions on the subject with other ways of thinking. This included armchair trips into a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, social sciences, postcolonial studies, nuclear history and even nuclear physics, but also actual trips and inspiring encounters. Over the five years of research that went into this book, I attended not only Humanities conferences and visited art exhibitions. I also undertook several trips to nuclear sites and initiated an artist project on nuclear site markers. In September 2015, I embarked on a guided tour through the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone that was created in response to the 1986 nuclear disaster and still has significantly raised levels of contamination. In October 2018, I visited the Belgian underground research laboratory for the disposal of long-lived radioactive waste HADES, and in 2019, the Dutch nuclear waste storage facility COVRA, which is the only facility in the Netherlands licensed to store radioactive waste. Moreover, I attended a technical conference on monitoring systems for geological repositories in Paris funded by the European Commission, and spoke at a symposium on the preservation of records, knowledge and memory of radioactive waste repositories from the Swiss Federal Office of Energy in Zürich. A formative experience was the artist collaboration that I initiated in the summer of 2019 and the results of which I discuss in chapter 4. Seeing the end of my research trajectory approaching, I felt it was necessary to cross a last disciplinary line—that between writing about art and taking part in the production of art. For this project, I approached several artists with the request to collaborate on the development of ‘critical’ markers for a radioactive waste repository. Three artists agreed to participate: Grit Ruhland, Agnès Villette and Elise Alloin. Over the course of six months which involved a whole-day brainstorm session and many informal online and offline exchanges between the artists and me, each artist developed an artistic concept for a nuclear site marker that was exhibited in Leiden between December 2019 and January

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2020.7 The exhibition was accompanied by a discussion of the works at the Free University Amsterdam. The purpose of these trips and projects was to expose myself to the complexities of nuclear sites and issues that the artworks I discuss in this book engage with. Although I do not discuss my experiences of these ‘excursions’ to nuclear sites and into other disciplines in this book (with the exception of the artist project and a short mention of my trips to COVRA and HADES in chapter 4), they form an important backdrop for this inquiry as they have provided important entry points into current debates. As this short overview also reveals, I have spent more effort and pages on the backend of the nuclear fuel chain, that is, with the question of how to dispose of radioactive waste, than on any other part, which is reflected also in the length of chapter 4 that explores this question. Thus, I feel a brief justification is in order. The aim of this study is not to cover equally all the major debates in the field, or to provide a general overview of artistic responses to nuclear issues. Instead, it seeks to make a relevant contribution to the debate on art’s societal relevance in the nuclear debate. The selection of the debates I included in this study thus followed the selection of artistic practices that I found relevant to discuss because they raised an intriguing question or offered an unusual perspective, not vice versa. 1.4 HOW THIS BOOK IS ORGANIZED As stated above, the chapters in this book focus on the ‘by-products’ and ‘side-effects’ of nuclear energy production, because it is here that nuclear technology’s wicked complexity is articulated. At the same time, the order reflects a continuity between the seemingly opposite ends of the chain that I find important to highlight. I begin in the center of the chain with the nuclear power plant while also referring to its front end, uranium mining, with its detrimental impact on the health of mining communities. I also refer to the risk of contamination which I fully turn to in the next two chapters. The last chapter returns to the beginnings and ends touched upon in my discussion of nuclear power plants and engages with nuclear energy’s most prominent by-product, radioactive waste, and the challenges it creates not only for engineering, but to the ability to take responsibility for the technology we have created. By making these interconnections, I do not aim to repeat the facile dictum that everything is connected to everything else. Instead, I want to counteract the tendency in debates on the benefits of nuclear energy to separate nuclear reactors as ‘clean’ energy producers from the radioactive minerals that fuel them, and insist to ask where it comes from and where it goes. So, paraphrasing literary scholar Hannes Bergthaller’s (2014) observation

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that some connections are more important than others, this study engages with links in the nuclear energy chain that give insight into the tremendous challenges that nuclear technology poses to society. Each chapter discusses a number of artistic practices that explore, each with their own means, that is, within their own medium and aesthetic language, the societal challenges emerging at these sites. A recurring pattern in these explorations is that many of the works I discuss deviate from the autonomous modern individuum as a productive subject position to confront these challenges, and instead suggest or utilize other kinds of pre- or postmodern subjectivity. In chapter 1, “Ironic Encounters in Nuclear Landscape Photography,” I discuss Jürgen Nefzger’s photo series Fluffy Clouds in the context of Germany’s polarizing debate on nuclear energy. Fluffy Clouds portrays nuclear power plants across Europe to ironic effect. In this chapter, I explore the power of visual irony to challenge established power dynamics in the nuclear energy debate, using the genre conventions of Western landscape imagery as a playfield. At the heart of this exploration stands the ironic destabilization of the position of the privileged modern observer which forms the backdrop of the work’s visual investigation into alternative political subjectivities. Chapter 2, ‘Snapshots from the Zone,’ focuses on photographic representations of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, exploring the possibilities of photography to capture the new radioactive state of being that the 1986 disaster has become. Discussing Donald Weber’s photo series Post Atomic, I explore how a medium thought to be only capable to depict a moment in the past, can convey a sense of temporal complexity and hence give visibility to the ongoing nuclear violence that the Chernobyl disaster still exerts in the present. Part of this endeavor is the series’ depiction of premodern or preindustrial forms of collaborative survival in and around the zone that have formed in the vacuum of missing state infrastructure and offer a counternarrative to the romanticized image of the self-sufficient settler. The third chapter, ‘The Art to Remain Exposed,’ turns to the more recent Fukushima nuclear disaster and the techno-capitalist relations in which it is embedded. This chapter asks head-on about art’s contribution to social resistance in a system that has rendered oppositional modes of resistance ineffective. I look at two works in particular, the Otolith Group’s essay film The Radiant and the anonymous act of civil disobedience Finger Pointing Worker. Both works project a postmodern subject that is complicit with the power relations it seeks to resist, but suggest different forms of resistance. This difference allows me to discuss the more fundamental issue of art’s complicated relation to power in the techno-human condition. Chapter 4, ‘How to Care for Nuclear Waste?’ moves to the back-end of the nuclear energy chain and the question how to dispose responsibly

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of radioactive waste. Specifically, the artworks I discuss in this chapter all engage with the problem of communicating to future generations the dangers of the radioactive waste they inherit. Arguing that to simply warn or inform future generations about the waste is not sufficient, I discuss several artistic practices that seek to introduce a caring disposition into radioactive waste management, and specifically the debate on to how preserve knowledge on the repositories in which the waste lies buried. Finally, I offer a short conclusion to this inquiry. NOTES 1. The exhibition Yes Naturally: How Art Saves the World, curated by Ine Gevers, was held from March 16 to August 25, 2013 at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag. The exhibition catalogue gives an extensive overview of the artworks featured in the exhibition, complemented by interviews and scholarly essays by leading voices in the Environmental Humanities (Gevers et al. 2013). 2. Eat to Support is a campaign by the Japanese ministry of agriculture and forestry to promote the consumption of locally produced food from Fukushima and surrounding prefectures by declaring it ‘safe to eat’ (Kimura 2016, 7). Citizen science initiatives like those analyzed by Kimura are often led by women, especially mothers distrusting the official numbers. Contrary to government sources, these initiatives have found elevated levels of radioactive Cesium in locally produced foods. 3. For a detailed yet accessible analysis of the emerging conflicts between Level II and Level III for the Fukushima nuclear disaster and its aftermath, see Lochbaum, Lyman, and Stranahan (2015). 4. The link between the Anthropocene debate and the nuclear debate is not coincidental. The concept of a nuclear Anthropocene has been repeatedly discussed, especially in geological circles. Zalasiewicz et al. (2015), for instance, “suggest that the Anthropocene (formal or informal) be defined to begin historically at the moment of detonation of the Trinity A-bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico, at 05:29:21 Mountain War Time (± 2 s) July 16, 1945 (= 11:29:21 Co-ordinated Universal Time = Greenwich Mean Time)” (200). This dramatically precise moment in nuclear history, the argument goes, inaugurated the series of several thousands of atomic tests over next decades that created a “globally distributed primary artificial radionuclide signal” in the earth’s sediments that could clearly be identified as being of human origin (196). Critical reflections on this suggestion came for instance from Carpenter (2014) and communication scholar Peter C. van Wyck (2016). 5. “Muddling through” is a phrase coined by economist Charles E. Lindblom (1959) in an article on methods in public administration. In this article, Lindblom (1959) describes a method he calls “successive comparison,” which replaces theoretical models in public administration with practical “insider” knowledge (87). Theory, Lindblom argues, has shown to be of little use when facing actual problems in public administration. In 1992, Lindblom published a more nuanced version of his argument in his book Inquiry and Change: The Troubled Attempt to Understand and Shape

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Society, in which he makes similar observations as Allenby and Sarewitz concerning the insufficient analytical approach to complex social systems. 6. As such, Allenby and Sarewitz intelligent muddling also responds to calls of adding more empirical weight to theoretical musings about the Anthropocene. As human geographer Maria Kaika (2018) figuratively puts it, to translate the theoretical insights of the Anthropocene debate into concrete policies, “we need to be prepared simultaneously to explore the world like a frog and see it like an eagle; to be present locally, splashing (frog-like) into the murky waters of empirics; and to zoomout broaden the gaze (eagle-like) from localized struggles, make comparisons and develop broader conceptual contributions” (1714). To muddle, then, would mean to engage with the incomplete and still unconceptualized (“murky”) empirical observations on the ground while at the same time continuously aligning them with the bigger picture. 7. The exhibition was entitled Topologies of Care and was held from December 3, 2019 to January 25, 2020 at the Humanities Faculty of Leiden University. It was made possible with the support of Kunstgang, an initiative by Leiden University art history students.

Chapter 1

Ironic Encounters in Nuclear Landscape Photography

In a compelling two-minute piece of animation from 2010 which is called Darkroom and was made by German animation artist Anna Luisa Schmid, a man goes through his morning routine.1 He enters the kitchen, switches on the radio and puts a slice of bread into the toaster. Upon pressing down the lever, the camera starts following the electric current feeding the toaster to a nuclear power plant on a green meadow with grazing cows, and further into a mine in the Australian Outback where aborigines-turned-miners extract uranium ore from an open pit. The image moves to a small lake shimmering in a toxic green, and an aborigine man who, upon drinking from the lake, falls sick. Zooming into the tear of his mourning companion, the camera returns to the man in the kitchen, who, ignorant of what he has caused on the other side of the planet, takes his toast and leaves the kitchen humming along to a cheerful tune on the radio. This chapter is about irony. It asks how irony can help develop a critical response to nuclear energy, a technology that despite its well-documented disastrous record many countries seem unable or unwilling to abandon. Irony, commonly conceived as the act of saying or showing one thing and meaning its opposite, is a popular rhetorical device in environmentalism, because it offers an appealing, often humoristic form to raise awareness about harmful societal and corporate practices without appearing overtly moralizing. However, irony does not always yield the desired effect. Darkroom, for instance, ironically undermines the nuclear industry’s self-presentation as a clean energy source, and yet, it risks supporting proponents of the industry. In less than two minutes, Schmid’s animation very effectively puts on the radar what proponents of nuclear energy usually omit: the mining of the ore fueling the reactors often gravely affects the environment, and hence the surrounding communities’ health due to lax regulations or violations of safety precautions. 19

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Moreover, with about 70 percent of the worldwide uranium deposits being located on Indigenous lands, the ones who are most affected are those already living on the margins of society, like the aboriginal tribes in the Australian outback that feature in the animation. The film shows clearly that the production of nuclear energy relies on power relations that exploit the economically disadvantaged (Indigenous peoples) for the benefit of the economically advantaged (the energy consumer in a rich nuclear-energy-using country like Germany, the filmmaker’s country of origin). It also manages to establish a link between these power relations and individual lifestyle choices by rhetorically connecting the suffering of Indigenous people to such trivial acts as using a toaster (a link that is sharpened in the closing sequence when the slice of toast assumes the shape of a skull before it lands on the man’s plate). However, the direct link the filmmaker draws between consumer practice and the wider negative implications of nuclear power for the environment, and those who depend on it provokes a rather reductive inverse conclusion: it suggests that if the consumer’s unawareness is to be blamed, then making the consumer aware of the implications of their energy choice (to bring light into the Darkroom) surely solves the problem as they can make a more informed choice. Recent developments in Germany show that this is far from the truth. By the time the film was aired, Germany had responded to the anti-nuclear protests that boiled up after the Fukushima nuclear disaster and decided to phase out nuclear energy by 2022. Germany has thus made the historical decision to not extend the life spans of its nuclear power plants as was planned prior to Fukushima, and anti-nuclear campaigners hope that this decision will have a lighthouse effect since Germany is the fourth biggest economy in the world. There are many reasons why Germany is far from having freed itself from nuclear energy. The government may have decided to discontinue the operation of nuclear power plants, but it is an open secret that German companies continue to sell uranium fuel to neighboring countries like France, buying in return their electricity in case of shortages—activities in which the consumer has little say (Becker 2018; Jauch 2019; Uken 2011). It, therefore, effectively strengthens other countries’ nuclear industries while bypassing the consumer. Another problematic side effect of this decision is that to cover the demand of electricity on a market that is poorly adapted to a post-nuclear energy state, new coal plants were built, fueling nuclear advocates in their claim that there is no climate-friendly alternative to nuclear power. Today, a decade after the decision to phase out nuclear power, Germany has a disastrous record in its carbon balance due to the coal industry. Thus, today’s viewer of Schmid’s animation is confronted with the unfair (and awfully reductive) choice between either abandoning nuclear power or slowing down climate change, leaving the nuclear critic in a dilemma. While irony, then, allows Schmid to

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make a point about the far-reaching implications of one’s personal energy choices in an ironic way, it simultaneously risks undermining the film’s critical rhetoric because it proposes a simple solution to a complex problem, which is to stop consuming nuclear energy. The issue, however, is not that the film is ironic, but to use the words of sociologist Bronislaw Szerszynski (2007), that it is “not ironic enough” (347, original emphasis). In recent years, irony has been reconsidered in environmental scholarship, drawing the attention of scholars like Szerszynski, Nicole Seymour (2014), Joshua Dicaglio (2015), Lisa Beth Lombardo (2014), and Timothy Morton (2010, 2013), who promote irony as a cultural expression able to capture the human condition in the face of the ecological predicament. Despite the growing knowledge we have of the world, the argument goes, we are increasingly less able to take control of it. Therefore, our actions, no matter how well-informed they are, will always have effects that undermine our original intentions, adding an ironic quality. Szerszynski (2007) goes a step further and calls irony not only a ‘symptom’ but also a ‘cure’ to our ecocidal behavior. The tension between what we know about the ecological crisis and what we (not) do to mitigate it (a tension that can result in a disorder according to Clark, see Introduction), he argues, roots in a “crisis in public meaning” (337) which irony can help to overcome. The kind of irony that Szerszynski sees fit to do this job, however, goes beyond the modes that environmental works, including Darkroom, typically employ. He calls these modes “corrective,” because “they draw attention to the gap between appearance and reality, or between stated intentions and behavior, in order to try to overcome it—for example, by forcing corporations to act in conformity with their stated pro-environmental objectives” (340). Darkroom clearly appeals to the pro-environmental objectives stated by the nuclear energy sector when juxtaposing a nuclear power plant in a green meadow complete with a smiling sun and grazing cows with the toxic reality of an Australian uranium ore mine. These corrective forms of irony, Szerszynski continues, “seek to establish a stable triangular relationship between appearance, reality and a privileged observer able to clearly perceive the relationship between the two” (340). This is problematic, because, as I have demonstrated using Darkroom as an example, “[in] another twist of irony, the apparently privileged observer in such corrective forms of irony can themselves be accused of self-deception and bad faith” (340, original emphasis). Szerszynski, therefore, proposes to adopt “a stance of generalized, philosophical irony” (340), which effectively means to widen the ironic scope to include the ironist and their gesture of ironizing. This all-encompassing ironic stance would recognize the impossibility of a privileged observer and, as a result, undermine the stable triangular relationship that characterizes corrective forms of irony.

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Coming from sociology, Szerszynski’s theoretical explorations are driven by the ambition to study societal challenges in order to effect change. He thus argues that in this general ironic sensibility lie the resources for an authentic response to the ecological predicament, which means a response that assumes genuine responsibility. More specifically, he sees irony at the heart of a new model for environmental politics: a model that would “involve the recognition of the inevitability of failure and error, and at the same time the need to act, with due care, in the very face of that recognition” (351). In other words, irony thus truly becomes a muddling tool in Allenby and Sarewitz’s understanding of the term: a tool that has the potential to effect social and political change by truly taking the limits of human reason into account. Thus, the issue with Darkroom is not that those in power remain unchallenged—they are challenged by giving the consumer more agency than the industry probably feels comfortable with. Rather, the film offers the promise of mastery (the viewer understands the problem and their possible involvement in it; hence they can solve it by choosing against nuclear energy) that, ultimately, it cannot fulfil. No consumer choice will undo one’s complicity in nuclear energy production. In fact, to build, operate or decommission a nuclear power plant is not a consumer choice at all; the decision lies with the state and the industry. Worse even, the film implicitly limits responsibility to the choices we make as consumers, foreclosing, it seems, social or political commitment beyond the field of consumption, for example, as producers, citizens, activists, critics, or artists. Drawing examples from art and activism, Szerszynski makes a convincing case against the use of corrective irony. The reader who looks for inspiring examples nurturing the general ironic sensibility he advocates, however, will be disappointed, leaving several questions unanswered. For instance, what cultural forms and formats can offer their audience such a generalized ironic stance? Or is it purely a product of philosophical reflection? And, once this stance is reached, how can the newly gained insights be translated into action, political and otherwise? In other words, is it necessary to leave the ironic mode in order to effect societal change? How, then, can the productive tension between the two seemingly exclusionary states of complicity and ironic (self-)distancing be sustained? And, with regard to the subject of this book, what are the implications for the possibility of resistance in the techno-human condition—not so much, perhaps, political or social resistance, but resistance in thinking? In what follows, I address these questions with the help of the landscape photography collected in Jürgen Nefzger’s coffee table book Fluffy Clouds from 2010. For this volume, Nefzger, a German photographer based in France, travelled Europe for several years to take pictures of nuclear power plants. The volume comprises a selection of seventy-two of these analogue

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photographs, organized according to the season in which they were taken. Factual information is pared to a minimum, consisting of a list of captions in the end of the book which informs the viewer when and where each picture was taken, and a two-page afterword by art curator Ulrich Pohlmann. Most photographs in Fluffy Clouds are built up in the same way, using just enough variation to keep the viewer’s attention while not undermining their model character: the nuclear constructions are nestled into rolling hills, or form the backdrop of crowded beaches, archaeological sites or other leisure places (figure 1.1). While it is generally difficult to spot the power plants at first glance as they tend to merge in shape and color with their surroundings, sometimes only the white trail of condensed water against a pale blue or cloudy sky (the ‘fluffy clouds’ of the work’s title) betrays the presence of a power plant. People who figure occasionally in these nuclear landscapes engage in leisure activities, paying no attention to the power plant behind them. Notably, the series is framed by three images that deviate from this rather rigid scheme. The opening image shows a sign at the beach of Dounreay, Scotland, warning against radioactive particles in the sand, followed by a view of the Dounreay nuclear power station. The third page shows protest symbols along an empty road against the construction of a permanent disposal site for nuclear waste in the North German Wendland region. Left of the road an oversized yellow nuclear waste barrel signals the ongoing struggle over the planned repository. Its top is adorned with a stick on which a linen cloth in the shape of a globe with a face has been attached. The viewer will reencounter this ‘linen ghost’ as a protest symbol at the end of the book

Figure 1.1  Jürgen Nefzger, Penly, France, 2003 (Fluffy Clouds), 2003, photograph. © Jürgen Nefzger, courtesy of Galerie Françoise Paviot, Paris.

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Figure 1.2  Jürgen Nefzger, Gorleben, Deutschland, 2005 (Fluffy Clouds), 2005, photograph. © Jürgen Nefzger, courtesy of Galerie Françoise Paviot, Paris.

(figure 1.2). While I say more about these framing images in the concluding section of this chapter, for now it suffices to note that these are the only images in the whole series that explicitly point to the negative consequences of nuclear energy production. The other sixty-nine images depict inconspicuous landscapes in which the natural or man-made surroundings stand in visual harmony with the power plants they host. In his short afterword to Fluffy Clouds, Pohlmann situates the series within the New Topographics movement in photography, a movement which took root in New York in 1975 and is known for its language of negativity. The movement gained visibility through the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, held from October 1975 until February 1976 at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. Curator William Jenkins (1975) selected a tightly knit circle of photographers including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, which according to him were united by a “stylistic anonymity” that mimicked the documentary neutrality of a topographic survey. They show man-made landscapes in America that are characterized by repetition and isolation, aesthetically as well as culturally, picturing the built environment where people lived in what John Rohrbach (2011), one of the current curators at the George Eastman House, calls “an atmosphere of vacant alienation” (xiv). While the exhibition itself was only on display among a series at the George Eastman House showing contemporary tendencies in American photography and only received a couple of mixed reviews, the photographs subsumed under the label New

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Topographics had a long-standing influence on subsequent generations of photographers in America and also in Europe. So much so, that, in 2009 the exhibition was remounted, accompanied by a 300-page catalogue, Reframing the New Topographics.2 The ‘topographic’ approach has thus become a transnational movement that has shaped a whole new generation of photographers who, as art historian Gisela Parak (2015) puts it, were giving “artistic documentary testimonies” (4) of the effects of urban development on the adjacent environment. Rohrbach (2011) attributes the movement’s large resonance to the photographs “uneasy recognition” (xiii). They “counterpointed prevailing conceptions of contemporary American life with a new definition of the country’s condition that was instantly recognized to be insightfully, if disturbingly more true” (xiii). Parak (2015) even draws a connection to the “eco-images” of the 1960s and 1970s—images specifically “used within the framework of a political campaign and which are intended to shake up the general public and appeal to the latter’s ecological conscience” (4). The critical force of the New Topographers and those inspired by them is hence believed to be found in the images’ ability to reveal something essential about contemporary life in a factual, indisputable manner. This assertion of photography’s truth value figures also in Pohlman’s (2010) afterword to Fluffy Clouds where he claims that it is the “documentary force” of Nefzger’s images that helps “sharpening our perception and awareness to lasting effect, through a subtle capturing of reality” (130). I suggest that it is not the depiction of reality with its production of a privileged observer who is able to tell the difference between truth and appearance that account for the images’ critical force as the above readings suggest, but their ironic questioning of this privileged position. It is this persistent questioning prevalent in the series that points toward ways of muddling through the wicked complexity that nuclear technologies produce. In the following sections, I trace the movement between corrective and general irony in Nefzger’s book. I conclude by discussing the implications of this ironic reflection for a critical and political engagement with nuclear energy. 1.1 LOCATING THE IRONY IN FLUFFY CLOUDS In what way are the images collected in Fluffy Clouds ironical? While the theorization of irony in literary studies—as a stylistic device, a mode of writing, a theme—is extensive, that is not the case for visual art. This is a problem because while visual irony appears easy to spot, it is much harder to describe and locate it in the image. One reason for this is that what appear to be instances of irony are merely triggers that need to be picked up by the viewer.

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Contrary to what the term ‘visual irony’ suggests, irony is not located in the image itself, but unfolds between the image and viewer. An image analysis is thus limited to identify triggers and demarcate a viewing context in which these triggers may turn into irony. Having said that, without a consistent methodology, visual triggers of irony may go unnoticed and, a problem that I address in this chapter, the irony they effect may remain underdeveloped, which risks impoverishing the reading of an artwork. For my own reading, I use a diagnostic proposed by the linguist and professional photographer Biljana Scott (2004). To locate and analyze triggers of visual irony in photographic images, Scott expands upon the ‘echoic mention theory’ by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. Dismissing debates in literary scholarship that focus on identifying components in a text that qualify the text as ironical as unnecessarily complex and unfit for the study of visual images, Scott turns to Sperber and Wilson’s suggestion that “the key distinction which needs to be made regarding irony is not so much between what is said and what is meant but rather between the use and mention of a proposition” (36, original emphasis). She illustrates the difference using the following example: (a) Natasha is a beautiful child / (b) ‘Natasha’ is a beautiful name / (a) involves the use of the term Natasha, and refers to a child, whereas (b) involves the mention of the term and refers to a word. Irony involves the mention rather than the use of a proposition. An ironic utterance expresses a belief about one’s utterance, rather than by means of it. (36, original emphasis)

The critical distancing to a mentioned proposition is reflected in the term ‘echoic’ in the echoic mention theory. Applied to images, echoic mention looks like this: Incongruous juxtapositions alert us to our preconceptions about how things should be—either how we are used to seeing them or how we expect to see them (use)—by introducing an element into the image which flouts our expectations. This dislocation between expectation and actual representation introduces the quote marks of mention, and finally the ironist’s value judgement introduces the echoic distancing. (37, original emphasis)

In visual irony that does not use words, such a proposition often comes down to a “system of beliefs” that is “readily enough available” to the viewer, suggested by an “easily identifiable symbol” (43). In the case of Fluffy Clouds, it works the other way around. The symbol that is being introduced is the nuclear power plant, evoking ideas of contamination and disaster that prominently figure in public debate. (To make sure that this association is

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not lost on the viewer, remember that Nefzger starts his series with a sign on a beach, warning about contaminated sand.) However, the way in which this proposition is ‘mentioned’ in the course of the series—the nuclear constructions being nestled between rolling hills, cows, golf courses and beach resorts, and showing no sign of damage or impending catastrophe—flouts this expectation. It is hence the context, not the element that flouts the ‘system of beliefs’ evoked by nuclear power. What enhances the ironic effect is the careful selection of the point of view, time of day and season in which the images were taken. This is because similarities in shape and coloration visually integrate the nuclear architecture into its surroundings. Another, more prominent element that enhances the ironic effect is the occasional presence of subjects who appear to be ignorant of the danger represented by the power plant. These ‘victims’ of irony seemingly reproduce the triangular relationship criticized by Szerszynski between appearance, reality, and a privileged observer that is able to judge the relation between the two. However, as I suggest in the following sections, what appears like a recourse to corrective irony is part of the work’s strategy to create general irony—a strategy that only takes effect in relation to other images in the series, not just in the viewing experience of a single image. For the sake of completeness, it should be noted that Nefzger also makes use of word-based irony. The book’s title Fluffy Clouds emphasizes what the series is about—the false claim that nuclear power is harmless. Clouds are an ephemeral meteorological phenomenon and a pleasurable sight, but in the context of nuclear energy, they evoke the danger of the architectural structure that produces them. While the word-based irony contained in the book’s title prepares the viewer to read the images contained in it ironically, it does not add new meaning to them. Therefore, I focus my analysis on visual irony. With her application of the echoic mention theory to photographic images, Scott has developed a useful and simple enough tool to evaluate visual irony in photographs. But that is not all. Echoic mention has another advantage that makes it particularly fit to connect a formal analysis of irony in a cultural work to philosophical considerations like Szerszynski’s. This is because it focuses on the dislocation between expectation and representation and, therefore, on the interaction between the viewer and the image rather than on the propositions themselves or their authors. Echoic mention, while not eliminating the triangular relationship of corrective irony, makes it easy to switch positions and thereby to destabilize this relationship. Scott herself demonstrates her method’s openness to an expanded, philosophical understanding of irony. Her distinction between ‘condemnatory’ and ‘celebratory irony’ bears strong similarity to Szerszynski’s distinction between ‘corrective’ and ‘generalized irony,’ albeit paying greater attention to irony’s formal realization rather than their theoretical and societal implications. Celebratory

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irony for Scott roughly refers “to the understated humour which some assume in the face of adversity” (47). Interestingly, to illustrate this philosophical stance, she quotes philosopher Richard Rorty and his inquiry into the persona of the ironist: “To him [Rorty] an ironist is ‘the sort of person who faces up to the contingencies of his or her most central beliefs and desires,’ and who is free of the delusion that such beliefs and desires ‘refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance’ ” (47). With Rorty, Scott quotes a philosopher who expresses a similar criticism of the ironist’s privileged position as Szerszynski and other eco-critical and environmental scholars. Celebratory irony, therefore, includes the (self-)ironizing of the ironist, phrased by Rorty as the ironist’s radical recognition of “the contingencies of his or her most central beliefs and desires.” As such, her reference to Rorty opens Scott’s formula to challenge the position of the privileged observer who defines the triangular relationship that is characteristic of corrective/condemnatory irony. In Fluffy Clouds, too, the privilege of the ironist’s judgment is challenged. While critics appear to agree on the work’s condemnatory stance towards people’s indifference, reserving the moral high ground of the detached observer aka ironist to themselves, I suggest that the work overcomes such simplifying attributions. In the following sections, I show that the role of the ironist is challenged, undermining (corrective) irony’s alleged power triangle and sensitizing the viewer to generalized irony. 1.2 OF VIEWERS AND VICTIMS The critical reception of Fluffy Clouds has focused on a limited selection of images that typically show people following their leisure activities close to nuclear structures. Examples include an image of a crowded beach near the French nuclear power station of Penly, which is readily visible in the background but of which nobody seems to take notice (figure 1.1); a golf course with three middle-aged men immersed in the game, having their backs turned on the infamous nuclear facilities of Sellafield, England; or a group of tourists visiting an archaeological site near Bugey in France, while in the background a suggestive column of white clouds rises into the sky. An often-quoted example and particularly strong picture in this context is Kalkar, Deutschland, 2005 which shows a nuclear power plant in Germany. This power plant never went online because of construction problems and public protest. Instead it has been turned into an amusement park, the Kalkar Wunderland, incorporating the abandoned reactor buildings and cooling towers into their attractions. In Nefzger’s photograph, the repurposed cooling tower, which has been transformed into a climbing wall and painted with an idealized mountain range, is prominently placed in the center. On its left,

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a miniature train winds its way through the park next to a sign asking the visitors to keep the park clean. The picture stands out, not only because it diverges from the standard composition, letting the cooling tower take up much more image space than most other pictures in the series, it is also the boldest attempt to ‘hide’ the nuclear plant in plain view. In this sense, Kalkar, Deutschland, 2005 puts in a nutshell what the series is taken to be about: people’s self-deceiving attitude towards nuclear energy.3 Critics like Thomas Köster (2010) have read images like these through the classical structure of moral superiority/inferiority that marks corrective irony. While asserting that Fluffy Clouds is not moralistic, Köster proceeds to assume a moral high ground from which he judges the “silly laxity” (alberne Sorglosigkeit) of the people populating these images about the imminent danger that cooks up in the reactors behind their backs. Pohlmann (2010) uses a similar, if more moderate, tone when he laments “how people are growing oblivious to the inherent threat linked to nuclear energy facilities” (129). Both authors adopt a moralizing attitude that suggests a stable (because unquestioned) triangular relation between the victims of irony (the anonymous group of people in the photographs), the ironized subject matter (nuclear power) and themselves as the ironists, here assuming the position of detached observers. Given that the general tone of the texts I quoted from is not one of mockery but of concern, this distinction might not have been intended to be as strict as I present it here. Nonetheless, their readings fail to grasp the reflexive movements these images are a part of which effectively undermine the triangular relation of corrective irony. Let me turn from the viewer/critic to the artwork itself to see what it brings to the meaning-making process. To draw out the implications of this impoverished reading, let me, against my original intentions, briefly turn to a theorist who defines ironic texts through its components. In his seminal work The Compass of Irony, literary scholar Douglas Muecke (1969) lists among the essential components of an ironic text the element of innocence, that is, the victim’s confident unawareness of an “upper level or point of view that invalidates his own” (19–20, my emphasis). Being not only the most original component of irony (it is present in the etymology of the term), the victim’s assumed ignorance introduces the power dynamic that is commonly associated with ironic situations or texts:4 One of the odd things about irony is that it regards assumptions as presumptions and therefore innocence as guilt. Simple ignorance is safe from irony, but ignorance compounded with the least degree of confidence counts as intellectual hubris and is a punishable offence. (30)

The same sentiment appears to have taken possession of the critics discussed earlier: The seeming ignorance about the danger associated with

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nuclear reactors turns into “silly laxity” in Köster’s eyes. Indeed, the ironic effect of Fluffy Clouds is enhanced by the presence of tourists and other people following leisure activities who seem confidently unaware of the ironic situation which they are part of, as it is the case in the images described above. For me, as a viewer, they make it easy to exempt myself from the situation and recede to the detached position of the observer. However, the pictures that Köster and Pohlmann refer to only represent a fragment of the series. Not even halfway through the book, the ironic distance that many images in Fluffy Clouds establish is challenged by a picture of two boys looking directly into the camera. They are pictured at full length in the lower half of the image in front of what appears to be a vacation park. One boy has a ball tucked under his arm, as if having been interrupted in their play to take this picture. In the background, one of the square buildings of the Heysham nuclear power station rises above the boys’ heads, easy to be mistaken for one of the bungalows. It is with this image that for the first time in the series I feel directly addressed as a viewer. That is, I become aware of my own presence as a viewer looking at other people while not being seen by them. The boys’ direct gaze breaks through the ironic distance I have assumed so far, because they address me, the viewer, as a constituent part of the picture. Another image invites me with an empty camping chair to join a young angler who is fishing right behind the French nuclear power station Nogent-sur-Seine (figure 1.3). In yet another image, I am offered a seat on a bench next to an elderly couple enjoying the scenic view onto the valley of

Figure 1.3  Jürgen Nefzger, Nogent-sur-Seine, France, 2003 (Fluffy Clouds), 2003, photograph. © Jürgen Nefzger, courtesy of Galerie Françoise Paviot, Paris.

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the Swiss town of Beznau which, unsurprisingly, includes a nuclear power plant. As the power plants pile up and peopled images alternate with unpeopled sceneries that offer no (human) victims of irony onto which I could project my discomfort of being looked at, the feeling creeps up that I was wrong all along to exempt myself from the reality inside the picture frame. I begin to reflect on my position, not only as a viewer looking at images, but as a citizen of Germany, a country, as I indicated in the introduction, with a rather ambiguous relation to nuclear power. Am I not acting just like the people I looked down upon a moment ago? Is this perhaps the only way to arrange myself with the nuclear condition—in a kind of schizoid pretense of safety? It appears that their blindness has been my blindness all along. What Köster and other critics hence fail to address is that the observer is always at risk of equally becoming the victim of irony. To quote Muecke once more: If this seems to put the ironist at an altogether unfair advantage it has to be observed that the ironist is equally vulnerable, for the very act of being ironical implies an assumption of superiority, an assumption one cannot make without forgetting either that the tables may be turned . . . , or that one may be subject to irony from a level higher than one’s own. (31)

This volatility of perspective, especially the possibility of being subject to irony in a more general way (or from a higher level as Muecke puts it), is fully played out in Fluffy Clouds, albeit in a more complicated fashion than Muecke suggests. The boys in the picture do not turn into ironists, and yet I feel being ironized. The question is, thus, by whom and to what effect? 1.3 NEW TOPOGRAPHICS AND IRONY Upon discussing a work by John Ganis, another representative of the New Topographics movement, Bergthaller (2014) notices that it is not the documentary quality that provides photographic images of ecological destruction (referred to as ‘anti-landscapes’) with their critical force, but the kind of iconography they employ or violate.5 What the photographs dramatize is . . . not ecological destruction itself, but rather the limitations which traditional modes for the representation of landscape encounter when they seek to depict that destruction. If the photographs are able to produce a sense of guilt in the viewer . . . it is not because they faithfully document the process of landscapes degenerating into anti-landscapes, but because they refer to a familiar tradition of landscape iconography whose generic conventions they purposefully violate. (125)

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The “documentary force of photography” that Pohlmann conjures does, therefore, not fully explain a viewer’s response to these pictures. Rather, it is the way in which they employ or violate a familiar set of generic conventions from which documentary photography draws its effectiveness. In the American context that Ganis is part of, these generic conventions were set in the landscape photography of the 1950s and its idealization of the American West as pristine wilderness with its most popular representative Ansel Adams and his photographs of the continent’s national parks and wilderness areas. Art historian Kelly Dennis (2012) attributes to this formal referencing an ironic quality. While showing spaces of American industrialization, mass culture, and degradation, New Topographics photographers would “often formally refer to and ironize past images of ‘pristine’ wilderness.” The use of foliage to frame a distant view and give a sense of scale which was borrowed by nineteenth-century nature photographers from landscape painting, for example, is rendered in Robert Adams’ On Signal Hill Overlooking Long Beach, California from 1983 as “pathos” according to Dennis, signaling the displacement of nature by urban development. Quoting postmodern art critic Craig Owens on his definition of irony as “a negative trope calculated to expose false consciousness,” Dennis argues the false consciousness exposed by the New Topographics photographers “is that the West was ever pristine, ever uninhabited.” With her reading, Dennis rejects the common accusation that the movement, while depicting what many would call sites of degenerating capitalist culture, would fail to take position. Thus, she asks suggestively, does the New Topographics photographers’ ‘failure’ to judge for us in the photographs relieve us of that responsibility? Might not the ethical ambiguity of the works themselves function as a critical tool, as many have argued about Conceptual and postmodern art, and thus more firmly implicate us in their critique of ideology?

Dennis’ line of reasoning is exciting because it shakes the ground that supports many conventional critical readings: the reality against which the viewer judges the image (the national parks’ pristine wilderness as counter-image to the shopping mall) is pulled from under their feet. Thus, supposed the viewer is willing to engage in an ironic reading of the movement’s images, they are burdened with the responsibility to engage with the reality they face. Or, at least, it is the desire of critics like Dennis for the image to do that. Fluffy Clouds is not only openly ironic but also more radical than its predecessors. The series goes without associations of war and death, but instead ‘echoes’ (simultaneously embraces and distances itself from) image traditions that saw no conflict between (technological) progress and nature, only to exclude the viewer from it, thus rendering their spectatorship explicit.

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1.4 OF SHEEP AND COOLING TOWERS Many of the photographs in Fluffy Clouds refer to the painterly landscapes of seventeenth-century Realism and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romanticism. They show low horizons and towering clouds. Crossing the line to kitsch, some views are framed by foliage, others use suggestive motifs that could have been taken straight from a painting of Caspar David Friedrich. One photograph, for instance, pictures a dead tree in a water pond, placed in front of a landscape that is mysteriously cloaked in fog. In New Topographics fashion, some traditional motifs like the rundown cottage are repurposed to offer social commentary. The cottage, once a symbol for transience and rural simplicity, reappears Fluffy Clouds in the form of what looks like a makeshift dwelling made from scrap wood, a shabby garage stocked with scrap metal, or, closer to the traditional motif, a little hut with bench in a wine yard. Unlike Dennis’ example, Nefzger does not dwarf natural elements like trees or rivers next to human settlements, to make a point about human dominance. Instead, he stages nuclear power’s formal implication in its natural and man-made surroundings to ironically undermine the viewer’s expectations. A reference that is particularly strong in Fluffy Clouds, and on which I would like to dwell on in this section, is the work of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Jacob van Ruisdael (1602–1670).6 Take, for example Wylfa, Wales, 2005, a photograph of the Wylfa nuclear power station (figure 1.4). It is one of the photographs in which the reference to Ruisdael is most explicit.

Figure 1.4  Jürgen Nefzger, Wylfa, Wales, 2005 (Fluffy Clouds), 2005, photograph. © Jürgen Nefzger, courtesy of Galerie Françoise Paviot, Paris.

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The photograph shows a stretch of green pastures with sheep along the coastline of Wylfa. The low horizon is drawn by a narrow stretch of seawater, granting the sky plenty of space to present its dramatically towering cumulus clouds. The shadows of the clouds run in alternating bands through the right middle ground, creating a pattern of dark and light patches on the land. The image is dominated by warm hues of green, grey, brown, blue and white and conveys an atmosphere of peace and stability. The distant center of the image is occupied by the buildings of the recently decommissioned Wylfa nuclear power station. The photograph bears likeness to View of the Dunes near Bloemendaal with Bleaching Fields from the late 1660s, one of the paintings that Ruisdael is most widely associated with today (figure 1.5). Like Nefzger’s photograph, View of the Dunes shows a domesticated countryside, in this case bleaching fields near Bloemendaal, a wealthy town that lies northwest of Haarlem. It shows five parallel bleaching fields flanked by the buildings of the bleachery De Mol. In the distance, just above the horizon and set apart by a dune, Haarlem’s prestigious church of St. Bavo stands out against the sky. The horizon is low and equally gives space to cumulus clouds throwing bands of light and shadow onto the land. While the tonal values are somewhat darker, the color palette and the distinctive treatment of light are very similar. While the similarities between the photograph and the painting are striking, the differences are even more important. In accordance with seventeenthcentury aesthetics, the painted landscape is formally inclusive. The viewer is guided through the painted landscape of Bloemendaal by bright stretches

Figure 1.5  Jacob van Ruisdael, View of the Dunes near Bloemendaal with Bleaching Fields, late 1660s, oil on canvas, private collection. Public domain.

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of linen laid out to be bleached in the sun and a dune arching to the image’s lower centre. Nefzger’s photograph of Wylfa simulates these visual strategies, except that here the image composition is directed at excluding the viewer instead of drawing them in. Unlike Ruisdael’s painting, the composition is dominated by horizontal lines, created by the clouds, the sea and the shrubs in the middle ground that seem to fix the power plant in the distance. Moreover, the empty space that dominates the foreground (the sheep are too small to function as guiding figures) does not invite the viewer to wander in the landscape. There are no visual lines that would lead up to the power plant. Importantly, the plant itself is located on the horizon, not above it, as it is the case with the church of St. Bavo in View of the Dunes. How do these differences in composition effect the reading of the photograph? One option is to read it as a comment on the atomic industry’s self-drawn parallels to representations of the church’s moral authority in the seventeenthcentury landscape tradition. In the seventeenth century, nature was assumed to be God’s creation and hence, as art historian Boudewijn Bakker (2012) explains, “all natural phenomena had, in addition to their outer appearance, an underlying meaning” (2). While scholars disagree about how contemporaries might have looked at landscape paintings, Bakker argues that they were likely to be read allegorically (207).7 Between 1400 and 1700, there was a widespread belief of divine presence in the world, a belief, he argues, that was barely shaken by the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: “Most educated people continued to assume that visible creation—the book of nature—naturally complemented Holy Scripture and was therefore an essential part of divine revelation” (2). The worldview Bakker describes follows the principle of analogy rather than causality, which means that word and image, art and nature, creator and artist were believed to have an intrinsic connection. As a result, the visible world could be read on countless levels. The artist’s task was to arrange the visible world in a way in which its hidden meaning could be revealed to the viewer. Bakker quotes a doctoral dissertation by Wilfried Wiegand from 1971 in which Wiegand proposes that the painted landscape of that time could be read “as a ‘text’ in a pictorial idiom, composed of motifs ‘quoted’ by the artist from nature. This pictorial text must then be ‘read’ or even ‘deciphered’ by the viewer, quotation by quotation” (207–208). In this way, for the “mystically-inclined,” the white bleaching fields that are depicted in View of the Dunes become a symbol of the “pure and pious soul” (208). Importantly, according to this allegorical reading of the Dutch landscape, not nature but the artist had the last word, formulating his message to the viewer and using nature as reference for the message’s authenticity. Thus, as Bakker explains, “the painted landscape becomes a pictorial construct. Living nature functions merely as an arsenal of meaningful motifs whose hidden

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connection emerges only in the studio, thanks to the painter’s interpretative ingenuity” (208). In other words, landscape is treated as a sign system or language to be constructed and deciphered, a practice that has become so conventional that viewers today barely notice doing it. Following Bakker’s reading of View of the Dunes, for instance, the white color of the bleaching fields returns in the white bell tower of St. Bavo, suggesting a link between the two. Moreover, St. Bavo is placed slightly above the horizon. According to Bakker, the link between the church tower and bleaching fields, here indicated by the color white, can thus be read symbolically for God’s blessing of the bleaching industry (208). The perspective is inclusive, it is meant to draw the viewer in, but places them below God’s moral authority as represented by the church. Of course, Bakker concedes that a painting was likely to be read in more than one way by its contemporaries. View of the Dunes is an example of Ruisdael’s so-called Haarlempjes, a series of landscape paintings depicting the surroundings of his native city Haarlem that were probably given to high-ranking visitors of the city (Slive 2005, 13). The bleaching industry was closely connected to the thriving linen industry in Haarlem at that time, and the bleaching fields were as characteristic as are the tulip fields today (in fact, they occupy the very same ground that supported the bleacheries in the past). They displayed the city’s wealth and represented a popular destination for visitors of Haarlem. Thus, deciphering the analogies to God in the landscape was probably not the only way in which people might have enjoyed this painting. To illustrate this ‘polyinterpretability,’ Bakker lists other possible contemporary readings, using a related painting as an example: Jacob van Ruisdael’s View of Haarlem with Bleaching Grounds, for example, could be enjoyed in the seventeenth century on several levels, though not necessarily simultaneously or in full by all viewers. Not only did it provide topographical information, but it also fuelled Haarlemmers’ pride in their beautifully situated and prosperous city, invited viewers to take an invigorating walk outside the city walls, stimulated thoughts of physical hygiene and moral rectitude, inspired a feeling of gratitude to the Creator, and touched the more mystically inclined, who saw the bleaching grounds as an image of the pious soul absorbing the spirit of God. (3–4)

Curiously, the allegorical dimension has not been lost in secular twentyfirst-century landscape imagery. In fact, there is an image tradition in the atomic industry that appears to capitalize on this approach, albeit in a worldlier fashion. The brochure “Germany’s Unloved Climate Protectors” (“Deutschlands ungeliebte Klimaschützer”) that was published by the German lobby association Deutsches Atomforum is a recent example of this tradition.8 It was the poster child of a national campaign that was staged in 2007 by the

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industry in a last attempt to counter the strong national resistance against nuclear power by marketing it as a safe and climate-friendly energy choice. The main asset of this thin brochure are five photographs showing scenes that look much like those chosen by Nefzger: a crowded beach, a cornfield, a meadow with sheep, a potato field during harvesting season. And all of them have a nuclear power plant in the background. The brochure was published in medium magazine, a German journal for journalists, in the spring of 2007. The choice of the date of publication contains its own irony, since in the summer that same year a series of incidents and scandals would once again shake public trust in the nuclear industry in Germany.9 It was also before another major nuclear disaster which occurred on the other side of the world, in Japan in 2011. While it is likely that Nefzger was aware of this brochure, most of the images contained in Fluffy Clouds, including the Wylfa image, were taken before 2007. Nonetheless, the parallels between the brochure and Nefzger’s book are striking, indicating that there is a more widespread appropriation of seventeenth-century landscape aesthetics, complete with the allegorical reading it suggests, in the self-presentation of the nuclear industries. To stick with the example of the brochure, there is one image that lends itself very well for a comparison with View of the Dunes. It shows the nuclear power plant close to the North German city of Brunsbüttel behind a herd of sheep grazing on a green pasture. The sheep seem unaware of the storm brewing above their heads as the sky is filled with dramatically darkened cumulus clouds. A text field above the building explains that “This climate protector fights 24 hours a day for the fulfilment of the Kyoto protocol” (“Dieser Klimaschützer kämpft 24 Stunden am Tag für die Einhaltung des KyotoAbkommens”). If I put this photograph next to View of the Dunes, the viewer would notice that the power plant takes the place of the church. It is invested with divine authority. Like the church of St. Bavo in View of the Dunes, the plant is placed just above the horizon, its dark square buildings and single chimney standing out against the cloudy sky like the church with its tower. The sheep guide the viewer’s gaze in a diagonal from the left foreground to the right background where the plant is located. Together with the short text, the religious reference is tangible. Like the church in View of the Dunes, the nuclear power station of Brunsbüttel appears as a mighty guardian looking over the symbolic herd of sheep by stopping climate change through its low CO2 emissions. The subtle difference is that the church in View of the Dunes is set apart from the earthly realm by the dune. To support this separation between the earthly realm of the viewer and the heavenly realm that the church represents, the perspectival lines in the painting converge not on the church, but above a small patch of forest next to it. Only the clouds (which belong to the heavenly realm of God) lead directly to the church. The Brunsbüttel nuclear

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power station, by contrast, is placed in extension of the pasture, having the sheep guide the viewer directly to it. Unlike Ruisdael, then, the Atomforum puts the responsibility for the Earth not into the hands of God, but technology, fitting the Christian idea of guardianship into the twenty-first-century debate on climate change. All possible tensions in this equation are smoothed out on the surface of the scenic. (On a side note: Following another ironic twist, Brunsbüttel ranked among Germany’s nuclear power stations as the most prone to failure. In July 2007, shortly after the publication of the brochure, the plant was shut down due to a short and never went online again.) In sum, the photographs in the brochure emphasize a religious element in their visual rhetoric that builds on a common belief that the dominant mode of interpretation of seventeenth-century landscape painting like Ruisdael’s Haarlempjes was allegorical. While other readings are possible, depending on the viewer’s social position, there is no ironic undertone transported in these images that would undermine, respectively, God’s grandeur, or nuclear technology’s clean and morally superior self-image.10 Moreover, the brochure demonstrates that the visual strategies employed in seventeenth-century landscape painting have been absorbed in today’s visual vocabulary, creating the visual literacy on the side of the viewer that is needed to make such an image-based advertising campaign effective. In Wylfa, Wales, 2005, Nefzger ironically undermines this affirmative image tradition and thus challenges the self-representation of the nuclear industry as a climate protector. The strategies of excluding the viewer and placing the nuclear power plant below the horizon are good examples of how Fluffy Clouds visually questions the moral authority of the nuclear industry by violating the pictorial conventions that the industry appropriates to rhetorically consolidate its power. While the power plant becomes part of the landscape, the viewer is barred from the scene, creating a critical distance from the nuclear industry’s pictorial claims of moral superiority. The similarity between Wylfa, Wales, 2005 and the Atomforum’s portrait of the Brunsbüttel nuclear power station is, as I indicated above, not an isolated case. There are other images in Fluffy Clouds that echo the visual rhetoric of the nuclear power industry. Grohnde, Deutschland, 2005, for example, shows the white buildings of the Grohnde nuclear power station residing majestically over the River Weser in romantic evening light, its cooling towers mirrored on the water’s surface. It mimics the “oceanliner aesthetics” (Wendland 2015, 282) of the Soviet nuclear industries that presents nuclear facilities in a futuristic visual rhetoric as white concrete ensembles nested at watersides in ‘natural’ landscapes. In Nefzger’s version, only the thin line of willows that is seaming the river prevents the power plant from becoming an ‘ocean liner.’ What is interesting about these images in the context of general irony is that, as a viewer, I am lured into the position of an intellectually and morally

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superior observer, ‘seeing through’ and condemning the rhetoric strategies of the nuclear industry. The Wylfa photograph and the associations it provokes, thus, appear to be exclusively about corrective irony, because they rely on a stable triangular relationship between appearance, reality and a privileged observer who is able to tell the difference between the two. Yet, this does not contradict my overall argument that Fluffy Clouds produces general irony, because my seemingly superior position in the Wylfa photograph is soon challenged, for instance, by the gazing boys just three images later, making me aware of my spectatorship. In the course of looking through the images, I go several times through this movement. Even Nefzger does not appear to exempt himself from being ironized. After all, as I have shown in this section, he simultaneously embraces the kind of kitsch that his images ironically undermine. A more explicit ironic self-reference is hidden in Penly, France, 2003 (figure 1.1). A woman among the crowd of bathers takes a photograph of her family in front of scenic cliffs and the nuclear power station of Penly. Does he signal here his complicity in perpetuating a certain spectatorship as a landscape photographer? Following my own viewing experience, I argue that once the viewer has gone through this movement, and became aware of their spectatorship, this awareness cannot be undone anymore. The viewer becomes the victim of self-irony. 1.5 IRONIC SELF-ENCOUNTERS To draw out the implications of Nefzger’s ironic positioning of the viewer, let me introduce at this point the idea of the “twofold, ironic self” which can be found in Paul de Man’s (1983) seminal essay “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” Departing from Romantic irony, a literary device that has been used by poets and writers to explore the relation between mind and nature, de Man discusses Charles Baudelaire’s dédoublement of the self in ways that resonate with Nefzger’s cancellation of ironic distance. De Man argues that the dédoublement or duplication of the self in irony is not a form of intersubjectivity (in which case the superiority of one self over another self would be possible). Instead the “dédoublement . . . designates the activity of a consciousness by which a man differentiates himself from the non-human world” (213). Importantly, the split occurs in the realm of language: The ironic language splits the subject into an empirical self that exists in a state of inauthenticity and a self that exists only in the form of a language that asserts the knowledge of this inauthenticity. This does not, however, make it into an authentic language, for to know inauthenticity is not the same as to be authentic. (214)

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Let me reread this quote by addressing a particular language: the set of conventions that form the pictorial system of landscape in Western visual cultures. In European and Western societies, landscape is a particular way of observing and ordering the visible world from an elevated, detached vantage point. As cultural geographer John Wylie (2007) suggests, this ordering does not necessarily require the kind of ‘objective’ distance associated with science, rationality and modernity of which landscape is a product (3). Even a phenomenological approach to landscape like philosopher Maurice MerleauPonty’s, who defines landscape as the product of a lived and embodied experience “where self and landscape fold together” in the moment of perception (3), is still a ‘scenic’ approach taking distance to bring things into perspective. In short, approached as a pictorial system, landscape happens where the viewer is. It is in the Western tradition of landscape as a pictorial system that the split of the self occurring in language resonates with Nefzger’s ironic displacement of the viewing subject. General irony does not only displace the viewer momentarily as a detached observer but makes this position structurally impossible. Thus, de Man’s notion of the twofold, ironic self opens the subject to a range of readings of relationality and displacement.11 This involves the unsettling awareness that one will never fully understand, let alone control one’s enmeshment in the world. With the subject being no longer set apart from the world of objects, the modern idea of mastery becomes an effect of the point of view one chooses. Once irony has got hold of the subject the position of mastery is no longer an option. The trusty and healthy-looking landscape is thus ‘unmasked’ as a set of generic conventions that tells the viewer less about the empirical landscape outside the picture frame than about the self that is inscribed in its image. As a result, the viewer ends up as clueless as the people in Nefzger’s images look, suggesting a relation of complicity rather than superiority between the viewer and the viewed. We have come a long way from the superiority of the observer in Köster. What has started as an intersubjective relation between the observer and the victim of irony has developed into a reading of the “discontinuity and plurality of levels within a subject that comes to know itself by an increasing differentiation from what is not” to quote de Man (1983, 213). Notably, this ironic consciousness does not resolve in the superior position of the observer as in Darkroom. Instead, de Man describes it as a condition of “unrelieved vertige, dizziness to the point of madness” if carried to the extreme (215, original emphasis), because irony possesses the inherent tendency to go on infinitely: “It may start as a casual bit of play with a stray loose end of the fabric, but before long the entire texture of the self is unravelled and comes apart” (215). What makes it worse, this process is not reversible. Once the subject has gained ironic selfawareness, there is no return to authenticity in relation to the same picture. The

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ironic viewer produced by Fluffy Clouds thus fundamentally departs from, and yet remains tied to modern subjectivity. Having debunked the superior position of the detached beholder as a modern belief, the viewer is not offered an alternative position but instead kept in the state of ironic awareness. For the overall question of this book of how to critically respond to nuclear complexity, this has significant implications. To ignore the irony would mean to engage in hypocrisy, or as de Man puts it, the willingness “to function within the conventions of duplicity and dissimulation” (215–216). Perhaps, I wonder while looking through Nefzger’s book, a certain degree of such willingness is needed to inhabit the techno-human condition without going mad. After all, it is very tempting to accept the empty seat and join the angler in Nogent-sur-Seine or the old couple in Beznau, which means that, again, the agency lies not with the image alone, but within the relation between the viewer and the image. 1.6 RETURNING TO THE WORLD Certainly, Nefzger’s images suspend the demand of positioning oneself for or against nuclear power in favor of a deeper engagement with the schizoid act of positioning itself. But does this engagement advance an ecological awareness of some sort, true to the image tradition of the New Topographical Movement that Fluffy Clouds is part of? In other words, does Fluffy Clouds allow the viewer to return from general irony to the world in which, after all, things need to get done if we want to change the status quo? The persona that de Man imagines doing the ironic operations I just discussed is the philosopher who trips over his own feet.12 The act of ironical self-reflection over this incident makes him a wiser man. Note that wisdom should not be confused with knowledge here, but describes an increased sensibility towards the fabricated character, the inauthenticity of what one believes to know. A similar conclusion could be drawn for the viewer of Fluffy Clouds. If I take my own experience of the work, irony for me does indeed not resolve in greater knowledge. Yet, the feeling I am left with after having gone through these movements is not frustration and displacement as de Man predicts for his ironic persona. Rather, to stay in this book’s image of muddling, it is a sense of ‘grounding’ that I experience, which has to do with the framing images of the series. Although Nefzger seemingly follows an agenda with his references to contamination and the Gorleben protest movement in the beginning of his book, Fluffy Clouds does not end in a militant call for anti-nuclear protest. Instead, it shows the dummy of a ghost made from linen sheets, dangling from a pine tree facing an empty road (figure 1.6). The dummy’s face is a sad emoticon

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Figure 1.6  Jürgen Nefzger, Gorleben, Deutschland, 2009 (Fluffy Clouds), 2009, photograph. © Jürgen Nefzger, courtesy Galerie Françoise Paviot, Paris.

and a diagonal red cross is painted on his body; it is another protest symbol of the Gorleben campaign against the construction of a permanent disposal site for nuclear waste in the Wendland region, the hotbed of the powerful anti-nuclear protest culture in Germany. The dummy occupies the center of a markedly static composition that is dominated by perpendicular lines. The lower fifth of the picture is occupied by the road which runs parallel to the picture’s bottom edge. It forms a kind of visual pedestal for the row of straight-lined pine trees filling most of the image space. Together with its muted color palette of grey, brown and green (except for the flashy red of the dummy’s marks), the photograph conveys a sense of deceleration, supported by the symbol of the empty road. Literary scholar Joshua Dicaglio (2015) suggests that if we don’t overcome irony, it means we leave the system of beliefs and hence our expectations about how things should be in place that allow a given situation or object to appear ironic (459–460). In the case of nuclear energy, this is the belief that there are only two positions to choose from: either proponent or opponent. On the other hand, it could be argued that leaving the ironic mode, too, risks falling back onto a(nother) stable set of relations that Szerszynski finds so problematic. Gorleben, Deutschland, 2009, the image of the empty road with the protest sign, does not continue the ironic movement, nor does

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it appear to overcome it. Instead, it remains ambiguous. Note that unlike the related image that refers to the Gorleben protests in the beginning of the book (figure 1.2), the road one looks upon here does not lead anywhere. The viewer is free to read into this road a negative, melancholic dialectics of a failed resistance (which can no longer be upheld in the case of Gorleben, because in 2020 it was ruled out as a permanent disposal site), or an invitation to sit down and allow myself to imagine a different kind of engagement with nuclear power, one that does not force me into the binary categories of the nuclear proponent or the anti-nuclear protester. In that sense, the image is ambiguous about what it proposes. It is not overtly dismissive about the achievements of the protest movement, and yet it does not seem to celebrate it either. To a local protestor, it may signal persistence and yet challenge the mode of persistence. To a proponent it may symbolize a shrinking, aging movement and yet perseverance. Returning to de Man’s stumbling philosopher, could this ambiguity capture the moment of dizziness in ironic self-questioning that comes before the decent into madness? As I have shown, Nefzger engages the viewer in a movement between identifying with the position of the morally superior observer (especially when referring to older image traditions) and undermining this position. In the last image, this movement comes finally to a halt by introducing a concrete audience, the anti-nuclear protester and those sympathetic with them. Although, I would argue, the photo series as a whole sensitizes the viewer to general irony, this moment of specific address (as it is also present in the boys’ gaze) can be seen as a return to the world. It does not resolve the ironic tension but rather exhibits the moment of stumbling, asking how it can be made productive without descending into madness or denial. It is here that Fluffy Clouds most clearly points toward ways of muddling, because it confronts my ironic self-questioning with a specific audience and problem, and thus the need to act in the face of uncertainty. What I refer to above as an experience of ‘grounding,’ then, results from the movement that Nefzger makes me go through. I do not become Köster’s ironist who claims moral high ground, nor do I become de Man’s madman who has lost all grounding or all sense of being grounded. I become the one who ‘muddles,’ the one who deals with the ground itself, so to speak. In that sense, the framing images become ‘grounding’ images: they offer me the possibility to move between general irony (questioning everything and everyone) and corrective irony that allows for action. For me, Nefzger’s images do not solve the tension between these positions, but signal their contingency and, therefore, open the possibility that things could be otherwise. In that sense, Fluffy Clouds is also a political work. Not taking a superior position, or choosing sides, it opens what political theorist Chantal Mouffe (2013) calls “agonistic spaces,” which are spaces of political struggle in

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which a “conflictual consensus” can be reached among adversaries (xii). With her concept of agonism, Mouffe (2007) offers an alternative model for political struggle in democratic societies that acknowledges “the ever present possibility of antagonism” rather than striving to reach a consensus or reconciliation between opposing positions which, ultimately, reaffirms a hegemonic order (under “Politics as Hegemony”). Agonism, the ongoing struggle between opposing hegemonic projects, thus helps “coming to terms with the lack of a final ground and the undecidability which pervades every order” (under “Politics as Hegemony”), political or not. In that sense, Mouffe’s agonism offers a political basis for muddling, especially in the form of nourishing productive disagreement in the debate on nuclear energy as a recent study, speaking of the “agony of the nuclear,” has shown (Machin 2020). Fluffy Clouds, by opening with the help of irony a space for this struggle, points towards ways of muddling politically. Of course, not every viewer will go through the same experience I described in this chapter, or consider Nefzger’s images to be ironic at all, just like not every seventeenth-century viewer of Ruisdael’s View of the Dunes near Bloemendaal with Bleaching Fields will have interpreted the white linen laid out on the ground as an allegory for the “pious soul” as I argued with Bakker in the section ‘On Sheep and Cooling Towers.’ As Bakker notes, the most plausible interpretation of an image is that there are several interpretations coexisting at a time, depending on the social background or interest of a viewer and the values that come with it. Like Szerszynski’s model of an ironic ecology, Nefzger’s work gives no indication how this reflection could translate into concrete social or political resistance, yet it has political implications as I signaled above. An ironic practice, it seems, remains a messy practice that has no theoretical role model. An anti-nuclear protester may interpret these images as a comment on people’s ignorance of the danger of nuclear energy while a golf player as pictured in one of the images may not and consider the land around the power station simply as cheap real estate. Likewise, a child of a low-income family spending their holidays in a caravan park next to a nuclear facility may see no contradiction in these adjacent facilities at all. Some of these readings are ironic, others are not. Yet, there is a common ground: if the work is approached as a series, none of these readings are stable. The anti-nuclear protester is confronted with a stalled resistance in the last image, the nuclear proponent with the material reality of leaking power plants in the first image, and the tourist passing through with the social reality of the child from a lower-income class background having little choice but to spend their holidays close to a nuclear facility because it is cheap. Thus, I would argue that in each of those cases, Fluffy Clouds, as a series, offers a resistance in thinking, a resistance not only against the seductive position of the superior observer, of the outsider, or, at the other end of

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the scale, that of the denialist, the ignorant, but also against accepting any hegemonic order as a given.

NOTES 1. The animation can be accessed on Vimeo, using the following link: https:// vimeo​.com​/81749731 (last accessed August 12, 2021). 2. The exhibition was on display from June 13 to September 27, 2009, at George Eastman House and after that, over the course of three years, travelled to eight other venues in the United States and Europe (Rohrbach and Foster-Rice 2010). 3. Alternatively, the placement of nuclear power plants near human settlements that Fluffy Clouds dramatizes could be read as a criticism of so-called Emergency Planning Zones. Emergency Planning Zones are areas that are created around nuclear power plants to protect people from the harmful effects of radioactivity in the case of a serious accident. They have been criticized to create a false sense of safety and “mask the inherent dangers of nuclear power” (Overy 2020, 215). 4. As Scott (2004) explains, irony “comes from the Greek word meaning ‘pretence,’” thus “eirôneía means ‘assumed ignorance’” (35). 5. Bergthaller counts among a handful of scholars who over the past two decades have opened the work of the New Topographic movement to new interpretations. Other contributions attesting the New Topographics movement a language of possibility rather than negativity as it was heretofore the case include Truscello (2012), Jurovics (2010), and Dunaway (2010). 6. In an interview, Nefzger mentions the work of Jacob van Ruisdael as a reference for his landscape aesthetics (Arena 2012). 7. Art historian Seymour Slive (2005), for example, doubts that Ruisdael’s landscapes are metaphors for biblical messages. It is nonsense to believe, he argues, that “every withered tree in Dutch landscapes is an intentional allusion to transience” because “not a single contemporary source indicates that landscape paintings were viewed this way” (8). Holding against this argument, Bakker (2012) points out that the religious conception of the world was so universal that it did not need explication; the most defining assumptions of a time are those unmentioned, because to the contemporary viewer (in this case premodern man) they were self-evident (2). More convincing than Bakker’s claim that the allegorical mode was omnipresent and therefore did not have to be explicitly mentioned in contemporary sources, I think, is his claim that the images meant different things for different people depending on their education and social standing. What is relevant to my argument is the fact that the atomic industry emphasizes a religious element in their visual landscape rhetoric. It shows that there is a common belief, nowadays, that the dominant mode of interpretation of seventeenth-century landscape painting was allegorical. 8. The brochure can be accessed via this link (or through a simple Google search): http://schrewe​.wp​.hs​-hannover​.de​/public​_www​/Informationskreis​_Kernenergie​/ Broschueren​/Deutschland​%20ungeliebte​%20Klimaschuetzer​.pdf.

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9. In summer 2007, the nuclear power stations of Brunsbüttel and Krümmel had to be taken off the grid due to several technical incidents. After the incidents and their gravity were first kept secret by the operating company Vattenfall Europe Nuclear Energy, its managing director was forced to resign. 10. Another reading is, for instance, the one offered by art historian Svetlana Alpers (1989). She suggests that Ruisdael’s Haarlempjes depict above all an economic relationship between the Dutch countryside and the rich city of Haarlem for which “the bleaching of linen in the fields” was “a major product and economic support of the city” (145). This reading has astonishing parallels to nuclear energy where nuclear power plants are mostly situated in the countryside to feed the energy-hungry cities. 11. Such readings or ontologies have gained momentum in the Humanities over the past decade. I think here specifically of authors in the philosophical movement of new materialism who claim that the human body is always already enmeshed in the world (Morton 2010), forming relationships of trans-corporeality (Alaimo 2012), intra-activity (Barad 2007), and vibrancy (Bennet 2010) that precede and exceed human awareness and understanding. 12. The philosopher that appears in Baudelaire’s (1859) original essay “De l’essence du rire” from which de Man quotes, is not further identified by either Baudelaire or de Man. However, the tripping philosopher evokes the famous fable of the astronomer falling into a well or ditch while gazing into the stars that is based on an ancient Greek anecdote about the pre-Socratic philosopher and astronomer Thales of Miletus. In a version of the fable that originates in the sixteenth century, an old woman watching Thales falling into a ditch, jokes: “O Thales, how shuldest thou have knowlege in hevenly thinges above, and knowest nat what is here benethe under thy feet?” (Childley 1831, 24). In the context of my conceptualization of irony as a form of muddling, this version adds a fitting detail to de Man’s philosopher. It is because Thales did not pay attention to the earth—the mud beneath his feet—that his knowledge of the skies is being questioned. As a metaphor for reality, the earth stands in contrast to theory, the distant skies that Thales gazes at. The fable thus could be read as a warning for those seeking to gain knowledge about the world while forgetting to engage with the material reality of the earth, or the mud, beneath their feet.

Chapter 2

Snapshots from the Zone

When, in the early morning of April 26, 1986, the fourth reactor of the Lenin Nuclear Power Station (also known as Chernobyl nuclear power plant) exploded, an area that extended approximately 30 km in radius around the damaged reactor was evacuated and placed under military control by the Soviet government. The land was turned into an area of Absolute (Mandatory) Resettlement and was given the name Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation. To the public it became known as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, or simply, the Zone. Today, this area covers around 2,600 km2 on the Ukrainian mainland and can only be accessed with a written permit. To the north, it borders the Polesie State Radiological Reserve, a separately administered zone in Belarus. In the 1990s, American-Ukrainian journalist Mary Mycio (2005) went repeatedly into this area to study the Zone’s radioactive ecology together with a small group of biologists. She published her experiences in the book Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl. When I read the book for the first time, one sentence particularly stuck with me: “‘Chernobyl’ and all that word entails, is no longer a state of shock but has become a state of being—a radioactive state never encountered in nature on such a scale before” (30). A radioactive state of being. What she refers to with this phrase is the fact that, at the time of her writing in the early 2000s, 95 percent of the radionuclides remaining of the 1986 disaster are no longer on the Zone, but of the Zone, “sunken to a depth of about two inches in the soil whence they have insinuated into the food chain” (30). It is a statement that still sends a shiver down my spine, for what it implies is that the largest share of the millions of curies of radiation released from the damaged reactor is not lying dormant in the Red Forest or other places in the Zone where one could go with the 47

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radiation detector and point to it, but has left the radar long ago, travelling through bodies without them even noticing.1 While Mycio limits her observation to the Exclusion Zone, others have argued that today, due to nuclear activities in the past, man-made radioactive particles can be found in every corner of the globe. Anthropologist Joseph Masco (2004) claims that the bombings of Japan during World War II and the thousands of atmospheric atomic tests that followed in the decades after have created a “global nuclear biosphere” that we all, to varying degrees, inhabit (519). Similarly, quantum physicist-turned-feminist Karen Barad (2017) attests that the “whole world is downwind” of nuclear test sites (G106). Photographer Hiromitsu Toyosaki (2015), drawing the logical conclusion, argues for the recognition of a “global hibakusha” (a term that initially referred to survivors of the Japan nuclear bombings) to point out that nuclear power, military and civilian, produces victims at every stage of the nuclear chain, including “uranium mining and milling, production and testing of nuclear weapons, production of nuclear fuel, operation of nuclear power plants and treatment of nuclear wastes” (161).2 Chernobyl alone, he estimates, has created sixteen million hibakusha if all decontamination workers as well as all people living in contaminated areas in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia are counted (159). What they argue, in sum, is that we inhabit a world imbued with man-made radioactive particles ever since the first nuclear device was detonated in the New Mexican desert on July 16, 1945, at 5:29 a.m. local time. Thus, in a sense, nobody is exempt from the ‘radioactive state of being’ that Mycio describes in her book.3 However, what makes Mycio’s statement particularly insightful in this context is that she refers not only to a physical condition, but also to an epistemic one. Her juxtaposition of “a state of shock” with “a state of being” reminded me of a widely read essay that was published in May 1986 by sociologist Ulrich Beck in response to the fateful events that had occurred only a month earlier. In this essay, Beck argues that Chernobyl has caused an “anthropological shock” (653) with which he refers to the sudden realization that knowledge— everyday knowledge and expert knowledge alike—had collapsed in the face of disaster. This does not seem to have changed much since his essay came out. Even today, three and a half decades after the disaster, scientists are puzzled to find their calculations proven wrong by yet another radioactive boar in Middle or South Germany that contains just as high levels of radiocesium as were found in boar meat a decade ago, even though, with a half-life of thirty years, the amount of radiocesium should have halved by now. This is because the ways radionuclides behave ‘in the field,’ that is how they travel through ecosystems and the food chain, are still poorly understood. Much less understood is the damage they cause in living bodies, especially human bodies, on their path.4

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Following Beck, the collapse of knowledge is the symptom of a larger societal process in modernity. Seeing his hypothesis confirmed that we live in an emerging risk society, Beck claims that with the Chernobyl disaster the “expropriation of the senses” (Enteignung der Sinne) in the atomic age has become undeniable: since humans cannot sense radiation, they are subdued to the dictate of external sources of information to point them to the danger they are exposed to (653). The implications of this ‘expropriation’ are deeply unsettling. With the senses rendered useless, humans lose their autonomy as individuals, because the idea of autonomous decision-making is based on nonrestricted, personal access to reality. By implication, after Chernobyl, there is no niche, no privacy, no retreat from technology anymore. To use a particularly powerful image from Beck’s essay: after Chernobyl, nuclear power directly connects to the milk a mother gives to her newborn child (657). For this condition to be real, it does not matter whether the milk is contaminated or not. The possibility that it might be and that the mother is unable to tell the difference is enough to render autonomous life an illusion, because it creates a direct dependency on sensors and expert knowledge to interpret the numbers.5 By implication, for Beck, Mycio’s radioactive state of being was an epistemic state all along that only gained dramatic ‘visibility’ with Chernobyl. According to Beck, the shock that this visibility produced was radical, perhaps too radical to translate into a new, more productive heuristic to approach and understand this condition. As Beck puts it, the scientists and engineers who built the nuclear power plant did not think of the cultural and social consequences because that was not their task (656). But as the rational architecture of the technical sciences collapses, we all move in and must live in its ruins (656). The metaphor of the ruin is a strong one, and Beck uses it to rhetoric effect in his essay. Ultimately, however, he seems reluctant to engage with the physical ruin it refers to, the crippled reactor building and the abandoned city it left in its wake. Only denial, he writes, allows to keep up the illusion of autonomy: “Nobody is as blind to danger as the one who still wants to see” (“Niemand ist so gefahrenblind, wie der, der weitersehen will”) (655). The German term weitersehen here assumes a double meaning: it can refer to our insistence to see (I translated it to “who still wants to see”), but it could also mean seeing further, that is, looking beyond the current danger and find ways to live with it. For Beck, denial—the insistence to see—seems to be the only livable option for those wanting to keep the illusion of leading an autonomous life. But this also implies the development of strategies to inhabit the nuclear condition and in that sense, to see further and have a future. Beck’s notion of denial thus possesses a temporal dimension that needs explication. While I return to it in more depth in the last two sections of this chapter, for now, it suffices to

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say that the implied temporality is problematic. What Beck suggests needs to happen in order for citizens to claim back their autonomy in the nuclear age is very similar to Allenby and Sarewitz’s list of principles of muddling forward. Beck puts his hope into political change: the power structures that have led to the disaster need to be broken on a systemic level, rather than on the level of the individuum. While this is certainly true, to suggest systemic change means also to shift the focus to the future. In other words, both Beck and Allenby and Sarewitz jump to the question of what can be done to prevent the next disaster. However, I wonder, what to do with this one? The radiation that was released at Chernobyl won’t go away any time soon. Thus, what I miss in both their contributions is the will to engage with the mess that has already been created, that is, the harm that already has been done. As it stands, their omission implies that denial is the only option for those forced to put up their tents in the ruins. In this chapter, I suggest that there are ways to work around this cultural blindness to the current condition. To explain how, let me briefly go back to Beck’s essay. The kind of denial that Beck refers to—the insistence to see—is not the kind of denial that Clark diagnoses in his discussion of the Anthropocene, that is, to deny that there is something wrong at all. Beck’s denial is the refusal to accept that nuclear disaster cannot be seen, that is, the denial of its invisibility. I agree with Beck that we lack the models and methods to truly engage with this novel condition, this radioactive state of being as Mycio calls it. But unlike Beck, I believe that such models and methods can be developed. So far, the consequences of Chernobyl have been approached through Beck’s logic of shock, the shock of blindness. So perhaps, I suggest, the remedy for this blindness is to find a different logic, a different way of seeing and knowing this condition not apart from, but as part of the world we inhabit—a logic developed from within the ruins to stay in Beck’s image. Like no other radio-contaminated site, the Zone has figured as a template for what life in a post-nuclear disaster world might look like. With its opening to tourism in 2011, images of the Zone that feature prominently the Sarcophagus (the concrete and steel structure that is covering the reactor ruin and which since November 2016 is concealed by a larger steel structure, the New Safe Confinement) and certain sites in the nearby abandoned town of Pripyat like a rusting amusement park that was never opened, were shared on social media platforms, printed in glossy coffee-table books and hung in galleries all over the world. The Zone offers, therefore, plenty of material to study the images and visual narratives employed to make sense of this novel state of being. I shall focus my inquiry on photography because it has shaped the perception of the Zone as an impossible image of nuclear disaster like no other medium.

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With an impossible image I mean, as I explain in the following section, that most representational Zone photography reproduces the cultural blindness toward Chernobyl’s impact on local ecosystems and people’s health. Zone photography, for the most part, revels in images of ruination and decay—images in which the continued impact of nuclear disaster remains absent—instead of taking the effort to look closely at this new ontological condition. Having said that, it is important to clarify what I do not look at in this chapter. When talking about the possibilities of photography to render the legacy of nuclear events like Chernobyl visible, one genre cannot go unmentioned: radiographs. A radiograph, or radiogram, is a photographic image produced by radiation, usually by placing a radioactive object on a radiosensitive surface like photographic film. Historically, radiographs have been instrumental to (military) nuclear research as they allowed to measure the accumulation of radiation in living tissue. While not nearly as popular as ruin photography, over the past years, artists have paid increasing attention to radiographs as “trace evidence” of nuclear events, to borrow the words of documentary filmmaker Susan Schuppli (2015). Anaïs Tondeur and Michael Marder use radiographs in their work Chernobyl Herbarium (2016) to create contact images of radioactive plants they found in the Chernobyl Zone and present them alongside poetry. In her work P(ech) B(lende) (2016), Susanne Kriemann digs through archives around the world to follow the radioactive traces of uranium mining through radiographs she finds or produces from radioactive objects. Similarly, in Trace–Cameraless Records of Radioactive Contamination (2012–), Japanese artist Shimpei Takeda produces radiographs from samples of dirt across Japan after 2011 to create, as he says, a “direct and physical documentation of the [Fukushima nuclear] disaster.”6 Schuppli brilliantly theorizes the radiograph as an “actual event” (288, original emphasis), an image in which radioactivity’s dark vitalism lives forth as it can become itself radioactive. As an example, she refers to Ukrainian filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko’s documentary Chernobyl: Chronicle of Difficult Weeks that was shot shortly after the explosion of the reactor. When reviewed, the film looked oddly “pockmarked” (286). Shevchenko initially blamed a faulty film stock for the static interference and noise, but finally realized that “what he had captured on film was the image and sound of radioactivity itself” (286). The marks, in other words, provide material evidence of radioactive particles damaging the film stock, which also had become radioactive. Shevchenko’s camera had to be buried because of the high levels of radioactivity it emitted. Also, the very first color photograph of the exposed reactor core that was taken by Ukrainian photographer Igor Kostin out of a helicopter on April 27, 1986, only 14 hours after the explosion, is heavily fogged by radiation.

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As an ‘actual event,’ a radiograph (voluntary or involuntary) is the most direct, nonreflexive way to render the physical phenomenon of radiation visible and a powerful tool to trace the accumulation of radioactive particles in living tissue. Yet, it takes more than material trace evidence to depict the multilayered impact of nuclear disaster on human and nonhuman communities over time and understand the prevalent desire to semiotically contain it. This chapter explores Zone photography that reflects on nuclear disaster’s cultural invisibility which comes most to the fore in representational photography. I begin by discussing Zone photography that presents Chernobyl as an event contained in the past. Given that photography is a spatial medium (unlike music or film, for instance), it could be argued that photography is generally not fit to articulate the continuity of nuclear disaster as it is limited to represent isolated moments in time. The following section, ‘The Self-Aware Image,’ confronts this claim and explores self-reflexivity as a way for photography to overcome this technical limitation. In ‘Blurry Photographs,’ I then develop my argument through the photographic series Bastard Eden, Our Chernobyl by Canadian photographer Donald Weber, who, some twenty years after the disaster, undertook several trips into and around the Zone to meet communities who are either not supposed to live there according to Ukrainian authorities and/or who simply cannot afford living elsewhere. I explore the potential of Bastard Eden to point to new ways of seeing the ‘radioactive state of being’ that Chernobyl has become from within the medium of photography (as opposed to from without, i.e., from a different medium). I hereby do not propose a different regime of images, a different set of representations. While the choice of what is being represented is part of the problem, the way it is represented and how viewers engage with these representations as symbols of nuclear disaster is just as important. I thus frame my discussion with literary theorist Ernst van Alphen’s reading of blur in photographic images as a self-reflexive gesture that allows to overcome deeply engrained ways of seeing disaster. Yet, as I suggest in the section ‘A Social Practice,’ Weber approaches photography not only as an aesthetic and epistemic practice (as van Alphen does), but importantly also as a social practice. Referring to art historian Georges Didi-Huberman’s notion of the photograph as a “visual event,” I propose that Weber’s series introduces a new way of ‘seeing’ nuclear disaster that makes an ethical request to the viewer. Fleshing out the implications of this way of seeing, I compare Weber’s practice in ‘Samosely Revisited’ to Rena Effendi’s portrait series of elderly women living in the Zone. Finally, in ‘The Art of Living in Ruins,’ I conceptualize and give a name to this new way of seeing that Weber’s photographic practice suggests.

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2.1 RENDERING NUCLEAR DISASTER INVISIBLE In his response to Chernobyl, Beck further argues that what the (German) mass media and experts did when trying to explain the implications of the disaster for people’s lives was to single out a few contaminated objects: sandboxes, meadows, lettuce. According to Beck (1986), they worked like “lightning rods: to focus one’s fear on them helps to repress the omnipresence of contamination” (654). In other words, the strategies chosen to make contamination tangible have effectively contributed to obscure the real extent of the disaster.7 As I show in this section, much Zone photography works in a similar way, preventing a better understanding of the problem of seeing nuclear disaster. When looking at photographs of the Zone, perhaps the most conspicuous feature is that most of them share a small pool of motifs: the concealed reactor ruin, lush woods and marshes, abandoned villages and towns overgrown by scrubs and birch trees, roamed by wildlife that seems to thrive in this radioactive environment. In this imaginary of wilderness and ruination, humans are strikingly absent. Chernobyl features as hardly more than a warning from the past, a relic of a bygone era whose consequences are claimed to be understood and contained like the reactor ruin itself.8 Take, for example, the book Chernobyl: Confessions of a Reporter by Ukrainian photographer Igor Kostin (2006), who collected photographs and documents from his Zone visits that span over nearly two decades. Kostin was among the first to photograph the burning reactor out of a helicopter only fourteen hours after the explosion on April 26, 1986, and has since repeatedly returned to the Exclusion Zone to capture its transformation from a nuclear wasteland to a “Mirage of the Garden of Eden” (197) as he calls it. As if having forgotten about the burning reactor, the young men dying in hospitals, and the children suffering from health conditions caused by the exposure to high levels of radiation—images which are given prominence in the first half of his book—he closes with an idyllic scene of a summer meadow in the Zone, dotted with bright red poppies. A yellow sign displaying a red trefoil, the internationally standardized sign for ionizing radiation, is placed between the flowers to render visible the invisible presence of radiation—a presence known and marked. Underneath it reads: “Happiness in the meadow. Red poppies grow wild in the forbidden zone. Even their color matches the signs that warn the field is contaminated” (196). In the book, the poppies can be said to operate like Beck’s radioactive lettuce: they reduce the current reality of nuclear disaster to a pleasant sight, a sight in which the invisible presence of radiation is marked and known. The plot of the wasteland-turned-paradise that is reiterated in a series like Kostin’s Confessions, works, in the words of historian Kate Brown (2019), like “magic

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dust,” because “[the] scary features of nuclear accidents disappear, so too the questions they raise” (2). Questions like: Why is there still such a great deal of uncertainty about the consequences of Chernobyl? Why, more than thirty years after the disaster, are large-scale, long-term studies that could shed more light into this still missing? Or, what does it take to survive in an area that has experienced, as K. Brown puts it, “the kind of thorough socialenvironmental-military sacking” (4) as the communities around Chernobyl in the twentieth century? Plots like Kostin’s, K. Brown suggests, “draw you in for a high-tech, human drama while leaving you feeling hopeful about the future and (most importantly) grateful it didn’t happen to you” (2). Following K. Brown, what is scary about Chernobyl are not images of people suffering from the consequences. Instead, it is the realization that you could be one of them. What she neglects to say is that, de facto, you are one of them in the sense that man-made radioactive particles from Chernobyl have found their way into all corners of the globe and that nuclear accidents are likely to happen again.9 Notably, the most important element in the story that Kostin and many others tell is not the presence of radiation in the Zone, but the absence of humans. The genre that orchestrates this absence most prominently is ruin photography, sometimes described as ‘ruin porn’—a sneering neologism attributed to writer and photographer James Griffioen that describes the aesthetic exploitation of urban decay while encouraging ethical detachment from the sites that are portrayed (Woodward 2013). Professional representatives of this genre who went into the Zone are Rebecca Litchfield, David McMillan, Robert Polidori, and Jane and Louise Wilson, but its aesthetics have also found their way into amateur photography. Images of this sort usually show overgrown architectural structures in the abandoned town of Pripyat, which was once the largest settlement in the region with over 40,000 inhabitants and today features as one of the main tourist destinations in the Zone. In some cases, humans are actively written out of the frame. An example for this is Jane and Louise Wilson’s photograph of Pripyat’s indoor swimming pool Azure from their series Atomgrad: Nature Abhors a Vacuum, in which the carefully chosen point of view conceals traces of ongoing human activity like the colorful graffiti that decorates most of the basin (figure 2.1). As the series’ subtitle unmistakably points out, what fills the void in these images that is left by humans, is nature. The image was taken at the short end of the hall from a springboard that extends from the lower edge one-third into the photograph. It is divided into two distinct realms: the nearly empty, geometrical space of the swimming pool dominated by hues of brown and white, and the vegetation outside that appears in vivid hues of green. With its dense texture of leaves and small branches, this latter realm creates an opacity that clearly sets itself apart from

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Figure 2.1  Jane and Louise Wilson, Atomgrad (Nature Abhors a Vacuum), 2010: Atomgrad 4 (the swimming pool), c-print, Diasec mounted with aluminium and Perspex, 180 × 228 cm. © Jane and Louise Wilson, courtesy 303 Gallery.

the openness of the pool. While borders and thresholds are accentuated (by the markedly white supports of the window façade for instance), the strips of insulation material hanging from the ceiling and the paint crumbling from the walls seem to indicate that nature, here associated with disorder and density, slowly disintegrates the ordered symmetry of human architecture. In this image the tension between order and disorder remains subtle due to the absence of larger pieces of litter, yet other images deliberately play with the motif of disintegrating order. One photograph, for example, depicts a former classroom littered with books, toppled bookshelves, newspapers and strips of wallpaper. Here the geometry of the room almost dissolves into a sea of crossing lines and a variety of different textures. It is not, as one might assume, the presence of plants, but the absence of humans that art critics read as an indicator of the return of nature in these images: “windows broken, floorboards strewn about, everything rusted, dusty”—these are, according to art critic Media Farzin (2013), the “chaotic effects of nature.” However, the link Farzin draws between ruination and nature is misleading. The broken windows and strewn floorboards are, like many other signs of destruction in the photographs, most likely the result of systematic looting rather than of technological failure or the ‘effects of

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nature’ (Dobraszczyk 2010, 381). Mycio (2007) reports in Wormwood Forest about two men having been arrested for robbing Pripyat apartments just six months after the accident (189). Besides looting, scrap metal scavengers and poachers are the greatest crime problem in the Zone. Thus, Pripyat’s ruination is importantly also a product of human agency. In fact, humans have never truly left the Zone, an insight that further undermines, as I have argued elsewhere (Volkmar 2017), the idea of a post-nuclear wilderness and the emerging discourse of “ecological purity” it participates in (Masco 2006, 311). What image practices like Wilsons’ fuel instead, is what Karla McManus calls “biocentric nostalgia,” the desire to return to nature (288–300), which turns it arguably less into a critical and more into a therapeutic practice. It is easy to blame a poorly informed critic for this misreading of ruination as an ‘effect of nature.’ However, given the unique temporality of the photographic image, I think that there is more to it than a simple fact check could correct. In media-theoretical terms, one could argue that it is the result of inviting a picture, in this case a photograph, to ‘speak’ without reflecting on its medium-specific way of speaking. To conclude that the ruination depicted in the image is the result of nature ‘reclaiming’ the site of man-made disaster means to suggest a causal relation between at least two events that the photograph does not and cannot depict. Photography’s narrative capacities have been subjected to discussion time and again. The art critic John Berger (1972), for instance, argues that a photograph gains meaning only “insofar as the viewer can read into it a duration extending beyond itself. When we find a photograph meaningful, we are lending it a past and future” (89). The narrative that evolves from this operation is thus evoked rather than told and depends on the context the viewer introduces to the image. It relies on cues based on which, as art historian and photographer Max Kozloff (1987) argues, most of the time we “make confident determinations about the incident, without being aware that they’re conjectural” (3). It is these cues provided by the photographic image to which I shall turn my attention now. 2.2 THE SELF-AWARE IMAGE It is photography’s supposed inability to tell a coherent narrative on its own that led writer and activist Susan Sontag (2005) in her widely read essay On Photography that was published ten years before Kozloff’s, to the dismissive remark that the medium would merely create an “illusion of understanding” while, “strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph” (29): “The camera,” she claims, creates “a view of the world that denies interconnectedness, continuity” (20). It isolates a moment from an ongoing process and stretches it into eternity: “In the real world, something is happening

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and no one knows what is going to happen. In the image-world, it has happened, and it will forever happen in that way” (148, original emphasis). The photographic image, in other words, is unable to depict reality because of its technical constraints: it can only isolate single moments from what is an ongoing process and hence give them a disproportionate emphasis. In addition to photography’s distortion of reality, Sontag observes a problematic empowerment of the beholder: “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power” (3). It is, therefore, not only that the photograph distorts reality, it also obscures this distortion to the viewer. The viewer is put into a self-blinding power position, a position from which the viewer appropriates the visualized object rather than understanding it. Against common-sense approaches, Sontag thus puts knowledge (in the form of understanding) and representation in a contrasting relation. Real understanding of the object, her statement implies, eludes its photographic representation. Sontag’s approach to photography is as pessimistic as it can be when it comes to its ability to depict an ongoing condition: the photograph atomizes reality and at the same time obscures its own artificiality. It becomes a distortive stand-in for the reality it refers to. As a result, Sontag contends, images become more real than reality, an “image-world” that follows its own rules (8).10 I contend that photography can encourage other ways of seeing than the one showcased by Sontag and thus provides tools to critically inquire into the consequences of nuclear disaster. Of course, I do not claim to have found a brand new perspective on a medium as widely studied as photography. And yet, the canonical approach to this photography, as exemplified by Sontag, closes some promising avenues that I think need to be reopened. This becomes particularly relevant if we want to understand how some photographic images still invite critical questions about the novel radioactive state of being as an articulation of the techno-human condition. I take my cue from philosopher Judith Butler (2009) who, in her discussion of war photography, points out in response to Sontag: “What photographs lack is narrative coherence, and it is such coherence alone, in her [Sontag’s] view, that satisfies the needs of the understanding” (67). This view is, according to Butler, focused on the subject doing the reading, while the interpretive function of the frame is ignored. Butler offers a different model: In my view, interpretation is not to be conceived restrictively in terms of a subjective act. Rather, interpretation takes place by virtue of the structuring constraints of genre and form on the communicability of affect—and so sometimes takes place against one’s will or, indeed, in spite of oneself. Thus, it is not just that the photographer and/or the viewer actively and deliberately interpret, but

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that the photograph itself becomes a structuring scene of interpretation—and one that may unsettle both maker and viewer in its turn. (67)

Following Butler, the epistemic value of photography, then, is not to capture reality or distil the truth of things, but to unsettle its viewers and raise questions about and, on a meta-level, frame the photographic representation of reality as a problem. The quest is thus not to ask the photograph to represent continuity but to reflect on its possibilities of representation in order to open new ways of seeing and interpreting reality. And it is in the interpretative work of the frame, Butler suggests, that viewers must search for this reflexivity. According to art historian Victor Stoichita (1997), this need not be an operation done to the image, but can very well be done by the image, that is, the image itself may introduce a theoretical perspective. In his book The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting which investigates the emergence of early modern painting, he argues that “the modern conception of the image . . . was invented out of a blazing confrontation between the new image and its own status, its own boundaries” (xv). With “the modern conception of the image,” Stoichita refers to painting becoming a “figurative object” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (3). As he shows using a wealth of examples, before the modern conception of a painting appeared in its pure form, a form that we would recognize today, there were paintings whose theme was painting. Before becoming a figurative object, in other words, the painting had to reflect on its own conditions of possibility. One of the examples he uses to illustrate this “blazing confrontation” (xv) is the birth of painted still life as an independent genre as an intertextual process. Before still life became a genre on its own, they were part of other paintings. Hans Memling’s Vase of Flowers (1480–1490), for instance, was mounted on the back of a diptych that probably figured a portrait of Madonna. It shows a vase of flowers in the niche of a wall. The existence of this kind of still life, Stoichita argues, “cannot be understood unless their confrontational role with the image on the obverse of the painting is taken into account” (20). In the case of Vase of Flowers, this amounts to the insight that it was only visible when the diptych was closed and that its role was to pretend to be a real part of the wall; hence its spatial arrangement. In other words, the painting “float[ed] between image and reality” rather than being considered an independent image in itself (20). Only later, the still life emancipated from a reverse image or “anti-image” into an image in its own right (20). What Stoichita shows with this example is that, historically, painting first needed to confront its own conditions of possibility, to become ‘self-aware’ as he calls it, in order to become a figurative object in its own right. Could the same be said about photography when facing the challenge to give ‘visibility’

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to something that exceeds the medium’s technical capacities, as is the case for nuclear disaster (again, I refer here to the cultural visibility of nuclear disaster, not to the physical invisibility of radioactivity)? How may a photographic image reflect on its own conditions of possibility, and how may this reflection help explore the radioactive state of being Chernobyl has become? Donald Weber’s work is markedly different from the works I have discussed so far in this chapter. Unlike other photographers, like the Wilsons and the late Kostin, Weber does not erase humans from the Zone, he actively searches for them. Almost 100,000 people from Pripyat and villages in the region had to leave their homes in the months after the disaster. But although the area around Chernobyl was evacuated, humans have never truly left the Zone. Besides almost 7,000 workers who are employed in the Zone, the area is regularly visited by tourists, scientists, journalists and former residents visiting the remains of their homes and tending the graves of relatives and friends (Pleasance 2015; Banaszkiewicz and Duda 2020, 199). An unknown number of unofficial visitors is likely to be added, because of “[l]ax surveillance and a lack of security, along with shoddy and broken-down fencing in places around the zone’s perimeter” (Phillips and Ostaszewski 2012, 127). While these figures apply to temporary visitors, there are permanent residents in the Zone, too. (Moreover, it should not be forgotten that there is a large number of people living on contaminated land outside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. There are no precise numbers, but anthropologist Adriana Petryna [2002] estimates that affected populations amount to roughly “5 million people either resettled from contaminated territories or continuing to live there” [xiii].) Few of them have ever been sought out by photographers, with exception of those elderly residents who are known as samosely in Ukraine and beyond—people who refused to evacuate or returned in secret to their houses in the unprotected area that was cordoned off after the disaster. I return to them in my penultimate section, ‘Samosely Revisited.’ Some twenty years after the disaster, between 2005 and 2007, Weber undertook several trips into the Zone to meet the communities who live there at the margins of society, invisible to most. According to the short text by curator Larry Frolick (2008) accompanying the slim paperback volume with the title Bastard Eden, Our Chernobyl in which he published a selection of sixty-three photographs from these trips, the people Weber met were “immigrants from other cities, who told him they preferred Chernobyl’s rural peace to the urban blight of Ukraine’s industrial zone” (62). In that sense, Frolick suggests, they lived in the “self-imposed exile” of the “nation’s peasant past” (62).11 Their pronounced material poverty, however, adds another layer to this story. Life in and around the Zone is cheap, but precarious. The sharing (and trading?) of risky foodstuffs from restricted areas like mushrooms, game and homebrewed alcohol which takes such a prominent role in Bastard

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Eden is testament to this precarity, but also to the growing informal economy around the Zone. As the state’s welfare and benefit system is dwindling, these activities ensure survival. By portraying these isolated communities, Weber thus adds a missing piece to dominant representations of the Zone: its human inhabitants. What makes Bastard Eden special, however, is that it approaches nuclear disaster as an ongoing condition that cannot be reduced to exposure levels alone. The argument I develop on the remaining pages of this chapter is that Weber’s images provoke viewers to challenge dominant ways in which the Zone is represented as a ‘lightening rod’ that blinds us to Chernobyl’s uncontainable legacy. To begin with, Weber avoids obvious references to radioactivity. A blurry vision of a teenage girl without hair and a portrait of a boy with a long scar running down his chest are the most suggestive clues which in themselves are oblique. It is the text with which the images are framed that reminds viewers of what they are looking at. Most prominently, this includes the series title, Bastard Eden, Our Chernobyl, and the short essay in the back of the volume. He also uses captions within the series to group the images into thematic units like “Exclusion Zone,” “Forbidden City,” and “Boar Hunters.” Most of them, however, are not referring to radioactivity or Chernobyl, but are general themes that emerged from his three-year engagement with these communities, for instance, “Mothers & Sons” or “Summer.” In Weber’s images, Chernobyl’s radioactive state of being does not qualify through unique appearances, something one could capture in a photograph. But it is not invisible either. As Mycio (2005) had claimed, 95 percent of the radionuclides are no longer on the Zone, but of the Zone and have entered the food chain. This means that Chernobyl has worked its way into the political, economic and social system of those countries most heavily affected by the disaster, including Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Hence, in a material and discursive sense Chernobyl lives forth, not only as radiation, but also in the daily and seasonal rhythms of the small communities described in Bastard Eden. Unlike in the images I discussed in the previous section, in Weber’s images Chernobyl (the historical event) and the radioactivity it released are part of the story, but they do not form its invisible, mythicized center. Similar to Nefzger’s ironic approach to nuclear power, Weber’s approach to this novel state of being can thus be said to be contextual rather than focused on one specific motif like the reactor ruin or the radiation sign. But there is more. What immediately strikes the eye in Bastard Eden is Weber’s play with form: there are images in which the principle subject, even though in the foreground, is cut off by the frame, obscured by a glass, or offfocus. In another case, it falls out of the image cadre altogether. He plays with visual overlap to humorous effects and often includes other photographic images in his pictures. He also reproduced a number of black-and-white

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photographs that he found in an abandoned apartment in Pripyat, showing scenes from the time before the disaster: a parade in Pripyat, the portrait of a young girl, an airplane in the sky. I suggest that this play with form introduces a theoretical perspective to the series, an operation similar to the one Stoichita has identified in early modern painting, turning the photograph into a “selfaware image.” Bastard Eden thus encourages the viewer to think through the medium of photography as much as about it, provoking not only a critical engagement with the cultural blindness to the consequences of nuclear disaster—the new post-atomic state as Weber calls it—but also pointing toward a new way of seeing which makes, as I shall argue, an ethical request to the viewer. In the following section, I focus on Weber’s use of blur as the most effective tool in Bastard Eden to reflect on the medium’s own conditions of possibility before further developing the implications of this self-awareness for ‘seeing’ nuclear disaster with the help of photography. 2.3 BLURRY PHOTOGRAPHS The cover of the book depicts a blurry strip of trees and undergrowth against a cloudy sky, framed by a dome-shaped vignette (figure 2.2). Taken out of a moving car, probably through a fogged window, the trees appear in different

Figure 2.2  Donald Weber, Bastard Eden, Our Chernobyl, 2008, photograph. The forests of the Zone can be lethal. Radiation loves to settle into tight pockets with little wind. © Donald Weber, courtesy of the artist.

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degrees of sharpness which suggests a sense of movement. While on a narrative level, the image introduces the viewer to the series—they are visually taken into the Zone in the protective, closed environment of the car—it also draws attention to the image surface, that is, to the technical constraints of the medium. This very first image, then, presents the viewer with a problem: the problem of photographic vision. It is not a problem of the ontological object, the forest (he could have taken a sharp picture if he wanted, because the forest itself does not move), but of what it stands for, the iconography of nuclear disaster. I cannot be certain of what I behold other than stating that this is a strip of trees, because the details are blurred. Undermining one of the defining properties of photography, the indiscriminatory recording of details, there are no fortuitous details to be discovered that would add to what the camera has captured. My initial response to this image was the desire to see clear, to render sharp what dissolves into a blur. Then, in a moment of reflection, I wondered: what would I see? What more would I know about this radioactive forest, if I saw every leaf of every tree in the frame? The answer is probably nothing. This is because in the first years after the disaster deformations were so rare that they were unlikely to be captured in a random image, and even if they were, it is very unlikely that a botanically untutored eye like mine would have seen the difference. It is the alienation of the scene through blur that introduces a self-reflexive moment to the image as a photographic image. According to literary scholar Ernst van Alphen (2018), blur in a photographic image, if caused through movement or time exposure, points to the limits of photography. This is because “movement can only be represented by actual movement, such as the movement of film. When motion creates a blur in photographs, it represents movement negatively, in the photograph’s failure to capture it” (128). Blur, in this case, does not point to an existing ontological phenomenon (it has no referent in the pre-photographic world), but to the technical constraints of the photographic medium. It is “precisely because it visualizes its limits or failures,” van Alphen suggests, that a blurred image “offers possibilities to better understand the condition of the photographic image” (119–120). Blur, in other words, adds a selfreflexive dimension to the photographic image that challenges reductive claims about the medium’s nature or essence and, by doing so, broadens its possibilities of cultural expression. It is in the play with blur exhibited in the book’s cover image that I become aware of its status as a figurative object in Stoichita’s sense as I have outlined in the previous section. Blur draws attention to the surface of the image, its technical possibilities and constraints to represent reality. The blurry image hence exhibits its conditions as a picture in a similar way as the early modern still-life paintings analyzed by Stoichita.

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Van Alphen’s interest in photography’s stylistic devices like blur is first of all theoretical (to challenge the dominant understanding of photography) and aesthetic (to broaden the possible modes of image-making in turn). Especially in light of one of his earlier books, Art in Mind, this points to art photography’s epistemic function. As van Alphen (2005) suggests, art enables understanding through aesthetic experience which, unlike other discourses, negates the attempt to yield positive understanding (xv). As a result, art actively disrupts conventional assumptions, thereby “triggering efforts” to form new ones (xvi). This epistemic negation is performed in Weber’s images, too, by exposing the technical constraints of the medium. The blurry strip of trees not only challenges the conventions of a ‘good image,’ but offers a critique of dominant ways of seeing and hence knowing Chernobyl. As van Alphen notes, movement can be presented in the photographic image only negatively. In Weber’s image, this negativity metaphorically extends to photography’s claim to knowledge. It is a double negativity that this image confronts the viewer with: one technical, the other epistemic. It is technical because the camera fails to capture movement, and epistemic (also in Beck’s sense) because the viewer cannot establish knowledge about the radioactive state of being of the Zone through photographic vision. In other words, we cannot see the radioactive state of being in the photograph. Of course, the history of photography is closely entwined with the history of nuclear visibility. As Schuppli (2016) points out, “the nuclear capacities of the twentieth century were preceded by two key developments in photo-imaging technology: the discovery of X-ray in 1895 followed by that of spontaneous radioactivity in 1986” (283). In 1896, French physicist Henri Becquerel discovered that the photographic plates he had put into a drawer together with uranium salts had been exposed without an external source of UV light. This showed that the uranium salts themselves emitted a yet unknown kind of radiation. Becquerel had discovered spontaneous radioactivity through photography, a link that would be continued in many ways throughout the twentieth century. From the perspective of media history, then, photography has been instrumental in making radiation visible in the first place, and the Chernobyl disaster is no exception as I have shown with Shevchenko’s and Kostin’s images. In photography’s long and troubled relation with nuclear technology, this capacity of rendering ionizing radiation visible was used routinely by the US military to trace the accumulation of radioactive isotopes in organ tissue after atomic bomb tests in the Pacific, usually by creating so-called radioautographs of tropical puffer fishes (278). For those radio-autographs, the fish would be sliced in half and put on a photosensitive plate. The radioactive particles the fish had absorbed would expose the film and make the concentration of radiation in the animal’s organs visible. Examples like this show

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that indeed “photographic images have been instrumental in shaping nuclear research and how it is used” (O’Brian 2015, 11), revealing one of the darker chapters in the medium’s complex history which is closely entwined with Cold War aspirations of military dominance. Yet, as more material is being declassified, one also realizes that this photographic visibility of radiation was carefully managed, hiding—that is, rendering invisible—the more disturbing health impact of radiation.12 This dialectics of in/visibility in the nuclear history of the medium continues to resonate in the blurry outlines of the contaminated forest in Weber’s image. Unlike in Kostin’s and Shevchenko’s early image records, today, radioactive particles usually go unregistered in Zone photography. For radioactive particles in the atmosphere to be visible on photographic film, the level of radiation has to be very high. This is not the case in the Zone today where most radioactive particles have settled on the ground or been absorbed into the ecosystem. There are instances in Bastard Eden where this epistemic dimension of the technically flawed image turns into an ethical request to the viewer. This applies especially to those instances where Weber’s images comment on the dominant motifs of Chernobyl’s image-world. One such motif is the ‘Chernobyl child,’ a term that refers to children suffering from Chernobylrelated medical conditions. One photograph, for example, shows a middleaged woman with a child on her lap (figure 2.3). They sit on a sofa and red curtains block the view to what is behind them, creating an intimate atmosphere. The intimacy is reinforced by a dresser in the lower right edge of the image that suggests that they sit in a living room or bedroom. Moreover, their faces, which occupy the center of the image, almost touch. The child’s posture and the way the child is dressed (the child wears tights not trousers, suggesting he or she stay indoors) indicates that the child suffers from a disability. The child’s face and upper body are slightly blurred, caused, as it looks, from the attempt to escape the motherly embrace. The image depicts Valentina Sabenok with her nine-year-old daughter, Tanya, who suffers from cerebral palsy as the image caption provided to me by the artist reveals. To the viewer of the book Bastard Eden, this information is not given, which, as I will argue below, impacts the way the image functions in Chernobyl’s image-world. When Chernobyl happened on the night of April 26, 1986, it released millions of curies of radionuclides (Chernousenko 1991, viii). It took thirty-five hours until the first radio broadcast alerted citizens to the accident, and three whole days until the disaster was announced in Ukrainian newspapers with a short note in the easy-to-miss Weather section on page three of Verchni Kiev (Evening Kiev) on April 29 (Phillips 2004, 161). Due to this failure of the Soviet government to inform its citizens about the accident, Kiev residents

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Figure 2.3  Donald Weber, Bastard Eden, Our Chernobyl, 2008, photograph. Valentina Sabenok with her nine-year-old daughter, Tanya, who has cerebral palsy. Valentina lives alone, existing on a pension of $60 per month. She takes pride in having to buy very little, virtually living off the land. © Donald Weber, courtesy of the artist.

were mostly ignorant about the radioactive cloud coming from the reactor which is located 116 km north of the city, when they took to the streets to join the May Day parade on May 1. The result was that “practically every child in Kiev was exposed to dangerous levels of radiation during the May Day parade” (Phillips 2004, 161). The May Day parade was a big event in Kiev, with tens of thousands of people taking to the streets, among them several thousand children. Children are particularly sensitive to thyroid cancers that result from inhaling aerosols containing iodine-131. The number of children suffering from what was heretofore a ‘sporadic’ disease, went up dramatically after Chernobyl (Phillips 2004, 167).13 Many Chernobyl-related organizations in Ukraine and abroad prioritized the need of children and thus spread images of children suffering from radiation-related conditions, making “the image of the Chernobyl child” one of the “most lasting cultural artifacts of the disaster” (K. Brown 2019, 287). Almost every publication on the Chernobyl disaster has an image of a little girl without hair suffering from cancer, a boy with twisted limbs, or a baby with a hydrocephalic head. The Chernobyl museum in Kiev features a wall with 648 photographs of children suffering from Chernobyl-related diseases, collected from their parents by museum employees (Phillips 2004, 167). It also features an empty cradle pointing not only to the children who have died, but also to those who will never be born due to the compromised fertility among

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men and women caused by high exposures to radiation. The Chernobyl child is the ultimate symbol for Chernobyl’s legacy.14 Yet, what had started with the intention to raise money for better medical treatment of these children soon became the symbol for Ukraine’s alleged moral corruption. As K. Brown (2019) elaborates in the closing chapter of her book, the symbol of the suffering Chernobyl child presented “the nation in need,” which fueled arguments in Western countries “about failed Soviet medicine and the alleged graft and incompetency of the socialist system” (288). In short, “[c]ritics charged that Ukrainians and Belarusians pushed their children in front of cameras to rattle the cup for international aid” (288). Hence, as the number of Chernobyl children’s programs grew, public attention shifted from radiation and the public health disaster to “survivors alleged addiction to welfare” (288). This had political consequences: For many foreign consultants, the antidote was clear. They dished up medical metaphors [like radiophobia] in place of medical aid. . . . Following this train of thought, IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] officials insisted that relocating people from Chernobyl contaminated lands was not a question of health but of economics. (288)

Thus, rather than pointing to the health crisis caused by Chernobyl, the Chernobyl child became primarily an economic concern for the nascent Ukrainian state that was also economically suffering from ‘cleaning up’ Chernobyl. As Petryna (2002) states, 5 percent of Ukraine’s annual budget is devoted to Chernobyl-related expenditures from which 65 percent goes to so-called sufferers, which are citizens who could claim compensation from the government for damage caused by Chernobyl (4). On first sight, it seems as if Weber’s photograph of Valentina and Tanya confirms this symbolism, if only because it depicts a disabled child that is contextually related to the Chernobyl disaster. However, closer scrutiny reveals that the image does something else. To begin with, the child’s age suggests that it does not belong to the first generation of exposed children during the mayday parade. Even if the precise age (nine years) is not known to the viewer, the child does not look as if she were in her twenties. Instead, it suggests that exposure did not stop in 1986 but is a continued reality. As Weber’s photograph of Valentina and her daughter suggests, this continued reality is a reality poorly understood: unlike other photographs of Chernobyl children in which the suffering bodies are clearly rendered as if to be inspected in all tragic detail, the blur in Weber’s image does not encourage such close inspection. Refusing to ‘offer’ the child to the anonymous viewer as an object to be studied (without the additional information that I received

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from the artist I am unable to even define the child’s gender), the image also resists abstracting the child into a symbol for a general condition.15 In fact, it is not even clear if the child suffers in the same way that other images of Chernobyl children suggest. Rather than showing a child in an orphanage or hospital, Tanya is shown in the coziness of her home with her mother taking care of her. The mother, likewise, does not seem to make any claim to the viewer by exhibiting the suffering of her daughter. Focusing her attention on Tanya’s face, she does not beg the viewer for help or compassion. Thus, like I have argued for the book’s cover image, blur adds a reflexive layer to the image that challenges the medium’s epistemic capacity to ‘see’ Chernobyl. In addition to this, the image of the Valentina and her daughter adds an ethical dimension to this self-reflexive gesture. This has to do with the photograph evoking an image tradition that has led to the alleged economic exploitation of children’s suffering caused by the disaster. Unlike images of Chernobyl children, Weber’s exhibition of the technical limits of the camera prevents the viewer to fully grasp the appearance of the child. Coming back to the Sontag’s criticism of photograph that I discussed earlier, this means the viewer is also denied the illusion of knowledge and mastery that Sontag claims photography inevitably produces. Again, the technical negativity becomes an epistemic negativity. But it also poses an ethical request to the viewer. To reiterate the question that I posed in the introduction of this chapter, I suggest that Weber’s images do not try to ‘see further’ (Beck 1986), that is, to arrive at some kind of conclusion or closure of the past to draw a lesson for the future, but insist on asking what to do with this one. To be more precise, how can images render knowable Chernobyl’s radioactive state of being that we all inhabit to varying degrees, epistemically or biologically? Weber’s (self-)reflexive use of formal strategies like blur challenge the usefulness of preconceived ideas like the Chernobyl child for this quest. But does Bastard Eden also go beyond merely challenging the status quo? In what sense does it point toward a new way of (photographic) seeing that allows to explore the novel condition that the Zone confronts us with? To put it differently, what new can be learned from Bastard Eden about the state of being that the Chernobyl disaster has helped create? It is the ethical investment of the photographer as it is articulated in the formal properties of his images that provides a starting point. 2.4 A SOCIAL PRACTICE In his book Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, art historian Georges Didi-Huberman (2008) shows that a blurry photograph

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can also be approached in a different way than van Alphen proposes, which is not from an aesthetic or epistemic, but phenomenological point of view. According to Didi-Huberman (2008), blur exhibits not only photography’s technical limits but importantly points to the phenomenological status of the photographic image as a “visual event” (36), that is, as the trace of a bodily act. It is the result of an effort taken by the photographer to take an image under specific circumstances and it is these circumstances alone, according to him, under which the image should be understood. Didi-Huberman introduces the notion of the “visual event” to defend the historical importance of a series of four much-discussed photographs taken inside the extermination camp of Auschwitz in 1944. The first two, one blurry the other sharp, show workers of the Sonderkommando, those prisoners who were responsible for removing dead bodies from the gas chambers and burn them in crematoria or open pits outside. The workers stand in between the bodies of gassed Jews, behind them a column of smoke rises into the sky. The images are framed by a black mass that Didi-Huberman identifies as the inside of the gas chamber. The other two images are taken from an oblique angle, capturing mostly trees and, in one corner, the figures of unclothed women marching toward an unseen destination. The images were taken in secret by workers of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz who were also members of the Polish resistance. Didi-Huberman uses these images to refute the often-articulated view that the Shoah is unimaginable, because no image could ever capture the horrors of the mass killing of Jews by the Nazis during World War II. While he recognizes this view as a gesture to acknowledge the unprecedented horrors of the death camps, to claim that there is no image of the Shoah also continues, in his eyes, the project of the Nazis to erase every trace of their crime. The problem, Didi-Huberman suggests, is not that there are no images (there are plenty), or that they would not do justice to the horrors of the event (which they do not, of course), but that we shy from the effort to assess the images we have for what they are: incomplete, yet true records of the mass killing of Jews at Auschwitz. For Didi-Huberman this means to engage in the difficult task of developing an ethic of the image: It concerns, he writes, “neither the invisible par excellence (the laziness of the aesthete), nor the symbol of horror (the laziness of the believer), nor the mere document (the laziness of the learned). A simple image: inadequate but necessary, inexact but true” (39). To develop an ethic of the image thus means to not contend oneself with the idea that something is unrepresentable or unimaginable, nor to turn the image into a symbol to be venerated or to reduce it to its mere informational value. It is about regarding the image for what it is: inappropriate, yet necessary, imprecise, yet true—the product of a bodily act that is as contingent as it is irreducible. Hence, it may not come as a surprise to the reader that it is precisely the ‘unwanted’ traces

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of the photographic process in the image like blur or the black mass around the scene that the photographer aimed to capture to which Didi-Huberman attributes particular importance when he comments on the cropping of the photographs for their use in court: The cropping of these pictures was no doubt believed to preserve the document (the visible result, the distinct information). But instead, their phenomenology was removed, everything that made them an event (a process, a job, physical contact). This mass of black is nothing other than the mark of the ultimate status by which these images should be understood: their status as visual event. (36, original emphasis)

With meticulous attention, Didi-Huberman reconstructs the circumstances under which the four photographs came into existence. It is the black frame, the blur, the trees which allegedly show nothing, that is, no distinct information, that give him an inkling about the circumstances and the urgency of the situation in which the images were taken: The mass of black that surrounds the sight of the cadavers and the pits, this mass where nothing is visible gives in reality a visual mark that is just as valuable as all the rest of the exposed surface. That mass where nothing is visible is the space of the gas chamber: the dark room into which one had to retreat, to step back, in order to give light to the work of the Sonderkommando outside, above the pyres. That mass of black gives us the situation itself, the space of possibility, the condition of existence of the photographs themselves. (35–36, original emphasis)

The black mass, in other words, prevents the image from becoming a stand-in for the whole, the totality of the horror of the Shoah, and yet retains its imaginational and informational value. It tells us about the urgency of the situation, which, too, is part of that history. Notably, Didi-Huberman draws in his description extensively from other sources. It is the photographic image itself, he claims, that demands to be contextualized. To approach the photographic image as a visual event, therefore, necessarily also means to regard it as an image that is “of all” but not an image that “is . . . all” (65, original emphasis). In other words, the photographic image is an amalgam of all—visible things, thought and action—but refuses to become all—a stand-in for truth or history, a symbol that needs no explication but ‘says it all.’ To approach the photograph as the product of a bodily act, therefore, does not mean to reduce it to the indexical gesture of “that-has-been,” but to acknowledge its irreducible bond with reality which it does not represent, but touches, and its epistemic capacity to mobilize, or

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“open” in Didi-Huberman’s words, the knowledge that arises from that bond “in the moment of seeing” (84). The photographic image is thus, strictly speaking, not a reconstruction of reality, but an approximation, and yet it is crucial to the knowledge itself. How does all this help to explore photography’s role in understanding the consequences of Chernobyl? Let me return to Weber’s cover image. Upon closer inspection of the strip of trees, I notice that there are two kinds of blur: the first, which I have discussed above as being caused by movement, smudges the trees in the center; the second kind of blur is stronger, creating a dome-shaped vignette around the center. In addition, the image is cropped on the lower left corner by what appears to be the rim of a window. Weber seems to have taken the image through a fogged car window while making his way into the Zone. It is the elements that obscure the image, the cropping and the blur, that steer my attention to the conditions under which the image was produced. Of course, Weber’s blurry cover image does not express the kind of urgency that Didi-Huberman invests into his notion of the visual event by discussing photographs taken at Auschwitz. The insight that Weber was sitting in a car when he took the picture might not be particularly meaningful beyond being a reconstruction of how this image came into being. However, it could also be argued that the closed car window is the result (or trace) of his attempt to keep exposure levels inside the car low, because he was moving through a radioactive landscape. Either way, the fact that it was a deliberate decision to use this image (and not a sharp one) for the book’s cover creates an interpretative frame or bracket around the series that sensitizes the viewer to the fact that photography is a practice and thus adds an ethical dimension. This understanding alone foregoes Didi-Huberman’s much despised elevation of an image to a symbol for the whole, in this case the legacy of nuclear disaster. The second image I discussed in the previous section, Valentina with her daughter Tanya (figure 2.3), shows that Weber does not stop here. With their faces only centimeters apart, mother and child articulate an intimacy that raises a question of a very different kind: is the viewer at all welcome in this scene? Of course, one could read the mother’s gesture as an attempt to make the child look into the camera, in which case our presence is legitimated by the mother because she is not only aware, but approves of the image being taken since she helps to create a ‘good’ result. But even then, her daughter appears reluctant to become part of the situation, which visually manifests in the blurring of her face and upper body. The tension between mother, child and photographer can only be explained on the level of the social encounter (between the photographed and the photographer). Insofar as the blur shifts the viewer’s attention from the level of representation to the level of practice, it forces them to develop an ethical attitude toward the photographed. In

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perspective of this ethical reading of blur, we could therefore also say that the blurred face of the child exhibits the technical constraints of the photographic image in order to say something else, that is, to point to the social dimension of photography—photography as a social practice. What this shows is that Weber approaches photography not only as a bodily practice, but importantly also as a social one. Drawing attention to his own presence as a photographer, he points to the social work that affords a photographic image. Strictly speaking, this aspect is already covered by Didi-Huberman’s phenomenological reading when he describes the risks taken by the photographer; the fact that he must hide to take his pictures implies an oppressive social relation between him and the watchmen of the camp. In other words, the form of the image—the blur, the black frame, the perspective—is a result, a visible trace, of this social relation which (importantly in this case) is also a power relation. Moreover, when taking the letter into account that was attached to the film roll, explaining that these images were intended to show the world “the truth about Auschwitz” (44, original emphasis), it becomes clear that, to understand their existence, the images need to be situated in a network of relations that precedes the immediate circumstances of their production. These social factors, the photographer’s sense of mission and his oppressive relation to his tormentors that brought the images into existence, are visible in the form in which we see them today. Again, this sense of urgency, the fact that the form of the photograph is forced by the circumstances, is not what the viewer finds in Bastard Eden. Weber choses to leave traces of his own presence in the image, a choice that, in its deliberate and voluntary nature, explicitly frames the image as the result of a social encounter. Hereby, one never sees Weber directly, but can reconstruct, or approximate, his presence in people’s expressions. This is particularly evident in his portraits. One image shows Evgeniy, a fourteenyear-old boy who has a scar running down his exposed chest that points to a heart disease he contracted one year after having moved into the Zone. He stands on a sofa bed, supported by one foot only, his arms folded behind his back. His posture betrays a certain discomfort that is underlined by his gaze avoiding the camera. He clearly responds to the photographer in the room for whom he seems a stranger or someone whom he has known only briefly and who has intruded the privacy of his bedroom. The fact that he does not face the camera while his body does—reluctantly—suggests that there sits the source of his discomfort, in the photographer wanting to take his picture. There are other portraits that express more confidence, like the one of a teenage girl in a dancing pose. She looks slightly past the camera, with a certain assessment in her gaze, a fragile trust which perhaps has just been built. But unlike the boy, she appears to approve of his presence, showing the photographer a dancing pose. Especially in images that show two people, mostly

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mothers and their adult sons, the intent of being photographed appears to lie with those being portrayed rather than with the photographer. One picture, for instance, shows an elderly woman with her adult son sitting on a bed, holding hands. Both are looking straight into the camera, smiling. The mother’s broad smile expresses a sense of pride. While she looks into the camera, her face is slightly turned toward her son. With her gaze, she seems to ask the photographer for their picture being taken. In these examples, Weber’s presence is rendered visible in the image indirectly through the response of his sitters. In one image, however, Weber’s shadow appears. It is a full-body portrait of a woman in a thick camouflage jacket and fur hat, standing in the snow and smiling warmly. To her right, upon closer inspection, we see a small shadow on a sunlit, shaky wooden shed of someone holding a camera. It is Weber, it seems, to whom the woman dedicates her smile. Interestingly, this is not a point-of-view-shot. Like in the image with the dancing teenage girl, the woman is not looking into the camera but slightly past it. The camera’s eye does not merge with Weber’s eye, the viewer does not see what Weber sees. His shadow draws attention to a third element structuring the image, besides the photographer and the scene or person photographed: the technical gaze of the camera itself, which is not identical with Weber’s. It is the visual presence of these three elements, the photographer, the photographed and the camera, in Bastard Eden that frame the medium as a social practice. The presence of the camera makes sure that the relation between the photographer and the photographed that is depicted in the image, is never mistaken to be an immediate one, in the sense of being unmediated, but is always conditioned by a third, the camera. Weber thus deliberately frames his images as ‘visual events’ in Didi-Huberman’s sense of the term, asking to be situated in and read through the phenomenological and social context from which they have emerged. Indeed, Bastard Eden is quite literally the product of a social effort. As Frolick (2008) writes in his introductory text, Weber repeatedly returned to the same community over the course of three years, “sharing their food and strange stories” (62), and as some images suggest, their home-made vodka. This social involvement is reflected in the images. He portrays people in the privacy of their bedrooms, takes part in everyday activities and festivities, or follows them in their (informal) occupations like boar hunting and, in another Chernobyl-related series, Stalker, scrap metal scavenging. On the level of form, this social encounter importantly translates into a situated perspective. One image shows a man at a picnic, moving out of shot. The perspective that the photograph offers suggests that the viewer is part of the picnic. Another image that pictures three men sitting in a semi-circle in front of some wooden sheds is taken from within the group as if inviting the viewer to drink and smoke along with these men. Thus, in a sense, the

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viewer is invited to take part in this social encounter, but only ever to a certain extent. Weber makes sure that his viewers never forget the conditions of this privileged perspective. The man at the picnic appears blurry, pointing to the medium-specific dimension of this perspective. In the group image, the perspective does not meet the eyeline of the other men but is below them, introducing the camera as a third, mediating element into this encounter. Moreover, since nobody directly looks into the camera, one gets the impression that the image was taken without the consent or even awareness of those photographed. This is perhaps the most important difference to dominant representations of the Zone like the ruin photography of Jane and Louise Wilson: they do not approach photography as a social practice. Not only do the Wilsons refuse to show people in their pictures, but their images also lack any trace of a social encounter behind the camera. Consequently, their images are turned into symbols of a larger whole—the failure of modern man, of technology, of progress. They can be read as an abstract warning from which the viewer gathers nothing specific, certainly no understanding of the social, economic, cultural, or ecological consequences of the disaster. Thus, they do possess a kind of dialectic reflexivity, but one that results in a nostalgic longing rather than provoking critical questions. Unlike Wilson’s images, then, Weber’s images refuse to become symbols. They refuse to be a stand-in for the whole, that is, for what nuclear disaster means or should mean to some, and retain their imaginational and informational value. Even in images that show widely used and recognizable motifs like the ruins of Pripyat, Weber carefully includes traces of human presence, like a graffiti heart drawn onto a flaking wall, or a bright yellow car passing through the dark forest, as if not to forget that the Zone, and those who inhabit or pass through it, leaving their mark, can never be subdued to just one narrative, one image, one perspective. What models do Weber’s images offer, then, to approach these conflict-ridden communities around Chernobyl that dominant representations do not? 2.5 SAMOSELY REVISITED When Ulrich Beck writes about lettuce and sandboxes as “lightning rods” that blind us to the omnipresence of contamination, and hence the real extent of nuclear disaster, he writes about the general public, the average citizen. It is them for whom he diagnoses a loss of autonomy. Anthropologist Anna Tsing (2015) takes a different approach in her book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. The protagonists of her story are not average citizens, but a group of informal workers, commercial

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Matsutake mushroom pickers, who have learned “to look around rather than ahead” (22), which means they have learned to adapt to the rhythms of the forest as well as to the rhythms of capitalism to be able to make a living from picking mushrooms. These mushroom pickers come from the margins of society: In the US Pacific Northwest, the area in which Tsing starts her exploration, most of them are refugees from Cambodia and Laos. The Matsutake trade makes a substantial contribution to their livelihoods (4). The difference between Beck and Tsing is crucial. While Beck starts from the middle of society, writing about and addressing the average citizen for whom the loss of autonomy is a traumatic event, Tsing looks at the margins to those who have lost this privilege a long time ago, or never had it in the first place, precisely because they are not average citizens. Unlike Beck’s dystopia, Tsing’s protagonists do not enter the ruins unprepared, their life at the margins of society has taught them how to survive under precarious conditions. The reason why Beck hasn’t noticed them is because these groups usually drop from the radar of official statistics since, as Tsing argues, “they are not a part of progress” (22). In times when the livelihoods of many are at risk due to the nonlinearization of national economies, and precarity becomes the dominant condition of our time, these “preindustrial livelihoods” she suggests, are instructive (22). This is because precarity does not just describe a condition of being at risk as one would deduct from today’s conflated usage of the term ‘precarious’ as a synonym of dangerous, uncertain or risky. What Tsing talks about when referring to precarity is “the condition of being vulnerable to others” (20). This definition acknowledges the etymological origin of the term, coming from Latin precarius which means ‘obtained by asking or praying.’ If we follow this definition, we see why the individualistic idea of the autonomous subject is not an issue for Tsing’s mushroom pickers and why, in their ability to acknowledge and work with their vulnerability to others, human and nonhuman, she puts her hope into them when looking for ways of surviving in the ruins of capitalism. Not having the privilege of the ‘average citizen,’ the male white worker, these mushroom pickers were always dependent on, and hence vulnerable to others. In other words, in order to survive, they are forced to collaborate with their human and nonhuman companions. She calls this mode collaborative survival. For Tsing, to put mushroom picking “at the center of the systematicity we seek” (20) thus offers a means to explain the world differently, outside of narratives of progress, modernization, and individualization. Communities who are not supposed to live in the Zone like the one which Weber portrays in Bastard Eden, exist at the margins of society like Tsing’s Matsutake pickers. How may the medium of photography allow us to see these communities in the way that Tsing sees the Matsutake pickers in her anthropological study? What models do they offer to explore the novel state of being

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that Chernobyl has become? In this section, I focus on a particular group of people: samosely, those elderly residents who returned to their houses in the Zone. After the Chernobyl area was evacuated, many of those who were resettled, especially the elderly, felt unhappy in their new homes due to experiences of discrimination and social isolation. Those who returned did so illegally until the government, after futile attempts to drive them out, issued a bill tolerating those who were older than fifty (thus beyond the birth-giving age) in the Zone (Mycio 2005, 184).16 One year after the disaster, in 1987, there was a peak of 1,210 samosely in the Zone (Mycio 2005, 184). Seventeen years on, in 2004, this number fell to around 300 people, mostly women, who were living in the Zone (Mycio 2005, 184). A recent study estimates that in 2018, this number has more than halved with 128 people remaining in the Zone (Baker 2019, 17). As I noted in the introduction to this chapter, samosely are given disproportionately high attention in Zone photography if one considers that they represent only a tiny share of people living in contaminated areas. Nonetheless, having been on the front line of several major conflicts, including “two world wars, one conventional war, a civil war, the Holocaust, plus two famines and three political purges, after which it became home to a Cold War bombing range” as K. Brown (2019, 4) points out, these elderly women should offer a rich source for those looking for models of survival in Tsing’s sense. In Chernobyl’s image-world, samosely are usually framed as rare examples of human resilience who, against the odds, appear to lead a self-determined life where no life was thought to be possible. How is this narrative of resilience shaped in Zone photography? Does it offer a different perspective onto the world, outside of narratives of progress, modernization, and individualization? Do samosely, perhaps, even offer an answer to the question of how to survive in the ruins of nuclear disaster? Again, it is worthwhile to examine dominant representations first. Let me use the example of the online photo series Chernobyl: Still Life in the Zone (2010) by photographer Rena Effendi. It consists of ten portraits of elderly women having returned to their houses in the Zone, a couple of images of their village, and ruin motifs in Pripyat. Except for the elderly women, there are no other humans in the photographs. They are represented as a self-sufficient community, following a traditional way of life cut off from the modern world. True to the title’s reference to the genre of still life, death is always present: there is a dead falcon hung up as a trophy against the grey winter sky; the dead body of a hog slaughtered for new year celebrations, and in another picture, its severed head leaving bloody marks on the snow-covered ground; leafless trees in a wintery land; ruins; the horns of shot deer on a string; a floor in Pripyat littered with gas masks; a pair of dried corncobs. It is against this omnipresence of death that these women are presented as models of human resilience.

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Another prominent motif deriving from the still life theme are cut flowers. The flowers in Effendi’s pictures are printed or stitched onto blankets and curtains, appear in a painted still life, are put in vases and on window sills, or, as in the case of the portrait of seventy-two-year-old Matrena Olifer, printed on one of those colorful cloths which women traditionally wear in this region. Unlike in a conventional still life, however, the flowers in Effendi’s portraits not only symbolize the transient nature of earthly goods and pursuits (if they do at all) but also refer to a distinctly national tradition. Floral ornaments, especially if stitched or printed on blankets or scarfs, are an important element of Ukrainian ‘peasant fashion’ which became popular as a national symbol in Ukraine’s struggle for sovereignty before it gained independence from Russia in the 1990s. As anthropologist Sarah D. Phillips (2004) notes, “peasant imagery . . . has long been a major facet of Ukrainian national identity” (175). Including many flower motifs in her portraits, Effendi’s pictures suggest a link between these women’s lifestyle and romanticized notions of the nation’s peasant past. Olifer, for example, is portrayed in her house in the village of Gornostaypol. Her face is framed by a headscarf showcasing the same red flowers that adorn a piece of cloth draped over a chair in the background. Left of the chair, a vase with a flower bouquet completes the picture. Except for the flowers and floral ornaments, the colors in the image are muted. Olifer wears black garments, accentuating her bright face and hands that stand out against the barely lit room. She looks healthy with her red cheeks which suggest that she has just been interrupted from physically demanding work. Her gaze is turned inward. Here, the ‘still life’ the series’ title stands for the quietness of rural life in the Zone, far away from the noise of towns and cities people were relocated. An important aspect in this narrative of resilience is bodily health. Another portrait in the series depicts Hanna Zavorotnya, a resident of the village of Zapavati who, as the caption attached to Effendi’s photographs tells me, was seventy-eight years old at the time the picture was taken (figure 2.4). Effendi shows her standing in front of a wooden shed holding a knife. In front of her lies the body of a dead pig. She looks directly into the camera, wearing a confident smile on her face. The caption informs the viewer that it was not her who slaughtered the pig (as the knife in her hand would lead you to believe), but her son who lives in a city and visited her for new year celebrations. Not only does this picture underline the bodily strength and well-being of Zavorotnya, who, apparently, is about to engage in the physically demanding work of gutting the pig, her son’s visit also indicates that family relations have not been disrupted by her return into the Zone. Life-supporting social and physical infrastructures, it seems, are still intact. Effendi represents samosely as survivors who chose to return to the Zone despite the lingering radiation in this heavily contaminated area. Everything

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Figure 2.4  Rena Effendi, Chernobyl: Still Life in the Zone, 2014, photograph. Hanna Zavorotnya (78 y.o.) helped to scrub and gut a pig that was butchered by her visiting son for the New Year holidays. Kapavati village, Chernobyl, Ukraine. December 2010. © Rena Effendi, courtesy of the artist.

in her images suggests that they do so successfully: they are able to live through the harsh winter, live off their own produce and even defy, it seems, radiation. Zavorotnya stands broad-shouldered with a knife in her hand. Her sturdy figure and confident smile suggest bodily health and determination. Similarly, Olifer with her rosy cheeks makes a healthy impression. Generally, the elderly women that Effendi portrayed do not look like radiation would have a negative impact (if any) on their lives. There is enough food to survive on, and the skills these women have learned from their ancestors, it seems, are enough to even defy the radiation in this area. How does this vision of traditional community life respond to the many challenges that this new radioactive state of being poses to those who are more susceptible to the damaging effects of radiation than these elderly women, like children or young adults? If the answer to this question is ‘with tradition,’ it is a tragic answer at best. The way in which Effendi and other

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photographers represent these women is beautiful and dignified. Yet, by ignoring those who suffer from radiation-related health conditions, economic hardship or the weak social infrastructure of the state, she also inevitably turns them into lightning rods in Beck’s sense: they become positive role models for resilience in a post-nuclear world, thus blinding the viewer to the hardships and uncertainties that this new radioactive state of being has brought upon many people. Worse even, while Beck’s lightning rods like lettuce or sandboxes are unsettling, because one cannot distinguish the ‘clean’ from the ‘contaminated’ without special gear, samosely have a voice that reassures the viewer that radiation does not harm. As one caption in Effendi’s series reads, quoting Olifer: “Why should I be afraid of radiation? It does not byte[sic]!” The problem as it appears to me, then, is not that Effendi presents a romanticized view of the samosely’s rural lifestyle, but that it functions as a role model for successfully living with Chernobyl’s consequences, because there is nothing in her images that prompts the viewer to doubt this conclusion. In Weber’s series one also encounters some of these elderly women. One of his images shows Ludmilla who came from the Donbas region in southeastern Ukraine to live in the Zone with her husband. She stands at her kitchen table, looking absent-mindedly out of the window (figure 2.5). She wears a patterned scarf loosely around her head, revealing some of her grey hair in the front, and a carefully buttoned lilac cardigan. She supports herself with both her hands on the table in front of her. They show deep wrinkles,

Figure 2.5  Donald Weber, Bastard Eden, Our Chernobyl, 2008, photograph. Ludmila. At least here the snow is white, said Ludmilla’s husband, an ex-coal miner from the Donbass. © Donald Weber, courtesy of the artist.

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suggesting a life of hard physical work. On the table, there is a glass with conserved fruit and a porcelain jug. Behind it two pairs of glasses are put neatly next to each other. The ornaments on the tablecloth are faded in some places. Her kitchen looks simple but clean. In the background, two white curtains with floral decoration let us a peep into the adjacent room. To the right a clock is mounted on the wall and a socket with a plug, suggesting that the house is connected to the local grid. Behind her, in the semi-shade, one can recognize a simple stove with a pot and a kettle on it, and what looks like the backrest of a sofa. Although the two images, Weber’s and Effendi’s, both use the motif of the samosel, they leave a very different impression on me. Weber’s image does not offer a counter-narrative to Effendi’s vision of a traditional community. Ludmilla’s kitchen looks tidy and simple, floral motifs decorate her doorway. These are elements that could feed into a romanticized view of the rural lifestyle she leads in the Zone. In addition, however, Weber included ‘modern’ elements that disrupt this reading like the plug in the socket in the background, a device that shows her reliance on modern infrastructure, the power grid, and thus signals her belonging to the modern world. Moreover, she appears much frailer than Zavorotnya. In her thick winter clothes and heavy boots, Zavorotnya makes a sturdy, square-shouldered impression that fits into the rough surrounding. Ludmilla, by contrast, is shown in one-quarter profile from the waist upward, her footing is obscured. Her body is slightly bent, her hands rest on the table that seems to give her support. Her face is turned away from the camera. Then, there is her undefined gaze, introducing a degree of ambivalence: Is she lonely? Is the ‘traditional’ life she leads as fulfilling as Effendi’s portraits make us believe? Is she at all able to follow the lifestyle of her ancestors, given her ties to the modern world? The ambiguity in the image that allows such questions to emerge is created by a visual strategy that has its roots in narratology and is known as ‘embedded focalization.’ Embedded focalization is the presentation of an external perspective through a character in the story. In her dissertation on amateur photography of priests, Ellen Tops (2001) shows that the viewer can be manipulated indirectly by characters in the image. Tops defines focalization in photography as the act of manipulating or steering (sturen) the viewer through the viewing subject(s) in the image (170). Formal strategies like perspective, framing and focus, as well as elements that are external to the image like image captions all contribute to a particular reading of the scene recorded in the image. But, Tops suggests, these may not be the most important interpretative strategies employed in a photograph. Discussing an image of a boy during mass, she illustrates how the choice of perspective and arrangement of characters in the image, including the highlighting of the boy’s face, makes the viewer see the church through the trusting eyes of the boy (rather than the

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eyes of the photographer). Hence, a photograph can offer a vision not only ‘from without’ (the omniscient gaze of the photographer), but also through the eyes of a character in the image that ‘ascends’ from the focalized object being looked at, to a focalizing subject whose interpretation of the recorded scene the viewer is inclined to follow. What is important for this strategy to work is that it remains hidden to the viewer. In other words, the viewer must believe to see ‘objective’ reality, rather than the photographer’s interpretation of reality, presented through the figure of the boy. In Tops example, thus, the boy becomes an embedded focalizer, steering the viewer’s interpretation of the scene without the viewer being aware of it. In Weber’s photograph, Ludmilla’s gaze focalizes the narrative in this image without framing Ludmilla herself openly as a focalizer. It creates a tension that emerges from within the visual dynamic of the image, a tension that is absent from Effendi’s portrait of Zavorotnya who faces the viewer. Ludmilla’s pensive gaze prompts questions as it stands in contrast to her neatly arranged kitchen, while Zavorotnya’s straight, confident look into the camera suggests an answer. At the level of viewing, this translates very directly into a different treatment of the page: In Weber’s portrait, Ludmilla’s gaze leads out of the image, raising the question what lies beyond it. In Effendi’s image, Zavorotnya looks into the camera, hence at the viewer, creating a closed circle that curbs my curiosity of a beyond. In this sense, unlike Effendi’s portrait, Weber’s portrait encourages the viewer to look further, to engage in the effort to consult other sources, starting with the images on the same page. Underneath Weber’s portrait of Ludmilla, the viewer finds an image of a table shot from above on which the leftovers of a meal lie scattered (figure 2.6). There are dirty bowls, cups, and cutlery, some of them broken and without an apparent order, a jug, an onion, an open package of flour or sugar, breadcrumbs, spoons, margarine, and plastic wrappings. The image does not show merely another table that differs from Ludmilla’s because it is messy. Being shot from a different perspective, it also stands in a formal contrast to the image above. With this play of perspective that characterizes his series, Weber translates the incomplete nature of the photographic image onto the space of the page. Moving the gaze down to the second image, the romanticized idea of country life as simple but plentiful, which is often connected to the motif of the samosel, gives way to a kind of poverty that critically links the question of food security to economic pressures. Indeed, the caption that the artist provided for this photograph suggests that Ludmilla and her husband moved into the Zone, because life in the Donbass region became either too expensive or unbearable (“At least here the snow is white, said Ludmilla’s husband, an ex-coal miner from the Donbass”). Thus, the formal tension between the images is instructive for how Weber not only offers a different,

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Figure 2.6  Donald Weber, Bastard Eden, Our Chernobyl, 2008, photograph. Breakfast, or lunch. Time is fluid around the Exclusion Zone. © Donald Weber, courtesy of the artist.

less common representation of a samosel, but at the same time provides visual cues that point to its own representational limits. In his discussion of the four Auschwitz photographs, Didi-Huberman (2008) observes that their readability . . . and thus their potential role in providing knowledge of the process in question—can only be constructed by making them resonate with, and showing their difference from other sources, other images, and other testimonies. The knowledge value could not be intrinsic to one image alone. (120)

The readability and epistemic value of photographs, in other words, depends on the context that one constructs around them. The resulting “montageimage” is only of value if it does not draw foregone conclusions but adds to the complexity of the historical imagination to which it refers. The images in Effendi’s series can be said to work toward one conclusion: that these women are resilient because of the traditional lifestyle they follow. A similar claim could be made for the ruin photography of the Wilsons: it warns against the fallibility of modern technology (while, at the same time, conveying the soothing image of nature’s return). Their aesthetic approach, in other words, does not allow for a multiplicity of meanings. Weber, by contrast, allows for divergent readings, by framing the photographic image as a montage. In Weber’s sequence of images, Ludmilla’s neatly organized kitchen is less a symbol of confident control over her environment than an attempt to exert control where no control is possible. As Mycio (2005) observes:

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Poverty forces the vast majority of zone residents to grow and gather nearly all that they eat, which gives them most of their radiation doses. They consume cesium and strontium with vegetables, fruits, meat, and fish caught in zone waterways. (194)

The same is true, she continues, of the several hundred thousand people who continue to live on the highly contaminated lands outside the zone, where radioactivity is between 15 and 40 curies per kilometer . . . and where radionuclide levels in milk and meat exceed permissible limits from 5 to 15 times. In such regions, which should have been evacuated but haven’t been, poverty-stricken fatalists have the highest internal doses, while people who feel in control of their lives and who have the resources to buy uncontaminated food can reduce their Chernobyl doses to virtually zero. (194)

The numbers that Mycio cites in this quote challenge the romanticized vision of a traditional way of life, which in this region, includes a diet based on homegrown vegetables and mushrooms, berries and game foraged from the surrounding forests. Sociologist Olga Kuchinskaya (2014) shows in her study of contaminated communities in Belarus, moreover, that exposure levels are often not a choice made by autonomously acting individuals, but the result of a complex set of factors many of which are beyond their powers. She notes that a view often endorsed by the authorities is that people living in contaminated areas are responsible for their doses, because most of the exposure happens through food intake. Turning the table, she adds, “people make their own doses, but not in circumstances of their own choosing” (39). There is a “unique intertwining of radiological, geographic, economic, cultural, infrastructural and other factors” that leads to whole communities being exposed to dangerous levels of radiation (39). In sum, if samosely are taken to be representative of people living on contaminated land, which their overrepresentation in photography suggest they are, the implications are problematic: The focus on samosely and their self-chosen return ignores those who are forced for other (mostly economic) reasons to live on contaminated land, inside and outside the Zone. They present a large-scale technological disaster, in other words, as a matter of personal choice: one can choose either to be relocated or to be exposed. This is problematic, because it plays into the narrative of self-chosen exposure that, according to Kuchinskaya, is readily appropriated by some local authorities to avoid more costly improvements in the state’s social infrastructure. In Bastard Eden, Weber makes an explicit reference to Ukraine’s state politics in a second portrait of Evgeniy, the fourteen-year-old boy whom he

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pictured earlier exposing the large scar over his chest. In this image, the boy appears next to a calendar sheet from 2006 that shows a portrait of Ukrainian politician Yulia Tymoshenko (figure 2.7). At the time, Tymoshenko was touring the country in a bid to win the 2006 Ukrainian parliamentary election. She looks directly into the camera; with her hands she cups a small heap of earth with a seedling springing from it. She is dressed in a white turtleneck sweater and wears her hair braided over her head. Her hairstyle is important in this portrait. Having been developed in the early 2000s to renew her image, the braid became her trademark ever since. It mimics the traditional fashion of Ukrainian countrywomen and thus frames her as a member of the ordinary folk. Her braid hence functions as a nationalist symbol, building trust by mobilizing romanticized notions of Ukraine’s peasant past—a past many Ukrainians take pride in (Phillips 2004, 175).17 Tymoshenko gained international recognition for her success in the energy business, earning her the nickname ‘Energy Princess.’ She is also known for her fierce support of nuclear energy to increase Ukraine’s independence from Russian gas. This combination of folk symbols and her pro-nuclear attitude adds an ironic layer to Weber’s image. The boy, Evgeniy, is shown sitting at a table having a simple meal. His eyes are fixed on the bowl in front of him. In the context of the thematic section in which the image appears—“Mothers & Sons”—Tymoshenko’s appearance suggests trust, transparency and motherly

Figure 2.7  Donald Weber, Bastard Eden, Our Chernobyl, 2008, photograph. Evgeniy, 14, eats his lunch of potatoes and meat while Julia Timoshenko runs for president. Evgeniy moved with his mother and sister and brother from a village outside Kiev to a village on the edge of the Exclusion Zone. A year after moving in, contracted heart disease. © Donald Weber, courtesy of the artist.

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care. She metaphorically features as a surrogate mother, watching caringly over the boy having his meal. As I mentioned earlier, Evgeniy’s scar points to his heart disease that he contracted after he moved with his family into the Zone. In the light of Tymoshenko’s pro-nuclear stance, the image of the caring mother thus turns into bitter irony, especially when considering that most internal contamination results from the intake of contaminated foodstuff. Chances are that the boy either contracted the heart disease because of exposure to radiation released by Chernobyl. Even if this is not the case, it means that an already sick boy is exposed to even greater health risks as a consequence of living in a country that has suffered immensely from the downsides of nuclear power. Given Tymochenko’s political success as a prime minister, the mother in this image becomes a metaphor for the state, while the boy could be said to represent her ‘bastard’ child (to use the series title) that she doesn’t want to admit to. What supports this interpretation is the fact that Tymoshenko’s eyes are not fixed on the boy, but address the viewer of the poster, and by extension, of Weber’s image. It is the metaphorical mother that sacrificed her son—some of the most vulnerable citizens, children—for profit, eating possibly contaminated food due to poverty. In conclusion, one thing that emerges from this comparison of Effendi’s and Weber’s photographic series on the level of practice is that Weber forces the beholder to consider the context of a photograph. The new way of seeing nuclear disaster that I suggest Weber offers in Bastard Eden is precisely about this contextual approach, this ‘looking around’ on the page and in the archives, and the ethical attitude that it demands from the beholder. Therefore, to answer the questions I posed at the beginning of this section, perhaps samosely do not offer a good model for surviving in the ruins of nuclear disaster. Rather than being stuck with these unproductive role models, however, what Weber’s photography offers is a method to explore and comprehend the complexity of this state of survival. I would like to call this method with reference to Tsing’s “arts of noticing” a photographic practice of noticing. Let me explain what I mean with that in the final section. 2.6 THE ART OF LIVING IN RUINS Perhaps the most crucial aspect of Tsing’s model of collaborative survival is that it functions within the system, not outside of it. It is a response to the question how we can “live inside this regime of the human and still exceed it” (19). Her Matsutake pickers are not dropouts, they do not live some desirable social utopia (or undesirable dystopia) outside of capitalism. Like everyone else, they follow and are vulnerable to the rhythms of capitalism, the rhythms of supply and demand and exploitation. What distinguishes them from others,

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is that they have learned to make money of what were considered to be wastelands, left barren by large-scale capitalist exploitation. Zone inhabitants usually figure as victims, refugees, or self-supporters, but rarely as businesspeople. On his trip, Weber actively sought out those who made a living of what the Zone had to offer. There are scrap metal dealers and boar hunters. Unlike Effendi’s community of samosely, these people seem to do business rather than only satisfying their own needs of consumption. In other words, they have found a way to overcome, or better, to side-track the deadlock of promise and ruination. One of the images shows a poorly lit shed with a skinned boar is dangling in the center (figure 2.8). Its body is dramatically stretched as it is hung up on one of the hind legs. Its bowels protrude from its open belly. Around the body stand two men in camouflage jackets and caps. Due to the dim light, some areas in the picture remain dark; those which are lit up are packed with tools, shelves, and the bodies of two men in the foreground. A lot is going on in this image. Both men appear to be in the middle of something. The man on the left is talking on the phone. He is shown from the side in medium closeup holding a mobile phone, the action covering most of his face. Moreover, being slightly out of focus and cut off by the image frame, he seems to have just walked into the scene. The focus lies on the man to his right. He is shown frontal on in a medium shot while having a drink with his back turned to the

Figure 2.8  Donald Weber, Bastard Eden, Our Chernobyl, 2008, photograph. February, 2006. Gutting a wild boar after a hunt in the woods. The legal hunting season is two months in the fall, September and October. Many residents say the best hunting is in the winter. This was some of the best tasting meat I have ever had. © Donald Weber, courtesy of the artist.

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boar’s carcass. The fingers holding the shot glass are bloodstained and cover most of his face, similar to the other man in the picture. He appears to be in the middle of gutting the boar that hangs between the two men. For me, this image is among the most evocative in the series, which has to do with the boar and the way this animal is presented. Boar meat has made international headlines, after it was found to show particularly high levels of radiocesium after the Chernobyl disaster. The reason for this is that the diet of a boar consists of a considerable part of mushrooms and truffles, plants that are highly absorbent of this isotope. Most of the internal contamination in animals and humans result from the consumption of contaminated foodstuff. Looking at the skinned boar, I wonder on whose plate this meat will end up. Perhaps the local community? Food and drinking play a prominent role throughout Bastard Eden: there are images of men drinking and children eating; images in which food is simply present like the jar of fruit in the portrait of Ludmilla, or the messy breakfast table beneath it. But it could also very well be that the meat is sold on informal markets and ends up in Kiev and beyond. The dimly lit scene and informal setting seems to confirm my assumption that the slaughter happens in the rather murky waters of the informal economy that sprawls in response to the failing welfare system. Geographer Thom Davies and sociologist Abel Polese (2015) predict that in the Ukraine informal economies will grow in the future as a strategy of what Tsing would call a form of collaborative survival: As the state reduces the size of Chernobyl’s welfare and benefit system, which already falls well short of protecting its exposed citizens, it will become even more necessary for informal mechanisms to step in where welfare fails, and circumvent the consequences of de facto state abandonment (39). The trade with “risky foodstuffs from restricted areas” such as game, fish, mushrooms and scrap metal, is, I assume, one of the forms these “informal mechanisms” (40). An explicit reference to the trade of illegal goods from the Zone is Stalker, the second part of the Post Atomic series that follows two smugglers through the ruins of Pripyat. Notably, both the men’s faces are obscured in this image, dehumanizing them in a strange, mechanistic way. They appear like henchmen in a system that is as obscure and unaccountable as these portraits. Of course, there is no way for the viewer to find out what these men were really up to (except, perhaps, asking the photographer). It is in moments of exploration, of tentative readings like this, that Weber’s photographic practice suggests a cultural viewing practice. I call this practice, with reference to Tsing, a photographic practice of noticing, of looking around rather than ahead: I am prompted to follow some of the clues provided in the images, to bring a frame of reference to it, and then to stop and ‘look around’ to see how this trailing and trailing off might have advanced my understanding of post-atomic life in the Zone.

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Following these trails is precarious in the sense that the answers they evoke are not set and might change when they cross with other trails in the process. Indeed, going back, looking at the images that precede this one, I realize that these are probably the same men have seen in an earlier picture without obscured faces and in bright daylight. The possibility of an illegal activity is suddenly called into question. Just as each image in Weber’s series claims a certain aesthetic autonomy, each sets out its own trail for the viewer to follow. The heavy focus on Chernobyl’s social, political and economic context in this chapter is partly a result of this. Evoking and then revoking certain stereotypes, the viewer is thus prompted to account for both possible continuities and discontinuities between a concept (the poacher) and the singularity of the situation depicted in the photograph (two men gutting a boar). In DidiHuberman’s terms, Weber’s image of the boar hunters refuses to become a symbol, or a mere fact; it forces the beholder to account for the messy reality in-between. What Weber adds to this, as I stated earlier in my discussion of Chernobyl children, is that the ethics of the photographic image belongs not only to the photographer, or the image, but also to the beholder. I am forced to develop an ethical attitude toward what is shown, which in this case means to reflect on the implications of ascribing someone the dubious business of trading risky foodstuff. Yet, two questions remain: on whose dish this meat will end up and if it is ‘safe’ for consumption? Instruments to measure radiation are strikingly absent from the whole series. The loss of sovereignty to sense and hence to assess a danger in the atomic age that Beck describes, seems to fully hold sway here. In Bastard Eden, Our Chernobyl, nuclear disaster has inscribed itself into the social, political, and economic system. It has truly become a state of being, which also means that the risk of contamination potentially loses ‘visibility’ as it steps back behind other challenges like poverty. Both as production and viewing method, Weber’s photographic practice of noticing is effectively a form of muddling, because it engages with a messy, unpredictable reality while retaining a (self-)reflexive dimension. Yet, if I take Tsing’s use of the term seriously, I have to admit that ‘noticing’ is not entirely consistent with Allenby and Sarewitz’s ‘muddling forward.’ Tsing introduces the epistemic strategy of noticing to overcome the dead-end of modern ways of seeing and knowing the world. According to Tsing, we were “raised on dreams of progress and modernization” that for many have stopped making sense (21). The trope of progress pretends to explain the world both in success and failure, making it hard to imagine alternatives. Beck is invested in this progress narrative too, when he suggests that we can’t live autonomous lives anymore. Ruination, Tsing argues, is the other side of promise, leading either to an abandonment of hope, or shifts one’s attention to other sites of promise and ruin. However, inspiration may be drawn from the

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margins of society, from preindustrial lifestyles “from foraging to stealing” (22) to develop alternative models and methods of engaging with the novel conditions produced by technological disaster. It is not that this will save us, Tsing is very clear on that, “but it might open our imaginations” (19). Thus, the way in which Tsing uses the notion of ‘noticing’ stands in conflict with Allenby and Sarewitz’s notion of ‘muddling forward’ that I chose to develop in this book. In her critique of the concept of the Anthropocene, Tsing suggests that it “both evokes this bundle of aspirations, which one might call the modern human conceit, and raises the hope that we might muddle beyond it,” which for her is a false hope (19, my emphasis). Tsing does not refer specifically to Allenby and Sarewitz’s take on the term, but there are, undeniably, similarities between her “muddling beyond” and their “muddling forward.” It is the notion of the anthropos, of the arrogance of humanity in general and modern man in particular to exploit the earth to a point where it becomes unlivable, and the promise it contains to “muddle beyond it,” that Tsing identifies as part of the problem: “This ‘anthropo-’ blocks attention to patchy landscapes, multiple temporalities, and shifting assemblages of humans and nonhumans: the very stuff of collaborative survival. . . . a terrain it refuses to acknowledge” (20). The belief to be able to “muddle beyond” that, according to Tsing is contained in the anthropos of the Anthropocene, would thus stand in the way of finding new ways of dealing with the ruins of capitalism, instead of creating the open, critical-pragmatic space that Allenby and Sarewitz envision when they refer to muddling. Acknowledging Tsing’s critique, I would like to suggest that Allenby and Sarewitz’s notion needs some adjustment. Perhaps muddling should not be understood in a temporal sense of getting further, implying progress or at least a progression, but in a spatial sense of pausing and looking around in order to be truly attentive of the specific condition one is faced with and be open to reflect on this condition. Taking Tsing’s considerations into account, it becomes clear that what the Wilsons and Effendi are offering is a temporal approach to photography, a narrative that prescribes a progression of events to which there can be a ‘before’ (in Effendi’s case the notion of tradition) and an ‘after’ (in Wilsons’ case the idea of redemption). Weber is not interested in a narrative, that is, in the temporal aspect of photography. Instead, as I have shown throughout this chapter, he explores and pushes the boundaries of photography as a spatial medium at the various sites of the photographic image: (1) its surface by exploring blur’s double negativity (technical and epistemic), (2) the site of production by situating photography as social practice, and (3) reception when he prompts the viewer to look around and take into account the context of an image. Interestingly, despite the hidden temporality in Allenby and Sarewitz’s notion of muddling forward, Weber’s focus on space is entirely consistent with their line of reasoning: approaching a condition in temporal

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terms means looking for some kind of synthesis, for a way to overcome that problem. Approaching a condition in spatial terms means to explore it as a given situation, to which we need to relate—epistemically and, importantly, as Weber shows, ethically. NOTES 1. The Red Forest is a wooded area located in the Zone of Exclusion which acquired its name from the ginger-brown color of pine trees which died following the absorption of high levels of radiation from the exploded Chernobyl reactor in 1986. 2. In his essay, Toyosaki quotes a report from the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation that was released in the year 2000 according to which atmospheric nuclear tests alone have released about “three million petabecquerels of radioactive fallout which has dispersed around the globe” (158). From this, he concludes that “the term hibakusha applies not only to people in the vicinity of nuclear test sites, but to the entire human race” (158). 3. This is not to say that everyone is equally vulnerable to exposure. As Toyosaki (2015) clarifies, “Of all people who have been hurt by the nuclear cycle, those who have suffered most are indigenous peoples” who directly live off the land (161). Other relevant studies like the ones by sociologist Olga Kuchinskaya (2014, 2012) clearly show that the risk of exposure is unevenly distributed across different societal groups, and that it is important to draw lessons from this observation. In her study on communities in contaminated areas in Belarus, for example, Kuchinskaya (2014) found a strong correlation between poverty and a significantly higher risk to be exposed to harmful levels of radiation (39). 4. The absence of large-scale epidemiological studies has not only been noticed by critical historians like Kate Brown (2019). The international scientific community has called for them consistently over the past decades, but could not attract enough funding. Hence, what we have is a number of small-scale studies on animal populations in the zone and a few suggestive but inconclusive studies of human individuals outside the zone. Indeed, ‘counting’ Chernobyl, and more recently, Fukushima survivors is complicated by what Eric Cazdyn calls radioactivity’s “perverted temporality” (245). Commenting on the odd situation he experienced in some Japanese medical clinics where hibakusha from both bombings and the Fukushima nuclear disaster sit right next to each other awaiting treatment, he writes: “the illness and ultimately our deaths swing from short term to long term, from acute to terminal or chronic, and back again” (245). Anthropologist Adriana Petryna (2002) calls this cynically the “nonpeopled approach” to Chernobyl in science (xxvii). “It is ironic,” she writes, “that we have better knowledge about recovering ecosystems of the Chernobyl dead zone—where a herd of rare and ancient Przewalski’s horses now run wild, where the decrease of certain birds’ brain sizes has been observed, and where variability of species’ response to radiation has been gleaned—than we do about recovering people and human conditions on the ground” (xxvii). The Przewalski’s horse is the model example used to support the image of the Zone’s flourishing nature. Several dozen

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individuals of this endangered species had been introduced to the zone in 1998 as it was nearly extinct in the wild. 5. Today, following Masco’s writings on nuclear landscapes, we might call the experience that Beck describes ‘uncanny.’ In his book Nuclear Borderlands from 2006, Masco coins the term of the ‘nuclear uncanny’ (293) to describe the experience of inhabiting a radioactive landscape in the present. For Masco, the experience is uncanny because it calls two basic premises of Western thinking into question: the linear relationship of cause and effect in time, and the impossibility of separating the body from its environment in space. 6. The conversation from which I took this quote can be read here: https://mocoloco​.com​/in​-conversation​-with​-eepmon​-shimpei​-takada​-analog​-cameraless​-photographer/ (last accessed August 2021). 7. In his contribution to the edited collection Through Post-Atomic Eyes, Masco (2020) makes a very similar argument with respect to the visual politics of the atomic bomb. With his concept of “nuclear flashblindness” (106), he suggests that the proliferation and popularization of mushroom cloud imagery in American culture was figuratively and literally blinding civilians to the serious health implications of the bomb. The spectacle of the bomb that was created with this kind of imagery produced—just like the physiological blindness that occurs when the flash of an atomic explosion hits the retina of an observer—a collective blindness and created gaps and silences in public narratives regarding the dangers of nuclear energy (90–91, 106). This also links to Masco’s notion of hypervisibility (the omnipresence of mushroom cloud imagery) that renders parts of bomb program invisible. As I contend in this chapter, this representational strategy used by the nuclear and nuclearized state is continued in representations of the post-nuclear state. 8. I chose the phrase ‘claimed to be understood’ on purpose. In fact, it is not even known how much radioactive fuel has remained inside the ruined reactor. As geographer Thom Davies and sociologist Abel Polese (2015) argue, the new safe confinement that was slid over the old confinement, the crumbling concrete structure that is called ‘sarcophagus,’ contributes to render Chernobyl invisible. As such, it is part of a larger political process that they have identified as a “move within Ukraine and beyond to rebrand the catastrophe from an ongoing process to a bounded and fixed event in late-Socialism” (38–39). 9. In a critical response to K. Brown’s (2019) book, environmental scientist Jim T. Smith (2020) reminds us that the amount of radiation released during Cold War atomic testing is much higher than what Chernobyl released. However, he argues, this does not mean that individuals will suffer from its consequences. The individual dose is still very low and unlikely to have an effect on the body. The argumentation that everyone is potentially exposed can thus be misleading since it implies that exposure results in suffering. Yet, scientific studies on the effects of exposure to lowlevel radiation over longer periods of time are not conclusive and, given their need to legitimate the continued use of nuclear power despite its proven risks, nuclear states have a large interest in keeping it that way. Since this is an ongoing debate, I choose to follow K. Brown who (as Smith claims) possibly dramatizes the consequences, because I rather be prepared for the worse than risk underestimating them.

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10. Sociologist Philip Stone (2013) develops a similar argument in the context of the touristic exploitation of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. He claims that Zone photography turns Chernobyl into a ‘heterotopia’ with the result that it becomes increasingly fictionalized, or at least set apart from everyday reality, as if it belongs to a different world (79). 11. Despite its rural character, the Pripyat marshes have a long and troubled history ridden by wars, political conflicts and poverty that led to the immiseration of the local peasant population. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster that contaminated large parts of the region is just the most recent in a long series of conflicts. 12. For a more detailed exploration of this instrumental use of hypervisibility in the context of the US bomb project, see Masco (2020). 13. As K. Brown (2019) specifies, “[the] rate of thyroid cancer among children in Ukraine has risen at least tenfold since the Chernobyl disaster (Shcherbak 1989, 47–48). In some areas in Belarus, rates of thyroid cancer in children were 200 times that associated with the normal ‘sporadic’ incidence (Gray 2002:58)” (167). The nongovernmental aid organization Chernobyl Children International suggest on their website as of December 2020 that “there has been a 200 percent increase in birth defects and a 250 percent increase in congenital birth deformities since 1986. Moreover, children living in the contaminated areas are expected to possess ‘genetic markers’ whose long-term effects are still unknown, and which might be passed on to the next generation.” 14. Many photographers, from Ukraine and abroad, have traced Chernobyl’s legacy most emblematically in those small toxic bodies. They feature not only in brochures of international aid organizations but have become aesthetic objects to be looked at in horror in glossy coffee-table books. The illustrated Magnum volume Chernobyl Legacy by New York-based photojournalist Paul Fusco, is a good example for this aestheticization. It contains black-and-white photographs of mostly children and babies that he took during his visits to hospitals, orphanages and mental asylums in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. In this brutal account of how radiation messes with human bodies, young children with visible deformations and tumors stare into the camera while sitting in a wheelchair or on a mattress or held by a female caretaker or family member. 15. Masco (2006) suggests to approach people like those portrayed by Weber as ‘mutants’ in the biological sense, because their bodies or the bodies of their parents were biologically altered by the exposure to radiation. The mutant, according to Masco, is a fitting concept to describe the altered biology of anyone inhabiting a nuclear landscape like the Zone in the present, because it accounts for the nonlinear and often delayed effects of genetic mutation that sometimes only become evident in the following generation or generations (301). Magdalena Stawkowski (2016) shows how in the case of the rural population around the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site in Kazakhstan, today the label of the mutant also works as a way of positive identification: Villagers would “think of themselves as biologically transformed but not disabled” (144). 16. The term samosel literally translates to “self-settler,” but there is disagreement about the precise meaning of the term. Sometimes those who returned after the

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government or local administration had given them permission, are not referred to as samosely, because they did so legally. Since I am interested here in the samosel as a motif of Chernobyl’s image-world, existing next to other motifs like the Chernobyl child or the Stalker, I refer in this chapter to all elderly settlers or returnees in the Zone, whether they are merely tolerated or got official permission to live there, as samosely. 17. As Phillips (2004) points out, the contamination of large areas of agricultural land by fallout from Chernobyl was framed by some as a colonial attack from Soviet Russia, a narrative serving “to legitimate Ukrainians assertions of national sovereignty” (176) during the glasnost period. Chernobyl was thus culturally appropriated by Ukraine to serve nationalist claims. In that sense, to Ukrainians, Tymoshenko’s pro-nuclear stance does not form a contradiction to her recourse to folk-fashion as Chernobyl was perceived as a foreign attack that had little to do with nuclear power as such.

Chapter 3

The Art to Remain Exposed

In his short book After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, published in French in 2012 as one of the first philosophical responses outside of Japan to the 2011 triple disaster, the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (2014) suggests that we are exposed to a “catastrophe of meaning” (8). By this he means that social relations have been reshaped by modern technology in such a way that any disaster response inevitably results in an increase of social, technological and economic complexity and interdependence, instead of enabling a denouement, solution or catharsis as the term katastrophē (“to overturn”) promises. Nancy vaguely characterizes the experience of this annihilation of meaning as a kind of “stupor” that befalls him in the face of disaster. Instead of overcoming this feeling by trying to fix this rift that has opened with Fukushima, Nancy implores, “let us remain exposed, and let us think about what is happening to us” (8). What is happening, according to Nancy, is that Fukushima is not only the product of poor decision-making by a handful of individuals and organizations that can be held accountable for what happened, and whose replacement would, in turn, prevent future disasters. Instead, it is the product of “our technologized world,” a world that he characterizes as an “interdependent totality” in which relations only ever intensify no matter how (self-)destructive the results (31). What Nancy urges his readers to do, then, is not to merely clean up the rubble and return to ‘business as usual.’ Continuing the critical tradition of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s modernism, he asks to use the momentary rupture in the fabric of meaning that Fukushima has caused to reflect on the suicidal logic that stands behind it. According to Lyotard (1984), this logic is a system-logic, sneaked in by the mediating function of technology across all spheres of life. In his influential essay The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, which was 93

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originally published in French in 1979, Lyotard diagnoses a fundamental shift in social relations in the second half of the twentieth century. He argues that with regulatory functions being increasingly entrusted to machines since the 1950s, social relations began to work toward improving the performance of the system, rather than to consolidate a certain ideology or set of values as it was the case up until then. The new value that holds society together is thus efficiency, which strictly speaking is not a value (like freedom, prosperity, or even amassing wealth are) but a function. The shift that occurred with the technologization of social functions is thus a shift in kind, not in scale, having far-reaching implications for the way society works. For Nancy, Fukushima is the ultimate confirmation that this shift in social relations is self-destructive. The only katastrophē, the only ‘turning,’ he can identify occurs on the level of meaning, because it is in the loss of meaning that the suicidal system logic of techno-modernity is revealed. Today, with Japan’s return to nuclear power, Nancy’s claim to remain exposed to this catastrophe of meaning appears more urgent than ever. Lyotard, writing in 1979, already observed that in techno-modernity oppositional modes of resistance, even if they cause momentary system breakdown, ultimately lead to a validation of the system. He goes so far to claim that disruptions are necessary to the system’s functioning because it allows it to adjust to new challenges (15). More than four decades after Lyotard wrote these lines, and almost one decade after the triple nuclear meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, Japan’s Prime minister Shinzo Abe’s persistence with nuclear power despite massive public protests seems to prove Lyotard (and Nancy) right (Silverstein 2017).1 To be sure, Nancy’s call to remain exposed is not a call for action, but for critique. What Nancy asks from his readers—amid unfolding nuclear disaster—is not to simply re-act to the urgency of the physical disaster in the hope to return as soon as possible to some pre-disaster condition. It is precisely this pre-disaster condition, and the implied escape from the disruptive present, that Nancy considers to be fatal. So, what he suggests is to pause and reflect on the nature of the problem instead of rushing to a solution that will cover-up the rift in the present. In this sense, his call to remain exposed emerges from a similar critique of the modern progress narrative that Tsing (2015) voices in her book The Mushroom at the End of the World, which I discussed in the previous chapter in the context of Chernobyl. Nancy (2014), too, asks his readers to acknowledge the present “that we want to ignore,” which ‘we’ allegedly do by “escaping toward a future” or “toward a past of nostalgia” (38). However, unlike Tsing, Nancy is not interested in the question of how to survive in this ruinous present that she accepts being the new status quo, but asks how to change the system that produced it in the fear that there might

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be no future at all if things continue as they are. Accordingly, the ‘after’ in Nancy’s book title After Fukushima does not evoke a future in the sense of a temporal progression of moving on (a streak I already identified in the previous chapter in the notion of ‘muddling forward’). For Nancy, Fukushima precisely challenges this logic. The ‘after’ is hence not to be read as a statement, but as a question: “Is there an after?” he wonders, “Is there anything that follows? Are we still headed somewhere?” (15). Fukushima is framed as a moment of radical disorientation that evacuates any fantasy of posteriority, that is, of a future that logically evolves from the present. To return to the spatial metaphor that I employed in the previous chapter, it is a moment in which the path ahead is obscured, compelling one to stop and question the reason of one’s journey. Nancy asks his readers to take the experience of stumbling seriously and remain exposed to it long enough to figure out what it means, instead of continuing down the trodden path as soon as the dust settles. A question that thus needs to be addressed in light of both Nancy’s request to his readers and the political developments in Japan and beyond is how to remain exposed to the catastrophe of meaning? And, taking it a little further, how to turn the stupor that Nancy associates with the experience of nuclear disaster into a tool for societal change? To philosopher Krzysztof Ziarek (2004), the answer to these questions is art. Art, especially the historical avant-garde, for him becomes a transformative force where conventional modes of resistance fail, because it offers an alternative to the kind of manipulative power that has come to determine social relations in technocapitalism. Ziarek’s claim is intriguing not so much because it frames art as a transformative force (a framing which remains unsatisfying in key respects as I argue below), but because it provides a conceptual vocabulary to analyze art’s role in Nancy’s critical enterprise of remaining exposed to the catastrophe of meaning that Fukushima reveals. Central to Ziarek’s argument is the concept of ‘technicity’ which he refers to as the “techno-logic” of power in the modern age (38). Following continental philosopher Martin Heidegger’s ontological approach to technology (technology as a tool that does not exist separate from being, but determines being), Ziarek refers to technicity as a distinctly modern mode of revealing the world through technology that leads to “a greater penetrative and formative reach of power” (4).2 Specifically, technicity is described as a matter of advancing information technologies that help the capitalist mode of production by translating reality and experience “into data, codes, and programs in the service of globalisation and the accumulation of capital” (2). Digital technologies and genetic engineering are prime examples for this development in their ability to translate, produce and manipulate experience and even living organisms, often to commercial ends.

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According to Ziarek, art, especially the historical avant-garde, has found a way to resist technicity without being absorbed into its play of power. This is a daring claim, given that Ziarek, like Lyotard, asserts that the technocapitalist system is ubiquitous: technicity pervades all levels of life in technocapitalist society. Nothing, not even art, is exempt from its performative reach. Where commercial websites, for instance, use modernist aesthetics to attract clients, the essence of aesthetics and thus of art as a primarily aesthetic phenomenon appear fundamentally consonant with technicity. Yet, Ziarek insists that art offers the possibility of transformation—a claim that I think deserves critical attention in any debate on art’s social relevance in information society. According to Ziarek, unlike conventional forms of resistance, art poses not an alternative power (in the form of an opposition) but an alternative to power, an alternative mode of relating, free from the “paradigms of production, mobilization, and technical manipulation at the core of contemporary operations of power” (3). In this sense, art is literally powerless, that is, it performs outside the (techno)logic of power, enabling in a paradoxical twist an alternative configuration of power relations. It is in this paradoxical capacity of art that Ziarek sees “the possibility of a critical turn, even transformation, in the play of power” governing society (4, my emphasis). Framing art as a transformative force in the sense that it posits the possibility of a redistribution of power relations, Ziarek provides a platform for Nancy’s critical project to remain exposed. However, his theory remains unsatisfying in two respects: First, by arguing that art’s ‘forcework’ (the redistribution of power relations within the artistic experience) as he calls it, remains unrepresentable as it operates beneath power relations, to my mind Ziarek mystifies the actual ‘work’ that art is doing. To counteract this mystification, the readings I offer in this chapter will be helped by other sources. Specifically, I develop Nancy’s (2007) concept of ‘resonance’ in the section ‘Re-Volt’ to describe art’s aesthetic redistribution of power relations. Second, Ziarek’s theory remains unsatisfying with respect to the question of how art’s critical force can become the social force that he claims it to be. Speaking of art’s resistance as a “silent revolt” (188), I wonder, how does art regain its voice in society? In search of answers, this chapter discusses two artworks that respond to the Fukushima disaster and each grapple in their own way with the question of art’s transformative force. The first is a film essay tracing the cultural origins of the disaster; the second is an example of activist art that was performed at the site of disaster and went viral on the internet. The fact that these two works employ very different platforms to engage with the Fukushima disaster allows me to approach the question of how to remain exposed to the catastrophe of meaning also as a question of the medium in which power relations are articulated. To prepare the ground for this discussion, the following section, elaborates what makes

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the Fukushima disaster a technicist disaster, setting it apart from a man-made catastrophe caused by technological failure. 3.1 A TECHNICIST DISASTER It began with a strong earthquake of 9.0 magnitude on the Richter scale that had its epicenter under the ocean floor near the east coast of Japan’s largest island Honshu. The earthquake itself did not damage the buildings of the Fukushima nuclear power station, but caused an automatic shutdown of its active reactors and destroyed a tower which supported power lines so that the plant was cut off from the external electricity supply. What made things escalate was that about forty-six minutes later, a fifteen-meter-high tsunami triggered by the earthquake flooded the power plant’s emergency diesel generators. This caused a loss of cooling water in the reactors as the pumps running on external power supplies stopped working, which resulted in three nuclear meltdowns and three hydrogen explosions in Units 1, 2, and 3 between March 12 and 15. It took more than a year until the Fukushima nuclear disaster was officially recognized as a man-made disaster. In July 2012, a report by independent investigators was presented to the Japanese government and TEPCO which argues that the reactor failures are man-made and could have been prevented with better safety regulation and supervision by an independent commission. It was thus officially acknowledged that the escalation of events in March 2011 was not caused by the tsunami, but by technical flaws in the power plant’s design, poor decision-making on the part of TEPCO, and the lack of independent control bodies to check on the safety of the power plant (The National Diet of Japan 2012). In short, the tsunami was not the sole problem; human miscalculation was. With the help of Nancy’s and Ziarek’s analysis of the current social condition, this distinction can be made even more precise. Fukushima is not merely a man-made or technological disaster but is a result of techno-capitalism. To borrow from Ziarek, Fukushima may best be described as a technicist disaster. This means, Fukushima not only involved technology and is mediated by technology but was caused by relations that follow the manipulative logic of techno-power. In After Fukushima, Nancy (2014) goes back to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which also triggered a tsunami that together destroyed almost the whole city of Lisbon and adjoining areas, to make the point that already back then the idea of a ‘natural disaster’ was challenged. It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau writing to Voltaire in 1756 who made the remark “that it was hardly nature who assembled twenty-thousand houses of six or seven stories” and that with a different city layout “the losses would have been fewer or perhaps none

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at all” (4). Already then, Nancy argues, we see that natural catastrophes are considered “no longer separable from their technological, economic, and political implications or repercussions” (4). It is hence not nature or divine providence that Rousseau makes responsible for the catastrophe, but the manmade unsafe architecture of the city. For Nancy, the difference between Lisbon and Fukushima is not that Fukushima is man-made, according to Nancy’s reading both are. The difference lies in their consequences. What has changed is that, today, a comparatively simple solution like rebuilding the city with a lower building density, is not applicable anymore. All efforts to reimagine or reconstruct a city would inexorably lead to “an increase in technological, social, and economic complexity and interdependence or toward the problems and obstacles raised by complexities already in place and the necessities they impose” (5). This is because in the current techno-capitalist system, all systems and subsystems involved in reconstruction are interconnected by money and must ultimately lead to profit. Thus, the production of wealth is the goal and not the reproduction of the conditions of existence (5).3 What does this analysis say about the causes of the Fukushima disaster? Already before Fukushima was officially recognized as a man-made disaster, sociologist Harutoshi Funabashi (2012) argued that the reasons for the escalation in March 2011 must be sought not in natural phenomena, and not even in technology only, but in the social relations of Japan’s ‘nuclear complex.’ By this he refers to the institutional frameworks that ensure the immense power that electric power companies enjoy in Japan, including government ministries, courts, city councils, mass media, pro-nuclear academics and others (65). In short, he introduces a technicist perspective. While he acknowledges that flaws in the power plant design and its emergency power supply, as well as multiple background defects (like the seawall that was too low to withhold the tsunami, although precedents of tsunamis more than five meters high exist, or the concentration of six reactors at one site) have technically caused the situation to escalate into multiple meltdowns, Funabashi locates the real problem elsewhere, namely in the failure of social safeguards.4 These encompass a range of institutions and decision-makers, from the regulatory body of Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission that gravely underestimated the potential of earthquakes and tsunamis to cause serious accidents to the individual engineer ignoring under TEPCO’s command, known defects in the reactor design (67). For Funabashi, this is a problem specific to Japanese society. But a look at what drove decision-making reveals that it follows the global trend to put the performance of the system over people and hence profit over safety which has a particularly troubled history in the nuclear sector (Buser 2019, 25–78), creating the conditions in which technical flaws that he claims were known

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to TEPCO could be ignored.5 Funabashi’s article is an archetypical description of a technicist power dynamic in the way Ziarek defines it, which is that social relations are manipulated to yield profit. A second key aspect that Nancy highlights specifically in the context of Fukushima is the longevity of the radiation that was released. What makes techno-capitalism so destructive, according to Nancy, is that it accumulates the risks of “all our technologies, whether it’s a question of carbon dioxide emissions or depleting various species of fish, whether it’s a question of biogenetic and biometric technologies, nanotechnologies or electronic-financial technologies” (30–31). For him, Fukushima is yet another proof of this. While the earthquake and the tsunami were highly destructive on their own in terms of lives and livelihoods that they destroyed, their repercussions became irremediable when the nuclear reactors were destroyed. In other words, while the city of Lisbon could be rebuilt, the radiation that was released by the reactors will not go away. This in turn leads to a further intensification and complexification of the system, because any solution that is being thought up needs to account for the constraints produced by lingering radiation in addition to the existing constraints of the system like the need to ensure profit. Having theorized Fukushima as a technicist disaster, how can these abstract systemic relations be traced in concrete processes and experiences, and how might such tracing enable a critical turn? To explore this question, I now move to the first of the two artworks I discuss in this chapter: the film essay The Radiant (2012). 3.2 THE RADIANT The Radiant was produced by the London-based artist collective the Otolith Group, consisting of Kodwo Eshun and Angelika Sagar. If it can be said to ask a question, it would be twofold: How could Japan, given its dreadful experiences with radioactivity in the past, allow such a major nuclear disaster to occur, and, to paraphrase Eshun (2013), what role do images play in constructing the understanding that we have? The film explores these questions, one historico-political and the other aesthetic, through an essayistic journey into the cinematic imagination of nuclear power that ranges from early promises of abundant energy ‘too cheap to meter’ to recent surges of antinuclear protest in Japan. The film begins with a chronological retelling of the events of March 2011, using snippets from the news and shaky footage from handheld mobile phones, but soon transmutes into a fast-paced collage of historical documents that is interspliced with art performances, interviews and pensive shots from inside the national Earthquake Center in Tokyo and the contaminated zone around the crippled nuclear power plant. Thus, unpacking

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the highly mediatized and visualized event that the world got to know as ‘Fukushima’ or ‘3/11,’ The Radiant embarks on an explorative search for meaning that evades conclusive statements or moral judgments. According to film scholar David Montero (2012), what is exceptional for the film essay in demarcation to the closely related genre of the documentary is that it treats images not purely as records of a reality that exists independently from them, but as utterances in a discourse that create reality: “the transition from a non-fiction image anchored in the idea of representing reality to one which responds to the logic of the utterance, from showing to telling, from documentary evidence to subjective/critical discourse” (2). Thus understood, the cinematic essay, unlike the closely related genre of the documentary, is not a fact check, but it has something to say about how factuality is formed. The Radiant expands this discursive dimension to the level of aesthetics to disclose the technicity that pervades social relations in technomodernity and hence the nuclear condition. As I suggest in the following section, ‘Re-volt,’ the film also aesthetically redistributes these relations, staging what Ziarek describes as a silent revolt. It is in this redistribution of relations in the aesthetic experience that a fruitful link between the writings of Nancy and Ziarek can be drawn. Using the concept of ‘resonance’ that Nancy (2007) introduces in one of his earlier texts, I suggest that The Radiant’s silent revolt consists in redefining (technicist) camera vision to sonorous vision, a form of vision that is not determined by the technicist momentum of production. This section is about how the film sets the scene for this redistribution. The Radiant draws on a variety of materials for its cinematic discourse, combining footage from a trip to Japan that the artists undertook shortly after the disaster, with snippets from the news, historical fragments from nuclear cinema, avant-garde video art and recordings of anti-nuclear protests in Japan. The images invoke “the historical promises of nuclear energy and the threats of radiation that converge in Japan’s illuminated cities and evacuated villages” (Eshun and Sagar 2012), constructing a narrative of disaster in which Fukushima features as an inevitable climax rather than an unexpected turn of events. Given the lead role of the United States in the development of nuclear technologies and their strong economic ties to postwar Japan, it is not surprising that most references come from US cinema. The list includes the nuclear test film Operation Castle (1954), fragments of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s speech Atoms for Peace (1955), the Walt Disney television series Our Friend the Atom (1957), the feature film Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), and the documentaries Thread of Life (1960) and Japan Anchor in the East (1960). A reference, not from nuclear film history, but showing how the cold war nuclear rhetoric has infiltrated American culture on all levels, is Goodbye Mrs. Ant (1959), a commercial for insecticides that plays in a classic American suburban family home.

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Besides these popular references, the radio play The Japanese Fishermen Suite (1955) by Australian composer and pioneer in electronic music Tristram Cary, and the promotional documentary Fukushima no Genshiryoku (Fukushima’s Nuclear Power), produced in 1987 by TEPCO for the Japanese public, play a prominent role in the film. Snippets from both the play and the promotional documentary keep returning over the course of the film, offering a kind of lead counterpoint to navigate the complex collage of images. The radio play is an acoustic interpretation of a tragic incident that made headlines in 1954 as the Lucky Dragon Incident. In that incident, in the morning of March 1, twenty-three Japanese fishermen went out on their fishing vessel, the Lucky Dragon, to catch tuna. Shortly after, a hydrogen bomb was set off on the island of Bikini Atoll, only seven kilometers away, exposing the fishermen to high doses of radiation. The boat went unnoticed by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) that conducted the test and even after inquiries from the Japanese government about the nature of the test to be able to identify the illness of the fishermen, the AEC stonewalled. Together with the bombings of the two Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki not even a decade ago, the incident sparked a powerful anti-nuclear movement in Japan which, however, remained focused on nuclear weapons (Avenell 2012, 269). For those viewers of The Radiant not familiar with the meaning of the radio play, the reference to nuclear weapons is made explicit in a clip following its first appearance in the film, showing declassified material of the Castle Bravo Test that irradiated the fishermen and members of the marine due to miscalculation. Fukushima no Genshiryoku, on the other hand, promotes the construction of the Fukushima nuclear power plant in the 1980s. Layering images of the documentary with the soundscape of the radio play, Japan’s nuclear history with its idiosyncratic separation of nuclear energy production from the production of nuclear weapons, becomes a backdrop for the Fukushima nuclear disaster. What this collage of historical utterances signals is that Fukushima is not an isolated, localized incidence, a hiccup of an otherwise impeccably performing system, but needs to be understood in the context of the manipulative power relations that started to form seven decades earlier. A scene that appears about twenty minutes into the film, shortly after fully transitioning into an essayistic collage, strikingly illustrates how this technicist legacy bears on the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, tracing the kind of continuity of relations that Nancy finds so alarming. The scene consists of two parts: the first is a snippet from Fukushima no Genshiryoku, the second a zoom-in on a digital radiation map showing the radioactive fallout of the Fukushima disaster. The snippet from Fukushima no Genshiryoku lasts one minute and forty seconds and shows the construction of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power

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plant. A voice-over reassures the viewer of the power plant’s absolute safety. The scene is accompanied by classical music reminiscent of James Bond movies expressing awe toward this new nuclear technology. Both the formal realization of the scene and the voice-over make sure to embed this sense of adventure in a language of being in control: the image track follows the rules of continuity editing, giving the viewer a sense of orientation and narrative consistency, while the voice-over complements the scene with adjectives like “strong” and “firm.” The message is clear: this is a powerful and promising technology, and TEPCO is sophisticated enough to handle it. The voice-over ends with the reassurance that the reactor building “is also built to withstand severe earthquakes.” To today’s viewers, the irony of this statement resounds clearly. Yes, the building withstood the earthquake; however, it did not withstand the tsunami that was caused by the earthquake. The scene switches to the hybrid map, showing square 3D-columns in different colors and heights layered on top of a satellite image of the east coast of northern Japan. The columns indicate the different amounts of radiation that were measured at a given location. It is the kind of hybrid map that was circulated in the media in the months after the accident to illustrate the spreading of the fallout from the disaster in Japan and elsewhere. In this scene, the map is largely stripped of its informational value, as the continuous zoom movement makes it hard to identify the numbers and units flaring up as the digital eye approaches the ground. Eventually, the red column on which it was zooming in disintegrates, revealing the buildings of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant underneath. The movement is supported on the soundtrack by a suspended electronic chord. If conceived as utterances in a discourse, as Montero suggests, on a narrative level the scene forms a counterpoint. While the fragment from Fukushima no Genshiryoku insists that nuclear power is safe, the post-Fukushima radiation map indicates the contrary: apparently, the safety measures have failed, causing radioactive material to escape the reactor and spread over Japan and beyond. However, this is an established knowledge. What I find interesting about this scene is not the point it makes about the vulnerability of a complex technological system like a nuclear reactor as it interacts with other systems like the electric grid and the earth system, but the way it raises questions about this commonplace by the way the scene is set up. Beneath the narrative level, something else is happening that may seem less obvious and yet, I think, is unlikely to miss the viewer’s attention. Reviewing the sequence, what struck me as odd was the choice of different media. If the aim really was to create a simple counterpoint, a video of the exploding reactor building in place of the map would have served the purpose, because it logically disproves the claim being made in the documentary and is unlikely to be challenged as a representation of the explosion. The map, on the other hand, being a different

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kind of representation altogether than film or video, introduces a whole new set of questions that complicate the narrative counterpoint. The columns in the map are a form of data visualization. As such, they are not a representation in the mimetic sense, but, as media theorist Alexander Galloway (2012) points out, a visual presentation of raw data, numbers whose “primary mode of existence is not a visual one” (88). In order to assume a visual form, “any data visualization must invent an artificial set of translation rules that convert abstract number to semiotic sign” (88). In other words, there are not one but two moments of conversion involved in data visualization, one from an observable phenomenon into a number, the other from the number into a sign. The square columns in the hybrid radiation map are thus the result of a conversion process following artificial rules such as linking a certain numerical value to a specific color and height of the column. This arbitrary relation of the informatic image to reality is cinematically revealed in the zoom movement. As the digital eye zooms into the map, increasing the amount of detail in the satellite image, it also passes through the column that is projected on top of it, revealing the Fukushima nuclear power station beneath. The informational value—which is the main function of the informatic image—is lost at this zoom level: what looked like a fine grid of data points has dissolved into large squares which do not trace the texture of the now detailed satellite image. The movement is underscored by an electronic chord that creates an almost narrative sense of suspense which culminates in the visual disintegration of the column. It is through cinematic means like the creation of suspense through movement and sound, and the distinctly aesthetic (rather than informatic) treatment of the image that the disintegrating column is shown to be not about the conversion of reality into numerical values (raw data), but to the second conversion, from numerical values into signs. Presenting these two kinds of images, the informatic and the cinematic, not only side by side, but treating the informatic image cinematically, raises the question of representation, which is the relation between reality and image. Both scenes, the documentary excerpt and the hybrid map, depict an abstraction of reality into numbers, the first by showing workers measuring fissures in the reactor vessel, the second in the form of a hybrid map. On this basic level, then, a continuity is revealed between the two scenes that undermines the counterpoint: the second scene is not merely a counterargument, but also a continuation of the technicist logic informing the first. But this is not all there is to say about this sequence. Following Galloway’s double conversion of reality in data visualizations that is revealed in this sequence—from reality into data and from data into image—it could be argued that the hybrid map does not merely continue the technologic of numerical abstraction, but obscures it.

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The viewer of the map can only make sense of the numbers through their form, their visualization. Hence, for them, the numbers only exist as an image, whereas in the case of the documentary, the numbers are clearly delineated from what they (are said to) mean—the numbers on the workers’ displays exist separately from the voice-over offering an interpretation of them (which is that these numbers demonstrate the safety of the reactor vessel). The columns thus reduce the reality of contamination not only to a collection of data points in a way comparable to what the workers do with their monitoring devices in Fukushima no Genshiryoku. Contamination becomes a semiotic sign, that is, the result of a conversion of data into a visual representation following an artificial set of rules. The existence of this set of rules (if not, necessarily, the rules themselves) is only rendered visible in the disintegrating column, turning the cinematic image back into an informatic image. It is thus in the vagueness of the largest zoom perspective that technicity is revealed within the very (informatic) tools that are used to measure one of the consequences of technicity, nuclear disaster. To summarize my observations, rather than merely exposing the modern (and specifically TEPCO’s) belief in technological progress, on a second assessment, the scene I have discussed raises a problem. If the failure of nuclear technology is assessed through a technology that follows the same technicist logic that is responsible for the failure in the first place, the underlying problem remains unaddressed. In other words, it appears as if the current—technicist—response to nuclear disaster is trading one symptom for another, all the while keeping the social relations intact that created the catastrophe in the first place (both the nuclear catastrophe and Nancy’s “catastrophe of meaning”). Importantly, this problem does not contradict the contrapuntal reading I proposed earlier. Putting the scenes side by side, they turn into utterances responding to each other, which includes the falsification of the older piece by the newer. But it also reveals a continuity between them, which is the production of reality as numbers, precisely the form of technicity that Ziarek criticizes for its manipulative nature. What does this continuity say about the fact that these kinds of maps were used as a tool of resistance in post-Fukushima Japan? After the nuclear disaster, citizen-led initiatives of mapping fallout have become a form of resistance in Japan. Technology is used to empower citizens by providing them with the tools to collect data independently from the government. While the film does not provide information about the context in which this map has been produced and for what it is being used, it has been highlighted in the literature that hybrid maps such as the one presented in the scene discussed above are an expression of online participatory culture and did have a critical function in Japan, especially in the months following the explosion of the reactors when there was a lack of information about

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the spread of radiation across Japanese territory (Plantin 2015). The emergence of unofficial, that is, nonexpert maps, created by anyone possessing a Geiger counter and feeding their readings into the database was a response to TEPCO and the Japanese government holding back information about the spread of contamination and thus their attempt to cover-up the graveness of the disaster (Plantin 2015, 905; Hirano and Kaisai 2020).6 However, even if the map shown in The Radiant emerged from a critical practice or protest culture, its cinematic juxtaposition to the scene from Fukushima no Genshiryoku introduces a layer of ambiguity, because the aesthetics of the hybrid radiation map appear consonant with technicity. To conclude, a fundamental insight that the sequence discussed above reveals is that technicity informs the very tools of assessing disaster. The techno-aesthetics of hybrid radiation maps are an example of this, even if they are used in the context of critical civil or artistic practice. In this sense, The Radiant raises the problem that while modern technology can be empowering, especially when accessed by a broader critical public, it always also follows and reproduces the principles of technicity to some extent. Be it the government or citizen scientists, mapping radiation as a form of rendering nuclear disaster knowable, means also to frame it as calculable, translating its singularity into a system of thresholds and mathematical models—formal representations that can be (and are) adjusted, if necessary, to an overall logic of profit and loss. The Japanese government, for instance, has decided in response to the disaster to raise the permissible annual dose limit of radiation exposure for those living in contaminated areas from 1 mSv/y (millisievert per year) to 20 mSv/y, while keeping it at 1 mSv/y for the rest of the country. For critics, this decision reflects a strategy of the government and energy companies to avoid financial accountability for the damaging effects of radiation on human health and prioritize the economy over people’s well-being. In his essay about hidden and forgotten hibakusha, Toyosaki argues that the level of permissible radiation after Fukushima “was established in order to encourage people to return to their communities, not to ensure their safety” (162). An interview with journalist May Shigenobu that is included in the film reflects a keen awareness of the social consequences of this technicist condition. Shigenobu argues that the Japanese populace are used as Guinea pigs to explore the effects of radiation on human health while the government and TEPCO have no interest in acknowledging those effects. Later in the film, the motif of the guinea pig returns in an interview with a farmer who stayed inside the contaminated zone and offers his body as an experimental site for the government to gain knowledge about radiation. Again, the film demonstrates how potential rupture, the injured body, gets absorbed in the system itself: he offers his body to make the system better. From an economic point

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of view, then, it appears to be more profitable to change the biology than to change the system. The implications of such a decision cannot be underestimated. Political commentator Sabu Kohso (2011) claims that this decision is taking the whole Japanese populace hostage to maintain a corrupt and irresponsible system. As if to make sure that international readers, too, feel addressed, he stresses that this system is not limited to Eastern Honshu but an articulation of techno-modernity, which, in its marriage with late capitalism, is anchored in more than just industrial and military institutions around the world in which Kohso locates what he calls in his short response with the same title “The Global Nuclear Regime.” The sequence of the hybrid radiation map discussed above opens a reflexive space in which these power relations, to the extent that they are sedimented in images, are aesthetically disclosed. The following examples show how the film makes the possibility of their redistribution tangible. In light of this critical turn, I conclude that the film offers an aesthetic transformation of power relations which point toward the social. At the center of this aesthetic transformation stands the figure of light. I suggest that by orchestrating light’s technic and poietic dimensions, the film manages to voice social critique while at the same time going beyond it (or ‘beneath’ in Ziarek’s terminology), engaging, as he claims, in a much more radical revolt than mere critique or opposition would allow for. And yet, I conclude, the revolt only acquires social significance when it is overcome, when it exists as the possibility of a turn in Nancy’s understanding, emerging from and being immanent to dominant power relations. 3.3 RE-VOLT The tenet of Ziarek’s book is to develop a theoretical approach that allows him to recover art’s significance in society. He responds thereby to the widespread cultural pessimism that art has lost its critical function in society, because modern avant-garde aesthetics have been absorbed into commercial culture, for instance, in the form of commercial websites using modernist aesthetics to attract customers. In this case, he argues, the essence of aesthetics appears fundamentally consonant with technicity, because it serves the production of profit, and is subordinated to the logic of power. Despite these phenomena, Ziarek defends art as retaining a critical force that does not oppose power relations but circumvents dominant articulations of power altogether. Art’s transformative force is, as I mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, not to create an alternative power (in the form of an opposition) but to create an alternative to power. To distinguish art’s work from the work of power, Ziarek describes art as a force field “where forces drawn

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from historical and social reality come [to be] formed into an alternative relationality” (7). In other words, even if an artwork aims to shock by opposing, and hence engaging in dominant power relations, it can retain a critical momentum that frees relations from the manipulative drive characteristic of modernity. He calls this work art’s “silent revolt”—a silent transformation of power relations (188). The term revolt, or ‘re-volt,’ Ziarek explains, hereby “takes on a specific, ‘technological’ meaning, indicating a turn within technicity that is, within the power-motivated modality of relations dominant in modernity, a turn that redirects relations toward aphesis, that is, toward ‘letting be’ and nonpower” (169). The volta in re-volt thus signifies the turning within technicity toward a way of relating outside of power (198). I suggest that The Radiant performs such a turning, such a silent re-volt, in its play with the figure of light by introducing a moment of non-power. In The Radiant, electric light is a signifier for Japan’s economic and political power. Early in the film appears a black-and-white shot of Tokyo by night, taken from up high so that the car lights in the streets appear like veins pumping life into the flesh of the city. Preceding this view of the illuminated city is a black-and-white shot of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant emitting beams of light. The order and aesthetic continuity of this sequence recalls that a substantial portion of the electricity produced at the plant was going to Tokyo to cover its immense energy demands (a connection that is made explicit throughout the film), translating nuclear power directly into financial and political power. The shot of the illuminated city is, as art historian Sven Lütticken (2015) puts it, “the hypervisible obverse of the malignant waves that have now made part of Japan uninhabitable” (53). Later, the film returns to this metaphor through a fragment from Fukushima no Genshiryoku, in which the completion of Fukushima’s first nuclear reactor is celebrated with a shot of the rising sun, making nuclear energy a national success story of rapid technological and economic progress. It is a key moment in the country’s striving to become a technological and economic superpower that nuclear energy helped create (Avenell 2012, 271). The power relations encoded in the figure of light are challenged in several ways. A recurrent aesthetic strategy used in the film is scenes shot in black and white to show places in or around the contaminated areas in northern Japan. What they add to the film’s narrative is a strong, self-reflexive sense of entanglement in the problem that is being addressed. One of the most revealing sequences where this device is used appears toward the end of The Radiant when the viewer encounters an illuminated black-and-white nightscape at the outskirts of the exclusion zone that has been created by the Japanese government in response to the disaster. There is a blocked road that functions as a checkpoint to control traffic coming in and going out of the zone (figure 3.1). Cars are passing, guards are waving a bus in and out. The

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Figure 3.1  The Otolith Group, The Radiant, London: LUX, 2012, BluRay. Play of light at an access road into the Fukushima exclusion zone, TC 00.43.05. Screenshot.

removal of color is crucial, because it turns light into the main protagonist in this scene: shadows scurry over the asphalt, increasing and decreasing in length, as the blinding headlights of cars (which themselves are barely visible) shine through a row of trees alongside the road; the alarm lights of a nearby truck create flares and quick, rhythmic flashes that move with seeming indifference over the guards and the surrounding vegetation. The scenery is not only illuminated but becomes a stage for light itself, flickering, flaring, and hurrying over the surfaces, disclosing their textures and giving them an eerie liveliness. On the soundtrack, the electronic beeping from the previous scene fades into the muffled sound of an ambulance siren, then only the soft, monotone humming of cars passing by. The scene lasts for less than two minutes, but it is key to understand how The Radiant frees light from its calculative, informational momentum. For a brief moment, light exists as a singular aesthetic experience, an artifact that emerges from the interaction of video camera and headlights. It is this reciprocal shaping that lies at the basis of the visual artifact that prevents light in this scene from standing in for something else. In the context of the film, the flares suggest a power-free logic as it can only be found in singularized experiences that resist abstraction and appropriation. However, readers should not be too contend at this point. According to Ziarek, this critical work performed by art must remain invisible, because as soon as art’s forcework enters the realm of representation it is absorbed into the play of power, because representations are the “sedimented relations, so to speak, between objects, bodies, [and] substances” that constitute power (7). Nevertheless, as Ziarek demonstrates in the examples

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he gives, there are ways around this impasse. In his reading of the 1929 film Man with the Movie Camera by Soviet director Dziga Vertov, he draws attention to the rhythmic organization of shots. Man with the Movie Camera is about the technological rhythm of modern life, it represents traffic lights, moving machinery, factories, trams, cars and people following the machine’s rhythm. While it can be argued that with the rhythmic organization of the film, Vertov cinematically foregrounds the technical pulse of modern life, it also introduces a degree of ambiguity. As Ziarek points out, the scenes don’t follow only what appears to be the mechanical rhythm of machines, but are organized according to musical principles, turning techne (the revealing of the world through technology, here understood as a mode of production in the sense of making and manipulating) into poiesis (the revealing of the world through artistic creation, here understood as an alternative form of relationality enabled by ‘letting be’).7 As a result, what could be read as a celebration of modern technology and its transformation of all spheres of life, is refigured around the non-technicist principle of poietic creation. For Ziarek, it is in this musical rewriting of the technical pulse of modern life that we get a glimpse of the work’s “invisible” forcework (181). He speaks in this context of a “double character” of art’s forcework: “its explicit intervention in the public sphere, on the one hand, and its ‘invisible’ forcework, on the other” (187). Thus, art does not exhaust itself in social critique, but is more radical in that it directly, albeit invisibly, redistributes the underlying power relations in what Ziarek calls art’s silent revolt. I turn now to Nancy’s concept of ‘resonance’ to trace the redistribution of power relations in this scene. I suggest the flares in the scene described above are the result of a ‘reciprocal shaping’ as the light source and the camera mutually enable the emergence of the flares which don’t exist outside this specific technological set up, thereby invoking together a whole different knowledge economy than each of the two (light and camera) would invoke separately. This knowledge economy is structured by what Nancy (2007) refers to as resonance. I evoke his idea of resonance here because it offers a vocabulary to speak about Ziarek’s invisible forcework in an aesthetic context. Indeed, Nancy’s logic of resonance follows closely Ziarek’s logic of reciprocity. Nancy suggests the concept of resonance as an alternative to evidence. Resonance and evidence, for him, are bound to two different perceptual regimes, the auditory and the visual, and as such inhabit two very different knowledge economies. “The visual,” he writes, “is tendentially mimetic and the sonorous tendentially methexic (that is, having to do with participation, sharing or contagion)” (10). Sonority, then, is not about presence but about return. Within the sonorous, he further distinguishes between hearing and listening: While “to hear is to understand the sense,” that is, the text/context, “to

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listen is to be straining toward a possible meaning, and consequently one that is not immediately accessible” (6). The difference between hearing and listening, then, is that hearing aims to produce sense while listening makes sense resonate, entangling sound and sense in a shared space of referral in which new, unintended meaning is possible to emerge. Notably, although experimenting in many instances with sound, The Radiant does not abandon vision for sound.8 Rather, much like in Ziarek’s example of Vertov’s Man with the Movie Camera where the image is reorganized according to musical principles, camera vision is refigured through the logic of sound. As if to emphasize the transition of rhythm from sound to image, the soundtrack fades into monotone, markedly nonrhythmic motor sounds, when the image’s rhythmic alternation of light and dark picks up speed. The flares are the result of an encounter between camera and light, an error, or side effect put centerstage. Vision is thus refigured to what could be called ‘sonorous vision:’ the refiguring of vision through the logic of resonance. I suggest that it is through sonorous vision that the film’s forcework is made tangible, stressing entanglement and mutual becoming in the place of distanced observation. The flares do not exist outside the resonance between the light and the camera. They are the result of what Nancy calls an “infinite referral” since they refer to “something (itself) that is nothing outside the referral” (9). In other words, they are the result of camera and light getting entangled, listening to each other (to stay with Nancy’s image) and thereby mutually enabling a shared space of resonance. In this figuration, light stops serving the purpose of illumination, stops producing evidence, occasionally it even hinders its production by blinding the viewer. To be clear, the scene is not about light as such, just as the flares do not represent a forcework. The flares form a surrogate phenomenon, a visual effect, in which the gaze of the camera, traditionally a site inscribed with power cutting the world into observer and observed, is being reinscribed with sonority, becoming sonorous vision. In other words, the flares enable me to think the forcework that The Radiant performs through a refiguring of the camera gaze. With this shift in the perceptual regime of the camera, the knowledge economy of the image changes as well. In the mode of listening, the self (of camera vision) is nothing substantial or subsistent but exists only as the resonance of a return. Therefore, “listening . . . can and must appear to us not as a metaphor for access to self, but as the reality of this access” (12). Sonorous vision, therefore, undermines the technicity of the camera by turning the camera into a listening device exploring itself. A recent study on diasporic photography by Tina M. Campt (2017) helps me to theorize this shift toward the sensory register of sound. In this study, which is called Listening to Images, Campt suggests that listening as a method in visual analysis opens the (photographic) image to alternate

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readings that conventional tools in visual analysis do not register. The images she studied are identification photographs, taken by state authorities as part of a larger bureaucratic apparatus designed to control the movements of subjects from African countries in and out of the diaspora. They are quotidian images that, according to Campt, were also ‘quiet’ in the sense that, following a strict set of conventions, individuality of expression including expressions of resistance were largely silenced. Silence has a very specific meaning in the diasporic communities that Campt studied which cannot be simply read as passivity, agreement, or absence of expression. It is through attending (or indeed listening) to the quietness of the portraits that Campt believes to detect a sense of subversion in the subject’s silent expressions. According to Campt, the subjects’ quietness “[refused] the very terms of photographic subjection they were engineered to produce” (5), offering an alternative reading of these images that adds nuance to the formation of diasporic identity. For Campt, then, “the choice to ‘listen to’ rather than simply ‘look at’ images is a conscious decision to challenge the equation of vision with knowledge” (6). In other words, it is not what the pictures show, but what they do not explicitly show and yet claims presence in the image, the portraits tense silence, that she takes as her basis of interpretation. For her, it means to engage with the affective qualities of an image rather than merely with what it represents. Thus, listening to images is proposed as a method to read images against the dominant visual logic of the medium and the kind of racial profiling and control it facilitated. A racial subtext can also be identified in responses to Fukushima. As novelist Kyo McLear (2020) argues, the many reports highlighting the absence of looting in the areas in northern Japan that had been evacuated after the disaster reflect a particular form of racism in which Japanese-ness is qualified through restraint and “staying composed” (227). A similar argument can be made, I think, for the many images of ordered protest and victims staying composed after they had lost everything. According to McLear, this fueled nationalist attitudes and racist sentiments against foreigners, especially of Asian descent. Moreover, it was a “troubling indicator of a society conditioned to trust too heavily in its government and its leaders” (227)—an observation that eerily resonates in the figure of the self-sacrificing farmer from Japan’s contaminated rural North that was interviewed for The Radiant. Campt’s operationalization of the sensory register of sound as a tool to read photographic images against the dominant logic of the medium helps me to better describe the medium-specific work of sonorous vision in The Radiant. It is the refusal to equate vision with knowledge that I propose to capture with the term ‘sonorous vision.’ In its experimental play with camera vision, The Radiant challenges this equation by destabilizing the image. Light, a medium enabling us to see, is used to blind the viewer, or to create visual effects that

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complicate a documentary reading of the image, of showing what is there. The image is treated according to the sensory logic of sound, that is the logic of return or ‘resonance’ gaining visual presence in the flares. The flares deconstruct the truth-claim of the medium using its own medium-specific means of expression, light and sound. In other words, the scene refuses to the viewer to simply look at the images it offers but forces them to listen. Another aspect of sonorous vision is the importance of context. Like in Campt’s example, with listening discouraging an evidential reading of the image, the context gains significance as interpretive framework. Highlighting the cultural importance of silence in the African diasporic communities, Campt studied as an expression of disapproval, even resistance; Campt is able to attribute agency to the portraits’ tense silence. The scene in The Radiant is shot at a checkpoint into the contaminated areas of Fukushima prefecture. It is preceded by a shot showing workers passing radiation detectors which points the viewer to the presence of invisible radioactivity. This invisibility stands in contrast to the hyper-visible man-high detection machines that exceed the image frame, and which aim to render this invisible presence knowable. Moreover, the electronic beeping of the machines is distorted and carried over into the scene with the flares, evoking the beeping of a Geiger counter, another index for the invisible presence of radiation. The main actor, radioactivity, is hence contextually present but remains invisible in the scene. Layering the different sensorial registers in the scene discussed, creates a reciprocal relation between sound and image, a relation of sonorous vision. The critical engagement with camera vision as a technical device helping to reproduce a culturally determined way of seeing is anticipated in a scene that compels through its focused slowness. It shows the disassembling of a digital SLR camera that is intersected with the musings of the Japanese photographer Chihiro Minato on radiation in the landscape as another kind of invisibility. He explains that the Japanese word for landscape, fukei, designates not something that is static but defined by movement. Fukei means ‘a scene of wind.’ In this sense, fukei remains invisible to the camera lens. A second kind of invisibility present in the landscape is mythology, the spirits and gods of the forest. He wonders if radiation, one day, will become a divinity or stand apart as a third kind of invisibility inhabiting the forests. I will show in the following chapter that, even to Western scientists, this is not such a strange thought as it continues the tradition in nuclear history to mythologize radioactivity. In her catalogue entry on The Radiant, the art historian Ruth Erickson (2015) observes that in this segment landscape and camera are paralleled, both being “bodies that register the immaterial and invisible (that is, air and light)” (68). They are metaphorically linked to radiation as both relying on surrogate bodies (“the land, produce, animals, humans”) that exhibit the

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damaging effects of radiation. Toward the end of the segment, the woman retrieves the blue tainted hotmirror filter, a filter that is employed to protect optical systems by reflecting back infrared light while allowing visible light to pass. Originally, the black-and-white scenes were supposed to be shot in near-infrared, linking the way these contaminated places are captured in the image directly to the affordances and limits of the medium producing the images. As a consequence, another dimension is added to the camera’s search of itself as a registering device. To return to Nancy (2007), one could say that the camera changes from a “phenomenological subject, an intentional line of sight, to a resonant subject, an intensive spacing of a rebound that does not end in any return to self without immediately relaunching, as an echo, a call to that same self” (21). In other words, while the phenomenological subject is always already given in a fixed point of view, the resonant subject is always yet to come. Camera vision, as an object- and a subject-constituting device, is emptied of its culturally inherited intentionality, opening the viewer to alternative relationalities. In other words, by undermining the equation of vision = knowledge by treating the image through the logic of sound (articulated in the flares), the camera switches “from gaze to listening” (21). Reframing the camera as a listening device means to accept the impossibility of it producing evidence. Evidence, existing within the knowledge economy of vision, is something already given, something coded which can be decoded through “a system of signifying references” (36), the sediments of power in Ziarek’s terms. Resonance, by contrast, existing within the knowledge economy of the auditory, posits the possibility of new, noncoded meaning. “Perhaps,” Nancy muses, “we never listen to anything but the noncoded . . . and we never hear [entend] anything but the already coded, which we decode” (36). Seen in this light, the camera does not make sense, it enables meaning to arrive, which according to Ziarek is a fundamental difference. While the first implies a mode of imposing meaning, the latter represents a mode of letting be. To understand how this could translate into the social critique that forms a vital part of Ziarek’s forcework, it is necessary to recall where the scene was shot. What we see is the exclusion zone’s access road, the liminal space that discriminates between inside and outside, dangerous and safe. It is a transitional space in which the consequential distinction between contaminated and clean is materially enacted. Reinhabiting technological vision with sonority means here not only that the distinction is questioned but that a space is opened to listen, to be open for meaning not immediately accessible, that is, to question not only where the line is drawn, but how the very line that separates clean from contaminated, safe from dangerous, is a construct and a tool of existing power relations that reflect a vested interest in maintaining the system, as Kohso (2011) claims. Questions

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like who comes to define and how what is dangerous and what is safe, or who would benefit from such a definition and who wouldn’t, could follow such a speculative opening. Notably, in the end the scene switches to color and exposes the source of the light flashes, a car with an alarm light mounted on its roof. It worked for me like a switch between two worlds, the one hypothetical, full of suspense and possibility and modulation, the other weighed down by a sense already formed. The regained color removes the filter or threshold that allowed for new meaning to emerge; the black-and-white image as a space removed from, yet resonant with, the reality most familiar to us. For me, the scene’s ending challenges the societal impact of the just performed ‘silent revolt’ in art. While it opens a given condition to speculative relations other than those determined by power, ultimately, it risks to remain silent. It risks to vanish just like the black-and-white image gave space to the image in color. Ziarek himself proposes that the forcework of art must be continued by social and political transformation for art not to be subsumed into the matrix of power. It must constantly be “reactivated” (14). Toward the end of his book, he concedes that in today’s society, where the “technicism of being” is amplified, “recognizing and appreciating the revolt inscribed in art becomes more and more difficult” (176). This suggests that the question if art can be consequential hinges on the open-mindedness of a given society, that it needs to be ‘granted’ the space to ‘let be,’ a space free from modern power. Despite him insisting that art’s transformation is not mere semblance but has an effect in the world (13), when it comes down to it, Ziarek himself concedes that the current global condition is not in art’s favor, as art gets increasingly marginalized: As the technicism of being amplifies, recognizing and appreciating the revolt inscribed in art becomes more and more difficult because technicist deployments of modern power tend to strengthen their determination of being to such an extent that no other disposition appears possible or real. (176)

The ‘third voice’ that Ziarek promotes as an alternative to power is at constant risk to become a passive voice, pushing the artwork back into the muchdreaded dichotomy that structures the play of power. This, it seems, is the Achilles’ heel of Ziarek’s theory: Who is going to advocate for art? To perform a critical intervention, a rupture along the lines of Nancy’s turning or solution in the techno-modern condition, there needs to be more than a subliminal re-volt, that is, more than a silent turning or rewiring of power relations. The alternative mode of relating that is developed through art’s forcework needs, at some point, to translate into the social fabric of power to have any effect at all. However, this is something that Ziarek considers as

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being fundamentally problematic, because of the danger of art being absorbed into the play of power. Therefore, he insists that the transformative work of art is being done “[b]eyond [art’s] political meaning and ideology, beyond the fanfare of manifestos and aesthetic polemics” (186). However, from the beginning, Ziarek also acknowledges art’s ‘double character’ as an “explicit intervention in the public sphere, on the one hand, and its ‘invisible’ forcework, on the other” (186). This is important, because it offers the possibility to locate the activating force within the artwork itself, that is, in the artwork’s (visible) intervention in the public sphere. While throughout his book, Ziarek refuses to engage with art’s political meaning (its power so to speak), it is in the closing remarks that this strict separation begins to falter when he discusses examples of internet art. With information technology becoming increasingly important for, and hence synonymous with the operations of power, Ziarek observes, internet art is given the “historically unequaled powers of disclosure,” because of the “unprecedented correlation between technical manipulability and aesthetic construction” (195). Using the same principles of programmability and manipulation that define the techno-informational flows of power, internet art would assume the privileged position to disclose these very operations of power as manipulative. To illustrate his point, Ziarek refers to two influential, early examples of internet art: Seiko Mikami’s Molecular Clinic (1995/96) and Eduardo Kac’s Genesis (1998/99). In Molecular Clinic, the viewer can reprogram a virtual spider’s DNA via an online environment, leading to the spider’s “e-volution” (191). Genesis goes a step further in the sense that it involves living organisms, bacteria, which are exposed to UV light, causing mutations in their DNA. The interaction, again, is mediated through the digital interface of a website through which the viewer can switch on or off a UV-lamp in the gallery display of the work which is placed above a petri-dish containing the bacteria. Engaging, according to Ziarek, in “the same principle of interactivity that underlies e-commerce, Internet trading and banking, and so on, as well as other forms of web interactivity” (190–191), these works are revelatory in the sense that they reveal the microlevel operations of power. They allow the average internet user to taste the power of genetic engineering, to become part of the latest culmination of the various forms of manipulative power structuring present-day experience. It is a hands-on, even though distanced, experience of modern techno-power. By participating in the manipulative work of techno-power, the viewer of Molecular Clinic and Genesis becomes a user. The act of participation is revelatory, because it takes place in the context of an artwork, which adds a reflective layer to the “taste of power” by removing the experience of modern techno-power from its original context of purpose and profit-oriented sectors like genetic engineering, e-commerce, internet trading and banking.

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For Ziarek, however, this privilege of internet art to reveal the micro-operations of power comes at a risk. With technical manipulability and aesthetic construction going hand in hand as demonstrated in the works of Mikami and Kac, internet art risks losing its transformative capacity and becoming thoroughly consonant with technicity (192). He particularly targets the element of interactivity, because, as a form of action, it is also a form of production and thus follows the very principles of programmability and manipulation that art’s forcework is supposed to transform. As I have argued in this section, The Radiant offers an aesthetic transformation of power relations that translates into social critique, but remains inconsequential in the social domain. Finger Pointing Worker, the artwork to which I turn now, is a piece of internet art that is not interactive in the sense that it allows the viewer to taste the manipulative power of changing life in techno-modernity. And yet, or perhaps because of that, it has something to add to Ziarek’s reluctant take on art’s reemerging power, because it follows the rules of a technical infrastructure set up by, and in service of, those in power (which in this case is TEPCO). It is only by participating in the micro-operations of power and at the risk of losing its status as an art object, I suggest, that Finger Pointing Worker redefines the line between force and power, between art’s silent revolt, and its ambitions to be consequential in the public sphere. 3.4 FINGER POINTING WORKER What circulates on the internet as Finger Pointing Worker is a recording of a rogue worker (or an activist/artist posing as a worker) in a protective suit pointing at a webcam that was installed at the Fukushima Daiichi site by TEPCO in response to charges of censorship after the accident. In the recording, the worker walks up to the camera and moves his right arm in a wide bow first to the side, then to the sky and down again until his index finger points at the center of the screen. With his left hand, he holds a mobile phone on which he watches his movements through the live stream of the webcam he is pointing at. After about twenty minutes, he climbs up the scaffold on which the camera is mounted and continues pointing in a close-up for another minute before he leaves (figure 3.2). The incident was recorded on August 28, 2011, around ten in the morning from a camera positioned North-West of reactor unit one.9 The day after it was recorded, the video was uploaded to the streaming platform YouTube where it was shared widely. The initial media response to this rogue worker’s action focused on determining his identity and the message he wants to send to the world with his pointing gesture. The mystery was partly resolved when, on September 9, 2011 (almost two weeks after the incident was recorded) a

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Figure 3.2  Anonymous, Pointing at Fukuichi Live Cam, 2011, CCTV recording uploaded to YouTube. After pointing for twenty minutes at the camera (left image), the worker climbs onto the scaffold on which the camera is mounted and continues pointing for another minute before he leaves the site. Screenshot.

web blog with the name Pointatfuku1cam appeared, authored by a former employee of TEPCO who identifies as the worker in the recording (Finger Pointing Worker 2011). He explains that his actions were directed at TEPCO and its subcontractors specifically, and ‘the media’ more generally, accusing them of turning a blind eye to the poor working conditions at the disaster site. Tellingly, TEPCO did not comment on the incident, except for a short statement saying that they were unable to figure out the identity of the rogue worker and will not pursue legal action against him. Indeed, the identity of the worker remains somewhat of a mystery to the present day, leaving doubt about whether the recording was intended as a piece of art or a piece of activism, or something in-between. The fact that the status of the recording was never finally clarified fueled much of the debate around it although the tendency to label it art emerged early on. While I explain below why I think it is fruitful to approach this performance as art, let me first delve a little deeper into the debate surrounding its labelling. On the web blog I mentioned above, the author also revealed that his performance was modelled on a piece of modern art. “I simulated,” he writes in the post, “ ‘centers’ by Vito Acconci in the situation with internet and nuclear power plant [sic]” (Finger Pointing Worker 2011). The work he refers to is the video performance Centers from 1971 by US installation and performance artist Vito Acconci. In Centers, Acconci faces the camera in close-up, pointing with his index finger at the exact center of the screen, which he achieves by watching his own image on the video monitor. He sustains this posture for almost twenty-three minutes (figure 3.3). Finger Pointing Worker appropriates the form and duration of Centers, while he transposes the performance to the post-disaster site of the Fukushima power plant and replaces the video monitor with a mobile phone. If the fact that the performance is modelled on

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Figure 3.3  Vito Acconci, Centers, 1971. Open Reel video, black and white, 4:3, mono. Screenshot.

a piece of modern art was not enough of a clue, the announcement of performance artist Kota Takeuchi to include the recording under the title Pointing at Fukuichi Live Cam in his solo exhibition in Tokyo the following year seemed to dispel any doubt that the rogue worker’s act was itself a piece of art possibly staged by Takeuchi himself (Corkill 2012).10 With the question of authorship seemingly resolved (although, as I noted above, there is no conclusive evidence), the work was classified as art for the larger audience. The performance featured in various art exhibitions and video works thereafter, including The Radiant. In The Radiant, the last fifty seconds of the performance that show the worker in close-up pointing to the center of the screen before he leaves the site appear in a fast-paced collage between fragments from the cultural history of nuclear power. On the audio track, the clip is accompanied by Cary’s radio play The Japanese Fishermen Suite, which I have mentioned in the section ‘The Radiant’ as a musical interpretation of the Lucky Dragon 5 incident, the most formative postwar experience of nuclear violence in Japan. The Radiant also includes an excerpt from Acconci’s Centers to highlight its artistic legacy. Linking the Finger Pointing Worker with two avant-garde art pieces, the alleged worker is framed as an artistic agent, albeit with a strong sense of a social

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mission to bridge the historical separation of the peaceful and the military atom with a joint experience of nuclear violence. At the other end of the spectrum, following statements made on the web blog about the incident’s alleged goal, the recording has also been presented as “a public act of defiance and accusation” against TEPCO and the poor working conditions more generally of those who helped in the aftermath of the disaster (KADIST 2011). Such presentations did not defy other framings of the recording as art, but instead introduced a clear political mission into this framing. Thus, read as an oppositional form of resistance, Takeuchi’s act of claiming authorship can be read as a political gesture, while the ambivalence about his role in the performance served to increase attention and legitimate his political claims. Stressing the work’s political dimension, independent curator and writer Jason Waite (2019) suggests, “putting Finger Pointing Worker’s body on display draws attention to those bodies sacrificing their safety in the zone,” hence the “transient working class” hired by subcontractors of TEPCO to do the clean-up work at the disaster site. The pointing gesture, moreover, “alluded to the complicity of people, safe in their electrified homes, as being entangled in the web of production and consumption that underlies the disaster” (Waite 2019). One could also argue that by comprising his own well-being, the pointing worker also undermines the viewer’s privilege to “view disaster” from afar (Azoulay 2015, 1). Nuclear disaster, by its very nature, breaches this privilege, yet most image regimes keep it up as an illusion. The pointing gesture could be read to not only as making the (Japanese) viewer complicit in having used the disaster-generating technology, but on a much simpler, material level, of being exposed to its fallout (radioactive, political, social) too. The Finger Pointing Worker is thus framed as an instance of artistic activism, raising awareness about the system that produced and ‘manages’ the disaster and the viewer’s complicity in it. Art theorist João Florêncio (2012) further explores this hybrid nature of the work. While Waite reads the performance before the background of Takeuchi’s (nonartistic) activities as a clean-up worker, Florêncio focuses on the work’s formal reference to Acconci’s Centers. For him, the pointing gesture goes beyond the social context of the Fukushima clean-up worker and the viewer’s complicity in allowing these exploitive structures to persevere. The pointing gesture, he writes, does not only include the viewer and the man-made system they are part of, but “the reality of the Anthropocene” at large (120). He bases his reading on three crucial differences between the two performances: First, Acconci was filmed against a white wall of a “generic art space” while the worker is “surrounded by a very specific and identifiable environment, the Fukushima power plant” (120). Second, whereas it can be said that Centers had only a very small group of spectators, the Fukushima video was uploaded to YouTube and, therefore, immediately multiplied and

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circulated in a much larger network. And third, while Acconci raises his arm upward and forward until it points directly at the center of the frame, the worker is pointing in a wide angle first aside, and only then to the front. For Florêncio, these three differences between Centers and its nuclear reenactment suggest that the worker does not actually point back to himself, but to what surrounds him: “Fukushima, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake, ‘green’ nuclear energy, cesium-127, himself, and all his viewers” (120), a list that culminates into a warning against what awaits us in the future. Hence, pointing not only out but ahead, rather than back to itself as in Centers, in Florêncio’s reading Finger Pointing Worker evokes a scenario of doom: the “anthropogenic end of days” (121). The pointing is thus turned into a premonitory gesture that could not be more alarming. However, it is also rather vague with respect to what or whom exactly it aims to address. Herein lies a general problem with the concept of the Anthropocene when used as a political concept: it is not sure whom or what it accuses. As Bonneuil and Fressoz (2016) argue that the rising inequality among human societies makes the notion that there is one universal anthropos collectively to be held accountable for the massive changes in the Earth’s ecosystems questionable (70–71). Therefore, they argue, the category of the anthropos doesn’t help to analyze the causes of this condition and to develop solutions for it. This problem is shared by Florêncio’s reading of Finger Pointing Worker. But even if it were clear whom the worker accuses (some have argued he points at TEPCO), Waite (2019) concedes that the work is not quite effective as an activist gesture, because its message is too ambiguous: While the pointing gesture’s “unclear intentionality . . . stokes critical imagination, accelerating the image’s circulation,” he contends that it also “defies simple explanation, potentially negating its use value as a form of visual activism.” To conclude, the question on the status of Finger Pointing Worker that has drawn so much attention remains ultimately unanswered. However, for me the whole debate raises a different, perhaps much more important question, which is why is it important to identify this as art? Or, to put it differently, isn’t it more important to explore the effects of the performance, instead of deciding whether it is art, or activism, or something else? So far, interpretations have focused on the work’s message and context, neglecting the medium and the viewer as two other important sides of a(n art)work involved in the production of meaning. And indeed, there is one element strikingly underdiscussed in these readings: the mobile phone. While both Florêncio and Waite mention it and the feedback loop it creates, they do not flesh out how it contributes to, or even changes the meaning of the work. In The Radiant, the mobile phone is not even visible. So, in the following section, I move away from the pairs of author/message and message/context, to the pair

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medium/viewer to take a closer look at what the work exhibits so bluntly: its use of information technology and the effect it has on the viewer. 3.5 BENDING THE RULES On the web blog, the author included a simple sketch, showing the worker in a circle of technological devices that are connected to each other to which he is connected through his own mobile device.11 The worker is presented as one of the links in the technological infrastructure that allows TEPCO to produce information as a means to exert power. The worker engages the camera in a circular movement that follows the dissemination of data from a local server to the ‘eyes’ of the world. While he is pointing at the camera, he watches his own performance on the mobile phone via TEPCO’s livestream. On the one hand, this exercise produces a kind of mise en abyme of networked culture, creating a recursive image that is not confined to what is recorded by the webcam, but instantly recedes into the abyss of uncontrolled multiplication by an unknown number of users and devices. On the other hand, the circularity hinders the image to ultimately become something other than an image. In her short comment on the recording, Erickson (2015) characterizes this circularity as the “feedback circuits of the machine and the body intertwined in futile efforts to save one another” (68). What Erickson highlights is the high level of redundancy as the very substance of this artwork. The worker is pointing at everybody and thus at nobody. In that sense, no meaningful relation is established. On this level, the work performs the kind of stupor that Nancy associates with the current techno-capitalist condition, giving expression to the catastrophe of meaning. But the ‘work’ of this artwork does not stop here. More important than saying something about the system is that the performance is staged within the system, using its own channels of dissemination to challenge it. As Waite (2019) remarks, The Finger Pointing Worker neither brought filming equipment into the plant nor made illegal recordings, but instead used the existing video streams available to the public. Furthermore, no statement was made in the video, the silent gesture was simply uploaded to YouTube.

In other words, the rogue worker followed the rules. He clearly was familiar with TEPCO’s policies and took appropriate precautions to interpret them for his purpose without having to break them. Shifting attention to rules means to shift the understanding of the institution within the system from being a monolithic power to a game that follows a specific set of rules. To understand the meaning of this shift, it is fruitful to return to Lyotard’s (1984)

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seminal work The Postmodern Condition, which I have mentioned in the introduction to this chapter. In this text, Lyotard proposes the metaphor of the ‘language game’ (which he adopted from philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein) to understand what forms the basis of legitimation in a society that does not believe in grand narratives anymore. In postmodernity, Lyotard suggests, the social consist of “flexible networks of language games” (17). Language games can be understood as micro-narratives that follow a set of rules. Institutional language games are more restrictive than private language games like a conversation between friends. Institutions limit the things that should be said and “there are ways of saying them. Thus: orders in the army, prayer in church, denotation in the schools, narration in families, questions in philosophy, performativity in businesses” (17). The rules imposed by institutions on the language game they play, thus restrict the number and kind of possible moves. In information society, machines structure social relations. To reduce machines’ function to communicate information, Lyotard argues, means to privilege the system’s point of view and interest, because it replicates unwittingly the values and prescriptions programmed into the machines (16). With information becoming more important by the day, power in the technomodern condition has essentially become a language game (16). Every game follows a set of rules, even if they are not well explicated. However, potential moves in language games, even institutional ones, are never once and for all. In fact, the way in which techno-power operates in information society is to continuously negotiate the limits of possible moves that can be made in a game: “the limits are themselves the stakes and provisional results of language strategies, within the institution and without” (17). The rules set by institutions can be changed under the condition that the limits of the institution itself are displaced. For instance, there can be language experiments in university if a creative writing course is taken up in the curriculum. Perhaps this is another way of putting the problem I identified with Ziarek’s silent revolt: evading the power relations altogether that structure society, art in Ziarek’s understanding also remains excluded from the language games through which power in postmodern society operates. Powerless art must, therefore, remain inconsequential, because it remains unanswerable to the sets of rules governing the various language games performed in society. Lyotard makes a different suggestion: art itself is a language game. It is not just any language game that is ‘played’ independently of other games, but one that has existential significance to other language games. To be modern, art has first to be postmodern, that is it must question the rules of the old (aesthetic) regime in order to propose its own. Lyotard calls this transformative act “artistic experimentation” which is “the work of art having to investigate what makes it an art object and whether it will be able to find an audience”

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(75). Art in the postmodern age continuously pushes the limits of what can be said in art. This is what makes art’s language game relevant to other language games: it does not simply impose its own rules, but works “without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done . . ., the paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo)” (81, original emphasis). Temporarily suspending the rules of a game, art introduces the possibility of a displacement, the boundaries of a game become the stakes. With regard to art’s role in techno-modern society, Lyotard offers an alternative to Ziarek’s silent revolt. If art is to change the nuclear industry’s language game, it cannot do so by leaving the game. Nor are countermoves effective, because they would merely react to the move of the opponent without shaking the power balance. It is unexpected moves, moves which suspend the rules that are needed to challenge the power balance as they accomplish a displacement in the system. A few unexpected moves, Lyotard concedes, will help the system to readjust, but a critical number of such moves will create a displacement big enough to have changed the system (16). Lyotard makes two claims here: to change the rules in a language game both unexpected and a critical number of moves are required. The question is where the emphasis lies: on the disruptive force of the single work, or the number of disruptions? To answer this question, different kinds of analyses are required. While the first leads to an individual analysis of an artwork, the second aims to define a critical mass in a specific situation and thus would require to look at possible coalitions and alliances between works of art and between art and political/ social institutions. For this chapter, I have chosen the first kind of analysis, so let me follow through this path for now and look at the single work. I return to the second kind of analysis in my next chapter, ‘How to Care for Nuclear Waste,’ when I discuss the historically built relation between radioactive waste management and the arts. Thus, the remainder of this chapter explores the question in what ways Finger Pointing Worker, as a postmodern work in search for its self and an audience, creates the conditions for a displacement in TEPCO’s language game. As I have mentioned in the previous section, no legal action was taken against the rogue worker. Is it possible to interpret TEPCO’s response as evidence that Takeuchi’s performance was such an unexpected move in TEPCO’s language game? Clearly, the incident had an impact, at least on TEPCO’s public image, and possibly TEPCO couldn’t deal with it within the framework of their game. In any case, the performance steers attention toward the role of information technology in the power game that TEPCO is playing. From the beginning, images have played a key role not only for the public to stay informed about the latest developments at the Fukushima site, but importantly also for those officials and workers who were practically handling the disaster.12 In the first days, the Japanese broadcasting corporation NHK got permission to install

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cameras about twenty miles away from the power plant to get live material on the events. While it broadcasted the images of the explosion in reactor Unit 1 on March 12, at the same time, without functioning control panels due to the blackout inflicted by the earthquake and subsequent tsunami, “stunned workers [inside TEPCO’s emergency response center] watched the explosion on television, not sure what exactly had blown up” (Lochbaum, Lyman, and Stranahan 2015, 41). To this day, elevated levels of radiation make it impossible for workers to enter the reactor buildings to assess the level of damage and the amount of fuel left inside them. In costly operations, drones, robots, and cranes perform this task in their place, providing images of what otherwise would remain invisible and unknowable. Soon after the events, TEPCO started to make this material publicly available. Moreover, it installed two surveillance cameras directly on the Fukushima Daiichi site that since then provide a live stream of images of what is happening on the site in a single, uninterrupted shot to anybody with internet access.13 This is the Fukuichi Live Cam, the webcam that recorded the performance. Because, unlike other image-generating devices used during and after the accident, the Fukuichi Live Cam fulfils no other function than provide a livestream of the site for the public, it is a purely strategic device placed by TEPCO to give the impression of transparency and dispel rumors of censorship. By letting the public follow the unspectacular clean-up and construction work at the Fukushima Daiichi site, it shows literally that there is nothing to see. The Fukuichi Live Cam could be seen as another instantiation of what Masco (2006) has called the “nuclear banal” in the context of the US Cold War atomic bomb project (84). As the logical inversion of the nuclear sublime which fetishizes the bomb, for Masco, the nuclear banal that manifests itself as a disinterest in the bomb, merely is a “counterdiscursive effect” that, like the nuclear sublime, “prevents thought through either an anesthesia effect or overstimulation” (15, my emphasis). Similarly, the livestream of the Fukuichi Live Cam, together with other information on the disaster made available online, such as a continuously growing list of “prompt reports” containing the most recent updates on the company’s decommissioning work, creates a feeling of being overwhelmed and bored at the same time—rather than being informed—by this neverending stream of technical information. In this sense, rather than being a sideeffect of the sublime as Masco observed in the context of the US Cold War bomb project, in Japan, the nuclear banal has become a tactic. Kohso (2014) calls the tactic of information management that the Japanese government employs in the context of the Fukushima disaster, a “tactic of undecidability” (6), which is a new way of exerting power in democratic regimes. Unlike the channeling of information common in totalitarian regimes, a tactic of undecidability is characterized according to Kohso by

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a flood of spectacles to be disseminated to the public (for instance, the endless watering of the crippled reactors) while indefinitely postponing any judgment about the truth of information that is put into circulation (especially concerning radiation contamination and its effects on living organisms). (6)

In the context of Japan’s political situation, the endless flow of images from live cameras and drones could be said to serve the same purpose of postponing judgment to enact laws that would help sustain Japan’s nuclear power which is still a central policy of the Japanese government. To overwhelm the spectator rather than to inform them represents an effective political enterprise in a society where information is power. What can be witnessed is the production of opacity through the illusion of total transparency creating a new discourse of the nuclear banal. Considering TEPCO’s disastrous record of communicating the gravity of the disaster and connected health risks to the public despite its comparatively large marketing budget (Funabashi 2012), this new policy of transparency did not pass in the public without suspicion. Online commentators have expressed distrust to the released material. But the point I am trying to make here does not concern the trustworthiness of information released by TEPCO. It concerns the sheer amount of material that is being released. In its unending, continuous flow, a steady image stream like the one provided by the now two Fukuichi Live Cams works to overwhelm spectatorship instead of generating or facilitating a meaningful evaluation of TEPCO’s efforts. Consequently, the public is forced into a relation of complicity: Instead of allowing the public to assume the position of a witness, that is, an observer that acts as an independent regulatory body where governmental bodies have failed to do so, the live stream together with the countless updates on the progressing clean-up efforts send the message: ‘See for yourself, we could not have done more, the situation is too complex to judge!’ In other words, as the most direct way of accessing the site of nuclear disaster, the excessiveness of the available online material comes to stand in for the excessiveness of the situation itself. What does this mean for the critical subject? If the spectator of the Fukuichi Live Cam becomes a mere witness to TEPCO’s transparency, they are reduced to a link in a system that guarantees its performance. So, let me move from the medium to the viewer. In his comparison of Finger Pointing Worker and Centers, Florêncio (2012) draws on a reading by art historian Rosalind Krauss (1976), who suggests that unlike any other artistic medium, video, as exemplified in Acconci’s Centers, reveals the narcissist self of modernity. She describes Centers as a “sustained tautology” (50) in which the video loop works as a mirroring apparatus for the artist’s body. What demarcates video from other visual artforms like painting or photography, she claims, is that video’s

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instant feedback loop renders everything beyond the artist’s self, such as the materiality of the canvas or film, irrelevant. In the context of Finger Pointing Worker, Florêncio dismisses her claim on the grounds that it includes the surroundings in his pointing gesture by raising his arm in a wide angle, thus using video art to make a statement not about the artist’s self, but about the state of the world. However, as I have already argued in the case of The Radiant, what Florêncio loses sight of when basing his reading on the first seconds of the video, is the work’s reflection on its own mediality. It is the long 23 minutes of pointing in which nothing spectacular happens that follow the initial adjusting movement, which make up most of the performance and, therefore, largely determines the effect it has on the viewer. Let me, therefore, go back to Krauss and her medium-centered approach to shed more light on the link between the medium and the viewer. Krauss describes the tautological relation in Centers in the following manner: “a line of sight that begins at Acconci’s plane of vision and ends at the eyes of his projected double” (50). As a result, the artist’s body is suspended between two machines like between two mirrors, the video screen and the monitor, collapsing everything in-between in a “movement . . . toward fusion” (56). Krauss calls this relation ‘narcissist’ in a psychoanalytical sense: a subject in constant search for itself, or its self as object, a search that never results in unification. While indeed there appears to be a shift between Centers and its nuclear reenactment, it is not, I argue, a shift away from the self—or a self—being dramatized in this performance as Florêncio claims. Instead, I would locate the shift within the definition of self: from a narcissist self in search of its self to an empty self being defined or subjected by the system it is part of. The webcam recording is not only about the instant feedback loop like Centers, but about the multiplication of this loop and its simultaneous performance all over the globe as Florêncio rightly points out. Therefore, from the perspective of the medium, the performance is not about a rogue worker/artist pointing at social injustice, or about a system, or ‘us’ (whoever that might be); it is about a (potential) spectatorship watching him pointing, about that spectatorship being able to watch him because of the technology provided by the company in charge. The worker becomes a technical link in an information circuit and so does the spectator, watching him. What he discloses in his doubling of the circuit is that the spectator has no other function than to keep the system running. The system, the information circuit, is dependent on someone watching, and yet, the spectator does not figure as a player in this game, but as a tool for the system to perform. Hence, I think it is indeed ‘a self’ that is being revealed. If it is not the narcissist self of modernity as Krauss claims in the case of Centers, I suggest it is the redundant (human) self of information society which Roland Barthes (1977), writing at the beginning of the information age, importantly

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characterizes as an uncritical self. Let me briefly dwell on Barthes’ observation here, as it helps me understand better the side of the viewer in Finger Pointing Worker. In the late 1960s and 1970s, just before Lyotard published his theses on postmodernity, several renowned literary scholars, including Philippe Sollers, Roland Barthes and Frederic Jameson, observed a spatialization of texts that required a new mode of interpretation. In his seminal essay ‘The Death of the Author,’ Roland Barthes (1977) writes that “the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced” (147). Here, Barthes approaches a text as “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (146). Consequently, “everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered” since “there is nothing beneath” (147). According to media scholar and programmer Alexander Galloway (2006), Barthes replaces the vertical reading mode of demystification with the horizontal or spatial reading mode of scanning.14 Galloway suggests that the appearance of scanning as a cultural mode of interpretation is concurrent to the emergence of information society. As such it is indicative of today’s social and political realities (90). Unlike demystification, scanning is not only disinterested in any underlying truth, it structurally negates the existence of such truth altogether. Scanning, for Barthes, is a process of collecting quotations. As such, he argues, it is effectively a form of writing which “[carries] out a systematic exemption of meaning . . . by refusing to assign a ‘secret,’ an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text)” (147). In other words, scanning does not allow meaning to settle in static decoding but subjects it to constant modification and readjustment. Scanning is thus presented by Barthes as an ongoing process of rewriting “the world as text.” Crucially, it is not the reader that does the rewriting, but the text: The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted. (148)

I find this last point, the abstraction of the reader to someone “without history, biography, psychology,” particularly intriguing: Although being necessary for the text to exist, Barthes’ reader/writer is not a critical individual who stands over against a unified text, but an empty space in which the desires of the text are realized, a some-one or unity that scans rather than pierces the text. What Barthes presents in this passage is a vision of information society in which the subject is being reduced to a conductor in a power circuit, a

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subject that has no agency of its own. Yet, what the Finger Pointing Worker exposes is that the whole purpose of TEPCO’s livestream is to retain a sense of agency in the viewer. This agency is importantly located not between the viewer/reader and the system/text, but in the viewer/reader alone, the critical witness that I have argued has become an important link in TEPCO’s power strategy. Again, like the artworks I discussed in the previous chapters, it is not the modern subject (here in the form of the independent critic ‘piercing’ the text of the CCTV livestream to reveal TEPCO’s foul play) that figures as a resource for societal change in Finger Pointing Worker. Instead, it is from a position of complicity that Finger Pointing Worker posits the possibility of change. Using his mobile phone to create an instant feedback loop within TEPCO’s power circuits, the performance reformulates the catastrophe of meaning as an ethical problem because it reveals the citizen’s complicity with the system. Through scanning, then, the performance voices social critique from a position of complicity. The blurring of the line between critique and complicity in the information age is something that Ziarek discusses in his book as well. Interestingly, he, too, uses the metaphors of reading and writing to describe this blurring. The basis of technicity, he claims, consists of “manipulative writing” (195), at least in the case of digital technology and genetic engineering. Referring to the two works of internet art by Mirakami and Kac, Ziarek observes an “indistinguishability of critique/complicity” in today’s global flows of infopower because as the artworks demonstrate “everyone can be, in the same gesture, both critic and conduit for the ostensibly criticized power” (196). Finger Pointing Worker could be taken as yet another example of an artwork exposing this conflation of complicity and critique. The difference to Ziarek’s examples, however, is that Finger Pointing Worker does not operate as an artwork within the art institution, but in the social arena, which arguably makes it particularly vulnerable to be absorbed in the play of power it seeks to challenge. Thus, unlike Molecular Clinic and Genesis, Finger Pointing Worker does not enjoy the legitimation of the art institution (at least not in the first instance); it crosses the line between art, activism, and civil disobedience. As a result, the work shifts the question that I have explored throughout this chapter from how to remain exposed to the catastrophe of meaning to what is at stake for art in this exposure? In the case of Finger Pointing Worker, even more than risking to become complicit in the operations of power the work criticizes, it risks losing its audience and hence its critical force. Yet, what it gains is power, which in this case means to reconfigure the very tools used by those in power in a way that enables critical insight. To give up, or at least obscure its art status allows Finger Pointing Worker to participate in the language game of power. Unlike Ziarek, I see this balancing act as art’s unique

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potential to make a difference, to change the rules of the game as Lyotard has put it. By putting its status as an art object at risk, art gets the chance to rewrite the rules of the game, not in the sandbox of the art institution, but on the playground of power. Yet, it is true that so far, the aspired systemic change did not happen in post-Fukushima Japan. What, then, do I mean when I say that art can be consequential if it questions itself? Have the artworks I discussed in this chapter not, as a matter of fact, remained inconsequential in the social domain? In effect, what my analysis suggests is that art’s disruptive force is primarily a disruption in thinking, a disruption, moreover, that must constantly be reactivated and requires powerful allies in society as Ziarek concedes. To put it simply, art creates a condition for change in society rather than actually causing change. What does this say about the problematic relation between art and power that I took as the starting point for this chapter? My analysis has shown that Ziarek’s proposition that art should not be complicit in any form and at any rate is untenable. However, in light of Finger Pointing Worker’s transformation into a form of entertainment (a clip to be watched on YouTube and shown in art galleries), Lyotard’s proposition about art’s existential force also appears utopian. Ultimately, then, this chapter did not resolve the tension between these two positions. Instead, what my analysis has exposed is a dilemma: to be critical, art needs to stay clear from power relations; yet for its critique to be heard, art needs to participate in power’s language game. It is a dilemma that both Ziarek and Lyotard do not fully acknowledge when arguing that art can be consequential and critical. 3.6 EXPOSURE I have shown in this chapter that art offers ways to ‘remain exposed’ to the catastrophic condition that Fukushima reveals, ways that present not only a resistance in thinking as I have argued in the previous two chapters, but that rewrite the micro-operations of power. I have argued for The Radiant that by orchestrating light’s technic and poietic dimensions, the film voices social critique while at the same time going beyond (or ‘beneath’) it and engaging in a much more radical revolt than mere critique would allow for. The question that remains (and that the film itself raises as I suggested in the section ‘Re-Volt’) is how this aesthetic revolt can regain social significance once it has sidetracked power relations. Finger Pointing Worker, on the other hand, directly participates in the micro-operations of power, TEPCO’s language game, thus redefining the line between force and power, between art’s silent revolt, and the ambitions to be consequential in the public sphere. To do that, it puts itself—its status as an

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art object—at risk. It is this postmodern self-questioning I suggest, not the artist’s activist ambitions, that creates a displacement in TEPCO’s language game. Ziarek similarly defines art’s force field as a space in which power relations are redistributed. According to Ziarek, art may have activist ambitions, but the real transformation happens under the radar of power. The reading of Finger Pointing Worker I proposed in this chapter suggests that for art to be consequential, it must perform in both spaces: the forcefield of non-power and the (language) game of power. The risk of art losing its identity as an art object in the process is not, as Ziarek has feared, an undesired consequence of this hybridity, but as I have shown a precondition. To be consequential in the social sphere, art must take the risk of losing itself and its audience. To be clear, this does not mean that art gives up itself in order to become activism. Instead, what I have observed in Finger Pointing Worker is a genuinely postmodern, thus artistic moment in Lyotard’s sense, a radical openness in the work that transitions to the viewer. What the transition between these two artworks signals, then, is that in the context of art the question of how to remain exposed that I raised in the beginning of this chapter, raises another question, which is, what is at stake for art in this exposure? In my discussion of Finger Pointing Worker, I already gave a tentative answer: what is at stake is the ‘work’ of art itself, its critical force as a transformative force in society. To be consequential art cannot stay apart from the power game but must muddle through it, even at the risk of losing itself. Yet, one artwork won’t make a change. The question, with Lyotard, remains when a societal system actually starts to change, that is, how many and what kinds of artworks it needs to transform the social sphere. The last chapter of this book further expands on the issue of art’s risky relation to (institutional) power, shedding light on possible coalitions and alliances between art and actors in the field of radioactive waste management. Offering a range of examples, as well as three in-depth analyses of artistic practices, I show why I think it is absolutely necessary to involve art in the question of how to responsibly dispose of long-lived radioactive waste and discuss the ways in which this is already being done. NOTES 1. Protests started one week after the nuclear accident when three activists called for action in front of TEPCO headquarters in Tokyo. The movement gained momentum on April 10 when 15,000 people gathered in Koenji area, and peaked on June 29 that same year, when 200,000 took part in a nation-wide anti-nuclear protest (A. Brown 2018, 1). The protests lasted, with fluctuating participation, for several years. In the context of Japan’s political culture which is often said to be dominated by

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apathy, these numbers are massive. However, they did not change the ruling party’s supportive stance on nuclear power. 2. Moreover, the passage from which I took the quote reveals an iteration of Lyotard’s claim that power in techno-modernity resides within the (social) relations that constitute things, bodies, and values rather than in the things, bodies, and values themselves. For Ziarek (2004), power is articulated in the “various flexible operations of producing, managing, and (re)programming, in which entities and relations come to be constituted into the modern world whose standards of reality and importance are determined with a view toward a greater penetrative and formative reach of power” (4). Other thinkers that have informed Ziarek’s argument include Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, and Lyotard, who all have constated a technologization and intensification of power in the modern age. 3. With this, Nancy adds a significant element to Lyotard’s description of postmodernism, which is that the performance of a techno-human system—its efficiency—is measured by the profit it yields and this does not necessarily coincide with a self-preservation of its subsystems. 4. For an in-depth analysis of the Fukushima nuclear disaster as a ‘normal accident,’ that is, an accident to be expected on this level of system complexity, see Jorgensen (2016, 346–373). 5. There is evidence that scenarios like Fukushima were within the range of the thinkable. In an 1995 interview of nuclear chemist Takagi Jinzaburo that was published by the Citizens Nuclear Information Center (CNIC), Jinzaburo gives (an ultimately accurate) warning about the lack of earthquake readiness of Fukushima Daiichi that comes uncannily close to what happened in 2011: “suppose there were a combined rupture to the water supply line, a breakdown of the emergency core cooling system, and a malfunction of the emergency diesel generator; even if the reactor vessel and primary cooling system were not directly damaged, the result would be a large release of radiation from a meltdown” (Avenell 2012, 270). 6. A notable citizen science initiative is Safecast (https://safecast​.org/), which has played an important role in providing independent radiation measurements on the spread of contamination after the Fukushima disaster. 7. Ziarek (2004) refers to techne in the modern context as the “channelling” of force relations into “technical flows of power” (165). Techne is not opposed to poiesis, which he defines as investing force relations with “more-being” (165), but rather designates a distinct streak in the common origin of art and technology that subjects art and technology to power. Ziarek’s take on techne and poiesis follows Heidegger’s (1977) discussion of the terms in his widely-read essay “The Question Concerning Technology.” Heidegger (1977) suggests that in the case of modern technology, techne loses its poietic dimension, its ability to bring-forth. Instead, it takes the form of a “challenging” [Herausfordern] (6). Interestingly in the context of this book, one of the very first examples Heidegger uses to explain this ‘challenging’ is modern physics “which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such” (6). In the next paragraph he explicitly refers to “atomic energy, which can be released either for destruction or for peaceful use” (7). Nuclear power is thus a prime example for techne’s transformation into a manipulating form of power.

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8. Sonority, in fact, is part of the art collective’s name, Otolith Group: an otolith is a calcareous concretion in the inner ear that allows us to sense movement and gravitation, hence it allows us to orientate. Nancy (2007) himself mentions “acoustic oto-emissions” in his book as sounds produced by the inner ear of the one who is listening: “the oto- or self [auto]-produced sounds that come to mingle with received sounds in order to receive them” (16). For Nancy, this testifies to the “simultaneity of the visible” and the “contemporaneity of the audible” (16), playing into the vibrant come-and-go movement that is resonance. What it also underlines, is the explicit agency of the listener in the production of the phenomenon. 9. The position of the camera from which this recording was taken has changed meanwhile, albeit not in response to the recording itself. The new location of the webcam can be found here: http://www​.tepco​.co​.jp​/en​/nu​/f1​-np​/camera​/index2​-e​.html. 10. His solo exhibition was entitled Open Secret and ran from March 17 to April 1, 2012, at Tokyo’s Setagaya Ward. Takeuchi was employed as a clean-up worker at the Fukushima site at the time the incident took place. Moreover, he is about the same height and built as the rogue worker. However, when asked if he was the finger pointing worker, he would keep his answer vague and refer to himself as his “agent” (Takeuchi 2019). 11. The sketch can be accessed here: http://pointatfuku1cam​.nobody​.jp​/e​.html. 12. At the time that I write this, it can safely be stated that Fukushima is the most mediatized nuclear disaster in history. The massive coverage of the disaster in both traditional and new media far outstripped the (then print) media coverage of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl both in scale and speed (Friedman 2011). The returns on Google speak for themselves: If you search for “Fukushima,” you get tens of millions results, the search terms “Fukushima and radiation” still return almost 10 million results. According to communication scholar Sharon M. Friedman (2011), the results list is even longer. When she searched for “Fukushima” in July 2011, she claims Google returned 73,700,000 results and 22,400,000 results for “Fukushima and radiation” (55). For differences in news coverage between countries and media outlets, see Kepplinger and Lemke (2016) and Imtihani and Mariko (2013). 13. The livestream can be followed here: https://www​.tepco​.co​.jp​/en​/nu​/f1​-np​/ camera​/index​-e​.html. 14. Barthes uses the term parcourir in the original text, which can be translated as ‘skim through’ or ‘glance through.’ The version I quote here translates parcourir as ‘range over.’ While Sollers and Jameson use the term scanning themselves, in Barthes’ case, the technological connotation to this reading mode is only added by Galloway, equating ‘range over’ with ‘scanning.’

Chapter 4

How to Care for Nuclear Waste?

In the previous chapters, I have looked at the central link of the nuclear fuel chain, nuclear energy, and touched upon its dirty origins in uranium mines, and also delved into its disastrous effects when it spirals out of control.1 This last chapter moves on to the debate on how to responsibly dispose of the long-lived waste that is generated in nuclear energy production and what art can contribute to it. I continue the argument developed in the previous chapter that to be consequential art cannot remain at a comfortable distance to the power relations governing techno-capitalism, and explore the critical potential that experimental forms of involvement can assume in the setting of nuclear waste management. Radioactive waste is any waste containing components that are unstable due to radioactive decay and hence harmful to living entities. It is produced at every stage of the nuclear fuel chain and ranges from waste rock piles left by the mining of uranium ore that contain only low levels of radioactivity, things that have come into contact with radioactive materials like gloves, tools, or a reactor vessel that has reached the end of its operational period and needs to be dismantled, to used fuel from nuclear energy production. Not all these waste materials are equally hazardous. Used fuel and separated waste from the reprocessing of used fuel belong to the most hazardous category of long-lived, high-level waste.2 Although they only make up 3 percent of the total amount of waste, they emit according to the World Nuclear Association (2018) 95 percent of the radioactivity emitted by all existing radioactive waste. Moreover, long-lived radioactive waste like spent nuclear fuel remains hazardous for upward of 100,000 years, or 3,000 generations. It is numbers such as these that have compelled generations of engineers, archaeologists, linguists and others to search for responsible ways to permanently dispose of long-lived radioactive waste. While a solution is yet to be 133

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found, today there is a broad consensus among the international radioactive waste community that geological disposal, the burying of radioactive waste in suitable geological layers several hundred meters underground, is the best option available.3 Unlike other disposal methods that have been explored during the twentieth century, geological disposal does not involve risky (and potentially very costly) procedures like shooting waste packages into space or throwing them into subduction zones. Moreover, it follows the principle of ‘passive safety,’ which means that a repository is constructed in a way that does not require any technical maintenance after closure, thus reducing the likelihood of accidental exposure.4 However, even if it appears technically possible to isolate the waste today, there is no guarantee that it will stay isolated in the future considering the large timespans involved. Any man-machine interaction can only be predicted and controlled to a limited extent, even if the technology in question is designed in such a way to keep this interaction to a minimum. In order to account for this uncertainty, philosopher of science Jantine Schröder (2016) suggests to approach geological disposal as a “long-term socio-technical experiment” (687). A technological experiment “serves the practice oriented demonstration of the functioning of a technology” (689), which involves that it moves out of the laboratory setting, causing an inevitable decrease in control. In that sense, most technological experiments are also social experiments, with the difference that the latter sometimes are not even acknowledged as experiments, making controlled monitoring not only challenging but impossible. Social experiments can involve a variety of participants and bystanders who are not aware of the experimental setup and the potential hazards imposed (689–690). Radioactive waste projects can be seen as long-term socio-technical experiments in the sense that the technology (for instance, a radioactive waste repository) that is currently being developed in a laboratory setting, still needs to be tested outside the laboratory. But to verify this technology before it is implemented is virtually impossible, because verification requires that the repository will have completed its life span, which is when the radioactive waste it stores poses no danger to the environment anymore.5 By implication, geological disposal will never go beyond the experimental stage, adding, if you will, a yet unknown number of future hibakusha to Toyosaki’s already extensive list that I referred to in chapter 2. To conceive of geological disposal as an eternal experiment as Schröder suggests sits squarely with statements of the World Nuclear Association (2018) who maintain to have “technically proven” the functioning of geological disposal and thus found a solution to the radioactive waste problem.6 As soon as geological disposal was considered to be a viable option for the permanent disposal of long-lived radioactive waste, the question arose how to warn future generations about its dangers, so they would not attempt

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to excavate it. As the debate evolved into what today is referred to in the radioactive waste community as the preservation of records, knowledge and memory of radioactive waste repositories across generations, short RK&M, the question was reformulated from how to warn future generations against the waste to how to inform them about nuclear technologies and the risks they pose, so they would be equipped with the necessary knowledge to make their own decisions about what to do with the legacy they inherited. I propose that to fully realize this shift, a third term needs to be introduced into this debate, which is care. Care, as a term, is not alien to the RK&M debate. In fact, the radioactive waste community has a specific understanding of care which is captured in the concept of ‘oversight’ on which much of the RK&M debate leans ever since it was introduced by the International Commission on Radiological Protection in 2013 (Weiss et al. 2013). Oversight, also called “watchful care,” refers to “society ‘keeping an eye’ on the technical system [of a geological repository] and the actual implementation of plans and decisions” which includes the “regulatory supervision” of the facility until its existence will be forgotten (Weiss et al. 2013, 42:20). Literally relying on the disembodied eyes of regulators, the concept of ‘oversight’ as defined here by the International Commission on Radiological Protection, does present a form of care, but one that can be practiced at a distance: it translates care into a series of technical procedures and regulations following a checklist of principles that are overseen by institutional control bodies. In ethics, this approach is known as the liberal justice model which defines morality as a collection of universal principles and calculations based on Reason (Sander-Staudt 2019). As I demonstrate in this chapter, in the context of geological disposal such a universal approach is problematic, because it allows current generations to liberate themselves from the responsibility to really care for the waste they produce (see next section ‘Nuclear Waste as a Communication Problem’). The understanding of care that I suggest is necessary to adopt in radioactive waste management, and I therefore adopt in this chapter, draws not on the liberal justice model, but the critical countermovement of care ethics. Care, as a concept, is closely associated with feminist theory and was only introduced into ethics in the closing decades of the twentieth century. What became known as the ‘ethics of care’ or ‘care ethics’ was a response to the liberal conception of justice outlined above that dominated the field at the time. Instead of following universal principles, care ethics highlight the networks of relations in which ethical interaction and moral judgment take place. Although care ethicists disagree on some of the core values that define this philosophical movement, there is a consensus that care ethics privilege the response to the individual over generalizable standards and conceive the world as a complex network of relations rather than a

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collection of independent individuals acting on the basis of Reason.7 Due to its aversion against generalizable standards, care ethics are often portrayed not as a theory but as a practice, virtue, or cluster of overlapping concepts. But there is one principle that all conceptualizations of care within care ethics seem to share, which is “to guide the moral agent to recognize relational interdependency” (Sander-Staudt 2019). Care ethics offer a means to acknowledge both one’s relatedness in the world and the violence and incomprehensibility of these relations, which is especially useful when dealing with harmful substances like radioactive waste. It is this understanding of the individual being bound up in and dependent on a network of relations rather than acting independently of others that I think needs to be internalized in radioactive waste management, and specifically the RK&M debate if its efforts to avoid that future generations suffer from the waste they inherit are to be successful. In this chapter, I draw on Donna Haraway’s (2008) notion of care as creating an “ontological opening” in experimental relations that forces the one conducting the experiment to stay responsive to the suffering of the ones participating in it (84). A trained historian of science and acclaimed feminist writer who, throughout her career, has engaged critically with instrumental relationships in science and technology, Haraway suggests that it is not the inequality of the relations in an experiment that is the problem, but the legitimation of this inequality on the basis of an assumed ‘natural’ hierarchy between the experimenter and the participant (75). Although Haraway is concerned with laboratory experiments involving animals, I think her observations are useful to better describe the kind of relations emerging in the long-term socio-technical experiment of geological disposal. To my mind, the RK&M concept of ‘watchful care,’ too, reflects a naturalized hierarchy between current and future generations, because it sets up the rules that coming generations have to follow. Those who will potentially suffer from the toxic waste that past and current generations have produced (and keep producing) are turned into unsuspecting participants in a socio-technical experiment that will last for many millennia to come. To create an ontological opening in such relations is a risky undertaking for those at the top of the hierarchy, that is, radioactive waste agencies. It means to open up to the uncertainty of multidirectional relations in which the other answers back, “never [leaving] their practitioners in moral comfort, sure of their righteousness” (Haraway 2008, 75). Obviously, in the case of geological disposal, those likely to suffer from the consequences of the decisions that are being made today are not yet even alive and won’t be for a long time. Thus, there is no option to have them answer back in the same way as an animal in a laboratory experiment would.8 Seen from this angle, it only appears logical that the idea of care that the radioactive waste community propagates with

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the notion of ‘oversight’ is not directed at the present but aims to create ‘safe’ futures. Yet, for Haraway, this is the wrong avenue to go down. In her book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Haraway (2016) has turned to the question how we—the human and nonhuman ‘critters’ inhabiting this world—can together build livable futures in the face of looming ecological crisis and social collapse. The one big mistake that is being made in “urgent times,” she suggests, is to make the future ‘safe,’ that is, “clearing away the present and the past in order to make futures for coming generations” (1). According to her, a fixation on the future, or a future, is always misguided if it comes at the expense of engaging with the present. The key to a responsible and responsive relation to future generations, then, lies not in finding ways to make the future ‘safe,’ but in learning to be “truly present” which is to realize that what is called the now is ‘thick’ with memories of the past and beginnings of what might still be, and to build relations that inhabit and respond to this thickness (1). A care practice addressing the future must hence engage with the complexities of the present. In the case of the experimental condition of geological disposal, I think this means first of all coming to terms with not only the social but the sociotechnical complexities of a radioactive waste repository. To ask for a caring disposition toward technology (rather than through technology) may not sound intuitive. But as the growing body of literature indicates, it gains traction in scholarly debates—and not only since philosopher of science Bruno Latour (2011) provocatively demanded in a widely read essay that “we must care for our technologies as we do our children” (21). As Annemarie Mol, Ingunn Moser and Jeanette Pols (2010) point out, with an eye on practices of care, any technology needs to be cared for, however smooth and instrumental it is designed to look: “Technologies . . . do not work or fail in and of themselves. Rather, they depend on care work. On people willing to adapt their tools to a specific situation while adapting the situation to the tools, on and on, endlessly tinkering” (14–15). The technologies they refer to range “from thermometers and oxygen masks to laboratory tests and video cameras” (14). They are omnipresent, yet rarely recognized tools of existing care practices not unlike the technologies used in geological disposal and RK&M in the sense that they perform care work for future generations that is invisible and probably (hopefully) remains unrecognized by most. In the context of geological disposal, the idea of continuous, persistent tinkering that the authors associate in this quote with care, is both imperative and at stake. Repository technology is developed in situations of incomplete knowledge about both current and future conditions, and therefore requires a certain extent of experimentation (and ‘tinkering’). It is the abstractness of the (distant) future that poses a challenge to a potential care practice, because care defined in this pragmatic way relies on specific and existing situations to

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which tools such as the ones listed by Mol, Moser, and Pols can be adopted in situ. In the case of radioactive waste management, tinkering alone cannot be a sufficient basis for care due to the inherent futurity of the problem. What is needed is a general ethical comportment toward the world that is based on a relational understanding of morality of the kind outlined by Haraway. Another challenge to introducing a care perspective to radioactive waste management is that the whole idea of ‘passive safety’ in geological disposal assumes that there are no users after the repository goes into operation, only potential intruders to be warned. However, as Schröder (2016) helpfully points out, every technology has users who need to be instructed on how to use it, even if in the case of an autonomously functioning, underground repository this means that people need to learn how not to interfere with this technology (through breaching the barriers by digging for instance) (696). To introduce a care perspective into the debate on geological disposal is not only about emphasizing the necessity to deal with questions that concern future generations in the present in order to remain responsive to their potential suffering. RK&M is about finding ways to communicate with future generations. Every message is created (consciously or not) with a certain recipient in mind. As such, the kind of message that is sent determines, at least to some extent, the kind of response it provokes. While a warning addresses an intruder and an instruction a user, what is needed to attach relevance to a piece of information handed down, is someone who cares—someone who takes responsibility rather than following (or ignoring) a warning or an instruction, be it in the present or in the future. The question that remains to be answered, then, is how to create and sustain the kind of ontological opening that Haraway sees at the root of a responsive care practice, within the institutional debate on geological disposal? How to turn RK&M’s ‘care at a distance’ into a risky, multidirectional practice that stays responsive to the socio-technical complexities of the long-term experiment of geological disposal? I suggest that art assumes a key role in this endeavor, not by offering a solution, but on the contrary, by pointing to new problems and raising questions that force the kind of ontological opening that for Haraway stands at the basis of any responsible (and responsive) relation. There is a history of drawing art (and cultural expressions more generally) into the question of how to preserve knowledge about radioactive waste repositories. Yet, partly as the result of a reductionist approach to interdisciplinarity as a form of problem-solving across disciplines, art’s role has overwhelmingly been either to illustrate and legitimate institutional narratives or to serve as the spare part store of history from which proven methods could be recycled for future preservation strategies as I argue in the section ‘Art and RK&M.’ To introduce a relational care perspective, I think, a different approach to art is needed. This is not to generally dismiss the field’s interest in art which continues a long-standing

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fascination of the technical sciences in transcendence (see also section ‘Art and RK&M’), but rather tweak it in a different direction to reduce anxieties around the ‘riskier’ uses of art—the kind that raises fundamental questions about the field. To explain what I think can be a radical contribution to the RK&M debate and the debate on radioactive waste disposal in general, I return to Deleuze’s and Lyotard’s views on art at the end of the section ‘Art and RK&M.’ This chapter is divided into seven sections. The first three sections, ‘Nuclear Waste as a Communication Problem,’ ‘Culture Solves What Technology Cannot?’ and ‘Art and RK&M,’ sketch the institutional debate on radioactive waste as a communication problem and how it turned the field’s fascination with art into a problematic separation of science and technology on the one hand, and culture (specifically art) on the other. In the sections ‘Viral Fictions’ and ‘A Marker for Halde Stolzenberg’ I introduce a different approach to art, using two examples of artistic experimentation to show how, through art, a relational care perspective can be introduced into the debate on radioactive waste. In the section ‘How to Really Care for Nuclear Waste,’ I conclude that introducing a care perspective through art points beyond muddling as conceptualized throughout this book toward a general ethical comportment. I close this chapter with a ‘Postscript: A Note on Mythology’ in which I briefly reflect on the self-presentation of the Belgian underground research institute HADES and the question if mythology provides a fruitful ground for interdisciplinary cooperation. 4.1 NUCLEAR WASTE AS A COMMUNICATION PROBLEM The foundations of the RK&M debate were laid by physicist Alvin M. Weinberg (1972) who argued that to manage nuclear waste, there is an unprecedented need for continuity in social institutions. It was the first time that nuclear waste was not only discussed as a technical challenge to be overcome by technical means, but as a social challenge asking for a broader societal approach. As soon as geological disposal became a viable option, experts felt compelled to consider the problem of human intrusion: How to make sure, they asked, future generations won’t dig up the waste in search for resources, or accidently breach the multi-barrier system of metal containers and salt, rock or clay that isolates the waste, while trying to build an underground highway between Seattle and New York? In the 1980s, this question was increasingly given attention within nuclear waste management and beyond (OECD-NEA 2019c, 20). Radioactive waste was thus reframed as a problem of communication, creating an intellectually stimulating debate that

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was held across many disciplines, unified by a single question. As the title of a special issue asked succinctly: “How will we tell our children’s children where the nuclear waste is” (Posner et al. 1984)?9 The newly found problem gave rise to a number of national and international research programs. Even a new academic field was founded, nuclear semiotics, which aims to develop warning messages for the distant future to deter potential intruders from radioactive waste repositories. The earliest and best known of these efforts was a series of studies conducted in the 1980s and early 1990s by the Sandia National Laboratories for the US Department of Energy (DOE). For these studies, several interdisciplinary expert panels were convened to develop ‘plausible’ future scenarios, and based on those scenarios, propose a so-called marker system for the planned Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada, and later, when this project was stalled, for New Mexico’s repository for military radioactive waste, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), to warn and deter potential intruders.10 A marker is defined as “a long-lasting object that indicates an area of influence, power or danger” which is “placed strategically at or near the site for immediate recognition or for discovery at a later time” (OECD-NEA 2019c, 101). It can take the form of a small object the size of a hand, a larger-than-life monolith or an entire architectural system of monoliths, corridors and enclosures to walk through. (I return to some of the proposed markers and marker systems later in this section.) A more recent example for such a research effort is the just concluded eight-year international initiative of the Nuclear Energy Agency, hereafter referred to as RK&M Initiative. Over the past three decades, the RK&M field has evolved to address broader issues related to the preservation of records, knowledge and memory of disposal sites across generations. The focus shifted from warning future generations against the dangers of radioactive waste to informing them about the technology and its cargo, so they can decide for themselves how to best manage this legacy. However, as more research was done, it became clear that to communicate successfully across generations was not only a matter of making sure that a given message will remain legible in the future. It was also to make sure that people will take it seriously and read it the way it was intended. Accordingly, the final report of the RK&M Initiative highlights the question of how to maintain not only information itself over time, but also its “meaning and relevance” as one of the three guiding questions in the field (OECD-NEA 2019c, 17). Thus, in addition to how to tell our children’s children where the nuclear waste is, another question emerged: How to make sure they will attach any relevance to the answer? I suggest that the latter question reveals an ethical complexity that was not addressed in the traditional RK&M approach which hereafter I shall refer to as the ‘warn-andinform approach.’ The authors of the report touch on

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this complexity when they identify “carelessness” as one of the key factors for the loss of knowledge and information in case studies from outside the nuclear sector (OECD-NEA 2019c, 38). It is argued that to prevent the loss of knowledge and information involves working not only against “negligence” and “incompetence” (which could be tackled with appropriate regulations), but also against “disinterest” and “wilful forgetting” which are, arguably, more difficult to remedy as they are not merely about giving the right instructions (OECD-NEA 2019c, 38). RK&M preservation, therefore, also requires a sense of responsibility and a certain level of willingness to engage with the subject matter on the part of the recipient that cannot be guaranteed through regulations alone. This is what in the report is identified as preserving the “meaning and relevance” of information as well as the information itself. Taking my cue from this short passage in the report, then, I suggest that to respond to the ethical complexity of the task of informing future generations about the radioactive waste they will inherit, a relational care perspective needs to be introduced to the warn-and-inform approach. In the introduction to this chapter, I have defined care in the context of geological disposal and RK&M, inspired by Haraway, as a ‘risky’ ethical comportment toward the world that forces the moral agent to stay responsive to the suffering of future generations. For the present, this means first of all staying responsive to the social, technical and ethical complexities of geological disposal—something which I argue cannot be achieved with the kind of archaic media that RK&M prefers. Let me now apply this definition to the scientific debate on human intrusion where the ethical dimension of geological disposal has been discussed most extensively. I shall argue that, although introducing an ethical dimension into the debate in the first place, the historical fixation on human intrusion has hindered a sustained engagement with the problem of communication that I think must build the backbone of any care practice in radioactive waste management, because it creates a categorical division between the human who acts, and the technology that is being acted upon, instead of conceiving them as participants in a network of yet undetermined relations. As a well advocated solution to the problem of human intrusion, the repository marker is a striking example for this dilemma. While offering ways to critically rethink dominant regimes of communication unfit to respond to the challenge of the long-term (Pannekoek 2018), repository markers have also been criticized for passing the responsibility for communicating the dangers of radioactive waste from the community on to the object, and from the object on to future generations, relieving current decision-makers from answering difficult questions (Wyck 2004; Bryan-Wilson 2003). Markers rely on their material and semiotic stability, which according to critics cannot be guaranteed. Indeed, a look into one of the pioneering studies on repository markers that is still being used as a reference point in the field

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reveals that the problem lies with the specific understanding of responsibility on which the designs are based. In a short statement justifying the marker they propose in that study, the authors elaborate their idea of a successful marker system: We consider the key to a successful system to be a credible conveyance of the dangers of disturbing the repository. We must inform potential intruders about what lies below and the consequences of disturbing the waste. If they decide that the value of the metal component of the waste far outweighs the risks of recovering the metal, the decision is their responsibility, not ours. (Trauth, Hera, and Guzowsti 1993, F-35)

In this short piece of scientific speculation, the authors respond to what is considered to be a ‘plausible’ scenario by the expert group—the exploitation of resources in a future defined by resource scarcity. What surprised me most about this response is that they seem to have a very clear idea about the intentions and actions of possible future intruders. Based on this idea, the authors determine the degree and kind of responsibility they carry. Having determined a certain scenario (resource scarcity) and a certain behavior of future humans within this scenario (digging up the metal used in the repository), the authors limit their responsibility to securing the successful communication of the specific dangers involved in this specific action. In effect, the current generation’s responsibility to future generations is limited to a set of predefined conditions. The strategy they follow is hence to contain indeterminacy by providing imagined (but deemed plausible enough) future scenarios on the basis of which a solution in the present can be developed. In these scenarios, it is humans who act irresponsibly, because nonhuman factors like geology or the repository technology are believed to be under control or considered passive enough to not pose any danger on their own. In the article on geological disposal as a long-term experiment that I referred to in the introduction, Schröder (2016) demonstrates that the same logic is applied to the repository technology itself. She argues that the institutional notion of responsibility within the radioactive waste community relies on a set of assumptions that are being made about the future. If these assumptions remain unchallenged, her line of argument suggests, geological disposal can only be called an irresponsible practice (696). One of the assumptions she identifies directly concerns human intrusion. Commenting on a statement by the International Commission on Radiological Protection, she writes: If inadvertent intrusion is mentioned, the main message is that “it is considered out of the scope of responsibility of the current generation to protect a deliberate intruder, i.e. a person who is aware of the nature of the facility” (ICRP 2011, pp.

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24–25). This position . . . reveals a hypothesis, namely that a deliberate intruder will be a knowledgeable intruder. (696)

The assumption being made is that there will be an effective knowledge preservation system in place that gives any deliberate intruder a sufficient understanding of the risks that their actions involve. It is on that basis that engineers may be held accountable for the performance of the repository technology. Effectively, this means that (although the functioning of the repository itself cannot be guaranteed!), if the knowledge transfer fails, the responsibility lies with the intruder rather than with its engineers. Choosing the liberal justice approach, thus, the problem of responsibility remains ultimately unsolved within radioactive waste management. This effects not only the question of how to mark a repository, but has implications for the repository technology itself as demonstrated, for instance, in the debate if the stored waste should remain retrievable in the future or not (Buser 2014). The problem here, as I see it, lies in the inability of the concept of responsibility as proposed by the techno-scientific community to properly incorporate uncertainty and unknowability into the methodological framework that is used to assess the question of how to responsibly dispose of radioactive waste. In other words, the scientific debate is unable to respond to the ‘wickedness’ of the question, that is, its resistance to resolution in the sense that any answer produces new problems that are as difficult to solve as the previous one. As I show in the following section, this deterministic approach to radioactive waste did not logically emerge from turning radioactive waste into a communication problem that marked the conceptual beginning of the RK&M debate. As can be gleaned from historical sources, framing radioactive waste as a communication problem initially opened the debate to ethical questions about the waste-producing nuclear technologies and the condition of existence they created, thus signaling the potential for a more fundamental ethical engagement with the problem of radioactive waste (Posner 1990, 14). Rather, it was an active choice that was being made at some point to operationalize this reflexive approach into the narrow problem-solving logic that Allenby and Sarewitz criticize to be unfit to address the complexity of challenges like radioactive waste disposal. To summarize, the moment that radioactive waste was turned into a communication problem, two paths were opened: one offering a critical ethical engagement with the technology and the condition of existence it creates, the other shifting the debate to a problem that is believed to be solvable. To frame the complex challenges of radioactive waste as a ‘solvable’ problem of communication, can thus be read as a way of containing semiotically what cannot be contained physically, which is the contamination that has already occurred or that can be expected to occur in the future as well as the complex

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network of relations involved. Notably, early on art, too, was fitted into the problem-solving logic of the second path. Before I delve deeper into it in the section ‘Art and RK&M,’ let me take a small detour into how this ‘fitting-in’ was prepared by early attempts to separate and define the role of culture in the field. 4.2 CULTURE SOLVES WHAT TECHNOLOGY CANNOT? In his essay ‘Atommüll als Kommunikationsproblem’ (Atomic Waste as Communication Problem), semiotician Roland Posner (1990) frames culture as a solution to a problem that could not be solved by technical means: “[w] hat cannot be achieved with physical apparatuses is attempted with biochemical means, and where these fail, cultural mechanisms are used” (12, my translation).11 While ‘culture’ is not further specified in his essay except as being different from “physical apparatuses” and “biochemical means,” that is, technology and science, Posner suggests a hierarchy between the three fields, with techno-science at the top and culture at the bottom. Within the problem-solving logic of techno-science, then, culture (which in the essays of the edited volume this text introduces, signifies anything from rituals and narratives to monuments and art) is presented as the last resort. This also means, however, that according to Posner there are problems created by technology that cannot be solved by the technical sciences.12 In other words, he suggests that technology creates problems that only culture is able to ‘solve.’ Posner suggests here an understanding of interdisciplinarity as problemsolving across disciplines that I have opposed throughout this book. Let me take the opportunity to address some of the issues I see with this approach in the context of RK&M and ask: What problem does culture solve, exactly? The inability to answer this question without raising new ones has been I think, one reason for the field’s anxiety about certain kinds of art. Aside from that, as the examples that I discuss in this section demonstrate, Posner’s division between science, technology and culture is a theoretical one that has never been strictly practiced. Yet, the model has shaped the radioactive waste community’s views on art. Thus, to understand art’s role in RK&M, it is key to explore how this particular model figures in the debate. As I shall argue, the division created a perceived dependence on culture that, in a field dominated by engineering and the technical sciences, has led to the very selective approach toward anything associated with culture that I have referred to as ‘problem-solving’ above. To illustrate how this cultural problem-solving looked like and why it sits squarely in the field, let me use three proposed marking strategies from the early phase of RK&M research, the 1980s and 1990s, that have become

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recognizable in the field and beyond: the ray cat, atomic priests, and the Landscape of Thorns. The first two concepts were proposed in the 1984 special issue on how to communicate 10,000 years into the future that I mentioned in the beginning of the previous section (Posner et al. 1984). The third concept, Landscape of Thorns, stems from a study of the Sandia National Laboratories from 1993 that I also mentioned in the previous section in the context of my discussion of responsibility (Trauth, Hera, and Guzowsti 1993). One reason why these three concepts have become recognizable in the field is because they started within the ‘problem-solving’ framework, offering enough reference points for the scientific debate, but eventually grew beyond it, making their way into popular culture. It is this ambiguous status in the field that makes them interesting cases to study possible openings in the RK&M’s warn-and-inform approach toward a care practice. The concept of the ‘ray cat’ was developed by French writer Françoise Bastide and Italian semiologist Paolo Fabbri (1984) and combined genetic engineering with folklore. Their idea was to genetically engineer an animal, preferably a cat, to change color in the presence of radiation and hence become a living detector to warn future generations about leaking radioactive waste repositories. The knowledge of the marker would then be “anchored in cultural tradition by introducing a suitable name (e.g. ‘ray cat’) and suitable proverbs and myths” that ideally reproduced over time like the tales of ancient gods to carry the message across generations. The reason why their idea still lingers in popular culture today is due to coincidence. In 2013, a New York journalist in search for a good story stumbled across the English summaries of the 1984 journal issue. In 2014, the story was picked up in the popular design podcast 99 % Invisible inspiring a veritable ‘ray cat folklore’ that to date includes a song, a documentary, a number of blog posts, T-shirts and bumper stickers.13 It has even inspired a science project at the open laboratory Brico​.b​io based in Montreal to engineer such an animal.14 Given this spontaneously generated folklore, Fabbri and Bastide’s idea has already been a success. The idea of atomic priests originates in Weinberg’s (1972) article on social institutions and nuclear energy. In this article, Weinberg introduces the notion of a nuclear “priesthood” to safeguard social institutions for the long term. Today, the notion of atomic priests is mostly connected to semiotician and consultant of the so-called Human Interference Task Force Thomas Sebeok, who took Weinberg’s idea and applied it to long-term radioactive waste management.15 The Human Interference Task Force was the first interdisciplinary expert panel convened in 1981 by DOE to reduce the likelihood of human intrusion into the proposed Yucca Mountain disposal site. Sebeok (1984) proposes an artificially created system of “legends and rituals” around nuclear waste repositories that were kept alive yet secret by a small group of initiated

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academics, the “priests,” and would steer away the “uninitiated” by spreading rumors and laying false trails (24). The third proposal, Landscape of Thorns, was developed in another pioneering US study that has been conducted on the development of repository markers for the WIPP in New Mexico. For this study, similar to the case of the Human Interference Task Force, an interdisciplinary panel, called the Marker Panel, was convened by DOE to develop strategies to mark the WIPP site for future generations. Responding to the claim that inadvertent, or unintended, human intrusion was considered to be “a significant, if not the most significant, threat to nuclear waste held in repositories” (Hora and Von Winterfeldt 1997, 155), an earlier study had developed a range of intrusion scenarios to identify the most plausible ways in which humans could damage the repository during its operational period of 10,000 years. It is to these scenarios that the marker designs respond. Assuming that someone in a future of resource scarcity would drill on the site, Landscape of Thorns proposes to cover the future WIPP site with giant spikes sticking out in odd angles (figure 4.1). With this third example, it is even harder to uphold Posner’s categorical distinction between techno-science and culture than with the previous two. While the idea of the marker was inspired by ancient cultural artefacts like the pyramids of Gizeh that ‘survived’ for thousands of years, and its

Figure 4.1  Scientific illustration of the marker proposal Landscape of Thorns. Concept by Michael Brill, drawing by Safdar Abidi. Source: Trauth, Hera, and Guzowsti 1993, F-61.

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conceptual realization, too, looked much like monumental art (and, accordingly, was criticized to attract people rather than deter them from the site as was the assignment), the design was rooted in science rather than art.16 The team that came up with this design worked with precepts about the human mind, namely precognitive affect theory which was popularized in the 1980s by psychologist Silvan Tomkins and accordingly emphasizes the bodily affective impact on onlookers, which was understood at the time as a precognitive response that was not rooted in a particular culture and thus thought to evade the ambiguity of meaning-making (Trauth, Hera, and Guzowsti 1993, F-49/5.10). Accordingly, Landscape of Thorns is designed to produce a bodily effect of discomfort, disorientation and even repulsion in anyone approaching the site. Ironically, affect theory has itself emerged from the culturally contingent modern Western belief in universalism (Moisey 2017). Accordingly, in the 2017, documentary Containment by Peter Galison and Robb Moss, Landscape of Thorns featured prominently as an example of the quirks of that historical period, rather than an example of having found a universal language to overcome cultural ambiguity. Notably, as soon as these projects grew beyond the problem-solving framework toward creating experimental communities (e.g., in the case of the ray cats), or raising more fundamental questions about the cultural implications of radioactive waste (as Landscape of Thorns did in Galison and Moss’ documentary Containment), the RK&M field seemed to lose interest. For instance, while the creative and philosophical value of these projects is formally acknowledged in the final report of the RK&M Initiative, the insights that can be derived from them did not feed back into the report. In other words, the new problems that the ‘cultural approach’ of experimental communities generated (such as how to describe their contribution to the field in technoscientific terms, or how to sustain such communities in the first place, or even, what kind of community is desirable for this task) put the dominant approach at risk in that it challenged the assumption that radioactive waste is a solvable problem. What has been done instead of acknowledging these problems is to extract ‘useful tools’ from these proposals to inform institutional solutions. For instance, what the RK&M Initiative took from Bastide and Fabbri’s ray cats is “the combination of tangible and intangible elements and of nonmediated and mediated transfer approaches” (OECD-NEA 2019c, 24). The tangible mechanism of the cat is combined with an intangible set of mechanisms including rituals, songs and storytelling which, moreover, has proven to work (at least for a couple of decades). Similarly, Landscape of Thorns is said to have inspired the RK&M Initiative’s core approach of combined systems because it is part of a large system of objects and messages spread across the site and documents to be stored in nearby archives (OECD-NEA 2019c, 22). From Sebeok’s atomic priests, the idea of a “relay system” has been

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adopted, suggesting to divide the long-term into the “manageable segments . . . planning no more than three generations ahead” (OECD-NEA 2019c, 23). Thus, if approaches that are deemed ‘cultural,’ that is, which exceed the engineers’ problem-solving approach, were taken up in the RK&M debate, it was done in an affirmative way, extracting specific communication “mechanisms” from them. Any of these approaches were only valued because they offered a tangible solution to a certain problem within RK&M, rather than for their capacity to put dominant techno-scientific views and practices at risk. This underscores my observation that practices striving toward a new opening, for instance, the do-it-yourself-mentality that the ray cat inspired, were being ignored. It is especially experimental communities like the one created by the ray cat concept that promotes an openness toward chance and uncertainty which RK&M institutions had trouble to incorporate, because they neither strictly warn nor inform anybody about the dangers of radioactive waste. The strategy of the RK&M Initiative to extract ‘useful tools’ out of these cultural practices could, therefore, be accused of simply excluding from the scope what cannot be ‘solved’ but merely sustains the engagement with the problem. Indeed, while it is widely acknowledged in the field that there is a need to democratize the debate and a necessity to pool expertise beyond technical disciplines, the final report concedes that cultural approaches like the three described in this section have been met with resistance. Looking for straightforward solutions characterized by scientific rigor and seriousness, regulators and policy makers in the field were put off by these presentations because they “highlighted the issue at hand as an insurmountable challenge” (OECD-NEA 2019c, 25). It is this tension between, on the one hand, acknowledging the need to involve expertise into the RK&M debate beyond the technical-scientific framework and, on the other hand, the anxiety that comes with such an opening as it often challenges the problem-solving framework that provides the basis for RK&M’s contradictory relation to art. An aspect I have not mentioned so far, but which plays a role in scientists’ and engineers’ continued fascination with art, and will therefore be addressed in the following section, is the desire to express transcendence in the techno-sciences. The following section discusses a range of examples of how the nuclear waste community has drawn specifically on contemporary art and architecture to address the problem of communication. Having thus set the stage, the remainder of this chapter will return to the question of how art can help introduce a relational care perspective to radioactive waste management, discussing two artworks in depth. I shall specifically focus on the use of media as a key to understand why some practices are more successful in this endeavor than others.

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4.3 ART AND RK&M There is a history of drawing art into the question of how to inform future generations about the radioactive waste they will inherit. The expert panel developing repository markers like Landscape of Thorns in the 1990s studied ancient monuments like the pyramids of Gizeh, Stonehenge, the Pantheon, or Irish tombs as role models (Trauth, Hera, and Guzowsti 1993, F-85-110). Accordingly, most proposed markers took the form of monuments or longlasting objects, individual or in clusters, that were covered with warnings and placed strategically at or near the disposal site. (That their findings do not uphold archaeological scrutiny, however, has been shown with ample evidence by archaeologist Rosemary Joyce [2020].) The same study proposed to commission well-known sculptors and land artists to turn the site into a work of art that would be preserved for its beauty (Trauth, Hera, and Guzowsti 1993, F-152). More recently, the French nuclear waste agency ANDRA started to hold regular art competitions in which artists are asked to create marker concepts for one of their planned repository sites. Going a step further, the Dutch nuclear waste storage facility COVRA has commissioned local Dutch artist William Verstraeten to turn one of their waste storage buildings into art. They also regularly hold art exhibitions in their office building and have a contract with local museums to store fragile objects between the waste drums. Outside the institutional framework, in 2017, an independent competition was held in architecture and design to create markers for the WIPP, which produced a range of intriguing proposals most of which drew on the historical predecessors of the 1993 WIPP study. Finally, there are a number of independent artists who have worked on the topic in various national and international contexts, some of which presented their work at RK&M conferences. This rough list already indicates that art’s involvement in the RK&M debate cannot be reduced to one single function or form of collaboration, but that art has responded to the different desires, anxieties and needs of different groups within this debate. The aim of this section is to show why some of these responses are more likely than others to sustain the kind of questioning that I argue is needed to open the field to a care perspective. Specifically, using the examples of WIPP, ANDRA and COVRA, I show that in most cases art has served to test, illustrate or legitimate institutional claims, while critical approaches have blossomed outside the institution. The relation between RK&M and art was ambiguous from the start. Art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson (2003) accuses the early RK&M field, and specifically the WIPP, of being “anti-art” (194). While her judgment curiously omits the study’s obvious fascination with certain forms of art, most prominently monumental art and land art, she is right to point out a hostile attitude

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against the New York avant-garde of the 1970s and 1980s. For this study, a panel of experts developed strategies to mark the WIPP site for future generations. The panel consisted of two teams, Team A and Team B, which worked largely independent from each other and produced a voluminous report in which the Teams present their results. It is a statement by one of the members of Team B, Jon Lomberg, that is attached to the official report, which BryanWilson picks up to illustrate her claim. Lomberg, an artist himself who specializes in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, ironically was one of the most vocal team members to speak up against involving (other) artists in the study. In the statement that BryanWilson quotes, he warns the panel against entrusting artists with the design of the markers, because “the thinking that now dominates the art world in places like New York is anti-scientific, anti-representational, and seems to favour more detached and (to me) nihilistic statements of artists” (Trauth, Hera, and Guzowsti 1993, G-85). While it is hard to demarcate artists’ allegedly “nihilistic statements” from the panel’s own reassurances that their developed markers would outlive radioactive waste, it should be noted that Lomberg’s criticism of art is above all polemic: he ends the paragraph with the warning that “they [artists] are likely to end up picking a giant inflatable hamburger to mark the site” (Trauth, Hera, and Guzowsti 1993, G-85). It is easy to dismiss Lomberg’s polemic outpourings as a matter of personal opinion about his artistic colleagues at the time, or as the expression of a generally dismissive attitude toward avant-garde art within the state-funded Marker Panel as Bryan-Wilson suggests. But, as a matter of fact, views on art differed widely within the panel. So, what to make of the hesitations of the members of Team A about including art, who did consider to commission an artwork as “additional possible component” of the larger marking system (Trauth, Hera, and Guzowsti 1993, F-135)? In their report, Team A shortlists three contemporary artists as being fit for the task: James Turrell who is known for his light sculptures, Charles Ross with his large earthworks and James Acord, who at that time was working together with engineers and scientists at the Hanford site and was the only civilian licensed to work with radioactive material. However, they expressed concern about art’s functionality as it could introduce too much ambiguity with respect to the site’s message of warning (Trauth, Hera, and Guzowsti 1993, F-135). Consistent with Posner’s framing of culture as a problem-solving tool, the Marker Panel sought to fit art into the framework offered by the technical sciences and engineering, a desire that perseveres in the current institutional debate as I have shown in the previous section, using the example of the RK&M Initiative’s report. Seen in this context, I agree with Lomberg when he argues that art is unsuited to serve as a repository marker, since any art object would be considered more as an object to be valued in itself “rather

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than as an organized attempt at communication” (Trauth, Hera, and Guzowsti 1993, G-84). However, I disagree with the implied assumption of this statement that art which is not immediately concerned with solving problems like, according to Lomberg, the New York art scene of the 1970s loses its relevance for the debate. It is this flawed assumption that makes Lomberg conclude that, because art cannot be fitted into the narrow problem-solving framework that was created by the expert panel to respond to the problem of communication, art should not be involved in the question of how to warn or inform future generations about radioactive waste. What Lomberg’s reasoning does not consider is that perhaps the issue with art is not that it does not fit into the framework developed to address the problem of communication, but that it renders the framework itself inadequate as it reveals its limited ability to account for the fundamental uncertainty of the future. DOE’s response to the disruptive force of art was to exclude it from the project altogether. If the 1993 Marker Panel’s stance toward art was ambiguous and comments scarce, in the updated policy document of the DOE from 2004 that builds on the panel’s report, the (already very short) paragraph on art has vanished. Across the ocean, the French nuclear waste agency ANDRA has taken a different approach. Since 2015, ANDRA runs open art competitions on a regular basis, encouraging French-speaking artists to submit their ideas on how to preserve and transmit memory about nuclear waste repositories—be they realistic, utopian or critical as they state on their website (ANDRA). The winning entries of the first three competitions that were held in 2015, 2016 and 2018 include ideas as diverse as a genetically modified forest to grow blue leaves above a repository site (Stéfane Perraud and Aram Kebabdjian, La Zone Bleue, 2015), a children’s song to pass on a warning about the site (Rossella Cecili, La Mémoire, 2015), landscape drawings creating a space of encounter for future inhabitants to engage in an exchange about their preferred memory practice (Elise Alloin, Enterrassement, 2015), a clay cylinder to be passed on from generation to generation whose indentured surface functions as a countdown (Bruno Grasser, Bonne Chance, 2016), a giant sculpture in the form of the radiation trefoil (Adrien Chevrier and Tugba Varol, Implore/Explore, 2018), and a system of hills pointing to the repository site and using contemporary geological materials to be renewed after a couple of years (Laure Boby, Termen, 2018). The declared purpose of these competitions, as stated on their website, is to open ANDRA to new ideas on how to preserve and transmit the knowledge of the planned repository sites. However, as I learned from several conversations with former participants of these contests, there is doubt in the artistic community whether ANDRA is going to do anything with these proposals at all, since the agency seems unresponsive to requests to develop them further.17 ANDRA’s flagship project is still to develop a durable data carrier

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to preserve all information deemed necessary for future generations to make competent choices about radioactive waste disposal. In 2012, a sapphire disk was presented that allegedly should last for ten million years (Rodgers 2012). The idea builds on existing proposals made in the 1993 WIPP report, where one of the teams in the Marker Panel suggests to bury “message disks” albeit made from arguably more vulnerable materials like clay or glass (Trauth, Hera, and Guzowsti 1993, 4–2). Given ANDRA’s efforts to involve artists in the question, it is surprising that seemingly nothing from the rich material produced in the art competitions so far has returned in the institution’s official marker designs. From the perspective of cultural criticism, it could be argued that ANDRA merely uses art as a legitimation of their institutional practice. However, this does not explain ANDRA’s and other nuclear waste institutions’ sustained fascination with art, especially in the field of RK&M. Another explanation is, therefore, that art serves a specific desire in the technical community to express transcendence, that which exceeds human control. The distant future that repository technology is designed for represents an undeniable limit to humanity’s sphere of influence (which immediately creates a new desire as the multiplication of near and distant futures in various studies indicate). I return to the desire to express transcendence in more detail below. Before, let me complete the discussion of commissioned art by turning to the last example, COVRA. COVRA is the only organization in the Netherlands licensed to store radioactive waste, and with respect to art, it has even gone a step further than ANDRA. Instead of running art competitions to pool ideas for marking future disposal sites, COVRA has integrated art into its current architecture addressing not a hypothetical future public, but the viewer in the present. The most prominent example is their high-level waste treatment and storage building HABOG, which was designed in cooperation with local artist William Verstraeten. Reinterpreting this interim storage facility into an artwork called Metamorphosis 2003–2103, Verstraeten painted the building in bright orange to signal the danger of the waste material it stores at the beginning of the one hundred-year license period in 2003. Every twenty years, the building will be repainted in lighter hues to gradually change color until it has turned white in 2103. This ‘metamorphosis’ symbolizes the decay of radioactivity over time, abstracting the problem of radioactive waste into a matter of time. Moreover, two well-known formulas from quantum physics, m = E/c2 (the ‘Einstein formula’) and E = hν (a simplified version of Planck’s law), were applied onto the building in large green letters. While in contrast to the orange background, the color green connotes a “safe situation” (Codée and Verhoef 2015, 54), the formulas of Planck and Einstein anchor this safety in the reliable laws of physics. The formulas describe a ‘metamorphosis’ from mass to energy as related

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to time, and thus literally shift the focus away from the messy materiality of radioactive waste to its disembodied or abstracted existence in mathematical (as opposed to subjective or lived) time. The choice to picture the less common notation of the Einstein formula m = E/c2 (instead of E = mc2) in photographs of the HABOG building used for marketing purposes, where m stands for mass, E for energy and c for the speed of light, underlines this shift as intentioned. The messy and dangerous materiality of the existing waste (the mass m) is literally dematerialized into Energy (E) and the speed of light (c). Applied to HABOG, a storage for long-lived radioactive waste, the problem of safe disposal is thus reduced to a matter of time which progresses with the certainty of the laws of physics. All that can be done, the work’s symbolism suggests, is to wait until the radioactivity has decayed and the waste is rendered harmless. It should be noted that HABOG is an interim storage for long-lived radioactive waste which will not have decayed to background levels by the time the license ends, or when the building will be covered in pristine white. Rather, 2103 marks the year when the waste will go into underground storage for another several thousand years, making it someone else’s problem. As COVRA’s representatives Hans Codée and Ewoud Verhoef (2015) point out, the fading color does not symbolize that stored waste will be harmless when the walls are white; rather, they represent the “decrease in heat production of the high-level waste” (54). However, this is not apparent from work itself; and as I can glimpse from Codée and Verhoef’s description, this subtle confusion of referents is welcome. Referring at the same time to radioactive decay and the heat that is produced by this decay, the fading color is easily mistaken to represent the decrease in harm coming from the radioactive waste to an extent that it is rendered harmless by the time the building is painted over in white, which is clearly not the case. By implication, this means that Metamorphosis 2003–2103 makes the misleading assertion that the problem will solve itself over time, hiding the costs and the many uncertainties and social and material complexities connected to isolating the waste above-ground for a century, as well as the open problem to find a permanent solution underground.18 While the symbolism of Metamorphosis 2003–2103 is problematic from a cultural studies perspective, the work is also a questionable example of how nuclear waste institutions make ‘use’ of art to disseminate their institutional narratives to a wider public. Verstraeten developed his artwork together with COVRA. It reproduces the company’s official narrative, which is to turn radioactive waste into a “story of time” (Codée and Verhoef 2015, 53). Rather than addressing the financial, social, material and political efforts that it takes to isolate radioactive waste above-ground, and the complexities and vulnerabilities that emerge from these efforts, time is chosen as the only lens through which to look at the problem; and it turns out to be a rather reassuring

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lens, too. As Codée and Verhoef (2015) succinctly put it in their conference contribution: “Radioactivity decays with time, and time will ultimately make radioactivity harmless” (54). To make sure humans won’t interfere too much with time’s workings, they advocate art as a similarly unquestionable “longterm tool . . . to preserve knowledge and memory” (54) about radioactive waste.19 To support their claim, they draw on various examples from cultural history, such as the cave drawings in southern France which are estimated to be 30,000 years old and are still not forgotten, or paintings of Rembrandt or Van Gogh which the public is willing to store “forever” (55). What they omit, of course, are all the cave drawings that have been forgotten or destroyed over time, or the many works of Rembrandt’s contemporaries that are already lost, forgotten or ignored. Speaking from an artist’s perspective, moreover, Grit Ruhland (2019) wonders if such cooperation is at all a desirable position to be in, as such ‘use’ of art significantly cuts what she refers to as “artistic freedom” (220) which she sees as the basis for creativity and innovative thinking. On a content-related note, she also objects to Codée and Verhoef’s call for simplicity and clarity when it comes to artistic imaging processes (as allegedly demonstrated by Metamorphosis 2003–2103). Ruhland suggests that many artworks that have survived in public memory for so long did so not because of their alleged simplicity, but on the contrary, because they are complex and ambiguous. According to her, then, it is the more complex and ambiguous artworks that are better suited for the task of transmitting knowledge to future generations, because they keep public interest alive (220). Coming from a critical cultural studies perspective, I generally agree with Ruhland. However, I think at least one other perspective needs to be acknowledged as well, that of the technical community itself. There is a strong desire in the technical community to express transcendence as I have mentioned above, and art appears to be very helpful for that. The question is whether this desire can translate into a caring disposition toward and sustained critical interest in repository technology. To answer this question, let me briefly draw from a related debate in game studies. The long-standing fascination with transcendence reflected in these examples has a strong counterpart in the “techno-mysticism” of Californian cyberculture which “drew on diverse influences, such as ‘rituals involving drugs, mystical forces and electrical technologies’” and various Indian scholars and gurus (Wildt et al. 2019, 9). Drawing on a widely influential claim by sociologist Max Weber, it is argued that this interest in magic, the occult and other religions and cultures served a particular function, which is to ‘reenchant’ the secularized Western world “with a sense of wonder” (9) which it seems to have lost. Applying this reasoning to nuclear waste management, the fascination of the techno-scientific community, especially in the field of

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RK&M, with transcendent art from past cultures and religions like the pyramids or Stonehenge, comes not only from the belief of having found a tried solution to an identified problem. It points to an underlying desire to mystify a seemingly trivial technical contraption like a radioactive waste repository. According to this reasoning, then, it is the perceived opacity of certain technologies that offer a fruitful ground for techno-mysticism. A similar claim has been made for nuclear technologies which have been cloaked in mythical tales ever since their inception. Having analyzed these tales, historian Spencer Weart (2012) observed that every theme in such tales was already at hand early in the twentieth century, decades before the discovery of nuclear fission showed how to actually release the energy within atoms. The imagery, then, did not come from experience with real bombs and power plants. It came from somewhere else. (2)

The ‘somewhere else’ was mostly a combination of tropes from Christian and Greek mythology and modern progress narratives. The imagery preceded the technology rather than being produced by it, suggesting that it has no ontological footing in the technology itself. However, making a broader claim about the mystification of modern technology, philosopher of science Bronislaw Szerszynski (2005) warns that one should be careful not to reduce this mysticism purely to ignorance (technology’s perceived opacity) or a preexisting mystical culture as in the case of Californian cyberculture: Technology is thought of as mysterious not simply because of ignorance or some process of mystification but because it is mysterious. . . . Technologies do not just do what the designers intend. They are adapted by users and yoked to other ends. They also extend and transform these ends and thus transform our concepts of human need, flourishing, and even identity. They can have unanticipated side effects that become far more significant than their intended function. (820, original emphasis)

Following Szerszynski, technology is not only being perceived as mysterious, it is mysterious in the sense that it changes the world in unpredictable ways. Nuclear technology is a prime example for this ontological mysticism as the previous chapters have demonstrated. Since its discovery at the end of the nineteenth century and especially with its popularization at the beginning of the twentieth century, atomic energy was associated with the protoscientific discipline of alchemy. In fact, the very term ‘transmutation,’ the conversion of one chemical element into another, that came to describe radioactive decay originates in alchemy (Weart 1988, 5). In the context of Cold War aspirations to reframe nuclear technology as a harbinger of peace, atomic

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energy was reframed as “an elixir of life” that would create an unimaginable amount of “wealth” as journalist William Laurence put it in 1946, rephrasing a statement from one of the early nuclear scientists Frederick Soddy (Weart 1988, 171). Although their role has been ambivalent from the start, the kind of pride that nuclear scientists take in their profession is comparable to that in Californian cyberculture. Both the nuclear industry and cyber-industry nurture the image of the wizard handling quasi-divine material, be it by harnessing and manipulating the very powers that hold the Universe together, or creating an own universe with nanochips, quantum computers and big data. Moreover, just like nuclear disasters can be framed as the demonic ‘side effects’ of nuclear power (and radioactive fallout readily be reimagined as a divine force as suggested in chapter 4), the long operational periods of radioactive waste repositories create their very own mysticism of a deep future that is not served with the technical rhetoric of ‘passive safety’ dominating the discourse on repository technology. To summarize, when talking about the mystification and mythicization of technology, a difference needs to be made between perceived and ontological opacity of technology. While its perceived opacity may be deliberately constructed to political ends (as I discussed in the previous chapter in the context of TEPCO’s use of surveillance technology as a strategy to create opacity through total transparency), I suggest that it is technology’s ontological incomprehensibility that offers the basis for care in the techno-human condition. With Metamorphosis 2003–2103, COVRA refers to the ‘unchangeable course’ of linear time to contain, like a black box, anything ontologically unexplainable that might be connected to the waste drums inside the building. The fact that Metamorphosis 2003–2103 is explicitly mentioned in the final report of the RK&M Initiative as a positive example of how art can function as a preservation mechanism, indicates the field’s anxiety with the latter kind of incomprehensibility (OECD-NEA 2019c, 73). Over the past decade (with isolated examples in the 1990s and 2000s), a number of artists outside the institutional framework have been drawn to the subject who demonstrate a growing interest in technology’s ontological opacity. In architecture, for example, the independent research initiative Arch Out Loud held an open competition to create a landmarker for the WIPP nuclear waste site in 2017. Many winning entries draw on and develop the often lesser-known marker proposals presented in the voluminous 1993 report released by the Sandia National Laboratories. With their entry Terrestrial Rhapsody, for instance, Lucas Hoevelmann and Mathias Maurerlechner suggest placing metal pipes above the repository site to amplify the sound of the earth and the wind that runs through them. The aim is to “create an unworldly space” and to “make hidden processes tangible” such as air masses moving across the earth’s surface (Arch Out Loud 2017). A very similar proposal was

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made in the 1993 WIPP report, where “audible markers” were proposed “with structures that contain ‘tuned’ air masses that vibrate when set in oscillation by wind” (Trauth, Hera, and Guzowsti 1993, F-101). Unlike the more popular Landscape of Thorns, these ‘active’ markers were conceived to attract people to the site rather than deter them. Hoevelmann and Maurerlechner develop this proposal into an architectural design complete with bystanders contemplating the meaning of the pipes rising from the middle of the desert. Their design raises questions about the site and its invisible and intangible elements. Other designs play with the monumental form that many earlier marker proposals assume, for instance, by integrating elements of intentional decay and collapse into their monumental designs, or by exploring the use of rituals in transgenerational memory practices as Weinberg and Sebeok have done with their idea of atomic priests. Without going into detail, the winning entries for the Arch Out Loud 2017 open ideas competition encourage a sustained critical engagement with the problem of radioactive waste through the form of the repository marker. They do so by developing and challenging existing proposals, often drawing on the ontological mysticism of technology itself. The jury is hereby as diverse as one could hope, including scientists from the WIPP and MIT, an author, an artist, an art manager, an architect and a film director (Arch Out Loud 2017, 10). Notable examples from the field of contemporary art and design include Cécile Massart’s long-standing artistic engagement with nuclear waste. Since 1994, Massart seeks to educate through artistic work the public and relevant authorities about the necessity to identify sites for geological disposal and to explore the issues of constructing memory about them for future generations. Her multi-media, long-term project Laboratories, for instance, proposes to build several so-called laboratories within the perimeter of a disposal site. These laboratories would function as markers as well as living research platforms that bring together people with a variety of backgrounds including artists, musicians, archaeologists, poets, economists, farmers, economists and others to reflect on the transgenerational transmission of knowledge (Massart 2015, 130). Massart has worked on the now stalled Yucca Mountain geological repository in the United States and engages more recently with the disposal of high-level radioactive waste in Belgium. She expresses her ideas through photography, prints, publications, and installations, which sometimes take a provocative stance. For her installation in the exhibition Perpetual Uncertainty (September 17–December 10, 2017) at the Z33 House for Contemporary Art in Hasselt that was curated by Ele Carpenter, Massart created several circles from brightly colored loose pigment on the exhibition floor and put a wooden trestle over each in order to deter people from walking on them. As the title of

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her work Colours of Danger for Belgian High-Level Radioactive Waste gives away, the circles allude to the logic of repository markers to keep people away by signifying danger. By the time I visited the exhibition, a bit more than a month after it was opened, the floor is covered in colorful footprints—a vivid enactment of the doubtful success of this marking strategy. For their artistic research project Cumbrian Alchemy (2012–2014), Robert Williams and Bryan McGovern Wilson explored the complex ties of the energy industries in the English counties of North Lancashire and Cumbria with the folklore, material culture and archaeological heritage in this region. It is a complex work that seeks to broaden the “network of possible readings and meanings” (OECD-NEA 2015, 115) of a nuclear site to explore the potential of anchoring the knowledge about a waste repository in existing memory practices. Their findings were presented in the form of an exhibition and a publication combining their illustrations with archival material and written essays about the historical and philosophical context of the project. What stands out from an aesthetic point of view is their speculative use of drawing and photography. Let me briefly describe two examples. Many of the drawings included in the publication include a wolf or a boar. Figure 4.2, for instance, shows a drawing of a wolf who fixates the viewers with his eyes. On his back a dense forest grows and from his bowels protrude the ordered yellow shafts of an underground repository. The wolf is a reference to the region’s folklore in which it once played a prominent role which is testified by sculptures and reliefs that have been preserved. The tales which are linked to specific places are remembered to the present day as journalist Alan Cleaver (2013) confirms in his contribution to the artist book. Many of them are to be found along today’s energy coast in Cumbria and Lancashire. In the drawing described, the mythical wolf is turned into a steward for the region’s nuclear legacy. As a mediator between the surface and the underground, the wolf becomes part of the mnemonic ecosystem that nuclear waste repositories urge us to create. Cumbrian Alchemy also includes a critical interrogation of historical RK&M approaches. One of the ideas their work draws on, for example, is Sebeok’s folkloric relay system that uses storytelling, oral traditions, and semiotics to create an atomic priesthood. In Williams and Wilson’s version, the figure of the priest appears as a character among sites of archaeological interest in Cumbria (figure 4.3). The black-and-white photograph that adorns the cover of their publication shows a man in an old-fashioned suit and a hat with his face covered in white paint. The man is Bryan-Wilson, performing Sebeok’s atomic priest, vested in the clothes of Robert Oppenheimer who is often referred to as the ‘father of the atomic bomb.’ In the photograph, Wilson is looking from the Greycroft Stone Circle toward Sellafield, Britain’s nuclear reprocessing site now in decommissioning. Blending the technical

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Figure 4.2  Robert Williams and Bryan McGovern Wilson, Ulpha—Wolf Pissing a Repository, Cumbrian Alchemy, 2013. Source: Williams and Wilson 2013, 48. © Robert Williams and Bryan McGovern Wilson, courtesy of the artists.

task of designing a repository marker with ancient history, nuclear warfare and the legacy of nuclear energy production adds weight to the choices this generation will make about nuclear waste and raises the question where we are headed. British artist Andy Weir directly takes on the concept of the nuclear site marker. In 2016, he developed, together with students from the Sliperiet Fabrication Laboratory at the Swedish University of Umea, his so-called antimarker Pazu-Goo. Pazu-Goo consists of little, 3D-printed nylon figurines that represent distorted versions of the ancient Sumero-Assyrian demon of contagion and pestilence, Pazuzu. The figurines are supposed to be flushed into local water supplies or buried around nuclear waste sites. The participants of the workshop (or whoever gets their hands on these figurines) were then encouraged to speculate what biochemical configurations the figurines might enter on their journey, who or what may rediscover them and when, and if

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Figure 4.3  Book cover of Cumbrian Alchemy, depicting a so-called alchemical host, Williams and Wilson’s version of Sebeok’s atomic priest. © Robert Williams and Bryan McGovern Wilson, courtesy of the artists.

their features will still be recognizable at that point, given that the material Weir uses decomposes within a couple of decades. Weir (2017) calls his figurines “anti-markers” (69) with reference to the traditional repository marker that is “meant to reach out to future generations in the medium to long term” (OECD-NEA 2019c, 101). Unlike traditional markers, Weir’s figurines are not designed to be “immobile” and “robust” (OECD-NEA 2019c, 101) to survive centuries if not millennia unchanged, but to travel, break or decay in the not-so-distant future. Nor do they aim “to provide messages designed to be understandable across generations” independent of one’s cultural background (OECD-NEA 2019c, 101). Rather, the pronounced semiotic ambiguity of these figurines underscores the instability of any message created by a particular culture at a particular moment in history, even though the motif might have survived for thousands of years as is the case with the character of Pazuzu. A work that does not take the form of, or explore the logic of the repository marker, but the abstract idea of deep time that frames the RK&M debate, is Erich Berger and Mari Keto’s Inheritance (2016). It consists of a stack of concrete and metal containers that shelter a set of jewelry artefacts made of gold and other precious metals but also of naturally mined Thorianite and Uraninite, along with an archaic-looking set of instruments and a copper plate with instructions screwed on top of them. The idea is to perform a low-tech

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ritual with the provided instruments to test if the jewelry is safe to wear, which must be repeated by every generation until the jewelry is not radioactive anymore. The catch is of course, that with half-lives exceeding several million years, this piece of jewelry will never be safe to wear for any human to come. Berger and Keto thus encapsulate the abstract idea of deep time into a tangible ritual act, one that needs no special gadgets or scientific protocols to be performed. Introducing radioactive stones into the privacy of a family ritual, Inheritance proposes what the artists call a “social thought experiment: what if nuclear waste were a very personal responsibility and thus part of our everyday life and our cities?” (Berger and Keto 2016). Evoking the notion of personal care, this work compels the viewer rethink the society’s responsibility to safely dispose of radioactive waste along the lines of a distributed, privatized practice, stretched into eternity. Just like the artworks commissioned by nuclear waste institutions, these works engage with the question of how to communicate the nuclear legacy to future generations.20 However, unlike Metamorphosis 2003–2103 or the art competitions held by ANDRA, the answers that these works provide raise new, and often more fundamental questions about radioactive waste disposal as a cultural practice. On a critical level, they encourage viewer-participants to resist the temptation to seek out those answers that promise closure. As I have indicated in the introduction to this chapter, a critical practice alone is not enough to create a caring disposition to the world, even if it stimulates the kind of persistent tinkering that is being associated with care ethics on a practical level. Haraway’s (2008) care ethics suggest that in order to take responsibility for one’s complicity in instrumental relations, one has to enter a relation of solidarity with the other. The shift is crucial: it means to move from acknowledging that one puts the other at risk, to knowingly put oneself at risk. By this she means not to expose oneself to the pain which one believes the other suffers (although that can be part of her care practice), but staying with the permanent ethical complexity of experimental practices that is not resolved by universal rules (77). To care for the other does not mean necessarily to care for specific others, but for being in general at the basis of which stands the questioning of the humanist self, acting from the top of the hierarchy of existence as a being that is capable of rational thought. It proposes an ontological understanding of care that is based on the act of deliberately putting this naturalized self-understanding at risk. What does that mean for art wanting to make a contribution to the debate on geological disposal? To answer this question, I suggest to return to Deleuze’s model of interdisciplinarity to analyze the intersections between techno-science and art, a model that is very different from the one suggested by Posner in his text on radioactive waste as a communication problem. To recap Deleuze’s (2014)

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claim, art offers answers, by its own means, to the problems confronted in the techno-sciences, “even at the risk that those answers would suggest other problems.” Having shown throughout this book many examples of nuclear art suggesting problems rather than solving them, I think Deleuze’s quote deserves a more radical reading than his own cautionary subclause suggests. Art’s ability to suggest new problems is, I would argue, not an accidental by-product but fulfils an existential function in society and forms, to my mind, the basis for a care perspective in radioactive waste management. Art enriches the techno-scientific debate on the disposal of radioactive waste not despite, but because it raises questions and brings up new problems. It thus creates an ontological opening that Haraway sees at the core of responsive care. In other words, the most radical contribution that I think art makes to the debate is that it turns geological disposal into a ‘risky’ practice, not for the unsuspecting future participants in this long-term experiment, but for those devising it. And it does so, as Deleuze suggests, from within its own disciplinary logic. To make the connection between Deleuze’s critical practice and Haraway’s ethical practice more explicit, let me briefly draw upon another philosopher familiar to this study, Lyotard. In the previous chapter, I introduced Lyotard’s notion of ‘artistic experimentation’ which for him designates a postmodern mode of the work of art questioning its predecessors, thereby putting its own status as an art object at risk. There is a curious similarity between Lyotard’s notion of postmodern art and Haraway’s notion of care that converges in the notion of experimentation. For Lyotard, artistic experimentation is the precondition for artistic innovation. Similarly, for Haraway, the act of taking a risk on the part of the experimenter is the precondition for a responsive care practice in scientific experimentation. Interestingly, for both Lyotard and Haraway, the moment of self-questioning (in art or science) is not a one-off event, a phase or epoch to result in some form of permanent state of enlightenment; it is a constant, a continuous self-questioning of a work, discipline or position of power. Haraway (2008) uses the term ‘remaining at risk’ (69) when describing the act of the experimenter in her opening example that would create the kind of ontological opening that is needed for a responsive care practice. Lyotard (1984), for his part, qualifies the postmodern moment in art through a verb, “assay” (80), a movement of searching in the uncertain space of suspended rules. With respect to the question of care in radioactive waste management, then, I suggest that the ontological opening that Haraway is speaking of is aesthetically prefigured in Deleuze’s understanding of interdisciplinarity and Lyotard’s artistic experiment. To my mind, what Lyotard describes as art’s self-questioning is a leap out of the security of established ways of knowing and being in the world that does not remain confined to aesthetic

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experience. Instead, as both Lyotard and Deleuze claim, it is relevant to other disciplines and society at large. How, then, might such a risky artistic practice look like? In pursuit of an answer, in 2019, I invited several artists to develop a site-specific nuclear waste marker that would account for future uncertainty but not shy away from the more difficult questions that a care practice in the present would raise. Specifically, I asked them to develop a knowledge preservation strategy for an existing or planned radioactive waste site, whereas the artists were not bound to the technology of the geological repository. The project evolved over several meetings, the first in the form of a kick-off workshop with the artists and an invited scholar specialized on media archaeology in July 2019, followed by a series of online discussions and progress updates over the next months. The concepts were exhibited at the Humanities Faculty of Leiden University between December 2019 and January 2020, and presented at the Environmental Humanities Centre at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. All invited artists had been working on radioactive waste as a communication problem in some form prior to the project and could thus each bring in a unique angle. The two works that I will now turn to, Viral Fictions (2019) by Agnès Villette and A Marker for Halde Stolzenberg (2019) by Grit Ruhland, both emerged from this project. They are particularly interesting, because they explicitly confront the problem of context and privilege I raised above: While Villette has chosen a social media platform to coproduce her work which put the work itself at risk, Ruhland created her marker for a marginalized rural community on the territory of the former German Democratic Republic. Thus, both works create their own, concrete experimental communities to explore the ethical ramifications of geological disposal as a long-term sociotechnical experiment. Although myths and myth-making figure prominently in them (as is the case with most of the works discussed in this section), my discussion shall focus on the works’ experimental form, because it is here that I think the work of care is primarily to be situated (and contested). It should be noted that because of the open, experimental character of Villette’s and Ruhland’s works, they should not be taken as full-blown proposals like the competition entries that I mentioned earlier, but as artistic concepts that help explore the problem of (rather than offering a solution for) a sustained engagement with radioactive waste. 4.4 VIRAL FICTIONS Art photographer and journalist Agnès Villette is not interested in developing a functional repository marker in the traditional sense of physically marking

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a site for generations to come. In fact, Viral Fictions undermines most of the defining qualities of a traditional marker, including material and semiotic stability and the orientation toward the distant future. Yet, Villette is not primarily interested in a critique of geological disposal or the production of radioactive waste more generally. Nor does she aim to find a solution for the problem of communication that it raises. Instead, her work tries to resolve by its own means the problem of communication in geological disposal. Her point of departure is social media, a technology that has revolutionized the way the current generation communicates but has not even been considered within RK&M as a medium for knowledge preservation because of its volatile and, therefore, unreliable nature. Moreover, Viral Fictions is rooted in a specific place and the stories that surround it, allowing participants to both observe the peculiar dynamics of storytelling and create “alternative narrative threads” (Villette 2020) in a distributed network that includes both human nonhuman actors.21 Villette chose a grotto on the Norman Peninsula of La Hague at the northwestern tip of France on which the country’s biggest nuclear cluster is located (which happens to be also one of the world’s most nuclearized sites), as the starting point for her artistic experiment. The cluster consists of four sites: the controversial refueling nuclear plant of Orano, the adjacent near-surface waste repository for low-level radioactive waste of the Centre de Stockage de la Manche (CSM), run by ANDRA, the Flamanville EDF nuclear plant 25 kilometers down south, where a third reactor is currently being built, and, Cherbourg, a city 25 kilometers north where the Arsenal has been building nuclear-propelled submarines since the end of the 1960s. Villette chose the grottoes beneath the peninsula’s coastal cliffs as a metaphorical space to reflect on the underground storage of radioactive waste. Her experimental marker consists of a hybrid myth generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and spread on social media that revisits a medieval legend about a dragon living in the grotto of Trou Baligan. The grotto had been a popular tourist destination until it was destroyed in the 1970s to give way to the first reactor of the Flamanville nuclear power plant. According to the French legend as it was written down by Jean Fleury in the nineteenth century, a monster (sometimes a dragon, sometimes a giant snake) lived in that grotto. Every week, it would venture out, break into barns and homes of the nearby village, steal a child, and devour it in its cavern. Desperate, the villagers decided to bring the beast an offering; one child every week was chosen to be sacrificed to the monster. One morning, a saint, St. Germain-la-Rouelle, would appear at the coastline on a big wheel ploughing through the sea and kill the beast with his crosier (Fleury 1883, 15–20). Compelled by the metaphorical links between this medieval legend and the idea of geological disposal as a technology to protect ‘our children’s children’

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from the dangers lying underground that were harnessed in the very same location that according to the legend was once the dragon’s retreat, Villette created an English translation of the Trou Baligan legend to feed it, together with archival photographs of the La Hague area into a commercial AI software. The resulting images and text were intriguingly evocative, decentering human’s exclusive claim to meaning-making. Figure 4.4 shows an example of such an AI-generated text-image collage that was integrated into an Instagram post describing the project. At the center, a flying vehicle or parachute can be identified, representing the algorithm’s interpretation of the words written next to it which stem from the legend. Underneath a rocky coastline appears what bears similarity to photographs of the coast of La Hague. In AI-generated images like this, elements of the coastal landscape from the photographs would merge with objects from other contexts, associated by the algorithm with the visual and textual information it received. Thereby it links the legend to the landscape and technology in ways that to humans remain unpredictable.

Figure 4.4  Example for an AI-generated image on the Instagram page of Viral Fictions, set up by Agnès Villette under the account @viralfictions. © Agnès Villette, courtesy of the artist.

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The hybrid legend that Villette generated with the help of a text-based AI software is another interesting example. Having fed the AI software with the first line of the legend, a new text was generated from that line, complete with a new title that read “Unfortunately, however, he too had a past life.” In the context of radioactive waste, this line seems to capture a sense of guilt or shame about the toxic legacy, the past life, that is handed on to future generations to deal with. As Deleuze predicted, the answers her work gives to the question of how to communicate with future generations suggests other problems. The fact that the line I quoted was written by a machine turns around the question about how to avoid the degradation of meaning across media, authors, and time. How, it compels me to ask, can the indeterminate meaning-generating force of nonhuman participants in the communication process be accounted for? How to deal, in other words, with the fact that humans cannot claim a monopoly in the production of meaning? Should the message address, perhaps, not humans but machines as participating readers? Of course, the bot acts on the basis of instructions in the form of code that was written by a human operator. And yet, as soon as the bot enters a system like the distributed networks of social media, it develops an own dynamic that is not always fully predictable. How much can humans rely, because or despite of this, on machines and technology more generally to record, preserve, and pass on—hence to manage—the knowledge about the dangers of nuclear waste? On a more fundamental level, then, for me the work raises the question why geological disposal raises ethical concerns in the first place, or even, what is responsibility? What these questions demonstrate is that Villette’s use of storytelling radically differs from the ways in which stories and myths have been employed by the institutional discourse. Instead of using fictional stories as a tool to illustrate and confirm a scientific scenario, or separate the ‘plausible’ from the ‘implausible’ scenarios as it happened in the early WIPP study, as I explain below with respect to the work’s unexpected performance on social media, Villette’s hybrid legend raises fundamental questions about the challenges and conditions of storytelling in the experimental set up of geological disposal. This has also to do with the medium she chose. Being a fictional marker, it raises the question if human interference alone is the problem or if, as I have argued in the introduction of this chapter in the context of practices of care, technology also behaves in unforeseen ways, pointing back to the debate on techno-mysticism and the larger question of technology’s reliability in radioactive waste management and beyond: not only humans, but technology, too, appears to be unreliable. Taking the AI-generated images and text-image collages, Villette then created an account on the social media platform Instagram to automatically disseminate them under the name @viralfictions, using a commercial bot

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(a software application running automated tasks over the internet) that was programmed specifically for this purpose. The idea behind using a bot was to activate other bots that would follow it and thus automatically disseminate the AI-generated images on social media and, by gaining more and more followers who would like and share them, across a growing virtual community and into the future. The ambiguous, ever-changing automated content of the ‘message’ (the new text/image collages) would keep viewers interested and curious. Interestingly, only days after the bot has been launched, it was kept by other Instagram-run bots from posting images, because it too explicitly stated what it was doing. “Viral Fictions,” the profile description of the Instagram account reads, “is an art project” using a “social media bot” to post images generated by “AI software” (Viralfictions 2019). Now, the bot-run account relies on human followers, again. It seems as if Villette’s experiment has failed. The digital community of ‘followers’ it drew remains small, and the bot has not returned to posting images to this day. But following environmental sociologist Matthias Gross (2014), strictly speaking, experiments cannot fail. Characterizing experimentation as a structured way of dealing with non-knowledge, a ‘failed’ experiment specifies the uncertainties and incalculability linked to the unknown and uses them to derive new insights (7, 12).22 Moreover, being questioned in its status as an art object (by the bot mistaking it for spam) and, as a result, having to search for an audience, Viral Fictions is a quintessentially postmodern work, an example of artistic experimentation (Lyotard 1984, 75). There are several interesting insights that I think can be derived from the non-failure of Villette’s experiment. First, if Viral Fictions is approached as an artistic experiment about repository markers, for me, the bot’s explicitness about what it is and does, refers to the idea that an unequivocal message would produce a predictable response that underpins traditional marker designs. In that context, it is telling how a rhetoric that aims at unequivocalness (the description of the bot) results in unpredictable outcomes (the sabotage of the project) as soon as it is inserted into a larger system (the digital network of Instagram). Second, returning to my earlier observation about the decentering of humans’ exclusive claim to meaning-making, it is worthwhile to point out that no human was directly involved in this decision. Human users were excluded from this part of the communication process. Here we have bots talking to each other, code that is being written and executed to safeguard certain (human) interests that have nothing to do with (and probably nothing against) the artistic project, and yet result in the project’s corruption by disrupting the automatized communication. For me, this raises the question: does it require a human to misuse, or indeed, intrude upon a human-made system? Or, if one goes down that path, does it need even (ill) intention, for

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example, a code written with the intention to intrude, a human who has the intention to exploit the resources that they expect the repository to hold? Besides the desire to express transcendence, there is another reason why nuclear waste agencies like Nagra and ANDRA, or their North American counterpart, the DOE, always end up with the most archaic-looking solutions like stone monoliths, time capsules or indestructible disks to communicate across long timespans. They deliberately aim to reduce the complexity of the medium and reduce the dependency on existing technologies like social media that, although being powerful communication tools, are likely to not be around in their current form in a thousand or maybe even hundred years from now. The question these low-tech approaches omit, however, is how to critically engage the present generation, the one that is building the repository and developing the communication strategies, in the problem and to make them mindful of the unexpected effects any technological solution might have. It ties in with the controversy on techno-mysticism that I sketched in the section ‘Art and RK&M.’ Again, despite its fascination with transcendence, it seems that the techno-scientific community has no means to address the ontological mysticism of modern technology, that is, the fact that technologies behave in unintended ways and have unforeseen side effects that can become far more significant than its intended function (Szerszynski 2005, 820). Thirdly, then, the incident compels me to rethink the role of the one whom the message might reach. As I argue in the introduction, what is needed may not be a user, but someone who cares, that is, someone who is ready and willing to intervene if needed to keep the (repository) technology working. The fact that the Instagram account @viralfictions now relies on human followers again, is exactly doing this: it points to the need for a caring disposition toward the technologies in question. To summarize, from the beginning, the RK&M debate focused on human intrusion. As mentioned earlier, already in 1993, it had become a commonplace that human intrusion was a significant threat to geological disposal (Hora and Von Winterfeldt 1997, 155). To the present day, the starting question for research efforts in the RK&M field is: How to keep humans from breaching the repository? Villette’s experiment raises a different question: How to keep technological systems from interfering with each other in undesirable ways? Of course, it appears like a far cry to compare social media and the rudimentary AI technology that it employs to keep users engaged, to the technology of a geological repository which is designed precisely not to ‘engage’ with users. And yet, Villette’s experiment points to the fact that both technologies, AI and geological repositories, are designed to make users (on some levels) redundant: the Instagram bot by taking automated decisions based on algorithms, the repository by going into passive safety after closure. Seeing the Instagram bot interfere in unexpected ways with Villette’s

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fictional marker makes me wonder what other, possibly future (technological) systems may interfere with repository technology that its designers may not be aware of. In fact, scenarios like this have been considered by the Futures Panel in their study of possible intrusion scenarios for the WIPP. While most of the Futures Panel’s scenarios work with the assumption that humans will make the decisions and be in control of whatever technology they might employ, there is one in which robots run out of control, digging up the waste accidently as they run rampant (Hora, Von Winterfeldt, and Trauth 1991). In a similar vein, but less spectacular, Villette’s miniature experiment raises the possibility that technology, even though human-made, takes the decisions and not humans. Recent technological developments in the financial and military sectors, including the use of algorithms to determine if a potential borrower is creditworthy or drones using automatic target recognition in military interventions, indicate that this is already a reality. Thus, should the RK&M debate really exclusively focus on human intrusion, or not rather also consider technologies intruding upon other technologies? To whom or what, as it is, should a transgenerational message be addressed? Which language should be used, a natural language legible to humans or perhaps more something like code, legible only for experts and machines? Through which media and on which platforms should such a message be distributed? Through highly vulnerable (because complex and contingent) but adaptable social media platforms like Instagram to spread fast, change fast and democratize the making and distribution of knowledge, while risking the loss of the original message or of an appropriate carrier medium? Or, should allegedly more durable low-tech but locally produced and unchangeable objects entrusted with an authorized message be the medium of choice? To conclude, if care is made possible through an ontological opening in experimental relations, then Viral Fictions creates this opening in the RK&M debate by challenging one of the debate’s key assumptions: that the main threat to a radioactive waste repository, which should keep humans safe from radioactive exposure, are humans. The artwork does not oppose the views and principles held in RK&M, it suspends the rules on which they are based within its own, goal-free experimental setup, raising questions that encourage a deeper engagement with the assumptions informing these views. As a result, Viral Fictions becomes part of a more sustained engagement with the communication problem as which radioactive waste has been defined, than any solution would generate. While Villette’s experimental community consists of bots and followers (human and algorithmic) that are not bound to a physical location, the second artwork I discuss in this chapter is a very localized practice. Rather than aiming for a wide reach to experiment with communication strategies for a permanent repository (be it the existing repository

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for low-level waste in La Hague, or the one that is currently being built in the Meuse area in the East of France for high- and intermediate-level waste), it addresses an existing local community suffering from the legacy of uranium mining in the former German Democratic Republic. 4.5 A MARKER FOR HALDE STOLZENBERG Trained sculptor Grit Ruhland’s Marker for Halde Stolzenberg comes close in form and ambition to the traditional repository marker. However, she did not develop it for a future repository but for an existing waste site and the nuclear past of which it is a remnant. Her work starts from the observation that it is hard to care for something that is invisible (like radiation or, indeed, an underground repository). She chose a site with comparably low, but above-average radioactivity that poses the long-term as a potential (rather than immediate) problem. Nonetheless, her work responds to one of the key issues in the RK&M debate: the invisibility of the object they want people to remember. Like Villette, Ruhland does not engage with the question of how to communicate to future generations head-on. Yet, her work raises fundamental questions about RK&M and especially the dominance of the technoscientific approach in the field and its correspondent valuation of certain (scientific) epistemologies over others (for instance, indigenous or religious ones). In fact, Ruhland’s work follows precisely Deleuze’s dictum on art. Ruhland’s work does not try to find, by itself and with its own means, an answer to another discipline’s problem, but uses it to look at its own problems instead, which is in her case art’s therapeutic function. As I discuss below, her artistic marker grapples with the question how art can offer a space to mourn the past while remaining a disruptive force in the present. Building on her artistic research on the region, Ruhland chose to develop a marker for a site known as Halde Stolzenberg. It is an overgrown, unmarked waste rock pile near the eponymous village of Stolzenberg, which is one of many rural municipalities in the provinces of Saxony and Thuringia that inherited low-level radioactive landscapes from mining activities during the Cold War. East Germany was one of the biggest uranium producers in the world, supplying the nuclear weapons program of the Soviet Union with raw material (uranium and yellow cake). As she explains in the exhibition text, the waste rock near Stolzenberg stems from an open cast mine that was operated during 1956 and 1960, extracting 92 tons of uranium. Despite having been covered with one meter of soil in the late 1970s, Ruhland discovered during her field studies spots of elevated radiation up to 1 µSvh−1, testifying to the unpredictable migratory patterns of radionuclides. The site is officially documented as Altstandort, a potentially hazardous former industrial site,

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but does not fall under radiation law and is due to legal loopholes not part of the extensive rehabilitation program concerning Uranium mining.23 While Ruhland believes that the site poses no immediate danger to people or the environment at the moment, she stresses that because future forms of land use and changes in the environment are not predictable, the site continues to pose a risk. Moreover, she notes that small municipalities like Stolzenberg are often overburdened with the task to rehabilitate such contaminated sites. This, in turn, can have negative consequences for nearby communities. Locals, Ruhland notes in the exhibition text, refer to the site as “a good place for mushrooms” which for her raises concerns about how the site is ‘used’ by the local population, especially in the light of the scientific controversy about the effects being exposed to low-level radiation (Masco 2006, 300), since mushrooms are known to absorb and accumulate certain radioactive isotopes. For her marker concept, Ruhland took the outlines of the now forested waste rock pile to create a mirror area, placed in reasonable distance to the waste rock pile, that could be used by the local population to reflect on the nuclear legacy of the region and the impact it had on their lives and the lives of their families (figure 4.5). The doubling of space is inspired by the mythical figure of Perchta, a Slavic goddess that once was vital to the area and existed in two incarnations, a benign and a malicious one. By analogy, unlike the waste rock pile, the mirror space is not contaminated and hence represents the ‘benign’ site that can be used. Both sites shall be fenced with a dry stone wall that would be just high enough to signal a separate space, but not function as an actual barrier. Unlike the wall around the contaminated site, the wall around the non-contaminated site has openings for people to pass through. The fields and meadows it will cover shall not be used for economic exploitation anymore to reflect on another kind of loss that came with the mining industry: the loss of land for agricultural use. According to Ruhland, who grew up in the region, there is almost no place for people to mourn the loss inflicted on them and their land by uranium mining.24 One of the primary functions of Ruhland’s mirror space is to offer such a place of mourning. The etymological root of the modern English ‘care’ lies in the Old English caru for ‘grief’ and ‘sorrow.’ In this etymological sense, A Marker for Halde Stolzenberg explicitly offers a care practice by allowing people to grief or mourn about their loss. The fact that the radiation levels on the waste rock pile are only slightly above average (except for some mentioned hot spots), is important here, because it allows the place to be used as a space of reflection rather than fear. The work’s function, however, is not purely therapeutic. It does not engage in mourning as a way to ‘heal’ past wounds, although it offers, to speak with Lyotard, the solace of finding pleasure in ‘correct’ forms—here that of sculpture as I show below. It leaves the security of the dominant conception of knowledge and leaps into the

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Figure 4.5  Grit Ruhland, A Marker for Halde Stolzenberg, 2019. Abstracted map of the mirror space. The black area designates the contaminated waste rock pile, the white area represents the non-contaminated mirror space. The figure in the middle of the white area represents the three-legged badger that is to be placed on an altarpiece in the Ruhland’s envisioned cultural center at the bottom right corner of the area. The sign on the black area is a deconstructed trefoil and was designed by the artist to signal a former nuclear site. © Grit Ruhland, courtesy of the artist.

half-known realm of myth, searching for alternative ways of making sense of radiation. What is being challenged by Ruhland’s artistic marker is the scientific distinction between knowledge and non-knowledge, or between standardized and non-standardized forms of knowledge production. Scientific activities like yearly measurements of the radiation on the contaminated site are proposed that would alternate with nonscientific activities. Ruhland envisions to build a cultural center on one side of the non-contaminated walled area that is shown in figure 4.5. In this cultural center, the excerpt included in the exhibition states, “a board consisting of seven persons, including locals (children) and externals” would decide upon the use of the site and motivate an exchange between locals, scientists, scholars, activists and artists from the region and elsewhere. The idiosyncratic decision to include children in the board that would take the decisions, on the basis of knowledge provided by ‘experts,’ already indicates a questioning of the conventional understanding of ‘useful’ standardized knowledge. The aim of the exchange between children, locals, artists and experts is not merely to get into conversation or to make radiological research

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on the area more accessible (currently, radiological reports are stored away in archives and can only be accessed upon request), but to somehow open the debate on uranium mining and the legacy it left to the land and people to nonstandardized forms of knowledge. (Admittedly, the question how to sustain a debate that includes such diverse actors as scientists and children still begs an answer.) Playing on the German term for superstition, Aberglauben, she calls this non-standardized knowledge Aberwissen, a neologism that was coined by cultural anthropologist Eva Kreissl. Aberwissen translates—from the perspective of the knowledge authority—to ‘wrong knowledge,’ but here refers to alternative knowledge, that is, knowledge that need not be authorized by the standardized practice of science (Ruhland 2019, 67). If conceived as an experimental practice, Ruhland’s marker slightly modifies Gross’ understanding of experimentation. Unlike Gross suggests, here the participant is not confronted with non-knowledge, but non-standardized knowledge (Aberwissen). In Ruhland’s case, the artistic experiment is not about defining uncertainties and incalculability as I suggested in the case of Viral Fictions, but about allowing non-standardized knowledge into the debate. The binary distinction between what is known and what is unknown (but can be known) that is posited by the scientific experiment according to Gross, dissolves into several possible modes of acquiring and using knowledge. Of course, there is a hierarchy between the different modes of knowledge acquisition. Aberwissen stems from a different time when there was no radiation science, let alone the concept of radioactivity. Today, science offers much more precise tools to measure radiation and its impact on the body than the hearsay of folktales. Yet, while for larger groups relatively accurate prognoses can be made using statistical methods, for the individual these prognoses are not necessarily more reliable than folktales in assessing the danger posed by a local source of ionizing radiation. The function of Aberwissen in Ruhland’s work is not to replace scientific knowledge or dismiss the invaluable tools science has developed to better understand the physical environment. It is to acknowledge folktales as a form of knowledge that fills the gaps left by science and raises important questions about the techno-scientific approach. And there is another function that folktales fulfil: While science produces facts, folktales tell stories, send warnings, or simply offer a means to articulate the range of emotions emerging in encounters with a particular phenomenon. At the risk to oversimplify, where science is precise, Aberwissen is social. The function of Aberwissen is thus to point out the limits of techno-science when it comes to the social function of knowledge, which is very much at stake in RK&M. In Ruhland’s work, at the center of this Aberwissen stands the small bronze sculpture of a three-legged badger that will rest on an altarpiece in the cultural center. The figure is taken from a regional folktale about local

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hunters who catch a badger and, after a supernatural encounter, realize with horror that the badger has only three legs.25 The incident is reported to have taken place in a forest close to Ronneburg, a village near today’s waste rock pile (Eisel 1871, 120). Many tales involving animals with missing limbs, especially rabbits and calves, have once circulated in this and other regions where later uranium mines would open.26 In these stories, they often function as harbingers of dread, disease, and death. Examples include a stranger who wants to hunt a three-legged hare to eat it on the spot. When striking the hare, it suddenly grows huge and the man dies after lying in a sickbed for three days. In another, less sinister, tale, a three-legged calf escorts people from Ronneburg to Raitzhain where it dissolves into smoke (Eisel 1871, 131). In yet another, a three-legged calf whistles so loud that villagers get frightened (Eisel 1871, 130). While there is no general consensus on the precise meaning or function of the animals in these tales, they always represent something supernatural, otherworldly or divine that is often linked to specific places. To today’s reader, the association with mutations caused by radiation may seem plausible. But, of course, folktales get reinterpreted over time, so Ruhland is careful to situate these tales in the history of uranium mining. In the wall-filling collage that Ruhland created for the Leiden exhibition that represents the area around the waste rock pile, she superimposed existing aerial photographs and copies of historical maps with recent snapshots from OpenStreetMap in several layers of paper squares (figure 4.6). Some of these layered squares would include excerpts of folktales. For her research area, the mining region east of the city of Gera, Ruhland managed to locate some of the places mentioned in these tales. Tellingly, the majority of these mythical places would later host uranium mines. The excerpts added to the collage were an attempt to visualize this link between the folktales and the presence of uranium deposits in the exhibition. They also confront the removed perspective of the aerial shot or abstracted map—the view from nowhere—with the highly localized and involved perspective of the folktale. In her dissertation, Ruhland (2019) argues for the relevance of folktales in the analysis of post-mining landscapes. As a genre, folktales are difficult to account for in scientific reference systems, because of their high ambiguity as signs. Rather than dismissing them as fiction, Ruhland suggests that they offer ways to observe and structure reality, building on ethnographic theories like those promoted by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Folktales are thus not a factual description or sign for radiation, since, as Ruhland points out, the concept was not known then: Not every uranium mining area has mythical markers, not every mythical marker refers to uranium. Even less so, because the concept of ‘uranium’ is

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Figure 4.6  Grit Ruhland, A Marker for Halde Stolzenberg, 2019, paper, cardboard, wood, metal pins, ribbon. Collage of open street map images and excerpts from folktales from the area around Halde Stolzenberg. Photo: author.

linked to a chemical-physical sign system that at the moment when the quoted folktales were recorded has not existed.27 (105, my translation)

Although Ruhland found a notable concentration of folktales involving threelegged animals in certain regions that would later become uranium mines, she stresses that these tales are not a cartography for uranium deposits. Rather, their relevance emerges from their signifying character. As the symbolic expression of a “general unease” (105) in regions with uranium deposits, they indicate that locals knew about the idiosyncrasy of certain places. In that sense, three-legged animals functioned as markers for the places in which later elevated levels of radiation would be measured, warning against the then unspecified danger. The bronze of the three-legged badger in the non-contaminated mirror site of Ruhland’s marker, thus, points to the fact that people living in the area had an idea of the phenomenon of radioactivity and its harmful impact on living beings long before there would be a concept for it. In this sense, it is a reference to this prescientific, non-standardized knowledge about radioactivity, derived from lived observation and preserved across generations without physical records or complex communication technologies (until the nineteenth century that is). For Ruhland, the sculpture refers to radiation in

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a nonthreatening, yet not belittling way. Representing a supernatural incident that does not immediately result in disease or death like other tales, the badger, she proposes in the exhibition display, merely “reflects on the forces that once lived underground and its ability to transform matters,” referring to ionizing radiation from natural sources. The Aberwissen contained in folktales about three-legged animals such as the badger, and the ways of observing and structuring reality they propose is taken as a reference point for a new communal practice of remembering and communicating the affordances and dangers of radioactivity when harnessed by humans for the production of energy or bombs. What Ruhland aims to avoid is to be trapped in the polarizing rhetoric that characterizes the debate on uranium mining and radioactive waste in Germany, which knows only the abstract, technical language of science or the emotional language of fear. Folktales and mythical figures like the three-legged badger, for her, represent an alternative path that stir up people’s curiosity as it situates the phenomenon in a time prior to its techno-scientific exploitation. 4.6 HOW TO REALLY CARE FOR NUCLEAR WASTE? Reaching the end of this chapter, there is one issue which I still would like to address before wrapping up, as it underscores the urgency of a reflexive approach to nuclear waste disposal because it has implications for the rest of the nuclear energy chain. Geological disposal is presented by the nuclear industry as a ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ of radioactive waste. I argue that this rhetoric and the logic that informs it (i.e., that there is a ‘technological fix’ to a wicked problem like radioactive waste) are dangerously misguided. First, with several failed repository projects over the past five decades and not a single operating repository to this day, this technical solution appears not as straightforward as it might appear. Second, offering the promise of having found a ‘solution’ effectively legitimates the production of more waste, and thus reproduces the problem (which, it should be remembered, is waste, not the fact that it cannot be contained) instead of solving it. Even if geological repositories should become widespread, their capacity to take waste remains limited so that a significant increase of long-lived waste, caused by the option to dispose of it ‘safely,’ may quickly exceed these capacities. Thus, while geological disposal is the best option there is so far to dispose of radioactive waste, the problem remains that this technology has harmful implications. Yet, questions about the nuclear fuel chain and how it is embedded in a socioeconomic system of increasing energy demands that still thrives on the Enlightenment belief that humans are in control, are seldomly

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raised in public debates on nuclear waste (and never, in my experience, when these debates are led by the nuclear industry and initiatives in which they are involved). On the contrary, one reason why good money and manpower is invested in the development of nuclear waste disposal facilities is that the prospect of a solution to the nuclear waste problem legitimates the production of more waste. So, how to develop a truly responsible disposal practice, that is, a practice that does not reproduce the problem it aims to solve by legitimating the production of more waste? This is a question that needs more attention within the radioactive waste community. To thoroughly address the wider ethical, philosophical and social implications of the condition created by nuclear waste, some detours to unlikely places are required as the field’s intrinsic fascination with transcendence indicates. One such detour that I proposed in this chapter is art. In this chapter, I have argued that artistic experimentation as defined by Lyotard is key to this endeavor as it paves the way for a much-needed care perspective to the debate on nuclear waste. Although institutional documents claim otherwise, I have shown that radioactive waste is still approached as a ‘problem’ to be ‘solved’ rather than as a condition to be managed. I have argued that this striving for discursive closure rather than for an ongoing ethical engagement with the condition created by nuclear technologies is unable to account for the radical uncertainty of the future. Taking my cue from Deleuze’s comments on interdisciplinarity and Lyotard’s concept of artistic experimentation, I have shown how art resists this temptation of discursive closure by raising fundamental questions about radioactive waste as a problem of communication and challenging some of the key assumptions in the field. Art, I have argued, turns the long-term experiment of geological disposal into a risky practice, not for the unsuspecting future participants, but for the experimenters, creating the kind of ontological opening that Haraway locates at the core of any caring disposition toward being. How does this care perspective on radioactive waste that I argue is introduced by art, link to my overarching project in this book to show how art advances Allenby and Sarewitz’s notion of ‘muddling through’ the technohuman condition? In my second chapter, ‘Ironic Encounters in Nuclear Landscape Photography,’ I argue that Nefzger’s landscape photographs prepare the ground for a muddling practice by offering a self-ironic perspective to the viewer that is neither that of a superior observer nor that of an ignorant or denialist. There, I define muddling as the always provisional act of positioning that opens a political space for agonistic struggle. In my third chapter, ‘Snapshots from the Zone,’ I emphasize in a similar vein the need to approach muddling as a spatial concept to account for the ethical implications of any muddling practice. I suggest that rather speaking of ‘muddling forward’ as Allenby and Sarewitz do, which implies a temporal understanding of

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muddling as overcoming a certain condition, muddling should be understood in a spatial sense of pausing and looking around in order to be truly attentive to the specificity and novelty of a given condition. My fourth chapter, ‘The Art to Remain Exposed,’ introduces a sense of endurance into this spatial understanding of muddling by calling to stop and reflect upon the moment in history that produced the Fukushima nuclear disaster. It is through art that we may reach a fuller understanding of the implications of the catastrophe of meaning that the Fukushima disaster exposes which is the precondition for social change. What I suggest in this final chapter is that muddling in the context of the disposal of long-lived radioactive waste consists above all of persistent care work. I have thus arrived at a practical level of muddling, the tedious labor of muddling so to speak. In order to counteract ‘carelessness’ in the present that threatens the project of a responsible disposal strategy of long-lived radioactive waste in the long term, I suggest that art can be a powerful force to motivate this work by insisting to raise questions and turning the experiment of geological disposal into a risky practice for the experimenter. 4.7 POSTSCRIPT: A NOTE ON MYTHOLOGY I said earlier in this chapter that I am not going to focus on the persistent use of myths and mythology in knowledge preservation strategies. Nonetheless, I cannot but add, briefly, an observation I have made during my research for this chapter. As it turns out, mythology not only figures prominently in artistic approaches to radioactive waste or in early marker proposals, but can be found in science, too. When I visited an underground research laboratory for the storage of nuclear waste near the Belgian town of Mol in 2017, there were two ways in which scientists related to radiation and their work on it: through the technical language of nuclear engineering and through mythology. The laboratory is called HADES, named after the Greek god of the underworld Hades, and consists of several galleries 225 meters below the ground, the longest of which measures 180 meters. From these galleries, tests are conducted to measure, for instance, the migratory behavior of radioactive particles in Boom clay, the material that due to its water impermeability and plastic qualities is a promising candidate to isolate humanity’s most toxic waste from the world of the living for at least 10,000 years. Both Belgium and the Netherlands have a several hundred meters thick layer of Boom clay underneath their surface. As the guide explained to us, it is a tradition from the Belgian nuclear research center SCK•CEN (Studiecentrum voor Kernenergie, or Centre d’Etude de l’énergie Nucléairé) that supervises the HADES research, to

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choose names from Greek mythology for the projects researching geological disposal. The laboratory, for instance, is managed by the economic interest grouping EURIDICE, named after a figure in Greek mythology who was killed by a snake while escaping from a man, Aristaeus, who tried to rape her. Notably, all these names are acronyms. The name EURIDICE stands for European Underground Research Infrastructure for Disposal of nuclear waste in a Clay Environment, while HADES means High Activity Disposal Experimental Site (high activity in this case standing for radioactive waste that would emit high levels of ironizing radiation for at least several thousand years) (ESV EURIDICE GIE). Behind this playfulness, I believe to identify a common ground between art and science: In all cases, myth is employed to make the indeterminacy of radiation relatable and narratable by giving it a specific, personified form. Pazuzu, the dragon, the three-legged badger, the ray cat, the atomic priest, the mythical hog from Cumbrian Alchemy, and finally, EURIDICE and HADES—they all operate as allegories of a phenomenon that defies form. It used to make the experiment of geological disposal risky for those devising it, myth may prove to be a ground solid enough to build on across disciplinary borders in the joint pursuit of a more responsible disposal practice. Yet, to offer that common ground, myth cannot be reduced to a purely technological endeavor. Myth must be understood as a cultural endeavor. As the examples discussed in this chapter demonstrate, myth can be used to create a space of authority and prestige to support the nuclear enterprise; yet it can also be used, like the artists did, to raise questions.

NOTES 1. The nuclear fuel chain describes all stages of the life cycle of nuclear fuel, including the mining, milling, conversion, enrichment, and fabrication of nuclear fuel, its use for energy production in the form of fuel rods, and the interim storage, potential reprocessing and final disposal of spent fuel. The dismantling of nuclear reactors and nuclear submarines that reached the end of their operational period as well as the remediation of contaminated landscapes through uranium mining, leakage or accidents are usually not included in the fuel chain, but are also a source of radioactive waste. In the literature, the fuel chain is more commonly referred to as a ‘cycle,’ because reprocessing of used nuclear fuel allows the reuse of fuel. However, I refer to it as a ‘chain,’ because even the reprocessing of used fuel produces new radioactive waste, some of it long-lived. Hence there is no justification to speak of a closed life cycle for nuclear fuel. Rather, speaking of a cycle obscures the various sources of radioactive waste production. 2. The World Nuclear Association (2018) estimates an amount of 34,781,000 cubic meters of radioactive waste material. This does not account for radioactive

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materials released in leakages and during accidents, nor does it include waste disposed of illegally or by now illegal disposal methods. Only 22,000 cubic meters, or 370,000 tons, of this total amount is long-lived, solid radioactive waste. Furthermore, it claims that the disposal of all radioactive waste is well “managed.” This does not mean that for every type of waste a disposal method has been found. When looking at the numbers, the amount of disposed (and not only stored) waste roughly decreases with the increase of the waste level. While 85% of existing lowlevel waste is estimated to have reached a disposal site, only 19% of intermediatelevel waste has been disposed so far. Of the 370,000 tons of solid high-level waste the number drops to zero, and for a good reason: there is no functioning repository for long-lived waste yet. Sometimes the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel is offered as an environmental-friendly solution to the problem of long-lived waste. Proponents of reprocessing, like the French reprocessing company AREVA, argue that it reduces the amount of high-level radioactive waste (Pernot 2009; Union of Concerned Scientists 2009). However, data from the US Department of Energy (2008) show that although decreasing the overall amount of radioactive waste classified as high-level waste, the volume of waste that has to be isolated permanently (like high-level waste) even increases with reprocessing as it dilutes high-level waste (50, table 4.8-5). Thus, while reprocessing is a potential solution to the depletion of economically accessible uranium supplies, albeit an expensive one, it does not solve the problem of waste production since in total it generates significantly more waste than a once-through cycle. Also concerns about nuclear safety are voiced as the extracted plutonium from used fuel could be used for weapon production (Union of Concerned Scientists 2008). 3. The international radioactive waste community can be defined as the “international elites of RWM [radioactive waste management], as they gather leading scientists and policy makers and representatives of national implementers, regulators and nuclear research institutes in the field of radioactive waste management and radiation protection, and assist member countries by providing information, guidance and standards” (Schröder 2016, 688). Leading institutions in the radioactive waste community are the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Nuclear Energy Agency of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD-NEA) and the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP). 4. Strategies that were considered for the disposal of long-lived radioactive waste included the disposal in outer space, over rock melting, the disposal at subduction zones, sea disposal, sub-seabed disposal, to the disposal in ice sheets and deep well injection. Unlike most of the other listed disposal strategies, sea disposal was actually practiced by most nuclear nations until international agreements forbid this practice. Likewise, deep well injection was implemented in Russia for low and intermediatelevel radioactive waste but has now been abandoned. Since the 1970s, moreover, some countries discuss the option to make the disposed radioactive waste retrievable in the future in the case that a better technological solution will be found (Buser 2014). 5. Another problem that has been identified in relation to public participation in the decision-making process surrounding the disposal of radioactive waste is the

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strict divide between the ‘technical’ and the ‘social’ in the technical community. As social scientists Anne Bergmans, Göran Sundqvist, Drago Kos and Peter Simmons (2015) argue, while a democratization of the field has been underway since the 1990s, affected communities often still have no full understanding of the technical options available, because they are only involved in the process after technical experts have defined the problem and decided upon a solution. 6. Adding to this, it should be noted that there is, to date, only one geological repository worldwide for long-lived spent nuclear fuel, the Onkalo repository in Finland which is expected to start operating in 2023 (World Nuclear News 2019). The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository in the Nevada Desert came close to be the first of its kind, but the project was halted in 2011 by the Obama administration due to protests and difficulties in the construction. While several other deep geological repositories are currently in planning or under construction, there are still fundamental problems with this technology which need to be solved first in order to become a real option for safe storage. The many delays in the planning process and rapid increase of costs over the past five decades in projects all over the world suggest that a solution may never be found without fundamental rethinking of the current economic and political structures through which the radioactive waste community operates (Buser 2019). 7. Psychologist and feminist Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development from 1982 counts as the founding work of care ethics. In this book, Gilligan revealed what she called a ‘male bias’ in the model of liberal justice which discredited more ‘feminine’ ways of interacting with one another as ethically less refined. Many care ethicists, including Elizabeth Spelman (1988), Joan Tronto (1994) and Sarah Hoagland (1991), and to some extent Gilligan herself, have since distanced themselves from this gender-essentialist identification of care as pertaining to women or to what is considered feminine (Sander-Staudt 2019). 8. Haraway (2008) introduces her concept of care through the example of a scientist in a novel who has his hand covered in insect bites to share the suffering his guinea pigs must endure for experimental purposes. The scientist, in Haraway’s reading, practices “remaining at risk,” which means he acknowledges the suffering of the other by exposing himself to the same kind of pain to which he exposes his test animals. He does not eliminate suffering, but instead introduces a multidirectional relationship that forms the basis for a reduction of suffering. There is even a more fundamental transition taking place here. Sticking his hand into the cage, the scientist puts himself at risk in an existential sense: he opens up to the uncertainty that comes with multidirectional relations, the condition of not being in full control. This vulnerability produces not only solidarity toward the other as Haraway suggests, it also raises new problems and questions about the relation at stake and thus works toward situating and perhaps even reducing non-knowledge. Most importantly, the scientist makes a choice. He is in the privileged position of being the one doing the experiment, not the one being experimented with. Haraway’s care ethics hence respond to the power imbalances of instrumental relations, asking the one in power to put themselves at risk to allow for solidarity with the other. There is thus a lesson to learn

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from Haraway for geological disposal. Like the guinea pigs in her example, future generations cannot ‘answer back.’ Yet, this privilege of the current generation should not open the door to unethical behavior. 9. The full German title is Und in alle Ewigkeit... Kommunikation über 10000 Jahre: Wie sagen wir unsern Kindeskindern wo der Atommüll liegt? (And Into Eternity... Communication over 10000s of Years: How Will We Tell our Children’s Children Where the Nuclear Waste is?) and stems from a special issue of the Zeitschrift für Semiotik (Journal of Semiotics) from 1984. In this special issue, authors from both sides of the iron curtain explore the possibilities of communication across 10,000 years. It was responding to an international inquiry launched by the journal in cooperation with Roland Posner who was then member of a special task force that researched how to keep future humans from intruding into the now stalled geological repository at Yucca Mountain. 10. To date, WIPP is the only deep geological repository that contains high-level radioactive waste, albeit from the US nuclear weapons industry, not the civil sector. It stores transuranic (heavier than uranium) waste. 11. German original: “Was mit physikalischen Apparaten nicht zu schaffen ist, wird mit biochemischen Mitteln versucht, und, wo diese versagen, werden kulturelle Mechanismen herangezogen.” 12. Posner’s text is an introduction to an edited volume in which he republished the essays of the 1984 special issue on how to communicate 10,000 years into the future that I mentioned in the beginning of this section. Posner has not only added a general introduction, but also rearranged the order of the essays. The new order supports my interpretation of his comment (with which I disagree) that culture offers a solution to problems produced by technology: Starting with a technical analysis, the essays continue with discussing biochemical solutions before moving on to cultural practices discussing underlying issues. 13. The podcast can be accessed here: https://99percentinvisible​.org​/episode​/ten​ -thousand​-years/ (last accessed on April 14, 2021). 14. The Do-It-Yourself Montreal-based laboratory brico​.b​io has taken on the task to engineer ray cats and other animals that would visually respond to environmental pollutants and dangerous substances like radiation, mercury or carbon monoxide and foster an open exchange of ideas about these matters. Brico​.b​io presents itself as an experimental platform for scientists, artists and members of the public that takes the ray cats as an inspiration to discuss and develop ideas and tools to inhabit a toxic world. The project can be followed online on https://www​.theraycatsolution​.com/ (last accessed on April 12, 2021). 15. Sebeok (1984) first coined the notion of a “nuclear priesthood” (24–28) in a report of the Human Interference Task Force, before he wrote his contribution for the Zeitschrift für Semiotik. 16. For a thorough discussion of the archaeological models that the study draws on, see archaeologist Rosemary Joyce’s recent publication The Future of Nuclear Waste (2020). 17. Personal conversation with Elise Alloin, who submitted a winning entry in 2015, and Agnès Villette who submitted a proposal in a later competition.

How to Care for Nuclear Waste?

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18. While it is required by European law to develop a policy for the permanent disposal of radioactive waste, the Dutch government has postponed the decision to the year 2100 (COVRA 2018, 12). However, sporadic initiatives concerning the longterm storage of radioactive waste in semi-governmental research institutions like the Rathenau Institute are signs for political change. 19. With reference to Metamorphosis 2003–2103, Codée and Verhoef (2015) state that “[it] is not questionable that the art work will be preserved ‘forever’” (55), whereby ‘forever,’ ironically, only refers to the 100-year operational period of the building. 20. Notably, most of these works directly explore ideas that form part of current proposals and strategies of RK&M. Massart, Williams and Wilson were invited together with the artists Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead, and Gérard Larguier (whom I did not mention here), to present at the conference “Radioactive Waste Management and Constructing Memory for Future Generations” organized as part of the RK&M Initiative in Verdun in 2014 (OECD-NEA 2015). This indicates that critical artistic practices already gain presence within the institutional debate. However, the care perspective they introduce has not been taken up in the scientific debate yet as my discussion of the warn-and-infor approach suggests. 21. My reading of Viral Fictions focuses on the media of storytelling. For a discussion of the stories themselves and the “alternative narrative threads” created across time in this work, see Villette (2021, 257). 22. Gross (2014) suggests that to acknowledge the productivity of non-knowledge as a source of insight, is particularly relevant for experiments that take place outside the laboratory where unknown factors multiply. He calls such experiments “Realexperimente” (8, original emphasis) which can be translated to ‘real-world experiments’ in order to emphasize that they have wider and more direct societal consequences than a laboratory experiment. Given the wide-reaching societal implications of scientific and technological innovations, he goes so far to suggest that the real-world experiment is becoming the new standard while the scientific laboratory experiment is increasingly less relevant, raising the question if the public should play a stronger role in regulating experiments both inside and outside the laboratory (11–12). Real-world experiments, for instance, should in Gross’ view be designed as a democratically organized process, which however rarely occurs (9). 23. From email-correspondence with the artist. The legal document (WismutAGAbkG) regulating the rehabilitation responsibilities of the former mining company Wismut AG can be found here: https://www​.bmwi​.de​/Redaktion​/DE​/ Gesetze​/Energie​/wismutagabkg​.html (last accessed April 14, 2021). 24. In 2014, a chapel was built on top of the filled opencast mine Lichtenberg in the Gessental near the village of Ronneburg which partly serves this function and is broadly accepted among the local community. As Ruhland (2019) explains, it continues a local resistance movement against uranium mining that started in 1988 and is historically anchored in the church (148). Yet, she notes that a chapel remains primarily a place for devotion and contemplation, rather than of active and critical engagement with the nuclear heritage. 25. The complete tale goes like this: “In Ronneburg forest a few villagers from nearby had hunted a badger. As soon as they stow it in the bag, the wild hunt surprises

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them and a voice asks: ‘Has all the game been bagged?’ Another voice replies: ‘There is only a three-legged badger missing.’ Caught with horror, the villagers now rush from their hide-out, empty their sack while running and what do they see? What falls out is a badger with only three legs!” / German original: “Im Ronneburger Forste hatten ein paar Lichtenberger einen Dachs erlegt. Kaum dass sie ihn im Sacke haben, überrascht sie die wilde Jagd und eine Stimme fragt: Ob alles Wild erlegt sei? Gleich antwortet darauf eine Andere: Es fehlt nur noch ein dreibeiniger Dachs. Von Grauen erfaßt eilen jetzt die Dorfbewohner davon, entleeren im Laufen ihren Sack und was sehen sie? Was herausfällt ist wirklich ein Dachs mit nur drei Beinen!” (Eisel 1871, 120). 26. Ruhland refers to the Sagenbuch des Voigtlandes, a nineteenth-century collection of folktales (Eisel 1871). In this collection, thirty-three places are mentioned in which three-legged animals were spotted. Of these thirty-three, twenty were rabbits and nine were calves. There was also a mention of two goats, a cat and a badger (Ruhland 2019, 110). 27. German original: “nicht jedes Uranbergbaugebiet hat mythologische Marker, nicht jeder mythologische Marker verweist schon gar auf Uran. Umso weniger, da das Konzept ‘Uran’ in ein chemischphysikalisches Zeichensystem eingebunden ist, welches zum Zeitpunkt der Aufzeichnung der im folgenden zitierten Volkssagen noch nicht existierte.”

Conclusion

So, why should we look at art when we talk about nuclear power? Nuclear power, military and civilian, has been framed as a solution many times—a solution to end war and sustain global peace, a solution for growing energy demands in rich countries, and more recently, a solution to climate change. All of these solutions soon produced a number of new problems, or turned into problems themselves, contributing to the wicked complexity of the techno-human condition. Yet, it is a mistake to turn away from complexity and seek answers in the form of certainties. After all, the ‘solutions’ listed above are a product of attempting to create certainties where there are none, of trying to overcome complexity and ambiguity. Thus, the short answer to the question posed in this study is that artistic practices are relevant to the nuclear debate not despite, but because the answers they offer in response to the tremors caused by nuclear technologies suggest other problems. Let us now take a look at the long answer. In this book, I have turned to Allenby and Sarewitz’s method of intelligent muddling as a productive way to respond, and stay responsive, to nuclear complexity. Offering a set of principles to guide decision-making in an era of increasing technological complexity, Allenby and Sarewitz (2011b) frame muddling above all as an epistemic practice, a method to resist “our Enlightenment instincts” (160) of seeking solutions where solutions do more harm than good. Yet, I have argued that to come to terms with the radical shift of mind that muddling entails, it takes more than following a set of principles. It means to unlearn ways of thinking that are still dominant in nuclear societies and to confront one’s own ignorance in the face of pressing societal challenges. Thus, as a method, intelligent muddling needs to respond not only to wicked complexity, but also to offer ways of coming to terms with the psychological and emotional challenges faced by the subject, the 185

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one doing the muddling. To this end, I have argued that art’s contribution to muddling is to engage with the problem of (modern) subjectivity and explore alternative kinds of subjectivity, such as the ironic subject (chapter 1), the premodern collaborative subject (chapter 2), or the postmodern complicit subject (chapter 3). In other words, art’s social relevance in an era of growing technological complexity consists in pointing toward ways of muddling that are specific to the kinds of challenges society faces. In the context of nuclear complexity, the artistic practices discussed in this book point toward ways of muddling not only intelligently, but importantly also politically (chapter 1), ethically (chapter 2), critically (chapter 3) and persistently (chapter 4). In the Introduction, I have identified the problem of social denial as defined by Clark as a problem situated in modern subjectivity trying to reconcile the growing gap between lived experience and abstract knowledge. In chapter 1, engaging with the nuclear energy debate in Germany, I reframed this problem of social denial as a problem of the modern subject taking sides in the face of irresolvable complexity. Through Nefzger’s photo series Fluffy Clouds, I challenged my own perspective of the privileged viewer, following the series of ironic movements that the images put me through until I arrived on the shifting ground of self-irony. Confronting this position with a concrete audience and problem, I suggested that Fluffy Clouds opens a political space which offers an alternative to the oppositional struggle around the use of nuclear energy. In chapter 2, where I turned toward the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and its cultural invisibility, I have argued with Weber’s Bastard Eden that photography can counteract this cultural blindness by introducing an ethical way of seeing nuclear disaster, which I have called a photographic practice of noticing. I argued that this practice suggests a spatialized logic of seeing that challenges Allenby and Sarewitz’s concept of muddling forward as a remnant of modern progress thinking which needs to be overcome in order to engage with the nuclear complexity in the present (rather than of the past or an imagined future). Chapter 3 engaged with the possibility of critique in the modern technicist condition that was revealed by the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Discussing two very different works of art, the Otolith Group’s The Radiant and the Finger Pointing Worker, the chapter explored art’s own stakes in muddling, suggesting that to be consequential in the social sphere, art must put itself at risk. In chapter 4, I developed this claim further in relation to nuclear waste management. It is here that the limits of muddling as a working method were being explored, negotiating between the two extremes of a need for concrete policies and the radical indeterminacy and unknowability of the distant future. I have argued that muddling through the challenges of radioactive waste requires, above all, perseverance. Discussing a range of artistic practices, including Viral Fictions by Agnès Villette and A Marker for Halde

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Stolzenberg by Grit Ruhland, I showed how art can be a driving force in this endeavor by enriching the debate with new problems and questions that help resist the desire for discursive closure in the face of the radical indeterminacy of the future and cultivate an existential sense of care. Taken together, the chapters in this book explore muddling through as a method to address questions that are specific to the post-atomic world we inhabit, such as how to position oneself politically to nuclear energy, how to live with the consequences of nuclear disaster, and how to communicate the dangers of radioactive waste to future generations. These questions require muddling rather than problem-solving because the issues they address are complex, ranging from the unknowability of the distant future, and the entwinement of complex systems and institutions, to the multilayered invisibility of nuclear disaster. But muddling does not only apply to issues related to nuclear power. In fact, as I have argued in the introduction to this book, it was developed as a tool to deal with the complex technological challenges of the Anthropocene that involve a high degree of uncertainty and defy simple (Level I and II) problem-solving. It, thus, offers a method to engage with various instances of technological complexity. What I hope to have shown with this book is that art is constitutive for developing ways of muddling. In an attempt to engage with the problem of subjectivity in the modern techno-human condition, the readings offered in this book emerged from my personal response to the artworks, and the kind of to and fro that evolved when confronting this response with a particular problem in the nuclear debate. This allowed me to make nuanced claims supported by empirical observations. Yet, it also means that the readings offered in this study are just one of many possible responses to the works discussed, especially when confronted with different problems. This study, then, can itself be considered an exercise in intelligent muddling and thus, practicing what it preaches, draws its value from specific encounters and the theoretical insights that can be derived from them, rather than developing a theory on its own. As a result, the answer this inquiry offers to the question of art’s social relevance is not to be understood as a normative claim of what art should be or do, but rather aims to describe ways in which I think certain artistic practices can make a radical contribution to society. These practices won’t solve the societal challenges posed by nuclear and other technologies, but they will point toward certain avenues to walk down that are more productive than others. As such, I think it is important that Humanities scholars continue to raise the question of art’s social significance and get prepared to be surprised by the answers.

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Index

Aberwissen, 173, 176 Acconci, Vito, 117–20 actual event (Schuppli), 51–52 Agence nationale pour la gestion des déchets radioactifs (ANDRA), 149, 151–52, 161, 164, 168 agonistic spaces (Mouffe), 43–44, 177 ANDRA. See Agence nationale pour la gestion des déchets radioactifs Anthropocene, 1, 9–11, 17n4, 18n6, 88, 119–20, 187; disorder, 10, 12, 21 anthropological shock, 48 anthropos, 88, 120 anti-marker, 160 anti-nuclear protest, in Japan, 100, 130n1, 131n6 Arch Out Loud, nuclear landmarker competition, 156–57 Area of Absolute Mandatory Resettlement. See Chernobyl, exclusion zone artistic activism, 117, 119 artistic experimentation, 122, 139, 162, 164, 167, 173, 177 Atomgrad: Nature Abhors a Vacuum, 54–55, 55, 56, 59, 73, 81, 88 atomic bomb, 4, 10, 17n4, 48, 63, 89n2, 90n7, 91n12, 101, 122, 124, 158, 176 atomic priests, 145, 147, 157–59, 160, 179

Bastard Eden, Our Chernobyl, 52, 59–89, 186 blur, in photography, 52, 61–67, 70 by-products, technology’s, 4, 15 care, 135–39, 141, 149, 155–56, 161, 163, 170–71, 176–78; ethics, 135–36, 161, 181n8; practice, 137–38, 141, 161–63, 171. See also carelessness; relational care perspective carelessness, 141, 178 catastrophe of meaning, 93–94, 104, 128 censorship, 116, 122, 124 Centers, 117, 118, 125–26 Centrale Organisatie Voor Radioactief Afval (COVRA), 14–15, 149, 152– 53, 156 Chernobyl: children, 64–67, 87, 91n13; exclusion zone, 13–14, 16, 44–92; exclusion zone inhabitants, 45, 59, 64–67, 70–89; nuclear disaster, 5, 11, 16, 47–54, 59, 63–65, 86, 91n11, 186 cinematic essay, 96, 100 climate change, nuclear energy as solution to, 19–20, 36–38, 185 collaborative survival, 16, 74, 84, 86, 88 complexity: ethical, 140–41, 143, 161; levels of, 5–8, 131n4; technological,

201

202

Index

3–5, 7, 93, 185–86; wicked, 8–15, 25, 41, 176, 185 complicity, 22, 39–40, 119, 125, 128– 29, 161 COVRA. See Centrale Organisatie Voor Radioactief Afval Cumbrian Alchemy, 158–59, 159, 160, 179 dédoublement, 39–41, 46n12 denial: insistence to see, 49. Eat to Support campaign, 6, 17n2 echoic mention theory, 26–27 Effendi, Rena, 52, 75 Enlightenment thinking, 7, 12, 176, 185 Eshun, Kodwo, 99 ethic of the image, 67–68 experimental community, 147–48, 163, 169, 172 expropriation of the senses, 49 film essay. See cinematic essay Finger Pointing Worker, 116–30, 186 Fluffy Clouds, 16, 22–45, 186 focalization, 79–80 folktale, 173–76, 184n26 forcefield, 106, 130 forcework, art’s, 96, 108–10, 113–14, 116 fukei, 112 Fukuichi Live Cam, 117, 118, 124–25 Fukushima Exclusion Zone, 99, 105, 107, 108, 113, 119 Fukushima no Genshiryoku, 101, 104, 107 Fukushima nuclear disaster, 2, 5–8, 11, 16, 17n3, 20, 37, 51, 93–132, 131n5, 178, 186 Futures Panel, 169 Genesis, 115 geological disposal, 134–39, 141–42, 157, 161–64, 166, 168, 176–79, 182nn9–10

hibakusha, 10; global, 48, 89n2, 89n4, 105, 134 human health, impact of radiation on, 64, 89nn3–4, 90n9, 91n13, 105 human intrusion, 138–43, 145–46, 168–69, 182n9 ignorance society, 5, 7–8 illusion of understanding, in photography, 56–57 information society, 122, 127–28 interdisciplinarity, 2, 138–40, 144–46, 162, 177 internet art, 115–16 ironic ecology, 44 irony, 19; celebratory, 27; condemnatory, 27; corrective, 21–22, 25, 29, 39; generalized, 21–22, 25, 28, 38–41; New Topographics and, 31–32; as rhetoric device in environmentalism, 19, 21; victim of, 27, 29–31; visual, 16, 25–27, 40; word-based, 26–27, 39 Kac, Eduardo, 115–16, 128 Kostin, Igor, 51, 53–54, 59 landscape iconography: allegorical reading of, 35–39, 44, 45n7; in painting, 33–38, 44; in photography, 16, 23, 31–32, 35–39; polyinterpetability of, 36 Landscape of Thorns, 145–47, 146, 149, 157 language game, 122–23, 128–29 liberal justice model, 134–35. See also oversight lightning rods, 53, 60, 73, 78 long-term socio-technical experiment, geological disposal as, 134, 136–38, 142, 162, 177 looking around. See noticing man-made disaster, 97–98 marginalized communities, 13, 19–20, 73–84

Index

A Marker for Halde Stolzenberg, 170– 76, 172, 175, 186 Marker Panel, 150–52 Metamorphosis 2003–2103, 152–54, 156, 161, 183n19 Mikami, Seiko, 115 Molecular Clinic, 115 moral superiority (in irony), 29, 38 muddling, 139, 177–78, 185–87; forward, 11, 50, 88, 186; through, 8–14, 41, 130, 177, 186–87 mythology, 145, 155, 158, 163–64, 166, 171–76, 178–79, 184n27 narcissist self, 125–26 natural disaster, 97 Nefzger, Jürgen, 22 New Topographics, 24–25, 31–33, 45n5 non-knowledge, 167, 172–73, 181n8, 183n22 nonpower, 107 non-standardized knowledge production, 172–73, 175 noticing, a photographic practice of, 84, 86–89, 186 nuclear: banal, 124–25; fuel chain, 15, 133, 176, 179n1; semiotics, 140, 158, 182n9 nuclear disaster, 3, 7–8, 20, 50, 57, 60; cultural invisibility of, 50, 52–56, 59, 61–62, 65–66, 73; as an ongoing condition, 7, 16, 48, 52–53, 60, 66. See also Chernobyl, nuclear disaster; Fukushima nuclear disaster nuclear site marker. See repository marker nuclear waste, 3, 133, 139–40 nuclear waste disposal, 139, 143, 152, 161, 162, 176–77 nuclear waste management, 15, 133, 139, 143, 148, 154, 166, 177, 180n3 ontological opening, created by care, 136, 138, 162, 169, 177. See also relational care perspective

203

Otolith Group, 16, 132n8, 186 oversight, 135–37. See also liberal justice model passive safety, principle of, 134, 138, 156, 168 Pazu-Goo, 159 poiesis, 109, 131n7 preservation of records, knowledge and memory of radioactive waste repositories across generations (RK&M), 135–45, 147–49, 155–56, 158, 160, 164, 168–70, 173 privileged observer, 21, 25, 27–28, 39 problem-solving approach, critique of, 4, 7–8, 120, 138, 143–45, 147–48, 150–51, 187 profit, logic of, 84, 98–99, 105–6, 115, 131n3 The Radiant, 99–114, 118, 125 radioactive state of being, 16, 44–45, 49, 63, 67, 75 radioactive waste. See nuclear waste radioactive waste repository. See geological disposal radiogram, 51–52, 63 radiograph, radio-autograph. See radiogram ray cat, 145, 147–48, 179, 182n14 relational care perspective, 135–36, 161–62 remain exposed, 94–95 remaining at risk, 162, 181n8. See also ontological opening, created by care; relational care perspective repository marker, 14, 140–42, 145, 146, 146, 149–52, 156–60, 163–64, 166–67, 169–75 resilience, human, 73–84 resistance, modes of, 6, 13, 16, 22, 37, 43–44, 94–96, 104, 111–12, 119, 129, 143, 183n24 resonance, 96, 100, 109–13, 132n8 responsibility, for nuclear technology’s by-products, 15, 22, 32, 38, 98, 130,

204

133, 135, 137, 138, 141–45, 161, 166, 177–79 re-volt, 106–16 risk, putting oneself at, 129, 161–62. See also ontological opening, created by care; relational care perspective RK&M. See preservation of records, knowledge and memory of radioactive waste repositories across generations RK&M Initiative, 140, 147–48, 183nn19–20 Ruhland, Grit, 154, 163, 170–76 ruin photography, 51, 73, 81 ruin porn, 54 Sagar, Angelika, 99 samosely, 59, 73–84, 91n16 scanning, 127–28, 132n14 self-aware image, 58–62 self-reflexive image. See self-aware image side-effects, technology’s. See by-products silent revolt, 96, 100, 107, 109, 114, 122–23, 129 social practice, photography as, 52, 67–73 sonority, 109–10, 113, 132n8 sonorous vision, 100, 110–12 state of shock. See anthropological shock stupor, 93, 95, 121 subjectivity, 13, 16, 186–87; collaborative. See collaborative survival; modern, 41, 125–26, 128, 186; political, 16, 43–45; postmodern, 16, 126; Takeuchi, Kota, 118, 132n10 techne, 109, 131n7 technical fix, 11, 14 technicist disaster, 97–99

Index

technicity, 95–96, 99–101, 103–10, 114, 116, 128, 186; of hybrid radiation maps, 102–4 techno-aesthetics, 96, 105–7, 116 techno-human condition, 5, 7–10, 13, 16, 41, 57, 185, 187 technological disaster, 2, 6–7, 82, 88 techno-modernity, 94, 106, 116, 131n2 techno-mysticism, 154–57, 166, 168 techno-power, 97, 115, 122, 131n2 TEPCO. See Tokyo Electric Power Company third voice, 114 Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), 97–98, 101–2, 104–5, 116– 17, 119–21, 123–25, 128–30, 156 transformative force, art’s, 95–96, 106, 114–15, 122, 130 twofold ironic self, 39–43 uranium mining, 15, 19, 48, 51, 133, 170–76, 179n1, 183n24 user, of technology, 115, 138, 167–68 Villette, Agnès, 14, 163–70, 182n17, 183n21, 186 Viral Fictions, 163–70, 165, 173, 183n21, 186 visual event, 52, 68–70, 72 warn-and-inform approach, 135, 140– 41, 145, 148–51 Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), 140, 146, 149–50, 152, 156–57, 166, 169, 182n10 watchful care. See oversight Weber, Donald, 16, 52 Weir, Andy, 159–60 wickedness. See complexity, wicked Wilson, Jane and Louise, 73 WIPP. See Waste Isolation Pilot Plant the Zone. See Chernobyl, exclusion zone; Fukushima Exclusion Zone

About the Author

Dr. Anna Volkmar is a lecturer of contemporary art and technology at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on the role of art to navigate the complex societal and environmental implications of modern technology. She holds a PhD in art history from Leiden University and has published on nuclear aesthetics and the Anthropocene.

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