The thing about infrastructure is that it never just does what it’s supposedly designed to do.
Infrastructure congeals and conceals social interest. It’s “inevitably imbued with biased struggles for social, economic, ecological, and political power to benefit from connecting (more or less) distant times and places” (Graham and Marvin, 2001). In other words, “one person’s infrastructure is another’s difficulty” (Starr, 1999).
Highways, dams, and pipelines have always been flashpoints of protest when they displace and disrupt lifeways and communities; they leverage the same logic as that of nuclear “sacrifice zones” – those spectacular feats of dispossession for the national good, from Hanford to Bikini Atoll.
But infrastructure is “biased” in mundane ways too. Cities are planned and built to enable some while disabling others, through infrequent bus schedules and uneven sidewalk surfaces; even the distance between public bathrooms is gendered. Shannon Cram exposes how even something as obvious as breast tissue is rendered invisible in the masculine politics of radiation detection.
So even if nuclear technology can be tamed in some way to, say, no longer colonize native lands to extract dangerous materials as it did across the American West, or, say, no longer pose safety hazards that can quite literally wipe out a person’s white-blood count, as it did in Tokaimura – even if the promise of “American ingenuity” that pacified the nation’s nuclear fears at the height of the Cold War comes through, in what universe could nuclearism escape infrastructure’s “sociotechnical geometries of power”?
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It’s the spectacular effects of mundane decisions and the invisibility of the power differentials that maintain them which bridge my interests with Christine’s, as vastly different as they may sometimes appear; we can have meaningful conversations about our projects because – as hilarious as Monty Python can be – the self-same “violence inherent in the system” is no joke, and it cuts across all subject matters.
Masculinist science is what once pitted the high magick of astrology against the lowly sorcery of witchcraft, justifying murder and the seizure of property; claims of greater good is what defended all sorts of evil by both church and state colonists. It’s the same toxicity taking different forms.
There is a theology to nuclearism. Even the early regulators knew that, in their own words, “the establishment of permissible levels of radiation exposure is not basically a scientific problem. Indeed, it is more a matter of philosophy, of morality, and of sheer wisdom.”
Shannon Cram puts it this way: living with the realities of radiation “meant embodying the logics of rational mutation: a physical and existential remaking of the self.” Doesn’t that sound familiar?
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The interplay of spectacle and mundanity is ultimately a politics of looking, which makes it an interesting vernacular for photography. Shannon Cram illustrates this in the story of how she kicked herself for driving past a nondescript building for years before she realized how important it was in her research; her eyes had always been drawn to the spectacle of the Richland Bombers stadium and its mushroom cloud logo across the street.
Cram includes several images in her book, but also chooses to withhold photographic evidence at times as well; in one visit, she writes about taking a photo of technicians in a cold-storage room for radioactive specimens, then regretting it, reflecting of how her documentation without consent was “another form of exposure.”
But she makes up for this with many vividly visual scenes, most from memory, and some from her mind’s eye, as she pictures how pivotal moments in atomic history could have played out; did the Rockerfeller trustee and the National Academy of Sciences president drink whiskey while they discussed the feasibility of studying the biological effects of nuclear fallout? Cram interprets the transcripts in different ways: maybe the responses were immediate and terse, or maybe there were long, awkward pauses, or maybe one of them choked on his drink and sputtered an incredulous reply.
There’s a politics to this kind of looking as well; to peer through the fogged lens of archives into the mundane makings of spectacular infrastructure is to reanimate the politics of their maintenance.