The Rem Imaginary: Geontopower Exposed in the Ukrainian Response to the Chernobyl Disaster
Adriana Petryna’s Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl examines the longterm and pervasive impact that the Chernobyl radioactive nuclear accident has had on Ukraine and its citizens. Petryna describes how this disaster has become a central component of the social contract that has been forged between the nascent Ukrainian state and its new “biological citizens” and how the terms of this social contract have blurred the lines between the living and the non-living parts of Ukrainian society in a variety of ways. Using the imagery from Elizabeth Povinelli’s book Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, the “Zone of Exclusion”, surrounding the beating radioactive heart of Chernobyl is the “desert” which threatens the possibility of life within zone and, in ways only imperfectly understood by scientists, perhaps far beyond the boundaries of the zone. The Ukrainian government has used what Povinelli calls geontopower – political power to maintain and rationalize the distinctions between “life” and “non-life” – in its bureaucratic approach to defining the various zones of exposure to lifethreatening radiation; according different levels of compensation to human beings based on their level of exposure to radioactive particles that can cause illnesses and death; and creating a narrative of life, illness and death which creates perverse incentives for humans to become something less than human. In this way, it is possible to see that Ukraine may not be an extreme outlier from a human experience standpoint but rather an image of the world in which humans are racing toward, namely one in which “healthy” life and radioactive “non-life” and illness exist side by side, not neatly demarcated in any simple and clear way, with life increasingly indexed by its relationship to non-life and with the potential that non-life (radiation) will eventually fold life into itself.
Post-Chernobyl Ukraine exemplifies the often arbitrary lines modern societies draw between what they deem to be alive and what they treat as “not alive” --– what Povinelli refers to as the Carbon Imaginary (Povinelli, 16). Povinelli refers to the Carbon Imaginary as being a “scarred” region, which implies something that is raw, rough and capable of opening up around its edges and infecting nearby areas. Povinelli’s concept of the Carbon Imaginary— the governing of life through establishing a boundary between bios and geos— implies the establishment of a hierarchy of Being (bios) over non-being or the inert (geos). In a geontological world, geos is harnessed to maintain bios, the lively (Ibid). In the context of Chernobyl, radiation emanating from crippled nuclear reactors is the geos that has slipped loose of its harness, taking the form of the Virus which Povinelli refers to her book and which as managed to commingle itself in the very bodies of the living in and around the desert.
In post-Chernobyl Ukraine, human biology and health is “indexed” by one’s proximity to the site of the accident (like Dante’s Inferno, with the Zone of Exclusion at the heart of the toxicity, surrounded by three outer zones each reflecting governmental estimates of decreasing levels of contamination). But the precise scope of the exposure (the extent of the radioactive plume released from the reactor explosion was poorly understood at the time because of Soviet secrecy) and the period of time over which the exposure may manifest itself in impacted populations (the half-life of some of the particles that were released from the explosion are virtually infinite) are unknowns. As one Ukrainian citizen notes in Petryna’s book, there is “no map of plutonium” (Petryna, 112). What is clear is that “biological citizenship” in the Republic of Ukraine, and one’s participation in the political economy of this former Soviet republic, is often defined by a person’s exposure to the Chernobyl radiation event and their illnesses, real or
perceived, relating to the event. Petryna quotes one Ukrainian citizen who observes “Here, the worst is to be healthy” (Petryna, 85).
Petryna describes how Ukrainian authorities have created a rough and approximate boundary between those who are “alive” and those who are “less than alive” that is, people who are disabled across a spectrum of ailments, symptoms and exposures, with a higher monetary value placed on those who are deemed more seriously ill and closer to “not being alive”. Petryna explains that “a person categorized as ‘disabled’ was far better compensated than a mere ‘sufferer.’ Persons completely outside the system of Chernobyl sufferers knew they had little chance of getting decent social protections from the state” (Petryna, 18). In order to claim their “biological citizenship” Ukrainians were required to carefully document their ailments, exposures and connections to the site of the accident in circumscribed and bureaucratic ways in order to be acknowledged by the state as fitting within the bounds of the geontopower regime established in Ukraine. This process is reminiscent of the documentation Povinelli describes that the indigenous people of Australia had to submit in order to make monetary claims, including proof of lineage and ancestral connection to the affected land, related to the destruction of “Two Women Sitting Down” by OM Manganese (Povinelli, 30). In order to make their claims, however, petitioning Ukrainians were required to acknowledge the non-living geos within them (radioactive exposure) and thereby relinquish their status as a normal, healthy human being and cross the boundary between what it means to be fully alive and to be not quite fully alive.
As evidenced by the Ukrainian experience, in the scarred region between life and nonlife, participants often negotiate the terms of their relationship with the non-life features of their world in economic terms. For example, capitalism thrives in this region, exploiting the potential for profit in the uncertainty presented by viral disruptions at the boundaries of life/non-life.
Petryna makes the point that the efforts of the American physician, Dr. Robert Peter Gale, who volunteered to do bone marrow transplants on some of the worst victims of the Chernobyl radiation exposure, may have been as much driven by career and reputation concerns as he was by a humanitarian instinct (Petryna, 44). Even in post-Soviet Ukrainian (which was seeking to embrace a market-driven economy but was still decidedly socialist in its orientation), Chernobylrelated illness, and the severity of such illness as defined within certain defined bureaucratic terms, entitled the victim/citizen to cash compensation in an economy that otherwise provided little economic opportunity or state support and where personal wealth was ravaged by prevailing high inflation rates. This has created a clear economic incentive for Ukrainians to find a link between illnesses and ailments they had and Chernobyl; it also created an “illness risk” economy, where people were willing to live and work in contaminated zones in exchange for higher/subsidized wages and cheaper housing and transportation. Economic activity in Ukraine has found a way to navigate the boundaries of the “Safe Living Zone” and the contaminated zones, creating perverse incentives for people to view illness, or partial non-life, as their ticket to economic security or survivability (Petryna, 54). The citizens of Ukraine, much like the indigenous Australians who sued OM Manganese when they destroyed “Two Women Sitting Down”, are being compensated by the state because they have been able to articulate, in the terms established by the (settler colonial) state, their entitlement to compensation or reparations for their injuries (Povinelli, 34). In other words, Ukrainians, with the encouragement of their government, have commoditized and put a price on their “human-ness” and health, making them in some respects the equivalent of a non-living object that can be valued, and be exchanged for cash (with the struggling young Ukrainian state receiving legitimacy and tacit support as part of this biological social contract).
The Carbon Imaginary that divides the living and non-living zones of the Ukraine is further blurred by the ways in which humans were used to deal with the threat posed by the radioactive geos. The Ukrainian government enlisted its working class citizens to become less than human in the effort to clean up the radioactive mess left behind by the Chernobyl incident. Humans were, in effect, turned into “bio-robots”, who went into the Zone of Exclusion to clean up radioactive debris on the roof of the power plant, a job that was originally designed for actual robots. Humans did the job in place of robots because the robots were unable to perform properly because the radiation levels at the plant were so high that they destroyed the machines’ ability to function (Petryna, 30). “Bio-robots” like Kulyk, who Petryna describes in her book, are not only changed by the state’s manipulation of humanity, but also by the radioactive particles that penetrate their skin and organs, which alter Kulyk and the other bio-robots on a biological level, infiltrating them with the potential for developing any number of illnesses.
When humans are being put in harm’s way to put out the radioactive storm within the “Zone”, they become the equivalent of the ‘manganese’ described in Povinelli’s book: they take on a non-living status. They are deemed expendable. They perform a function important to the ‘living’, but by allowing them to enter the zone, they become no different from the rock you extract from or the river you pollute.
Petryna refers to the sequence of events that comprised the Chernobyl incident and its aftermath as a “technogenic catastrophe”, wherein the detrimental effects of the incident are a combination of the actual radiation and the incident’s bureaucratic management (Petryna, 9). The girls with thyroid cancer who Petryna speaks to later in the book are key examples of the technogenic aspects of the catastrophe; they all come from different zones, and yet sit in the same room waiting to receive the same treatment. One of these victims is Alina, who tells
Petryna that radioactive Chernobyl plume, or ‘cloud’ “‘left a trace in my city too. I can say that the trace in me is this scar.’ She gestured the shape of her scar and said, ‘In others, other traces’” (Petryna, 80). She wears the ‘scarred boundary’ that marks her as an affected human, bordering on inert: it is u-shaped and biopolitical, it makes her forever reliant on thyroxine and therefor the grace of state intervention to survive. As Alina’s case exemplifies, although it may pretend otherwise, the modern state cannot protect its human citizenry from the desert or the virus because we are not and cannot be insulated from the non-living world of which we are inextricably part. Bios and Geos are, in fact, one, with no hierarchy between the two; our modern quest to “master” nature for our own convenience will only serve to accelerate that inevitable merger between the two worlds.
Works Cited:
Petryna, Adriana. “Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl.” Princeton University Press, 2013
Povinelli, Elizabeth A. “Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism.” Duke University Press, 2016