immanence

I’ll be giving this talk at the University of Kansas on Thursday. It’ll be exactly two days after the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. And 16 days before the 30th anniversary of Mikhail Gorbachev’s speech about the accident. Pravda (Truth) first reported in any detail on the accident on May 6 and 7.

The future of the Soviet Union hinged on that 18 day period between the accident and the Politburo’s admissions about it. If there was a single event that precipitated the USSR’s unraveling, it was the Chernobyl accident. Without the accident, its aftermath — including the quiet but chaotic departures of Party officials and their families while May Day parades went on as if all was normal in Kyiv (80 miles away and literally downstream from the accident) and Moscow, followed ultimately by the sending in of over half a million “liquidators” to deal directly with the impacts of the disaster — and without the meanings that were wrested out of both by the Soviet populace, it’s entirely possible there would still be a Soviet Union today.

My talk will tell seven stories about the accident, each of them interpreting it within different spatio-temporal reference frames: (1) histories of the Soviet Union, its growth and eventual collapse; (2) legacies of the ethnic mixing and “purification” of the northern Ukrainian borderlands; (3) the Cold War arms/space race and its legacy of militarized “black sites,” containment strategies, and conspiracy theories; (4) the growth of nuclear power and the anti-nuclear movement; (5) scientific and “biopolitical” experiments on biotic populations; (6) “stalker” and zombie subcultures; and (7) the Anthropocene and its scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic conceptualization.

In the end, I’ll argue that the “Zone of Alienation” — the 1000 square mile exclusion zone that has largely been taken over by “wild nature” (except for the tourists, the few hundred elderly resettlers, and the intrepid “stalkers”) — is as good a metaphor as any for the position of humanity today. As in the epigraph to Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), the prescient film that got read onto the Chernobyl disaster by so many Soviet citizens seven years later, we can ask ourselves:

“What was it? A meteorite that fell to earth? Or a visitation from outer space? Whatever it was, there appeared in our small land a miracle of miracles: the ZONE.”

The question is, who is on the inside and who is on the outside? And how long will the borders hold?