Slow Disaster: Subreal Infrastructures and the End of Time

• In Event: Securitized Subjects, Militarized Time(s): The Everyday Life of Violence

Abstract

This paper attempts to evoke—through research, story, and digital image—the slow disaster of military and industrial time-forms, accumulating in sites as dramatic as 22 million tons of toxic uranium tailings buried in ‘disposal cells’ in the deserts of New Mexico, and as mundane as the future metallurgic waste of the MacBook Air on which I write these words. With an eye on the occulted crossroads where human and nonhuman time scales intersect, I pursue a psycho-geo-logics animated by social history, and by memory traces held in non-human matters. What methods could possibly be adequate to such a pursuit? How to mark the ‘subreal infrastructures’ where, under life as we know it, natural and supernatural forces generate conditions in which we also dwell? What forms of catastrophic violence—material and phantasmatic, political and intimate—radiate inside everyday geographies of ordinary time? The paper is part of a larger project on slow disaster, digital cultures, and the accumulating emergency of exhausted time and unburied fallout.
This presentation examines the uneven temporalities of disaster by drawing on recent work in technoscience and media studies, and contemporary theories of psycho-politics and affect. Today, the anticipation of emergency operates politically to govern time itself—simulating and activating imagined futures in the present moment of their securitized foreclosure. At the real and imagined ground zero of disaster, the demand for future security produces everyday technologies of surveillance and control that re-structure the present in the name of a future emergency that must never take place. At the same time, the accretion of disaster-effects (the slow burn of 100 years of petro-capitalism; the radiant injury from extracted uranium’s insistent half-life) challenges us to think beyond crisis narratives of emergency-as-event, to illuminate the permeable boundaries of a disaster that unfolds through the ordinary time of repetition, accumulation, and sedimented transformations.
How to think with uranium, in the underground time of toxic transmutations? In the mid-1990s, the U.S. Department of Energy launches the UMTRCA program aimed at remediating 20 abandoned uranium mines and containing over 40 million cubic yards of uranium waste in massive ‘disposal cells.’ Many of the disposal cells are now licensed to the DOE’s Department of Legacy Management for long-term custody, “indefinite in duration.” How to reckon with a violence that gathers in non-human geologic dimensions and temporal fields? “Memory … is written into the fabric of the world,” writes Karen Barad, “…[T]he world is its memory.” How to narrate non-human memories of slow violence embedded as worldly matter? Focusing on the architecture and management of the DOE/EPA’s uranium disposal cells, many of which are located on indigenous territory in the U.S. Southwest, I investigate the violent re-engineering of time, land, and infrastructure in the name of “indefinite” security and protection from future terrors.

Author

• Jackie Orr, Syracuse University