ABSTRACT
In the age of nuclear power, members of industrial societies share the fate of radiation with a global community of beings for whom radiation works silently and invisibly from within. For them as for everybody else, radiation proceeds outside the reach of their senses: it is known only to their cells. Im/ material and beyond the capacity of perception and sensibility, it affects our collective present and long-term future, our own and other species’ daughters and sons of a thousand years hence. It is dispersed in time and space and marked by complex temporalities and time-space configurations. Its life cycles of decay span from nanoseconds to millennia. This means its time horizon too exceeds human capability and concern. Furthermore, radiation permeates all life forms to varying degrees and disregards conventional boundaries: skin, clothes and walls, cities and nations, the demarcation between the elements. Its ‘materiality’ thus falls outside the traditional definition of the real, outside a conventional view that has been absorbed as an unquestioned norm into the everyday understanding of ‘Western’ culture, the habits of mind where real is what is material and where this in turn is defined by its accessibility to the senses. Invisibility, vast variable time-spans of decay, networked interdependence and the fact that effects are not tied to the time and place of emission, therefore, make radiation a cultural phenomenon that poses problems for traditional ways of knowing and relating to the material world.
