Abstract
Nuclear power plants, with their promise of boundless cheap energy, are archetypal figures of progress modernity. As we acknowledge the limits of industrial progress and growth-based capital, places for where the dream is now over, and whose inhabitants are finding ways of living through its transition, offer emergent practical ontologies based on maintenance, bricolage and necessity. Through the case study of the atomic city of Visaginas, Lithuania, this paper addresses the question of how to account for forms of life that emerge in the aftermath of high modernity. Here, infrastructures operate as residual cultural and material resources for practical ontologies and world building after progress. Building on emerging scholarship on the political aesthetics of infrastructure, I suggest that their ontological transition involves what Fisher describes as the ‘memory of lost futures’, a future anterior that, through the remains of material connections, technocultures and cultural memory, provide limits and conditions for emergent ways of living ‘after progress.’
Highlights
In the face of structural change and upheaval, where macroeconomic decisions bear down on our lives, and over which we are largely powerless, we find ways of world-making and attaching to possible futures
Unlike Berlant’s examples of the post-industrial United States, I argue that Visaginas’ specific history and politics of nuclearity, postSoviet identity and ‘outsider’ status in Lithuania provides the conditions for a specific recalibration of its infrastructures, moulding social, material and practical forms of life
While my interlocutors often drew on childhood memories, or family stories to describe their relation to the town, they discussed how the material infrastructure of the town provides visible and tangible resources to bolster the effort required to persevere, to make this present endure
Summary
In the face of structural change and upheaval, where macroeconomic decisions bear down on our lives, and over which we are largely powerless, we find ways of world-making and attaching to possible futures. This broader concept enables a focus on what holds places together, but only if we bring out the specific histories and politics of the spaces they address.8 Unlike Berlant’s examples of the post-industrial United States, I argue that Visaginas’ specific history and politics of nuclearity, postSoviet identity and ‘outsider’ status in Lithuania provides the conditions for a specific recalibration of its infrastructures, moulding social, material and practical forms of life.9 While the analogue dream of Larkin’s ‘unbearable modernity’ may be fading as the town’s residents come to terms with the plant’s decommissioning, the forms of life that the dream affords remain as infrastructural assemblages that shape ways of living on and making do.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
