Eighteen days after a nuclear reactor exploded twice in Ukraine, causing irreparable damage to surrounding plants, animals, and human beings, officials announced the news to the public. Within that period thousands of people were exposed to radioactive iodine-131 which, 4 years later, led to a sudden and massive onset of thyroid cancers. Comparable to Hurricane Katrina, this atrocity could have been prevented if officials acted sooner and administered radioactive iodine pills within the first week of exposure. Petryna describes this initial lack of disclosure as an attempt to create an image of control over unpredictable and largely unassessed circumstances of risk. Most interesting to me were the many levels within the Ukrainian society, government, institutions, laboratories, and hospitals that were affected. In the months and years following the explosion, thousands of people were either voluntarily or involuntarily instructed to work at the radiation site, or “zone,” under perilous circumstances. Both physical and neurological damage preceded radiation exposure, and attempts to compensate sufferers triggered the emergence of "biological citizenship" in which health problems became a way for victims to acquire medical aid, social equality, and civil rights. The country’s health and politics overlapped: The post-Chernobyl world introduced profound political changes, including the collapse of the Soviet Union and the creation of an independent nation. This revolution of sorts assured that sufficient health care was not only a possibility, but an entitlement. Like the Atomic Bomb, as well as many other natural/unnatural catastrophes, Chernobyl worked its way into the collective consciousness—sufferers and non-sufferers alike demonstrated that the outcome of this disaster was by no means a “phenomenon confined to the past, interpretable as mere psychological trauma, or reducible in terms of scientific absolutes” (25 ).
What interested me most about Petryna's piece is how she speaks of the government's ability to cover up real, biologically tangible problems within individuals. It seems that this was only possible through a biopolitical framework. While on one hand, this caused individuals to take their own health under careful scrutiny, on the other hand it gave the government some sort of permission to not take care of it's citizens in the way that it arguably should. It is strange, and dangerous-seeming, that none of the methods that the government used to pull itself away from Chernobyl consisted of tangible assessments of the damage done to the people. If one were to just look at the babies being born, look at the cancer rates, look at the deformities...there would be no question that the government should be responsible for much more than it has been taking on. The governmental stance, however, is that one needs strict statistical evidence that Chernobyl caused such ills. At the same time, statistics are hidden and people are looked at as populations...groups instead of individuals. This, to me, sparks a direct connection to the government response to Katrina...feigning blindness and walking through the muck of bureaucracy before giving the people any help. The one advantage to such corruption, as Petryna indicates, is that people learn to take control of their own biological bodies.
I agree with Eva in that the government’s reaction to the explosion caused a lot more damage than necessary. The fact that governments do not deal with problems like natural or unnatural disasters directly after they occur causes far more damage than the actual disaster. The idea of class was very significant in this book in that a person’s position or place in society was determined according to their “biological citizenship” after the explosions took place. A person’s diagnosis and benefits determined their place like the relation between “sufferers” and “disabled” and even within the disabled there is a hierarchy of levels. In Life Exposed, one of the sufferers, Dmytro, worked as a miner shortly after the explosions and was later diagnosed with a number of illnesses and considered a disable person level 3. In the text, he describes his illness as a “foreign burden.” Cancers and others kinds of disease, when thought of at a cellular level are exactly that, foreign invaders that infiltrate a system and before the main structure can detect the invader it is too late and war is on between the cancer and the body. And then outside of the body, science no longer has all the concrete answers and medications because there were a lot more variables like where and when did the illness originate, would the government be accountable for treatment, or is this person just a hypochondriac who needs more psychological help then physical?
Ellery makes a good point in noting that science does not and cannot provide all the information necessary to classify sufferers of acute radiation sickness as "biological citizens." Petryna addresses this paradox of sorts by writing about the "accumulation of unknowns" that are necessary to provide a self-account in order to attain biological citizenship. This is such an interesting contradiction to me--on the one hand, science sets the values of life based on diagnoses and facts, yet also it is necessary that there exists an "accumulation of unknowns" in order to legitimize the illness in the social and scientific world. Post-Chernobyl action seems to be full of contradictions and paradoxes such as these: the government could have stopped many onsets of ARS had they distributed nonradioactive iodine pills within the first week after the disaster... Yet after the disaster, instead of being an agent of aid the government turned more into an appeals center, where citizens had to prove their illness on scientific terms before getting federal aid. Actual conditions of health came to be defined within scientific and social orders, rather than by their physical, self-affirming existence.
In Life Exposed by Adriana Petryna the lives of the people who experienced the Chernobyl disaster are analyzed through first hand accounts with the victims. Petryna also discusses the role of the government, the economy and science in this tragedy. She reveals the fact that more than 600,000 workers and government employee’s like soldiers continue to be exposed to Chernobyl’s radiation while trying to clean up the mess. Chernobyl not only destroyed the regional environment but it also destroyed the lives of the local people. The government refuses to take responsibility for the disaster. As one plant worker said, “no one is responsible for it”. The author tries to explain the effect of the Ukraine’s new democratic society on the Chernobyl victims. The health care system is no longer universal so some of the more impoverished people no longer have access to health care. This causes a major health care problem that creates social classes based on being a “biological citizen”. It is completely unfair that these people have become responsible for something they had zero control over.
Everytime I read the word "postsocialist" my knee jerked up to hit my chin and I screamed, NO!
All personal discomfort aside, the interviews, by and large beyond the data spreads, the bulk of Adira's "process," are by turns horrific (pg 3; pg 26, cf. "social psychology"; pg 56 cf. "DNA damage"), infuriating (pg. 48 cf. "new patients don't wish to recover," which is the most common fallacy in the psychological industry; pg. 58 cf. "the relation between experimental animals and human populations" pg 68, cf. "denied on account of varicose veins"; pg 103 - 117) and more often than not both.
But I find this argument of "biological citizenship" and a host of other abstractions Adira uses (whenever I hear the word "scientific" nowadays, I think, I think, quite rightly of the musical "the King and I": "scientific dogs," "scientific chopsticks," "scientific woman"), paradoxically to being an abstraction, not expansive enough, that is, the term allows for inadequate interstices. In fact, the way she uses the term "biological" is very reductivist, as does seem to be her conception of political forms.
It's like Adira just put this on our doorstep, so we could watch an Alaskan beauty queen say cheerily, "All of the above," and there be nothing we can do about what she means by that. As Charles Bernstein put on his blog, the morning after the election, "It's like a / nightmare is / ending but I / can't wake up."
In other words, as I always will say, Adira should’ve skipped Foulcaut and used Delueze, more expansive, far less structuralist “body” (body politic, body “biological,” “body” as “atom” or unit) metaphors.
*( Petryna has a precise and articulate way of telling the story of biological citizenship, a social and political result of the chernobyl catastrophe. her style is easy to follow as it is rich with narration, but no forced agenda smears all over the work. The circumstances that Petryna describes and the images that she conjures speak for themselves.
The concepts developed are clearly driven and arrive at well-knitted corners. Life, health, citizenship,death, anatomy,technology, evil, modernity, and science-- she sticks a cut in them all: and her argument follows, quite supportedly.
the language of government is magical for us, to hear the political discourse transgress deformed, amnesiac bodies strikes a certain note of sorcery. <<<< disease, the currency through which to negotiate social, economic, and political survival.>>>>>>
Petryna never underestimates the power of language to form around people and the power of people to form around language.
As a necessary and mesmorizing underbelly to her argument of academic, social, and political importance is;
the harmful unknown the radiative, the invisible radiation, the invisible substance, the "foreign body," the unnatural {super natural) force, that autonomous external force that overwrites the human anatomy and disassembles man.
One of the things that is always mentioned - or seems to be - regarding the "events"/"disasters" we have studied is the determination of risk and the question of preventability. That is, could the negative ramifications have been avoided, and if they were not - why? This is an underlying and pertinent question in regards to food (can we avoid commodification and the "unnatural"), natural disasters (can we avoid the tide post-occurence), and in the nuclear age (can we control such power)? And in every case the element of risk is calculated with the utmost concern to the consecrators of each hierarchy - often the state. Which would seem to me why the role of the state is always central to the debate in all; the risk that is weighed will ultimately shift to the benefit of those with the initial control. The biological citizens were only able to dictate their role in risk after-the-fact, as do almost all of the "other" citizens in each category we've studied. How can a state offer a cure rather than an anesthetic.
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Eighteen days after a nuclear reactor exploded twice in Ukraine, causing irreparable damage to surrounding plants, animals, and human beings, officials announced the news to the public. Within that period thousands of people were exposed to radioactive iodine-131 which, 4 years later, led to a sudden and massive onset of thyroid cancers. Comparable to Hurricane Katrina, this atrocity could have been prevented if officials acted sooner and administered radioactive iodine pills within the first week of exposure. Petryna describes this initial lack of disclosure as an attempt to create an image of control over unpredictable and largely unassessed circumstances of risk. Most interesting to me were the many levels within the Ukrainian society, government, institutions, laboratories, and hospitals that were affected. In the months and years following the explosion, thousands of people were either voluntarily or involuntarily instructed to work at the radiation site, or “zone,” under perilous circumstances. Both physical and neurological damage preceded radiation exposure, and attempts to compensate sufferers triggered the emergence of "biological citizenship" in which health problems became a way for victims to acquire medical aid, social equality, and civil rights. The country’s health and politics overlapped: The post-Chernobyl world introduced profound political changes, including the collapse of the Soviet Union and the creation of an independent nation. This revolution of sorts assured that sufficient health care was not only a possibility, but an entitlement. Like the Atomic Bomb, as well as many other natural/unnatural catastrophes, Chernobyl worked its way into the collective consciousness—sufferers and non-sufferers alike demonstrated that the outcome of this disaster was by no means a “phenomenon confined to the past, interpretable as mere psychological trauma, or reducible in terms of scientific absolutes” (25 ).
What interested me most about Petryna's piece is how she speaks of the government's ability to cover up real, biologically tangible problems within individuals. It seems that this was only possible through a biopolitical framework. While on one hand, this caused individuals to take their own health under careful scrutiny, on the other hand it gave the government some sort of permission to not take care of it's citizens in the way that it arguably should. It is strange, and dangerous-seeming, that none of the methods that the government used to pull itself away from Chernobyl consisted of tangible assessments of the damage done to the people. If one were to just look at the babies being born, look at the cancer rates, look at the deformities...there would be no question that the government should be responsible for much more than it has been taking on. The governmental stance, however, is that one needs strict statistical evidence that Chernobyl caused such ills. At the same time, statistics are hidden and people are looked at as populations...groups instead of individuals. This, to me, sparks a direct connection to the government response to Katrina...feigning blindness and walking through the muck of bureaucracy before giving the people any help. The one advantage to such corruption, as Petryna indicates, is that people learn to take control of their own biological bodies.
I agree with Eva in that the government’s reaction to the explosion caused a lot more damage than necessary. The fact that governments do not deal with problems like natural or unnatural disasters directly after they occur causes far more damage than the actual disaster. The idea of class was very significant in this book in that a person’s position or place in society was determined according to their “biological citizenship” after the explosions took place. A person’s diagnosis and benefits determined their place like the relation between “sufferers” and “disabled” and even within the disabled there is a hierarchy of levels.
In Life Exposed, one of the sufferers, Dmytro, worked as a miner shortly after the explosions and was later diagnosed with a number of illnesses and considered a disable person level 3. In the text, he describes his illness as a “foreign burden.” Cancers and others kinds of disease, when thought of at a cellular level are exactly that, foreign invaders that infiltrate a system and before the main structure can detect the invader it is too late and war is on between the cancer and the body. And then outside of the body, science no longer has all the concrete answers and medications because there were a lot more variables like where and when did the illness originate, would the government be accountable for treatment, or is this person just a hypochondriac who needs more psychological help then physical?
Ellery makes a good point in noting that science does not and cannot provide all the information necessary to classify sufferers of acute radiation sickness as "biological citizens." Petryna addresses this paradox of sorts by writing about the "accumulation of unknowns" that are necessary to provide a self-account in order to attain biological citizenship. This is such an interesting contradiction to me--on the one hand, science sets the values of life based on diagnoses and facts, yet also it is necessary that there exists an "accumulation of unknowns" in order to legitimize the illness in the social and scientific world. Post-Chernobyl action seems to be full of contradictions and paradoxes such as these: the government could have stopped many onsets of ARS had they distributed nonradioactive iodine pills within the first week after the disaster... Yet after the disaster, instead of being an agent of aid the government turned more into an appeals center, where citizens had to prove their illness on scientific terms before getting federal aid. Actual conditions of health came to be defined within scientific and social orders, rather than by their physical, self-affirming existence.
In Life Exposed by Adriana Petryna the lives of the people who experienced the Chernobyl disaster are analyzed through first hand accounts with the victims. Petryna also discusses the role of the government, the economy and science in this tragedy. She reveals the fact that more than 600,000 workers and government employee’s like soldiers continue to be exposed to Chernobyl’s radiation while trying to clean up the mess. Chernobyl not only destroyed the regional environment but it also destroyed the lives of the local people. The government refuses to take responsibility for the disaster. As one plant worker said, “no one is responsible for it”. The author tries to explain the effect of the Ukraine’s new democratic society on the Chernobyl victims. The health care system is no longer universal so some of the more impoverished people no longer have access to health care. This causes a major health care problem that creates social classes based on being a “biological citizen”. It is completely unfair that these people have become responsible for something they had zero control over.
Everytime I read the word "postsocialist" my knee jerked up to hit my chin and I screamed, NO!
All personal discomfort aside, the interviews, by and large beyond the data spreads, the bulk of Adira's "process," are by turns horrific (pg 3; pg 26, cf. "social psychology"; pg 56 cf. "DNA damage"), infuriating (pg. 48 cf. "new patients don't wish to recover," which is the most common fallacy in the psychological industry; pg. 58 cf. "the relation between experimental animals and human populations" pg 68, cf. "denied on account of varicose veins"; pg 103 - 117) and more often than not both.
But I find this argument of "biological citizenship" and a host of other abstractions Adira uses (whenever I hear the word "scientific" nowadays, I think, I think, quite rightly of the musical "the King and I": "scientific dogs," "scientific chopsticks," "scientific woman"), paradoxically to being an abstraction, not expansive enough, that is, the term allows for inadequate interstices. In fact, the way she uses the term "biological" is very reductivist, as does seem to be her conception of political forms.
It's like Adira just put this on our doorstep, so we could watch an Alaskan beauty queen say cheerily, "All of the above," and there be nothing we can do about what she means by that. As Charles Bernstein put on his blog, the morning after the election, "It's like a / nightmare is / ending but I / can't wake up."
In other words, as I always will say, Adira should’ve skipped Foulcaut and used Delueze, more expansive, far less structuralist “body” (body politic, body “biological,” “body” as “atom” or unit) metaphors.
whoops? !!!#@$%^ my comment went invisible::::
*(
Petryna has a precise and articulate way of telling the story of biological citizenship, a social and political result of the chernobyl catastrophe. her style is easy to follow as it is rich with narration, but no forced agenda smears all over the work. The circumstances that Petryna describes and the images that she conjures speak for themselves.
The concepts developed are clearly driven and arrive at well-knitted corners. Life, health, citizenship,death, anatomy,technology, evil, modernity, and science-- she sticks a cut in them all: and her argument follows, quite supportedly.
the language of government is magical for us, to hear the political discourse transgress deformed, amnesiac bodies strikes a certain note of sorcery.
<<<< disease, the currency through which to negotiate social, economic, and political survival.>>>>>>
Petryna never underestimates the power of language to form around people and the power of people to form around language.
As a necessary and mesmorizing underbelly to her argument of academic, social, and political importance is;
the harmful unknown
the radiative,
the invisible radiation, the invisible substance,
the "foreign body," the unnatural {super natural) force, that autonomous external force that overwrites the human anatomy and disassembles man.
a body without organs.
One of the things that is always mentioned - or seems to be - regarding the "events"/"disasters" we have studied is the determination of risk and the question of preventability. That is, could the negative ramifications have been avoided, and if they were not - why? This is an underlying and pertinent question in regards to food (can we avoid commodification and the "unnatural"), natural disasters (can we avoid the tide post-occurence), and in the nuclear age (can we control such power)? And in every case the element of risk is calculated with the utmost concern to the consecrators of each hierarchy - often the state. Which would seem to me why the role of the state is always central to the debate in all; the risk that is weighed will ultimately shift to the benefit of those with the initial control. The biological citizens were only able to dictate their role in risk after-the-fact, as do almost all of the "other" citizens in each category we've studied. How can a state offer a cure rather than an anesthetic.
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