Book review: Rahul Mukherjee,Radiant Infrastructures: Media,Environment,and Cultures of Uncertainty

I read Rahul Mukherjee’s fantastic first book, Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty, during a lockdown in Bangladesh occasioned by the global spread of COVID-19. The background of the pandemic made this superb read also an uncanny one. The world has been busy fighting a hidden enemy by looking for clues in the virus’s gene sequence and in the outward symptoms in the afflicted body. The biomedical crisis has unfolded as a dialectic of visibility and imperceptibility, which is also the analytical focus of Mukherjee’s book. It compares the everyday mediations of nuclear reactors and cell phone towers in contemporary India. Both are sources of invisible radiation-. Mukherjee draws from a trove of connected media events and texts. He juxtaposes television talk shows, documentary cinema, vernacular press, neighbourhood meetings, corporate and activist discourses, expert knowledge, and still images in order to show how ‘radiance’ captures and combines the ‘glittering and impalpable’ aspects of the scientific, activist and consumerist spheres of cell phones and nuclear reactors.

The urgency of the project and novelty of its approach cannot be overstated. The goal, most broadly, is to make sense of the way people experience radiation-emitting technologies and their daily encounters with them. Similar ‘embodied sensitivities’ in the radiation discourse have also been resonant in the epidemiological narrative of the novel coronavirus. The causal link suggested between 5G cell towers and COVID-19 has generated widespread conspiracy theories. Radiant Infrastructures documents similarly popular but also expert, corporate and politically progressive attempts to mediate – ‘to make visible’ – the reach, impact and cultural valences of radiation. It does so by bringing two distinct infrastructural sites into one frame.

Urban India is composed of radiant cities, Mukherjee writes evocatively. It is a fact which largely goes unnoticed because some infrastructures are only ‘seen’ when they fail, when they are disrupted. It is when calls drop that the distance or proximity to cell towers enters into the ‘lay’ consciousness. While cell antennas dot the urban landscape, nuclear reactors are largely set up in rural areas hidden from the field of vision of city dwellers, thereby forging a somewhat split public. Reactors do become national news but mostly around large-scale accidents or a national energy crisis. Together, their presence has coalesced a set of distinct stakeholders (environmental publics, Mukherjee calls them) and a range of formal and informal mediations. The book masterfully engages with the affective density around the infrastructures’ physicality and their intimate, social and imaginary lives.

The environmental publics are ‘always-in-formation’. They can be deliberative, realised through embodied experiences or take the form of displaceable populations. They are also products of media events and objects and are in turn influenced by them. The interconnectedness of the media and texts – from vernacular newspapers to English-language television talk shows, from radio-frequency scientists to villagers carrying cancerous outgrowths in their flesh – compels Mukherjee to apply the concept of ‘intermediality’. The use of intermediality entails tracing the connections and conditions of possibility of multiple media. Unlike intertextuality, the practices of producing and consuming the texts also become entangled with each other.

For mobile towers and nuclear reactors, exploring intermediality involves taking the radiation and discourses around it seriously. Both are tricky business, as a wide range of examples show how media events simultaneously sustain secrecy and publicity. ‘The governance of radiant infrastructures leads to the strategic deployment of media to make visible only selected features of such infrastructures, in an attempt to manage uncertainties about their environmental impacts’ (p. 107). Cellular operators and telecom regulators in India often work together to stage transparency all the while manipulating emission variables to produce favourable data. The e-portals (e.g., the Tarang Sanchar app) through which residents can ask for cell tower maps and signal strength have been the regulators and operators’ response, though inadequate, to the eroding trust between them and the consumers.

In the mediated arenas of scientists, journalists, politicians and activists, nuclear secrets are also performatively hidden and revealed. Mukherjee calls this ‘(un)regulated emissions’. Even when an accomplished journalist claims objectivity and power over editorial decisions, the reality is rarely that straightforward. Pallava Bagla, who was given exclusive access to a nuclear facility, said to the author, ‘You may take us to a facility. You may want us to go blindfolded. We are willing to go blindfolded. But, end of the day, it is not my job to show you what I am going to write or what I am going to air’ (p. 115). The protocols of ‘national security’ also posed unique restrictions to his access, and by extension, the access of his audience. The movements of journalists and the spaces of the reactor are, therefore, entangled in their performativity.

The media may be the direct objects of Mukherjee’s book, but the concept of mediation brings together the disparate subjects and spaces that cohere to tell a story about contemporary life, surely in India but globally as well. It elaborates on the affective and speculative work which mediation performs across time and space. Radiant Infrastructures may be, most broadly, an ethnography of media, but that does little justice to all that the book offers. Beyond the effects of media framing, it accounts for the circulation of sounds, images, things, effects and people. In other words, it shows through concrete examples that mediation is a constitutive process in social life and that due to the structural ambiguity of the media, the work of mediation is always potentially volatile (see Mazzarella, 2004).

Radiant Infrastructures straddles multiple genres. Its efficacy partly resides in the careful and caring consideration it gives to ordinary people who find themselves living intimately with infrastructure. Mukherjee never loses sight of this as he follows the entanglements of science, media, power and politics. The book successfully plays with the tools of film and media studies, ethnography, environmental studies, and science, technology and society studies. It moves through the five chapters by engaging with the debates and contestations over cell towers and nuclear reactors, radiation emissions, exposures to them and, finally, environmental activism and citizenship.

Because of its ambitious scope, the book will be useful to scholars and students interested in media and mediation, the environment and the Anthropocene, cinema and image politics, global development, and capitalist modernity, particularly the South Asian version of it. By eschewing easy answers and soft targets, Mukherjee boldly lines up the stakes in taking radiation-emitting infrastructures seriously. Modern South Asian life is directly enabled and affected by them. Radiant Infrastructures gives us a different starting point to work towards a more equitable experience with modernity in this and other parts of the world.