Since the end of our spring semester class, there have been two media blockbusters (the television miniseries Chernobyl and the film Godzilla: King of Monsters) that have made an immense impact on premium cable and the box office respectively. Chernobyl is an HBO historical drama miniseries that serves as a graphic and in-depth recounting of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster. Godzilla: King of the Monsters is the sequel to the 2014 Godzilla movie, but more than that it is a rather significant reboot of the new multimedia franchise and fictional universe, called the “MonsterVerse ” which also includes King Kong and his new movies.
Chernobyl is a five episode miniseries on HBO, a premium cable network, and was introduced right after the world-famous Game of Thrones series came to an end. The show itself is an excellent retelling of the specific events that happened in the early morning of April 26, 1986. The beginning of the show is the accident itself from the perspective of workers inside the nuclear power plant before, during, and after the explosion. It offers immense and accurate scientific background and information about how a nuclear power plant operates as well as what exactly went wrong inside the reactor to cause the disaster. Fortunately viewers will not get lost in a sea of nuclear physics jargon, because the scientific numbers and data get put in terms that everyone can understand for the sake of one of the main characters who is not a physicist but is a top bureaucratic official for Mikhail Gorbechev. In addition to the in-depth look we get at the nuclear power plant, we also get an equally fascinating view inside the Kremlin, the secret meeting spot for the top officials of the Soviet Union. It is here we get the full display of subterfuge, conspiracy theories, and the questionable decision making of the Soviet Union due to paranoia, pride and obsession.
One of the most significant aspects of the show is the in-depth perspectives of the main characters: an accomplished physicist with a terrible secret and a life-long bureaucrat questioning his lifetime of work. This gives us a chance to see inside two incredibly important communist institutions: the Kremlin, and the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. However, arguably the best part of the show is the graphic detail put forth to show the damage and dangers of nuclear radiation. The special effects showing the catastrophic power of the exposed core are phenomenal. One moving example is when the first of the firefighters on the scene accidentally touches a smoldering piece of exploded core material and within minutes viewers see that the radiation has eaten through his gloves and has already severely burned his hand. Radiation sickness is gruesomely brought to a new and hideous light in the show, as horrible disfiguring boils, lesions, tumors and scars eventually make the characters unrecognizable and virtually inhuman in appearance. The Chernobyl miniseries gives new material vibrancy to nuclear radiation, a topic which many people may not be familiar with, and gives the general public a horribly vivid example of slow violence. The damage slowly caused by nuclear radiation sickness that torments the human body and horrifically changes down to the cellular level.
There is one rather significant drawback to the show: all of the actors are British and nearly the entire script of the show is in English. This takes away from the full immersion of being in the Soviet Union during the Chernobyl accident and gives the sense of a British reenactment rather than an authentic Eastern European account. There are some parts of Russian dialogue and announcements and more often than not they were not translated, leaving us foreign in a supposedly genuine Soviet retelling. This does not make the show unwatchable, but it is definitely something viewers will notice .
Godzilla has represented the seen and unseen damage of nuclear radiation and technology for more than 50 years. He has gone from rampaging monster to protector guardian several times and has had his appearance changed as well. He has often reflected the general understanding and consensus of nuclear power of the time. However the impact of nuclear radiation on the environment has been a very strong premise in the Godzilla movie franchise. Godzilla: King of the Monsters changes that and makes it one of the major plot points in the movie.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters starts right after the disaster in San Francisco that Godzilla caused in 2014. Since that attack, many of the “titans” or gigantic radioactive monsters have been discovered and researched by a quasi-governmental agency called “Monarch.” As the movie quickly progresses, other titans are awoken by various means: some wake up on their own and some are awoken by an Eco-terrorism group that believes the titans will bring environmental balance back to the earth, a balance they believe humans have disrupted. In support of this claim, there is scientific and physical evidence of nature flourishing and thriving wherever the titans roam or rest. The movie also mentions how the nuclear radiation given off by the titans accelerates natural growth and actually heals the planet. The plot picks up when the Eco-terrorists awaken “Monster Zero,” or “King Ghidorah”: a three-headed, two-tailed, lightning-emitting, flying monster. King Ghidorah eventually awakens the remaining titans and causes them to go on a destructive rampage wherever they reside. However, Godzilla ends up defeating him, and the other titans submit to Godzilla and become peaceful once again. This resolution provides evidence for the first time in this movie series that Godzilla may actually be here to help the earth and humans.
Overall, Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a CGI-masterpiece thrill ride, but the acting and plot leave a lot to be desired. The struggle between Monarch and the actual government seems tedious and unnecessary, while the overall goals of the Eco-terrorism group is a bit one-dimensional. However, it brings a lot of new ideas and premises to the Godzilla “MonsterVerse.” There is a subtle yet powerful message of nuclear futurity and environmental humanities that cannot be ignored. Although the titans give off massive amounts of nuclear radiation and destroy entire cities, the simple solution of destroying the monsters is not a viable option as it only causes more destruction. The titans have become part of the planet and we have to learn to deal with the problems we create. The idea that we must learn from our past mistakes and work with them in order to fix them (like in the course text Staying with the Trouble) is a fundamentally important principle of Environmental Humanities. Hopefully this subtle yet powerful message is a recurring theme and message in the evolving “MonsterVerse” movie franchise.
Additionally, Dark just released its second season on Netflix today. So hopefully we will have more things to discuss about nuclear futurity.
Vasily Ignatenko (performance by Adam Nagaitis). “1:23:45.” Chernobyl, written by Craig Mazin, directed by Johan Renck, HBO/Sky, 2019.
Recommended (English-language sources) by Slavicists in response to the new HBO/Sky miniseries Chernobyl:
Re: the show.
The Chernobyl Podcastfrom HBO/Sky, 6 May 2019–present, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-chernobyl-podcast/id1459712981.
Gredina, Natalia. “‘He’s not a man anymore, but a reactor’: Meduza Reviews Episode Three of HBO’s Miniseries Chernobyl.” Translated by Kevin Rothrock, Meduza, 22 May 2019, https://meduza.io/en/feature/2019/05/22/he-s-not-a-man-anymore-but-a-reactor.1
Moskvitin, Yegor. “HBO’s Chernobyl: Yegor Moskvitin Reviews a Poignant New Depiction of the Soviet Disaster.” Translated by Nastia Kozhukhova and Jessica Mitchell, Meduza, 14 May 2019, https://meduza.io/en/feature/2019/05/14/chernobyl-yegor-moskvitin-reviews-hbo-s-poignant-depiction-of-a-soviet-disaster.
British Nuclear Energy Society. Chernobyl: A Technical Appraisal [conference proceedings], 3 Oct. 1986, London, UK, Telford, 1987.
Brown, John. “Radioactive Milk and the Lasting Threat of Chernobyl.” Guardian, 18 Jan. 2017, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/radioactive-milk-and-the-lasting-threat-of-chernobyl-a7530176.html.
Brown, Kate. “Are Our Blueberries Radioactive? The Chernobyl Nuclear Cover-Up.” Interview by Anushka Asthana. Guardian, 26 Apr. 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/global/audio/2019/apr/25/are-our-blueberries-radioactive-the-chernobyl-nuclear-cover-up.
Brown, Kate. Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future. W. W. Norton, 2019.
Chernobyl Heart [documentary]. Directed by Maryann DeLeo, HBO, 2003.
Higginbotham, Adam. Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster. Simon and Schuster, 2019.
Marples, David R. Chernobyl and Nuclear Power in the USSR. Palgrave Macmillan, 1986.
Marples, David R. The Social Impact of the Chernobyl Disaster. Palgrave Macmillan, 1988.
Marples, David R. Ukraine under Perestroika: Ecology, Economics and the Workers’ Revolt. Palgrave Macmillan, 1991.
Medvedev, Zhores. The Legacy of Chernobyl. W. W. Norton, 1992.
Medvedev, Zhores. Nuclear Disaster in the Urals. W. W. Norton, 1980.
Pinkham, Sophie. “The Chernobyl Syndrome.” Review of Manual for Survival, by Kate Brown; Midnight in Chernobyl, by Adam Higginbotham; and Chernobyl, by Serhii Plokhy. New York Review of Books, 4 Apr. 2019, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/04/04/chernobyl-syndrome/.
Plohky, Serhii. Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe. Basic Books, 2018.
Remnick, David. “Postcards from the Empire.” Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, Vintage Books, 1994, pp. 234–47.
Yekelchyk, Serhy. “From Chernobyl to the Soviet Collapse.” Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation. Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 177–92.
“Yuri Bandazhevsky.” Wikipedia, last edited 23 April 2018, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yury_Bandazhevsky.
Zabytko, Irene. The Sky Unwashed: A Novel. Algonquin Books, 2000.
Meduza is an independent source for news on Russia and the former Soviet Union. They are considered reliable and work in opposition to state news agencies. ↩
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is based on a series of books not yet translated into English. The books are in turn based on the Soviet sci-fi classic Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers (1972) and its film adaptation Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky (1979). ↩
Our most recent unit on protest cultures and “the challenge of music” has most changed my perspective on the environmental humanities. This last week, well, I can’t say I’m surprised metal was left out of the conversation, but its absence is certainly, I would argue, a missed opportunity. To be fair, this is for good reason. The chapter by Martin Klimke and Laura Stapane documents the Grüne Raupe movement in 1980s West Germany, and Noriko Manabe’s monograph explains how music “mobiliz[ed] political resistance in Japan” in the months following the Fukushima nuclear disaster. It happens that metal plays little role in either of these sociocultural moments.
The only exceptions I might offer are for Manabe: Japanese experimental metal bands Boris (1992–) and Sigh (1989–). Boris released their album Heavy Rocks in late May of 2011, but given the band’s prolific output (24 studio albums to date), when the album’s songs were written and recorded is difficult to pin down. Was it before or after 3/11? It’s tempting to read their song“Leak-Truth,yesnoyesnoyes-” through this context. Sigh’s album In Somniphobia, released in 2012, narrates the vertigo of a mind disturbed by elusive and imperceptible threats, and which seems to be losing a battle between truth and forgetting. The album bends genre in a way that has me thinking back to Writing Ground Zero, but this quality is so essential to Sigh’s sound that I can’t read into it in good faith.
In a way it is surprising, though, that metal receives only glimpses of attention from environmental humanists, despite its preoccupation with the same “clusters of problems and questions” (Heise 21). Metal culture in the U.S. (not so much in Northern Europe) is usually seen and described as underground or alternative, a subculture. This is a myth cultivated as much by the metal community as by those looking on from outside. While metal culture by definition transgresses normative society, and gleefully digs ever deeper into an abyss of niche sounds and elitist sensibilities, the music remains quite popular. Take Iron Maiden (1975–), for instance. They’re the exception to an aphorism relevant to cultural legacy: You either die a hero, or live long enough to become the villain. After 44 years, they still have a devout following across generations and truly worldwide. Record sales really can’t quantify their popularity. And as related to our course, their single “2 Minutes to Midnight” (1984) protests the Cold War in a reference to the Doomsday Clock.
Or we can look at the Grammys. Not Best Metal Performance, which necessarily recognizes the genre, but Best Rock Album, a category that to some questionable extent reflects trends in contemporary music. Gojira’s (1996–) album Magma was nominated for Best Rock Album in 2016. The track “Silvera,” one of their most played via streaming services, is a call for action and message of hope, with lines like “time to open your eyes” and “when you change yourself, you change the world.” Mastodon’s (2000–) album Emperor of Sand was nominated in 2017, and dramatizes the experience of receiving a cancer diagnosis with the story of a “desert wanderer” who’s been sentenced to death. It responds to questions relevant to both individual and society, namely “How much time do we have left? What are we doing with our time?” (Appleford).
The genre is growing in popularity, then, if the Grammys are any indication, and also attracting new audiences with the hybridization of genre. Deafheaven (2010–) has pioneered a new subgenre called blackgaze by merging black metal vocals and tremolo picking with the ethereal melodies of shoegazing. Their sound appeals to metal fans as well as those who “usually stay away from heavier stuff” (Stosuy). At the same time, it’s easy to see that metalheads are a self-selecting bunch. So does eco-metal simply motivate angry people to be angry, or does it redirect anger to specific ends? Are fans coming to metal with a preexisting worldview, or are they welcomed into the fold with an ideological initiation of some kind?
My instinct is to say, in an irresponsibly broad gesture, that the majority of those who find their way to metal do so when they are young, vulnerable, and angry without a cause. They are disillusioned, and yet hold on to the better world they imagined—a world they want to believe is possible. And then, once a metalhead, you die a metalhead. For ecocritical work, this might make for an ideal audience. Fans embrace metal as a way of life, sometimes as an essential point on their moral compass. Metal intersects with the straight-edge culture of abstinence and self-control, as one example, or with the crust punk DIY lifestyle, which meets at the crossroads of anarchism and the political bent of punk and hardcore. Who and when a fan might discover any of such beliefs is still murky, as Wolves in the Throne Room (2002–) point out:
There is a style, a sound, a set of beliefs—it’s all there to be purchased or downloaded with nary a thought of one’s own needed to get the whole package. There is deep truth underneath the façade of grim posturing, but one needs to search for it. (Smith)
For the casual listener, probably half of the lyrics are obscured by harsh vocals (depending on the subgenre), and even for those who do the work of searching for meaning, the lyrics may not be transcribed.
Still, metal has a long history of explicit political messages, starting as early as Black Sabbath’s (1968–2017) “War Pigs / Luke’s Wall” from Paranoid (1970), an album universally regarded as the genre’s prototype. The song protests the “Evil minds that plot destruction” responsible for the Vietnam War, and concludes by imagining the Day of Judgment, when “On their knees the war pigs crawling.” Killer Be Killed (2011–) takes up this tradition in “Face Down” (2014), a song that identifies cops as the “pigs” of modern society and incites listeners to revolt against oppressive institutions of power:
Brutality against brutality, The real face of the enemy. Keep them pigs away from me,
Abuse of power and authority.
. . . .
Menace to society, Cop-shoot cop-mentality,
A cancer of a broken land,
Traitor to the common man.
Invaders of your privacy,
Nothing-is-sacred reality.
Kill or be killed!
Another example of indignation at the problems of our age (e.g., neoliberalism, precarity, and corruption) appears in Pig Destroyer’s (1997–) “Army of Cops” (2018), except here we find the more provocative implication that we the people prefer to be held “face down”:
Nobody likes our direction, Yet we don’t turn around.
Now could it be that secretly
We like being kept down?
Tell me, where does it stop?
This tower of law, this army of cops.
These examples seem to take both diagnostic and motivational approaches, according to the framework Manabe proposes:
Frames are interpretive schemas that allow individuals to identify, label, and make sense of events. Snow and Benford (1988, 2000) define the core framing tasks as diagnostic (identifying the issues, condensing information, focusing attention on particular interpretations), prognostic (proposing solutions, counter-framing opposing arguments), and motivational (mobilizing people to action). (29)
As for diagnosis, metal aims to subvert what Laura Berlant calls cruel optimism, “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (1). This occurs in metal’s critique of conservative and religious Western values (the symptom; Spracklen 22) or “faith in progress and human exceptionalism” (the disease; McMurry 16). In a vast network of signification concerned with man and his relation to the world, especially the errors and dependency of mankind, metal responds to one cause taken up by the environmental humanities: to “help us acknowledge and confront the melancholic, dark side of humanity’s impact on the global environment” (Emmett and Nye 107). Some condemn humanity for exploiting natural resources in an invocation of the Anthropocene:
Only after the last tree’s cut And the last river poisoned,
Only after the last fish is caught,
Will you find that money cannot be eaten.
(Lamb of God, “Reclamation,” 2009)
Gas the earth, suffocate By our hand, at this rate.
Reproduce to further man—
Stop them now, if we can.
(Harm’s Way, “Human Carrying Capacity,” 2018)
Others, of course, choose to spread resentment evenly:
I reject this (expletive) race!
I despise this (expletive) place!
(Slayer, “Disciple,” 2001)
Moving into the realm of prognosis, we find that metal turns from the hubris of exceptionalism toward materialism, especially in songs that narrate death:
I am a smear of primordial ache, A dead star,
A dead star,
Full of dark matter.
(Black Table, “1942,” 2012)
I imagine the end. Then further downward so that I can rest, cocooned by the heat of the ocean floor. In the dark, my flesh to disintegrate into consumption for the earth. (Deafheaven, “Gifts for the Earth,” 2015)
It’s well documented that a driving force for metal fans is the fragmentation of human subjectivity, a dissolving of the ego (e.g., Phillipov). Atene Mendelyte connects this phenomenon to the Romantic sublime when arguing that the listener cannot enjoy metal unless she “affectively surrenders to its sound-imagery” and lets her mind “be taken into those dark recesses of the subconscious” (487). In other words, the experience of listening to metal opens the listener’s mind to explore new conceptions of her place in the world.
The motivational potential behind metal remains, like many other questions, unresolved. Jonathan Nicholas Piper questions the model typical of metal studies, one which I myself have hinted at here in this post: a cycle of violence and catharsis. Piper argues that, despite violent messages and practices in metal, there’s no clear explanation for what it is that’s supposed to make metal inherently violent; it’s just assumed. Themoralizing subtext to this assumed cycle, that fans listen to metal in an effort to purge violent or otherwise negative thoughts and emotions, returns us to a caustic and cruel optimism.
I would be remiss to not address the environmental activism clearly and systematically stated through metal lyrics, interviews, and actions, most notably by Gojira, the Ocean (2000–), and Wolves in the Throne Room. Specific environmental problems appear throughout Gojira’s oeuvre—most obviously in “Toxic Garbage Island” (2008), an ode to the vast heap of plastic floating atop the sea. Equally ambitious in scope, the Ocean “do[es] for earth science class what Mastodon did for Melville: make learning brutal” (qtd.). Wolves in the Throne Room renounces the “alien life form” of industrialized modernity, instead living in and with “rain storms, wood smoke and the wild energies of the Pacific Northwest” (Smith; WITTR).
These details only hint at what these bands (try to) achieve. A comparative study of their approaches to activism, from collaborating with international organizations (Rowehl) to defending ecoterrorism (Davis), and a case study on the affects of their words, sounds, and images on fans might offer new avenues for ecocriticism—its “political struggle for more sustainable ways of inhabiting the natural world” and “scholarly analysis of cultural representations”(Heise 506).
“Kaiowas” (1993) by Sepultura (1984–) is an especially interesting example in that it makes use of both paratextual and textual coding. The title cues listeners into the song’s purpose, which is to defend the rights of indigenous peoples. Kaiowas refers to a tribe who would rather commit collective suicide than let the Brazilian government seize their ancestral lands. The track is instrumental and all-acoustic (the band’s first), a sound all the more remarkable amid the relentless speed of a thrash metal album. As a “tribal jam” with emphasis on drumming, it seems to move beyond an informative function into an expression of admiration and respect.
We can thinking more expansively about techniques of messaging, as Manabe does with metaphorical language or intertextuality (29). Metal’s deep and enduring concern with folklore, epic, and myth points to a certain reverence for the natural world, with an imaginative conception of other life forms and a desire to return to a simpler way of life. Agalloch (1995–2016) worships nature in a mystical celebration of place, the Cascadian mountains. Concept albums often look to nature for a theme, as in Mastodon’s first four albums, which revolve around fire, water, earth, and air, or in the album Oceanic (2002)by ISIS (1997–2010).
Agalloch, The Mantle, 2002
Several bands have taken up space exploration in recent years as well. Parallax II: Future Sequence (2012) by Between the Buried and Me (2000–) includes an interlude that emits what can only be described as space sounds. Celeste (2005–) seem to speculate on human and nonhuman futures through their performances. The room is cast into darkness; the atmosphere, filled with thick smoke; and the music, accompanied by red headlights and white strobes.
Harris M. Berger defines the history of metal as “the pursuit of greater and greater heaviness” (59). And just when metal reaches its heaviest, “a new variety emerge[s],” somehow heavier than the last. If heaviness is what makes new trajectories in metal music metal, then what does it mean for critics to represent heaviness in environmental terms? A review of the Churchburn (2011–) album None Shall Live… (2018) describes “consistent audio references to natural disaster: waves crashing, winds shrieking, and always the agonized mass of human voices” (Ambrose). According to the drummer, they hope to instill a “sense of beauty and fear” in listeners, again reminiscent of the sublime (Jameson). Reviews for an album by Ommadon (2008–) use geological comparisons like “the crumpling mountain ranges of riffs, the tectonic low feedback tension and the slow lava distortion” (Coggins) or “heavier than a dying planet” (Whelan). This imagery supports a view of ecosystems as “dynamic, perpetually changing, and often far from stable or balanced” (Heise 510).
__ While music has helped me better understand ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, this course has also given me a new lens through which to view metal. Believe it or not, I’m something of a lazy metalhead, in that I don’t typically read the lyrics or go looking for new sounds. This useful new framework has given me an excuse to rethink my interest in metal (and something to do at the gym!). I’d like to continue collecting samples and organize them in a blog. My primary questions are these: how does metal already speak to environmental (and related) problems, and in what ways might it do more to intervene? As for points of departure: How does (or doesn’t) metal overcome the “repressor” of social movements, fear, and motivate the “trigger,” anger (Manabe 115)? In what ways might Judith Butler‘s theory of performative assembly inform the causes and effects of metal culture? Even just incrementally, this pet project might expand the horizon of ecocriticism from genre to medium, and shift the conversation on environmental change from more dominant to countercultures (Heise 513).
(For those interested in learning more about metal history and culture, I recommend the documentary Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey (2005), directed by “curious anthropologist and rabid fan” Sam Dunn.)
I always appreciate the opportunity to read Judith Butler’s work because there is such a depth to her writing. The chapters from her recent Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly that we read for the course is one that I had not read before and am glad to have. It has helped me flesh out some theoretical issues that have been at play in my own work and shaped my thinking around the role of the humanities within the larger scope of environmental action.
At the forefront of Butler’s argument is precarity, that is, existing within the system of neoliberal capitalism wherein our bodies and identities are caught up in our ability to produce some kind of economic value. This reduction makes the exigence of much academic work focused on results that generate capital, draw investors or grants, and help market the university or department where the work is done. This model is something I think we all feel on some level, some more than others. But, in the humanities, the drive toward marketability has in recent years grown louder and louder.
This is where I feel Butler’s intervention most dearly. When she writes that, “My increasing urgent sense about speaking in public, or writing for a public, is not that it should lead us straightway to a path for action; it is, rather, a chance to pause together and reflect on the conditions and directions of acting, a form of reflecting that has its own value, and not merely an instrumental one” (124). Doing for the sake of doing or rather, critical inquiry for the sake of education, something which the humanities as a discipline took as foundational for years seems under pressure to change into a more market driven approach to knowledge production. I think this formulation can be of use in thinking about the power of the humanities and its role within global disasters. The STEM programs are not the only ones with answers to these problems.
While, “just doing something” even if it doesn’t create any discernable change may seem like a futile attempt to participate, I think Butler wants us to think about this kind of action on a deeper level of what such action can evoke in those who are a part of it—that is, what can it helps us realize about ourselves and our communities? She writes, “What does it mean to at together when the conditions for acting together are devastated or falling away? Such an impasse can become the paradoxical condition of a form of social solidarity both mournful and joyful, a gathering enacted by bodies under duress or in the name of duress, where the gathering itself signifies persistence and resistance” (123).
What she calls “Vulnerability as a form of activism” is probably the most impactful idea that I learned from this course (123). Care and vulnerability already shape a lot of my work, especially in how we think of our relationships with the nonhuman world. But also in my interest in contemporary fiction and what some are calling a turn away from post-modern irony toward a kind of “new sincerity”. This movement is shaped by a desire to be engaged with genuine feelings without needing to create ironic distance between the self and the object of attention while at the same time not relinquishing the self-awareness and self-referential power of the post-modern. Such a discourse benefits from Butler’s notion of vulnerability as activism because it helps to inject a politics into the otherwise aesthetically focused concept of sincerity. To be vulnerable together—to care together—about the things we like and about the things we hold dear, (our political identities and our collective interests among them), is a way to embrace the precarity of our lives and find empowerment because of it. The importance of care and vulnerability, touch on nearly all of the major topics in the environmental humanities that we covered this semester. From precarity (which Butler also helps us theorize) to an openness to the agency of the material world beyond the human that Bennett asks us to embrace, there lies a push to recognize the already vulnerable nature of our existence. To think that we are not already vulnerable is delusion. The only way forward in terms of reconciling human impact on the planet and what we can do about it while entrenched in a system that complicates and perverts collective action, is through an embrace of that vulnerability.
I was very intrigued by the question in Butler’s chapter Precarious Life:
“Have the humanities undermined themselves with all their relativism and questioning and ‘critique’, or have the humanities been undermined by all those who oppose all that relativism and questioning and ‘critique’? (Butler 129)”
She answers this question at the end of the chapter after talking about humanization and dehumanization mechanisms:
“If the humanities has a future as cultural criticism, and cultural criticism has a task at the present moment, it is no doubt to return us to the human where we do not expect to find it, in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense. We would have to interrogate the emergence and vanishing of the human at the limits of what we can know, what we can hear, what we can see, what we can sense. This might prompt us, affectively to reinvigorate the intellectual projects of critique, of questioning, of coming to understand the difficulties and demands of cultural translation and dissent, and to create a sense of the public in which oppositional voices are not feared, degraded or dismissed, but valued for the instigation to a sensate democracy they occasionally perform.” (Butler 151)
In order to shape an environmentally friendly future we need to humanize and listen to all voices, not just the human ones. We need to ‘listen’ to the plants and animals and analyze their struggles for survival in a world that becomes ever more precarious. We also need to listen to each other in the way Butler describes without fearing, degrading or dismissing, but valuing the other voices. Today the humanities seem to be at the forefront of dehumanizing voices that are not in consent with main stream academia. I believe that this is the reason why the humanities have become under so much attack. The humanities could contribute so much to the environmental debate, but only if they remain open to all voices and refrain from categorizing and deflating everyone into the two groups of victims and perpetrators. The current debates in academia are resembling more a chorus of one opinion than a multitude of voices struggling to understand the world. The humanities should represent the voices of the government and of the victims in Japan concerning the accident. They should not dehumanize the Japanese government nor the victims. Only then can a dialogue between the two voices produce a knowledge of the actual needs and conflict solutions.
Throughout the semester we have heard different voices warning us about the future of nuclear energy. We heard from the victims of the two nuclear disasters and we heard from the victims of the atomic bombs. These voices need to be put into dialogue with the voices of pro- nuclear advocates. It is important to hear their voices as well and to try to understand what seems to be impossible to understand. I would have loved to listen to an interview with a pro-nuclear government official, being questioned about what he/she plans on doing with the nuclear waste. The credibility and strength of an argument comes from testing it against counter arguments. This is what need to happen more with the anti-nuclear movement, especially in Japan. I believe that the humanities should encourage public debates in Japan about the pros and cons of nuclear energy with all valid questions being ask from both side to each other.
There are also very many voices that are speaking about the future of our earth and it is the job of the humanities to place the different ideas and ideologies into dialogue with each other. This way the important questions are being looked at and tried to be answered. If we shut out the voices that we deem irrelevant we might miss important contributions towards the common cause of saving our planet.
Going forward I want to consider this responsibility the humanities have to let all voices be heard and whenever I will write something to include as many voices as possible on the topic.
Bibliography
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004. Print.
Prior to taking this class, my understanding of Environmental Humanities had been broadly informed by academic heresay about the Antropocene and Post-Human theories, which I understood to be a set of theories that try to expand the understanding and discussion of nature and the environment in the humanities beyond filtering it through a human and a human-utilitarian lens. Broadly speaking… This rather vague understanding found more footing when we discussed Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter. Her concrete example of random pieces of trash that have a presence, a history, and are interconnected was not exactly novel to me but it nevertheless influenced the things I noticed around me that I would usually not pay attention to. Most of that though results in speculation, random wondering, and thinking about abstract matters, which is, I understand the exact opposite of what Bennet talks about.
Therefore, what will stay with me is Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, not instead of Bennett but rather in combination with her text. They both resist easy solutions and graspable conclusions. It is a frustrating conclusion because they force one to keep thinking and to keep pushing even after you think you’ve arrived at understanding. Even at the end of this class, where we read, watched, listened, and talked about more media related to nuclear issues than the average grad student, I feel no closer to knowing what to do about the risk that’s inherent in nuclear power and other nuclear activities or what to do about other environmental concerns. Most of the texts don’t know what to do about them either. Instead they bear witness, which may be all they can do.
In some ways, Haraway’s focus on making-kin and interconnectedness could be misconstrued as optimistic and an easy solution in the sense of “We’re all in this together,” as if that can calm the fearful heart.
What I still struggle with at the end of this class, and this is my version of staying with the trouble, is the aspect of nuclear future or future in general. 1) It is difficult at best to imagine the future and to do so in a realistic manner. 2) Even when we try to understand the past and have a fairly thorough understanding of our present condition, it remains impossible to grasp and conceptionalize what will be. The risk and damage that are inherent in nuclear energy and the effects of other environmental disasters make the future look dire, as some of the works we covered, like The Emissary demonstrate, but imagining a dire future, as we know, does not prevent people from being careless. 3) Whatever the future brings, things will adjust and they will, for all intends and purposes, be fine. Fine does not mean that everything will be hunky-dory but rather that an equilibrium will exist.
What this reminds me of is a stand-up bit by George Carlin who riffs about a environmentalists that proposes to be concerned about the planet and he points out that people are concerned about themselves. The earth will be fine. The people may be gone in the future. This may come across as nihilistic but in the spirit of staying with the trouble, comedy and art like this has the potential to startle and shock people into not relying on easy solutions but rather to keep thinking and keep seeing our interconnectedness.
———————————–
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. Duke University Press, 2010.
Carlin, George. Jammin’ in New York. HBO, 1992.
Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
Rob Nixon and his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor provided me with a world of new information and insightful connections that really shaped my thinking about the world, specifically the importance of discussion and interaction between diverse fields of study in Environmental Humanities. As a person who enjoys studying both science and the humanities, I think having a diversity of knowledge is always important and this reading reinforced my idea of the importance of interdisciplinary study, research, and communication. In preface of the book he sites and connects the ideas of three prominent figures from different fields of academia.
First he discusses Edward Said, a professor of literature, who discusses world literature and politics, political idealism and the distribution of information. Distribution of information is how knowledge is divulged and disseminated by the rich and privileged, such as the government and monopolies, to the public. In the modern neoliberal era, hoarding knowledge and information is equivalent to hoarding natural resources and money. In addition, not sharing information could lead to information being entirely geographically-based and therefore not available to the entire world. This may lead to large scale misinformation and isolation, where “alternative communities all across the world, informed by alternate information, [are] keenly aware of environmental human rights and libertarian impulse that binds us together in this tiny planet” (Nixon X).
Nixon next considers Rachel Carson, a science writer who discusses the military industrial complex, socio-environmentalism, and environmentalism of the poor. Nixon explains that she emphasizes the problems of compartmentalizing expertise and information, bloated corporate funding and the privileged feigning objectivity and interest in humanitarian efforts.
Finally Nixon examines Ramachandra Guha a sociologist. He explains how Guha focuses on how environmentalism is connected to global distribution of justice, militarization and unequal rates of consumption. Guha also strongly rejects the ideas of sentimentalizing “traditional” cultures and ecology, as he thinks ecology is a rather stagnant field of study because it does not properly consider sociopolitical factors.
In the introduction to his book, Rob Nixon discusses a multitude of different ideas and examples to really describe the idea of slow violence. The first example that really reached me was the dumping of chemical, nuclear, and other hazardous waste to Africa by first-world countries to appease their own environmentalism. This idea was advocated by Lawrence Summers, the president of the World Bank who thought it would “help correct an inefficient global imbalance in toxicity” (Nixon 1). The idea that you can balance “toxicity” in the world by sending it somewhere else, rather than reducing output or making less toxic, is obviously absurd and self-serving. In addition to decimating these lands for natural resources, both in the past and present, we are now sending them toxic materials that we have no real idea how to manage. This will lead to a world wrought with irreversible environmental, social, political and economic calamity.
Nixon describes slow violence as “gradual, out of sight, delayed destruction across space and time” and also as “neither spectacular or instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive” by giving examples like climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, acidifying oceans, and the aftermath of war. The average person, sadly myself before this class, considers these topics every now and then, when the media deems it devastatingly interesting enough. We always learn that they have been occurring for a constantly and for a long time and now it is too late to actually help. When I heard these environmental tragedies listed one after another and how they are all examples of slow violence, it dawned on me how they are all connected in a horrible ways. Nixon explains how the media and public only respond to sensational and visceral events and they ignore the ones that you cannot see or feel. This made me immediately think of distribution of information because if the rich and privileged control the media and information they control what the public understands and how they feel. This creates a public that merely respond to tragedy as inevitable because they are fed regulated information, which Edward Said deems aptly as “the normalized quiet of unseen power” (Nixon 6). This really made me think about how social media and the internet almost seem to promote this concept by the mindless “retweeting” and “liking” of other people’s ideas. This creates a culture of using and promoting media-approved information, rather than researching your own information and sharing your own ideas. Although promoting and disseminating information is an invaluable part of academia and the media, it must be done with diligence and integrity and be available to all people. Otherwise environmental problems, along with a slew of other problems, will never be properly considered and solved.
Although it has nothing to do with the environment or nuclear futures, the concept of slow violence has always made me think of the issue of concussions and CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) in sports. I enjoy sports and frequently watch the ESPN channel on television. A topic that always arises every football season is CTE and how it affects so many former athletes. Recent research shows that multiple and consecutive concussions slowly damage the brain beyond repair and that it can start early as little league tackle football. The result has been an increase in funding for research and a lot of former athletes donating their brain to science. Tragically Dave Duerson, a former professional football player, ended up shooting himself in the chest so his brain could be donated and researched for CTE and other brain injuries. The result of this information has also led to a decreased participation in little league tackle football and many former and current professional football players saying they would not allow their kids to participate in tackle football at a young age. This damage is slowly accumulating, the results of the tackles aren’t as gruesome as broken limbs, and can only be seen until the damage is beyond repair. This is a version of slow violence would rarely be considered because CTE of athletes is outside the scope of conventional academia. Consequently those who know of the CTE problem would not have much of an opportunity to hear about a term like slow violence because it is a term used mostly in environmental-related areas of study. This damage is eerily similar to nuclear radiation, it is slow, invisible and irreversible. The only way to ease this damage is to prevent it from happening. Like the nuclear industry, football and other sports have monopolized regulations that favor monetary gain over proper safety. The public has begun to see the problems in both of these industries and many are advocating overhauling changes to both. Only time will tell if this will lead to safer regulations and practices in either sports or the nuclear industry.
There are myriad words, images, concepts, and sounds that will remain stored within my nuclear-coffer, for this has been both a very disquieting and very electrifying class. Yet, if I had to choose one single concept out of this radioactive pool of abstractions, I would choose Jane Bennett’s “vibrant-matter”, as it encompasses not only the theories of ecology, but also mirrors the aesthetic strokes of the wonderful novels we have read (i.e. Bronsky’s Baba Dunja, Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary, and Christa Wolf’s Accident). Bennett takes the idea of a holistic universe and embraces it beyond science-fiction, making natural structures—both dead and alive, animate and inanimate—become the explicit intermingled organism that we have failed to observe during our walks to the park. Her thoughts on ecology make us think of a world that (in Donna Haraway’s terms) appears to be of arachnid nature; of endless and interconnected ramifications. This cannot but remind me of Darwin’s scientific thought, for his view was not severed from the realm of images and aesthetic ponderings, on the contrary, it was utterly linked to them. He truly understood what it meant to inhabit a unified and symbiotic universe:
“As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications” (Darwin 171).
Darwin’s theory is a precedent of Bennett’s conceptual view, for it presents every organism as constituted of the same stuff, hopped on an ongoing wheel of thriving and decay: the dead and broken branches occupy the same space as the fresh and vigorous buds. This is what the novels we read helped to illuminate; through their neon-allure we got to experience a world that has been plunged into a postmodern nuclear design, in which the conventions that encircled the dead and the living, the normal and the abnormal, have finally been subverted. Bronsky’s Baba Dunja, for example, is constantly reminding the reader that the realm of the dead not only pervades the realm of the living, but determines it. The future invades the past just as the past invades the future, making human timelines go berserk: “Our dead are among us, often they don’t even know they’re dead and that their bodies are rotting in the ground” (Bronsky 13). The past (the corpses, the compost) continues to drag its invisible presence towards the future[1], thus mirroring the effects of the nuclear age—a gruesome scenario that obliges us to pay attention to change and to all its wired complexities.
Interestingly, when we pay attention to this continuous motion, and to the coexistence of dead and lively matter, we-readers experience something similar to what Mark Fisher calls the “cognitive weird” (48): i.e., when “the weird” is not “directly seen or experienced”, but when “it is a cognitive effect” produced by depriving reality of certainty. What lingers is an affect that is difficult to pinpoint or differentiate[2]; a mood, one might say, that springs from seeing (although not clearly) the circular web of interdependent structures in nature. This is not unlike what Baba Dunja thinks about while sitting in her radioactive garden: “the village has a history that is intertwined with my history, like two strands of hair in the same braid” (54). Amusingly, her knowledge regarding the omnipresence of historical events and their inextricable relationship with the precious-individual-self, achieves to alienate people—indeed, humans tend to shy away from the idea that their bodies are neither fixed nor immune to being permeated by ghosts and radiation (i.e., death): “We scare people. They seem to believe that the death zone stops at the borders [they] draw on maps” (Bronsky 43).
Consequently, nuclear-age could be thought of as an x-ray of nature’s uncertain flux—through its effects we are able to connect (once again) with the moving materiality of our surroundings. As Darwin states, it would be “rash to assert that characters now increased to their utmost limit, could not, after remaining fixed for many centuries, again vary under new conditions of life” (62). Somewhat ironically, the H-bomb and the malfunction of nuclear-plants have created new conditions of life which cannot go unnoticed, for it is that very obliviousness that has given rise to their empire. Both Darwin in the nineteenth century and Bennett et al. in the twentieth century, have turned their eyes outward, i.e., beyond the tiny kingdom of the human, making visible the invisible. They have contributed to the understanding of ecology through and outside of science.
Fun fact: Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), the German zoologist, marveled at Darwin’s theory of evolution, and, keen on capturing nature’s complex organisms, worked on aesthetic depictions of their form. He, in a way, accomplished through colorful drawings what Bronsky and Tawada accomplished through literature, i.e., to create a “cognitive weird” by unweaving the cloth of beings, nonbeings, and processes that breath under a seemingly shallow reality. The drawing above shows a body of creatures called “copepods”; these are small crustaceans that inhabit both fresh and salt water and are indispensable for the maintenance of global ecology and the carbon cycle—they resemble the earth’s flora as they reduce humans’ carbon emissions while floating in their oceanic habitat. Haeckel’s illustration gives agency to the specks that are interlaced with human life, thus broadening our view of the environment and situating us along the lines of Bennett’s lively matter.
We can certainly feel disturbed by all these overwhelming connections, as well as by the changing of scales and the warping of time; however, this is precisely what I enjoyed most from our classes, for I believe that this “knowledgeable-weird-affect” has the potential to stir our imagination and ward us from a growing hubris. On an age of nuclear energy and coffee chains, the strange and the eerie can help us disrupt our classically disjoint perceptions of nature.
[1]Nixon’s “slow violence” is a term that will inevitably come to mind every time this “invisible presence” appears.
[2]As when Baba Dunja says, “I know exactly what is happening to me, but the word of it escapes me” (Bronsky 121).
Works Cited
__Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. Duke University Press, 2010.
__Bronsky, Alina. Baba Dunja. Europa Editions, 2015.
__Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. Modern Library, 2009.
__Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. Repeater, 2016.
Prior to this course I had had no exposure to the Environmental Humanities whatsoever. I assumed it was field of scholars doing nature writing, reading Annie Dillard, or, I suppose, contemplating the hermeneutics of foliage. Therefore, I thought, it has no relevance to my research. I am delighted, if not really surprised to find I was quite wrong. Every text in this course has opened a new perspective for me, as I learned that the Environmental Humanities is not only legitimate but actually useful to me. More than any other text, though, I keep coming back to Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble. To explain why Haraway has resonated with me, let me first, as briefly as possible, touch on my aims and methods as a scholar of literature.
I research the material cultural history of literature and practices of reading and writing. My methodology tends to draw on Book History, Media Studies, and Textual Studies. Texts are always encountered as material objects. I like to think about texts therefore with an eye toward production and use. Textual production and use are always deeply interrelated. I mean a variety of things by this, but to avoid writing my dissertation in a blog post, allow me to home in on a single instance: one use for a text is the production of a new text. This is as much true when Seth Grahame-Smith added his own words to Jane Austen’s to produce Pride and Prejudice and Zombies as when a young Emily Dickinson read poetry by the Brontës. Moreover, if we consider production beyond mere composition, it becomes clear that many more hands were involved in making the thing we read than just the author’s. What I’m getting at here, is that my broader interest is a decentering of the author, not à la Barthes as a rhetorical or logical position intended to open up interpretive possibilities, but as a way of reading intertextually and revealing the labor hidden or elided by an “author-”centered approach. This is, make no mistake, a political project. I am resisting a neo-liberal discourse of individualism.
I was elated, then, to discover, amidst Haraway’s admittedly fruity prose, concepts that seemed to line up strikingly with my own work. Take sympoiesis, which Haraway learned from Katie King, who in turn learned it from M. Beth Dempster. Sympoiesis, Haraway explains (by quoting Dempster), describes “collectively-producing systems that do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries. Information and control are distributed among components. The systems are evolutionary and have the potential for surprising change” (33). What have I been moving toward if not a sympoietic model of literary production? Haraway seems to call to me to push what I’ve been thinking about even further. Her literary form enacts what it describes. She embeds herself in tentacular networks of ideas and writers. Haraway’s SF [string figures, “speculative fabulation, science fiction, science fact, speculative feminism, soin de ficelle” (31)] is both a way of thinking the world and telling the world. “SF is storytelling and fact telling; it is the patterning of possible worlds and possible times, material-semiotic worlds, gone, here, and yet to come” (31). Haraway marries cultural criticism and cultural production; that is to say, she positions interpretation in a reflexive relationship with what is normally thought of as creation [a problematic term in Haraway’s cosmology and indeed in my own model of shared labor]. Moreover, her model of sympoiesis emphasizes distributive authorship and distributive responsibility. Her form both interrogates and postulates (and then she closes with fiction!). She makes different syntactic, semantic, and aesthetic choices than I certainly ever will but this way of thinking and doing scholarship (or theory or philosophy) seems more alive than almost anything I’ve encountered.
At heart, what I find so compelling (or maybe just validating) about Haraway is that it makes me feel like my work could be connected to something more significant than the academy. In the last few years academia has come to feel like a particular pair of panels from K.C. Green’s Gunshow that are quite popular online:
Only it’s worse than that, because some of us have decided this is not fine and we seem helpless to communicate the urgency of that fact with anyone but ourselves. It is helpful to be reminded that “it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas” (34), that our work does not need to carry the weight of the world, that we can become together, and move toward a way of working, writing, and doing that has stakes for confronting issues like nuclear power/proliferation and climate change. Not only does Haraway expand my conception of what scholarship can accomplish but my conception of how we might perform and undertake scholarship altogether.
—
Top: “Spawn of the Stars” by Sofyan Syarief: Deviantart – Artstation – Behance – Instagram [CC BY-SA 3.0] Please note that Haraway’s “ChthuIucene” has nothing whatsoever to do with Cthulhu, and you are silly for assuming it might. However, I, for one, am looking forward to abandoning both the Anthropocene and the Chthulucene for the coming Cthulhucene, when the blessed cradle of madness can at last rock humanity to its longed-for slumber. Ph’nglui mglw’nafhCthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn
“We need a hope with teeth” writes China Mieville in his essay “The Limits of Utopia” – a hope that is “real, and barbed, and tempered into a weapon…A hope that abjures the hope of those in power.” Throughout the semester, I keep returning such a hope – one that has teeth, is barbed, and aimed weapon-like at those in power as well as the infrastructures of such power. It is possible to lose sight of a hope with teeth in the wake of increasing global precarity, the destruction of some peoples and places for the protection of others. Despair is easy. Of all of our readings this term, I have most appreciated Anne Allison’s Precarious Japan as a way-finder, a path through the mud to reclaim perspective and, somewhat skeptically, hope.
Allison wades through the muddy complexities in which pain, pleasure, skepticism, and hope all sit uneasily together on increasingly shaky ground. Allison’s work carefully untangles the enmeshed layers of isolation, trauma, violence, hope to explore the growing visibility of precarious social, emotional, and political life in postwar Japan. She balances intimate ethnographies with larger social currents, resisting a fetishing spectacle of trauma while not erasing the suffering of poverty, isolation, death, and fear. The attention to an ethic of care – one that is both cultivating a loving-kindness, one that has teeth of its own, and that struggles against erasure, against passivity layer in possibilities within precarity. Individual story fragments explore the broader slippages between ideal (stable work, stable relationships, opportunities) and realities (un- or limited employment, dissolution of relationships, unsteady opportunities) to leave a trace of what is possible.
It is all a bit muddy. Allison attends to the uncertain, the mixed muck of debris, bodies, precious memory things (omoide no mono, 思い出のもの), of lives fractured. She traces all of the contradictions of our world, for example, to claim 思い出のもの, one must show proof of identity, much of which has been swept away by water or lost in the mud (194-195). Allison’s engagement with what Donna Haraway terms ‘staying with the trouble’ enables us to sit in the murky contradictions and illogical logics of neoliberalism, with its deregulations, privatization of previously public goods/services, its structures that grow precarity. Precarious Japan offers a way to “stay awhile with the pain and uncertainty. To sit with it, hold it, sometimes for others, those too distraught to do much about it themselves (193).” To sit with the contradictions and absurdities, to make space for “not-closure” for incompleteness, for fractured beings and ways of being, space that is refuge for those living and dead.
More than exploration, Allison asks what does survival in the face of growing precarity look like, how to craft a politics of survival (13)? What are the “biopolitics from below” that not only resist an unrelated or relation-less society (muen shakai, 無縁社会) but imagine new ways of tapping into “emergent potentials…of new alliances and attachments, new forms of togetherness, DIY ways of (social) living and revaluing life (8,18).” Thinking with Judith Butler, Allison details precariousness as a dissolution of social ties, a distancing of acknowledged lives and mourned deaths. With Butler, Allison suggests that a way of staying with the precarity is to take “care of not only oneself, but also of others, even strangers: those with whom one shares the conditions of ontological vulnerability. Precariousness as establishing human relations and as a means of calibrating what is precious in life (193).” Identifying what is precious in life also means identifying what is grievable in death – that one mourns for the life lost (14). A reconfiguration of what is significant, what is attended to, opens possibilities for new ways of being and relating to each other.
Allison’s work offers hope – a heartbroken furious hope – that can grow new politics in the grime, debris, pain of postwar, post-bubble Japan; out of the radioactive waters, soils, livelihoods of the 3/11 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster. It is this broken-world thinking, the extended engagement with a toothy hope that does not lose sight of the fractures and loss, that will shape my future work, writing, and creative efforts. It is a tentative, skeptical path, uncertain and shifting though not pessimistic. Rather, it is a recognizing, a way of accounting for horrific losses – individual and huge – of making space for mourning. It is a way-finder for recognizing precarity: its discontents, and its emergent possibilities.
Theorizing Environmental Humanities for the Post-Fukushima Age
