Prompt 5, #1

With her book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Jane Bennett outlines a dynamic materiality that exists alongside as well as within human bodies as a lens to question how our understanding of political events shift “if we gave the force of things more due” (viii). Adapting Bruno Latour’s term “actants,” Bennett describes the apparent agency of non-human materials as she resists the notion that these non-human materials are lifeless and mechanistic. That is to say, traditional definitions of matter as passive, inactive, lifeless materials obscure the roles of such materials in the unfolding of disastrous and quotidian events. Bennett’s use of actant to describe materials and humans within the complex interrelationships and trajectories, enable our analysis of what is capable of producing effects in the world and contributing to – and even altering – a course of events. From this lens, objects have efficacy, a vibrant materialism which breaks down binaries (life/matter; human/nonhuman) to trace the force of things.

Reading Lockbaum’s richly layered unfolding of the Fukushima Daiichi earthquake and subsequent tsunamis alongside Bennet’s vibrant materialism surfaces the myriad actants and growing agency of the networks and relationships of things and humans into assemblages. Bennett’s notion of ‘thing-power,’ or the strange ability of inanimate things to animate, act, produce subtle and dramatic affects, help trace the various actors – from shifting tectonic plates and shifts in landmass caused by the March 11, 2011 earthquake to sensors, fuel rods, steam, concrete, and procedures within the nuclear power plant. Actants caught up within, and contributing to, the Fukushima disaster ranged from geology to human-created policies and procedures to technologies such as sensors and cameras, infrastructure, and debris. Since the vast and myriad actants within the unfolding events are never acting in isolation, each dependent on the connections and interactions of other bodies and forces. Leveraging Spinoza’s notion of affective bodies with Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblages, Bennet offers a way to ‘see’ the March 11 disaster as both an ad hoc grouping of disparate elements and the relationships and dependencies of such groupings.

Lockbaum writes, “nature was throwing technology a curveball” (4). Bennett argues that nature should be unpacked into the large and small actants and assemblages – nature is the ‘forested stretch of the coast south of Sendia” which has a long history of tsunami, the ancient Pacific Plate, a build-up of geological pressure as the Pacific Plate is forced under the North American Plate, energy waves of earthquakes primary (P) and secondary (S), ocean waves, salt water – just to name a few (3-5). Similarly, technology unfolds into human and nonhuman actants: sensors, cameras, sea walls, nuclear power plant (which itself includes actants of fuel rods, emergency policies, shut down procedures, monitoring hardware and human practices), telephone calls, internet, cell phone videos, and more.

Marking the the time actants converge to cause an event, Lockbaum telescopes between the individual actants and the larger contexts and consequences. Marking 2:49 pm with swaying chandeliers in the Diet Building in Tokyo, Lockbaum moves between Tokyo and Fukushima, between the initial pressure released in the earthquake to legislators advised to duck under desks, from helicopter footage to ancient myth (1-3). Much like the way we often engage the vast garbage patches in our oceans, lists of things involved help make such complex, entangled events knowable. Lockbaum’s use of time anchors his list and helps hold space for giant catfish to meet plate tectonics. Bennett’s vibrant materiality shift lists into relationships, active assemblages through which the force of things are better understood, noting how they form together and break apart, how some assemblages exist for particular times and places then dissipate.

Reading Lockbaum with Bennett help analyze the Fukushima Daiichi disaster – holding together the massive mix of geology, salt water, computer programs, profit motives, energy policies, legislative energies, and more. Understanding the force of things better details how the disaster unfolded, with an accounting of the human actors and motivators contributing to the disaster, the geological forces at work, and the awful serendipity of convergences. The agencies of the assemblages are distributed, a continuum that holds multiple actants from a salt molecule to the Japanese Diet. Lockbaum and Bennett show a distributive agency, which resists a subject as the root cause.  Rather both detail the swarm of vitalities connecting and dissolving within the unfolding moments of time.