“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.