All posts by Aaron

Final Prompt

Notes on How I Intend to Not Just Watch the World Burn

1 Comment

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:

K. C. Green Gunshow

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’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn

Prompt 8

Performing against Precarity

1 Comment
Credit: あばさー
Anti-Nuclear Rally in Tokyo on Sunday 27 March 2011

In Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly Judith Butler very slyly draws on speech act theory to suggest that “the political meanings enacted by demonstrations are not only those that are enacted by discourse, whether written or vocalized. Embodied actions of various kinds signify in ways that are, strictly speaking, neither discursive nor prediscursive.” To say that demonstrations have a performative character is eminently sensible, it’s patently obvious that they are meant to be noticed. Yet Butler’s deployment of the word “performative” is a little different than the standard usage and this difference is worth thinking about. J. L. Austin’s original formation of the performative in language in How to Do Things with Words begins by theorizing kinds of utterances which are not evaluable as true or false and for which the saying is part of doing a particular action. The classic example is a priest declaring, “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” the statement of which makes it so. By the end of the book Austin extends this analysis to declare that in fact all utterances have a performative character, that is, that they perform an action apart from (though often not unaligned with) their semantic value. When Butler suggests, then, that bodies coming together are performative, she asks us to consider the significance of this political act beyond the dimensions of what is being explicitly protested. This is question is particularly significant when dealing with protest methodologies like Japan’s ‘sound demonstrations,’ which lack explicit discursive meanings. What assembly performs for Butler, is, I would say, still in question. (As her title suggests, these are, after all, notes.) But she offers us a number of tantalizing thoughts as she asks to question the received primacy of political speech.

The neo-liberal moment ‘answers’ the problem of precarity with the discourse of personal responsibility. As Butler notes, this is deeply isolating. Such “responsibilization” transforms a condition of life that is the result of structural political and economic problems into unshared personal moral failings. Within the context of the precarious life, one of the things which embodied assembly performs is aa affirmation against this isolation. As Butler writes: “Over and against an increasingly individualized sense of anxiety and failure, public assembly embodies the insight that this is a social condition both shared and unjust, and that assembly enacts a provisional and plural form of coexistence that constitutes a distinct ethical and social alternative to ‘responsibilization’” (16). This is a significant gesture not only personally, but politically. Democratic forms of political legitimacy depend on the construction of ‘the people,’ which draws “a discursive border…somewhere, either traced along the lines of existing nation-states, racial or linguistic communities, or political affiliation” (5). This discursive border aligns in interesting ways with the tendency of neo-liberal capitalism toward designating “vulnerable populations,” “distribut[ing] vulnerability unequally” “for the purpose of shoring up certain regimes of power” (143). Butler demonstrates the violence of such a discursive move when she notes that “within the terms of booth military and economic policy, certain populations are effectively targeted as injurable (with impunity) or disposable” (143). It strikes me that responsibilization functions to justify the designation of the victims of precarity as vulnerable or even injurable, removing them from any connection to political legitimacy or action.

It is particularly fascinating in Butler’s analysis that vulnerability becomes a condition for and an object of assembly. Part of what occurs in assembly is a demand for access to infrastructure in and through which assembly takes place and from which vulnerable populations are excluded. More than this, assembly becomes a demand for space in which to live, the infrastructure that makes living (for Butler this signifies conditions beyond mere survival) possible. Butler argues “that part of what a body is…is its dependence on other bodies and networks of support…We cannot readily conceptualize the political meaning of the human body without understanding those relations in which it lives and thrives” (130). That very interrelatedness is a kind of vulnerability that is necessary to collective political action even as it becomes the goal of that action.

Anti-nuclear activism becomes an interesting test case for Butler’s work. The permeability of our bodies, our very interrelatedness with our environment, is the means through which radioactive contamination harms. Radiation itself seems to blow up the concept of vulnerability to extreme proportions—highly energized particles pass through and damage indefensible bodies. There is a way in which the threat of nuclear contamination seems to demand collective action. In Butler’s words, “to say that any of us are vulnerable beings is to mark our radical dependency not only on others, but on a sustaining and sustainable world” (150). The specific dangers of contamination threaten that dependency in a way that begs to be leveraged into political action. And yet vulnerability is distributed unevenly. In the case of radioactive contamination this is biological but also political and social. The triple disaster of 3/11 exacerbated for many what was already a precarious life. Vulnerability is one metric that helps inform the phenomenon of the Haha Rangers movement as depicted in Little Voices from Fukushima. The reproductive and social vulnerability of the mothers involved in the protest movement both necessitates and makes possible a collective coming together. If vulnerability is unequally distributed it seems that responsibilization is as well; the absence of men in Little Voices from Fukushima may in part be explained by Alexander James Brown’s interpretation of the work of Robin LeBlanc: “the gendered imagery of the heroic self-sacrificing salaryman” in Japan, he notes, “restricts the debate ‘between the polarising dangers of nuclear power and economic decline’” (63).  Thus, precarity is contorted in neo-liberal discourse to re-insist on the value of nuclear power. The threat of social isolation inherent in the discourse of responsibility becomes the means through which a destructive severing of ties between man and his environment is perpetuated.

Prompt 6

The Place of Belonging in Post-3/11 Japan

Leave a comment

As I skim through chapters of Anne Allison’s Precarious Japan for the fourth time, I begin to feel like I am standing before a sea of Japanese words and phrases: ryuudouka “the liquidization or flexibilization of work and life” (7-8), muen shakai “the relationless society” (8), genpatsu nanmin “nuclear refugees” (12), ikizurasa “pain in life” (17), kodokushi “lonely death” (19), tsunagari “one-to-one connections” (20), gesenbyou “landsick” (183), ganbaru “working hard together” (187). My sea of words, the very image itself, is Japanese as well. It comes to me from Miura Shion’s The Great Passage (Fune o Amu), a 2011 novel I have not read. Indeed, I have not even seen the 2013 live-action film adaptation. I am, however, midway through the 2016 anime adaptation, which tells the story of Majime Mitsuya, an out-of-place bookish young man who finds confidence and a sense of belonging working with an editorial team to develop a new dictionary. As Majime imagines it, this new dictionary, “Daitokai,” will “cross the sea of words,” (often depicted literally in the anime while Majime imagines it). The anime is at once heartwarming and innocuous, inspiring and mundane. I often forget that it is set in the present. Something about it conveys a certain timelessness. How interesting to think then that this popular and award-winning novel was published just six months after 3/11.

One of these Japanese phrases in my sea of words, “ibasho ga nai,” articulates an affective sense of unbelonging, of figuratively having no home. Allison, who was forced to adapt Precarious Japan to the triple disaster of 3/11 as the project was all but complete, highlights the ways that the disaster plays into ongoing trends of instability in Japanese life. On the ground in Touhoku, she sees signs that, even amid all the loss and displacement, the disaster drove many Japanese to pull together: “Belonging became the new buzzword: belonging to one another, to Japan, to a homeland transformed by mud and radiation. References to connectedness (tsunagari) and bonds (kizuna) gushed everywhere—from a rise in marriage applications to surveys pronouncing its new importance to a majority of Japanese” (198). Perhaps it is in this context that a quaint story of a young man discovering himself and overcoming a sense of “ibasho ga nai” became so appealing.

There is of course a demographic for whom “ibasho ga nai” takes on a much more painful and present meaning; these are the genpatsu nanmin, the nuclear refugees, forced from their homes. Lorie Brau’s account of The Truth About Fukushima arc in the long-running food manga Oishinbo asks us to think too about ways home can be lost even when the government has not forced an evacuation. Describing the arc’s emotional climax, she writes, “Yamaoka’s grief over his mother’s passing evokes and heightens the grief over the truth about Fukushima, both the farmer’s and fishermen’s loss of livelihood, and the inaccessibility of the land as mother—home and source of sustenance” (192). Indeed, for Brau, the manga reminds us how food, tradition, land, and home are deeply interrelated. No amount of “working hard together” (ganbaru) can restore a sense of belonging that is inexorably tied to a particular place– once that place has been rendered foreign through contamination. Tawada’s novella, The Emissary, offers perhaps a telling counterpoint. Faced with a breakdown of traditional forms of belonging, both familial and terrestrial, her imagined future Japan turns to an extreme nationalism centered on isolationist foreign policy. National belonging and shared history attempt to replace what has been lost. Is this merely a more sinister and extreme version of what Allison witnessed in Japan?

If one strain of response to 3/11 has been groping toward a sense of communal belonging based in Japan’s ability to overcome the disaster, mangaka Shiriagari Kotobuki offers a very different strain. His “Twin Geezers” for instance find themselves drifting on a river beset by the challenges that face modern Japan—reevaluating the relationship with nuclear energy, sorting through contradictory opinions and information, deciding what path to go down. Faced with these dilemmas, their ridiculous solution—using one of their penises to point the way—seems no worse than any other. For Mary Knighton, “Shiriagari’s ‘sloppy’ aesthetics thwarts…Romantic idealism by working from within the paralysis and enervation of the endless everyday” (8). As is evident with the Twin Geezers, driven relentlessly down river and forced to confront challenge after decision after challenge, Shiriagari also recognizes “that the quotidian has its own dangers, which include its relentless temporal unfolding and the dictatorial ease with which it covers up or incorporates difference and dissent under repetitive normalcy” (Knighton 8). In some senses “ibasho ga nai” is the starting point for Shiriagari’s art; normalcy itself is revealed as strange and the corresponding tension between belonging and unbelonging emerges as humor.

I am on the edge of suggesting that there is something a little insidious about The Great Passage with all its relentless normalcy, its Romanticization of belonging, and its imagination of a Japanese present without the impact of 3/11. I would never deign to criticize escapism, but what I find perhaps questionable is the way it might dovetail with the PR project of TEPCO and the Japanese Government. When does a belonging predicated on the ability to endure and overcome start to occlude the reality and severity of the ongoing disaster? What responsibility do artists have to resist a government that would be happy for everyone to forget? And what role do I, happily consuming the sanitized products of “Cool Japan,”[1] play in abetting this policy of diminishing and forgetting?

 

 

[1]While it’s no Naruto, I would argue this category includes the anime adaptation of The Great Passage, which is available for Americans to stream on Amazon Prime Video.

(“Site Visits in the Fukushima Prefecture (02811058)” by IAEA Imagebank is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0)

Prompt 2

Anti-Natal Futures

1 Comment

As a queer person with no interest in raising children, I feel a personal stake in Sarah Ensor’s conception of avuncular futurity—an ecological perspective grounded in “nonreproductive (and indirectly invested) figures” (410). Ensor’s “spinster stands in a kind of slanted or oblique relationship to the linear, vertical paradigms of transmission that govern familiar notions of futurity” (416). As the strange aunt of the future, the spinster reminds us of contingencies, paths not taken, alternate relations, networks of non-linear being. Reading Ensor, I felt invited to imagine myself as the future’s confirmed bachelor uncle. And yet I wonder now if that is quite right. The spinster is, after all, specifically female and exclusively so in Ensor’s paper.

The spinster, we might say, is legible as a kind of social outsider precisely insofar as she has been abstracted from time. She becomes a spinster only once it has been determined that she likely has no marriageable future; when that happens, however, she also comes to have no past—or at least no past in which a future, or the desire for one, ever existed. (We need think here only of the oddly virginal resonances of the phrase old maid, which erases the spinster’s lived past in favor of a kind of ahistorical, perpetual innocence. (414)

It is the gendered social expiration date that in part enables the spinster’s out-of-time perspective and role. There is no male correlate to “old maid.” (Interesting that there is too no aunt correlate to avuncular.) Indeed, the winking “confirmed bachelor” suggests not a misfortune that befalls but a choice, a willful headlong orientation toward the (childless) future. Wikipedia offers a little serendipity here. “Confirmed Bachelor” redirects to an article called “He never married,” which is described as “a code phrase used by obituary writers in the United Kingdom as a euphemism for the deceased having been homosexual.” With “he never married,” often the last words of an obituary, the subject is identified as queer at the same time that he is written out of the present and the future. These are final words that relegate queerness to a past that is dead and disconnected. My point with this response is not to discredit or even really critique Ensor’s spinster futurity. Rather, I wonder what other kinds of queer futurity we might find that, like Ensor’s, reject or remediate the antisocial turn in queer scholarship. Further I think highlighting gender makes clear the feminist potential in Ensor’s work for opening modes of female futurity that do not depend on reproductive capacity. Spinster futurity, in resisting “do it for the children” kinds of environmental discourse with its oblique perspective, also opens up space to think about complex, slow, or cumulative environmental happenings outside of a neat chain of causality. In this way it seems almost the perfect match for orienting ourselves with respect to Rob Nixon’s conception of slow violence, perhaps unsurprising given both authors’ indebtedness to Rachel Carson.

In Staying with the Trouble Donna Haraway offers another reorientation toward the environmental future. Her troubled and troubling conception of the Chthulucene is similarly aligned with resistance to simple cause and effect environmentalism. Haraway’s exigence more than anything seems to be a profound awareness of limits—the limits of our ways of thinking, the limits of our narratives, the limits of our power as individuals and as a species. Haraway’s sympoietic tentacular chthonic Gaia is so impossibly complex that thinking only about one actor, element, or problem is laughably inadequate. She implicitly questions what the goal of environmentalism should be. It cannot end, she seems suggest; the chthonic ones laugh in the face of discrete goals. Her sense of a world that becomes-with is intimately connected to the Chthulucene: “an ongoing temporality that resists figuration and dating and demands myriad names” (51). I sense that it is no accident that her Chthulucene resists easy definition; in the time of the Chthulucene, present, future, and past seem to lose relevance to a billion different distributed and interdependent nows. Haraway’s embrace of “kin” over kids, a benign anti-natalism, is grounded in this profound sense of interconnectedness of time and effects as much as it is in a sense of “response-ability” for overpopulation.  In her introduction, Haraway articulates her resistance to the conception of a discrete future that leads to faith in technofixes or a sense of our efforts being “too late.” That latter futurity has a real danger of paralyzing activism. Haraway has done something remarkable in being able to overcome that panic without losing a sense of the urgency for action.

As in Ensor, I sense a potential in Haraway’s reorientation of the future to be able to better understand and represent slow violence. Indeed, slow violence seems positively tentacular. Taken together, Ensor and Haraway persuasively make a case for an alternative futurity being almost a pre-requisite for negotiating a less destructive relationship with the environment and, as Haraway suggests, moving us out of the Capitalocene (or perhaps the Neo-Liberalocene).

 

(“Future is so Queer” by Eltpics is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0)