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Final Prompt

Performative Assembly and a Revised Ethics of Doing

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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.

 

 

 

Prompt 7

The Question Isn’t How, It’s When

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As we’ve discussed, nuclear disaster results in strange entanglements of time and place. From the deep time of radioactive decay to the affinity between Fukushima and Chernobyl, there is a simultaneity and a deferral that are held in close contact within the structure of nuclear futures. We live in contact with multiple time scales. Fears around radioactive waste and climate change bring it into sharper focus but, deeptime is in the rocks around us, the sun, systems of erosion and deposition, fossil fuels, the list continuing ad naseaum.  In Haraway’s reframing that “we are compost, not posthuman” there echoes the fact that our bodies are always already part of the process of earth-making (55). That is, caught up in the process of decay—the deferral of which haunts us.

I want to think about deferral and serialization together as terms that are reflected in the form and content of the two works we recently encountered: Dark and Ichi-F. Both works demonstrate in strange ways what is can be called thick time. Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker in their essay titled, “Weathering: Climate Change and the “Thick Time” of Transcorporeality”, explain thick time as being “a transcorporeal stretching between present, future, and past” that helps us “to reimagine our bodies as archives of climate and as making future climates possible” (1). Thinking in thick time is, as David Farrier suggests in his new book, Anthropocene Poetics, the “capacity to put multiple temporalities and scales within a single frame, to ‘thicken’ the present with an awareness of the other times and places” (9).

To describe the ways in which thick time is a function of deferral and serialization in these two works, I want to turn to comics theorist Scott McCloud.  McCloud describes the formal elements of narrative time in comics as operating in such a way that “Each panel of a comic shows a single moment in time. And between those frozen moments–between the panels–our minds fill in the intervening moments, creating the illusion of time and motion” (94). But time in comics is also described through the unfolding of sound-as-text in a single panel. The instantaneous and singleness of the moment of sound can’t be taken as coinciding with the image beside it . “Just as pictures and the intervals between them create the illusion of time through closure, words introduce time by representing that which can only exist in time–sound” (95).  Closure is  “The phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole”  (63). How we rely on incomplete information to construct semantically meaningful wholes. Like glimpsing only half of a soda can and recognizing the whole label.  This can help us think of serialization and deferment in that we are presented a splintered text that resists telling a full story until assembled into a coherent whole. However, the whole still has the formal elements of time that complicate and make messy the ways that plot unfold (mirroring/affinities in Dark, the quotidian in Ichi-F). The way that both simultaneity and motion are layered within and between the static images of a panel are a perfect visual model for understanding thick time.

Ichi-F exemplifies this in depicting the process of donning clothing for clean up. Each garment is represented in fine detail along with the process of putting it on. The mask cleaning process, the taping of the wrists of the sleeves, the booties, dosimeters, along with the specifics of where to find each and how to carry and operate them. Something as quotidian as dressing is shown to be part of a larger, more intimate relationship with radioactive deep time, thickening it. The process is drawn out from panel to panel, showing each step and urging the reader to assemble all the parts of dressing into a coherent whole. All of this points to larger moments of deferral that happen in comics—that is,  the way in which content is produced through serialization. Ichi-F was, afterall, originally published in three installments before being translated and resold as one volume in the English edition.

Dark operates differently from other forms of serialized content since it lives on Netflix. As a place so entangled with the concept of binge watching, serialization takes on a different meaning here. Serialization, I would argue, is a function of content over time. However, Netflix complicates that relationship in how it releases shows and encourages viewing habits. These habits we could argue are the by-products of consumer driven content creation. The ease of making and the result of on-demand content created in the age of platform capitalism.

But Dark also confuses the unfolding of plot usual to the serial with the ability to view it in all at once (if one were to follow the ethos of Netflix, as the writer has, or almost has). I want to suggest that because content about nuclear futurity echoes the formal aspects of time in comics, that we can read Dark in a similar fashion. The viewer is invited from the very beginning to give up on the assumption of time’s linearity. The narrator at the beginning most explicitly establishes a sense of thick time when they state that the distinction between “past, present, and future is an illusion” (Dark ep 1). In the same way that closure makes for continuity in comics, we can read closure in serialized media as well, both in content and form.

 

Farrier, David. Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifices Zones, and Extinction, Minnesota UP, 2019.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The invisible Art. Harper Collins, 1993.

Neimanis, Astrida and Rachel Loewen Walker, “Weathering: Climate Change and the “Thick Time” of Transcorporeality, Hypatia vol. 29, no. 3 (Summer 2014), pp. 558-575.

Prompt 4

Nuclear Cosmopolitanism

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I’m interested in Bronsky’s novel for how it can be read against what Sheri-Marie Harrison calls the neoliberal novel of migrancy.  Harrison writes that the novel of migrancy, while traditionally being an account of the entanglement between identity and place, takes on different exigence when contemporary stories “formally position migrant subjects as analogues of capital” (203). 

Two central imperatives that Harrison identifies in the classic immigrant novel are national assimilation, which suggests that a sense of rootedness (to place or nation) is the key to individual identity and cosmopolitanism (the movement between nations that instantiates that journey) which exists as its opposite number. In the classic immigrant novel, these two imperatives are joined. They operate together to inform the changes that identity undergoes as individuals move about within global structures.

Harrison’s intervention lies in her suggestion that the neoliberal novel of migrancy “breaks down the classic immigrant novel’s standard trajectory from ethnic identity to national cosmopolitanism, replaying this simple, linear trajectory with a free-floating transnational cosmopolitanism more akin to that of capital itself than that of the assimilated citizen” (203). However, rather than suggesting a full on critique of cosmopolitanism in its similarities to the flow of capital across borders, she argues that by allying the notion of human capital with the literal flow of bodies within cosmopolitanism, these stories highlight “a contradictory tension between cosmopolitanism’s endorsement of unallied global mobility and the rootedness of national assimilation” because the nation itself is no longer a fixed goal. The journey to a new nation in the novel, instead of standing for itself operates as mirror for “neoliberal capital’s paradoxical reliance on the nation as an economic mechanism that can facilitate competitive conditions for the free flow of capital and increasing globalized wealth (203-4).

Why I find Bronsky’s novel relevant to this discussion is in how it repudiates cosmopolitanism itself in how it privileges singular, isolated space as being central to identity in a world post-nuclear disaster.  Baba Dunja and the other returnee’s to Tschernowo operate outside of the generally recognized flow of capital in their isolated village.  As Bronsky describes it, it exists outside of the flow of a lot of things, a kind of silent oasis amongst the radiation. 

What I would never trade for running water and a telephone in Tschernowo is the matter of time. Here there is no time. There are no deadlines and no appointments. In essence, our daily routine is a sort of game. We are reenacting what people normally do. Nobody expects anything of us. We don’t have to get up in the morning or go to bed at night. For all anyone cares, we could do it the other way around. We imitate daily life the same way children do with dolls, or when they’re playing store. (Bronsky 95).

Tschernowo, despite its wastelandish makeup, is the perfect place to stage this discussion of identity and emplacement because it is a place that has no exploitable value under capitalism. Tschernowo and other locations within exclusion zones–or what Baba Dunja calls “death zones” trouble notions of the specific value of certain places within a neoliberal framework. While at the same time, the uneasy, blurred boundary prompts readers to consider larger questions of the impact of nuclear disaster because, as Baba Dunja notes, the notion that the death zones “[stop] at the borders people draw on maps” is facile (43). 

We’ve talked a lot about the importance of intentional community in class as well as the power found in emplaced thinking. Considering Bronsky’s novel as a means of re-reading migrancy under neoliberal capitalism allows us to probe what it means to return to, rather than escape from, disaster as a means of empowerment and solidarity. Baba Dunja’s Last Love models an emplaced knowledge that is based on both individual and communal identities. Individual in that Baba Dunja prioritizes self-reliance and personal responsibility. Communal in that she conceives of the above identities as thriving best within a place that prioritizes rhythm of life extensive with nature.  The characters’ return frames a different kind of cosmopolitanism–one predicated not on the flow of capital, but on a resistance to that flow for the sake of putting down deeper roots. 

One final point I’d like to add is in how Baba Dunja complicates neoliberal capital’s imperative to personal responsibility. While I do not believe that Tschernowo is a libertarian dream-land, as I noted above, the village exists in a space that has no value in economic terms, and all of the activity done there, by old bodies with no intention of increasing human-capital, sits outside the system laughing.

Also, as a side note, here’s this interesting essay I stumbled upon while Googling about place and identity in literature. I can’t really speak about it here, but it’s something I’m hoping to read over the break, and since it seems related to the work we’re doing in class, I wanted to share it here.

  1. “The Neoliberal Novel of Migrancy.” Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture. Edited by Mitchum Huehls and Rachel Greenwald Smith, Johns Hopkins, 2017. pp. 203-219.
Prompt 1

Activist-Writing and Vital Materialism

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For this post, I’d like to briefly highlight what I think is a productive overlap between Rob Nixon’s powerful suggestion of the role of the activist-writer and Jane Bennett’s Vital Materialism. To do this, I want to look at what Nixon calls “long-termers” (17).  Long-termers are those “who must live inside the ecological aftermath” of those governmental, corporate, or NGOs (called short-termers by Nixon) who seek to “extract, despoil, and depart” (17). What is important about these terms is that they are capacious. While short-termers can include a range of actors from individual tourists to more abstracted notions of corporate power structures, so too can long-termers include more than just the local or indigenous communities. Long-termers can also be nonhuman actors. And as Bennett helps us see, if the nonhuman world can include actors that create affective relationships amongst themselves and the human world, part of those affective relationships are the stories they have to tell. 

Speaking directly, the world tracks what happens to it. Scholars in the humanities now discuss geological strata as one would a book–leafing through the layers of rocks as though they were pages detailing the history of climate change and our own interference therein (there are layers of radioactive material found in recent strata which mark the advent of our nuclear age). These stone voices are those that speak in the longest of terms. 

In advocating for the voices of the long-termers, Nixon offers the role of the activist-writer as one who speaks truth to power, dispels the production of doubt, and amplifies the voices of those whom power tries to silence. But most importantly, the role of the activist-writer is to help remember. Specifically, it is to help remember the stories of those who are silenced by the construction of concrete boundaries.   Narratives of violence, Nixon suggests, erase the reverberations of thereof and create a myth of calm that is punctuated only by brief upheaval; once the disaster is over, it says, all will return again to as it was.  This itself is a myth aided by modernity in its construction. Amitav Ghosh,  in his book The Great Derangement argues, in part,  that the biggest threat to a full representation of climate change in fiction (and in general) is a need to adhere to modernity’s narrative of gradual change, especially in the context of economic and structural upheaval (21). That is, we are less likely to take serious the stories and warnings that tell of great cataclysm because they upset our shared narrative of relative calm.  Disaster, when it happens, is a break from the what is expected, rather than a state of being that exists independently alongside of us. As is the case in Nixon’s piece, boundaries aid in obscuring the underlying state of entanglement and uneasy definitions that structure the world. 

Nixon writes that “To confront slow violence requires, then, that we plot and give figurative shape to formless threats whose fatal repercussions are dispersed across space and time” and that we need stories that are “low in instant spectacle but high in long-term effects” (10).

This is one such story.  There are old stone tablets that are placed along the shoreline of Japan that warn of tsunamis. They have been there for hundreds of years. They mark high-water lines and urge in stone voices “Do not build your homes below this point” (Ghosh 55). For the sake of brevity, you can learn more about them here from this wonderful article. There are stones like these near the Fukushima Daiichi plant–above where it was built.  The solution that the humanities can offer is in helping to cultivate an ability to listen to the stories of those surrounding us. And they can teach us to do so before disaster has struck, since it is usually after the fact that we remember there were warnings in the first place.

I invoke these stones because for me they exemplify the intersection of Bennett’s call for an openness to our material surroundings and the need to listen to the voices of the long-termers. The stone voices are an instance of the voices of long-termers–those people who came before and tried to warn of danger but whose voices were drowned out by a drive for capital or for the sake of progress myths. The soft warnings, even of the human inscribed in the landscape itself, are drowned out most by those who stand to profit from ignoring them. The goal of the activist-writer is to amplify the voices of the long-termers–whoever or whatever they may be. That is something that the humanities in their creative capacity can do.