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Final Prompt

Tentacles curling back around

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I once balked at the idea of taking a class that seemed too overloaded with theory. I printed the first readings and sat down with my cat to prepare for the first week, and I just could not do it. There was too much thinking about thinking, too many demands for brain cells to be tied into pretzels. I look back now and see that I was not ready yet for that material, much as I was unready for the Faulkner that was assigned summer reading in 8th grade. I had to wait, to grow a little, before I could find satisfaction in the kind of brain twisting that theory demands. Though perhaps it is not the wordiest of our readings this semester, I find myself staying with Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway. Her work focuses on reformulating our conception of futurity in environmental justice, thinking tentacularly, and making kin, among other things. While I am nearly finished with my ‘academic’ career, such thoughts are sure to guide the decisions that drive my teaching style, as well as inform the most personal decisions I have ahead in life.

For Haraway, staying with the trouble means remaining focused on what is wrong. Our global community faces problems that demand we remain present and engaged to solve, and we cannot simply find a way out. Haraway condemns the tendencies toward techno-fixes and defeatism that characterize much of our environmental discourse. As she says, “Neither despair nor hope is tuned to the senses, to mindful matter, to material semiotics, to mortal earthlings in thick copresence” (4). Complacency and satisfaction in our own actions represents a deviation from the general trend of life on earth. A wild animal must never slow down and feel safe or satisfied in its position, because it never is. Likewise, looming environmental crises demand the same of us. There is no comfortable point in an ill-defined future at which we can all put down our tools and go back to how it once was. Saving the world will be a continuous struggle, and I aim to bring that struggle to inform my teaching and private decisions. In a high school German classroom, staying with the trouble will call for thinking outside the bounds of any given state’s curriculum for language instruction. I cannot be satisfied with that. German language and history are complex, tangled masses littered with knowledge that must be continuously re-engaged. Issues of nationalism and genocide, colonialism and class-consciousness are just some of the tentacles of my field that cannot be ignored. These initiatives may push the bounds of what one can teach in a traditional language classroom, so I want to give thought to expanding my teaching resume to include classes on German or European History. Graduate school has been two long years, but knowledge is a lifetime commitment.

Haraway goes on to focus our attention on the idea making kin, a word she problematizes. Not merely mothers and sons, brothers and aunts, kin are the connections we forge ourselves, the relationships we recognize in unpredictable places. She asserts that “the stretch and recomposition of kin are allowed by the fact that all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense, and it is past time to practice better care of kinds-as-assemblages (not species one at a time)” (103). Our kin are those entities with which we recognize a single fiber or a resilient tentacle of connection, and we should thus feel a responsibility to each and as Bennett concluded, perhaps not even living. Whether my sister or the worm feeding on my compost pile, we must establish and perceive these networks of kin if we hope to thrive in a world threatened with disaster. Like staying with the trouble, my personal life and my teaching career will require me to be ever in search of my kin. It is no coincidence to me that my students who perform the best are so often the ones with which I have a good working relationship. Likewise, some of my poorest-performing students have been those I felt unable to reach. People begin to invest in their future when they see others daring to do the same, and I want to help build that foundation for my students.

Last, Haraway’s notion of making kin touches on a subject that sits on the minds of many people my age: whether to have children. While we are still on the millennial fence for the foreseeable future, Haraway gives a glimmer of hope for finding meaning in nontraditional notions of family. Rather than feeling driven to meet someone nice, settle down, and have kids, making kin only asks us to do the first of these. We should not necessarily lash ourselves to conservative ideals of what constitutes a family. Perhaps having kin is enough.

Sources:

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.

Sentosa, Resorts World. “5 Curious Facts about the Octopus.” S.E.A. Aquarium at Resorts World Sentosa, 8 Aug. 2018, seaa.rwsentosablog.com/5-curious-facts-octopus/.

Prompt 7

How to win friends and shuffle off this mortal coil

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On the left this week was a very tempting queering of time and relationships that might be well suited to Ensor’s Spinster Ecology. However, my Geiger counter was ticking more toward the right, so I decided to work with Haraway’s ideas of trouble and making kin. Our viewing for the week, Dark is a sci-fi/suspense thriller set in the sleepy German town of Winden, translating as ‘to wind or coil’. Such a word calls to mind a spring or ball of wire, or perhaps a snake ready to strike. In Winden, a troubled history seems to be coiling back around and repeating itself, and few can grasp why or how.

In each time period depicted, the disappearances of these children have the effect of troubling what seemed otherwise a peaceful town. Haraway points early to the curious origins of the word ‘trouble’ in the French language, meaning to “’stir up, ‘to make cloudy,’’ to disturb.”’ The opening episode of Dark would have us believe that this is what has happened in Winden, that the sleepy town is only abruptly transformed. Such as assessment does not hold up after further viewing, and Dark demands (as does Haraway) that we stay with the trouble. Plotlines slowly uncoil and show us there is no simple solution to the crisis facing Winden, and that there was no time in which Winden stood without this trouble. Haraway similarly troubles our understanding of ecology, saying “staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings” (1).  Throughout the first season of Dark, Jonas and a handful of other figures come to partially understand the prickly, tangled web of events and people in which they live. The adult Jonas refuses to let his younger self return Mikkel to the future, and later refuses to release the younger Jonas from a bunker, in part because he understands that these actions have more far-reaching consequences than initially assumed.

The apparent peace and quiet of Winden mask the pain and grief of nearly a century of disappearances and murder, and many of our plotlines hinge on our characters’ ability, or lack thereof, to respond to this pain. The unresolved grief for his lost brother leads Ulrich Nielsen to attempt the murder of Helge Doppler as a child in 1953, in hopes that he might alter the future and bring back his brother. His belief in time and these events as linear entities renders him unable to recognize the possible intricacy and fragility of the pasts and futures he may create.

Thinking tentacularly in order to look at the roots of these catastrophes, we might recognize a fatal flaw in the inability of Winden to properly grieve, or according to Haraway, to grieve together. She asserts “Grief is a path to understanding entangled shared living and dying; human beings must grieve with, because we are in and of this fabric of undoing” (39). When the bodies of two young boys are found near the groundbreaking of the new nuclear plant, a cynical Bernd Doppler claims that the murders were likely the work of the coal industry. Within hours, Doppler’s son goes missing (nearly killed by Ulrich Nielsen) and his tune changes. Doppler asks the police chief to find his son at any cost, even the cost of the power plant. We are constantly faced with characters unable to empathize with those outside their own small spheres, and the pain of these losses persists. In Haraway’s terms, we recognize this shared grief in particular and emotion in general as characteristic of networks of kin. She makes the case that we need to reach outside of our nuclear family to craft new connections with unlikely people, that we might build communities from these connections.

We are led to believe that Bernd Doppler does not understand this notion. He leads a life of luxury lobbying for the nuclear industry, and his sympathy is aroused only when his family is on the line. When the troubled dust settles, he remains unchanged. He decides eventually to store excess radioactive materials in the cave system under his own town, jeopardizing both his children and neighbors. As we see later, this quiet act of violence circles back around and enables a series of troubling events in Winden. Change in Dark doesn’t come from tragedy, but from the ability to collectively and effectively grieve tragedy.

Such a process of productive healing is evidenced in the few moments of genuine togetherness in this season of Dark. Jonas returns from the past having learned that Mikkel Nielsen is actually his father. He embraces his mother, saying “I believe Dad loved you very much.” This is one of the few moments of genuine growth and healing among characters, and it comes because Jonas recognizes Mikkel as his kin, and the love that exists despite this strange pairing. The connection may be frustrating to him, but he can empathize with the love that Micky carried for his wife. These moments of genuine healing and production occur when people recognize the complex connections they share, and disaster results when they fail to recognize the same.

Haraway’s notion of kin is far-reaching and finds interesting results in Dark. As she says, “Ancestors turn out to be very interesting strangers; kin are unfamiliar (outside what we thought was family or gens), uncanny, haunting, active” (103). Perhaps Haraway was not envisioning meeting your future self on the other side of a door, but Dark creates an environment that coils back in on itself. Our various time travelers must thus recognize their kin in their own time, as well as past and future. They must work with these kin to win the victories they can and grieve the losses they must, or else expect more tragedy.

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.

Odar, Baran bo, and Jantje Friese. Dark, Season 1, episode 1-8, Netflix, 2017.

Prompt 2

Praising by faint Damnation

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In a reading from last week, John Treat helped present us with the unique challenge of approaching, reading and writing ‘atomic’ literature. A text attempts to effectively or even adequately communicate what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and “at the same time it must help us comprehend what it means to be living today in a nuclear age” (19). Dueling purposes clash where a writer attempts to describe a moment when everything changed but cannot put to words what exactly did change. Such a conflict demands writing that modifies or subverts traditional forms to push the reader (and writer, survivor) towards an understanding of what happened. The reader is tasked then with recognizing the inherent failure of language to fully capture such a meaning, and “the cooperation atomic-bomb writers ask of us is a kind of ethical restraint, a sort of respectful restraint from naively ‘understanding what we read” (33). The closest we as readers can come to ‘understanding’ or ‘knowing’ what happened is in recognition of the fact that any attempt to describe an atrocity is inherently incomplete, that we can only truly understand that we cannot understand.

Cue Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl, a collection of oral testimonies from various survivors of the Chernobyl disaster in the modern-day Ukraine. In it, interviewees seek to account for their experiences in the days and years following the explosion of the reactor core at the Chernobyl power plant. A pattern emerges in the inability to communicate the experience. “I’m not a writer. I won’t be able to describe it. My mind is not capable of understanding it” (34). Another survivor recounts “I don’t say anything. No one can speak to me in a way I can answer. In my own language. No one can understand where I’ve come from. And I can’t tell anyone” (82). The disaster has produced a barrier in communication between the people who were there to witness it and those who were not. Accounts from other survivors attempt to approximate this feeling that of experiencing war and death (68), but even that comparison resists reification.

For her part, Alexievich seems to understand this aspect of the stories behind Chernobyl, and she runs with it. Form in Voices from Chernobyl is often hard to grasp, and the focus of the work often seems chaotic and haphazard. One testimony may follow the resettlement of villages after the explosion, then the next will remember a childhood of fighting German soldiers in the second world war. Names are provided but are rarely attached to quotes. New sections begin without page breaks, jarring the reader. Stories are brief and often have no preface or epilogue. The result is like walking through an unlit room crowded with people, each trying and failing to tell their story. Such an organization (or lack thereof) contributes to the reader’s sense that they do not fully grasp what has happened, even after reading dozens of pages of eyewitness accounts. The reading experience reflects the experience of the survivor. What better way to convey something incomprehensible than by making your medium itself somewhat incomprehensible.

All this incomprehensibility is compounded by the invisible nature of the radiation that these survivors are exposed to. Alexievich juxtaposes the intangibility of experience with the invisible radiation our survivors were exposed to. A testimony from Lena M. recounts her family’s flight from Chechnya and the eventual incredulity of her neighbors when she resettles near Chernobyl. “They say ‘Would you bring your kids to a place where there was cholera or the plague?’ But that’s the plague and that’s cholera. This fear that they have here in Chernobyl. I don’t know about it. It’s not part of my memory” (64). Like the readers of the testimonies that came before, Lena cannot fully grasp a horror that she has not witnessed firsthand. To her, the slow and quiet violence of radiation cannot compare to the immediacy of the danger where she once lived. Up to this point, the reader has seen every reason for residents to get out of Dodge and get out fast. Now we are confronted with a person with a compelling argument for staying, and we are jarred with the cognitive dissonance of it. Alexievich thus undermines our last assumption of what can be the right choice when faced with evacuating or resettling the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. The reader finishes this text with no clear answers and definitely no understanding of this cataclysm, but rather with a better understanding of the questions they must ask in order to approach literature on Chernobyl.  To assume otherwise is to do an injustice to those who experienced this event.

Alexievich, Svetlana. Voices from Chernobyl. DALKEY ARCHIVE Press (IL), 2005.

Treat, John Whittier. “Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb.” AbeBooks, University of Chicago Press, 1 Jan. 1995, www.abebooks.com/9780226811772/Writing-Ground-Zero-Japanese-Literature-0226811778/plp.

Prompt 1

Prompt 1

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Question 2: In what ways are precarity, violence, and environmental degradation intertwined?

Oh boy, what a prompt, and where to begin?

I’d like to focus mainly on Nixon’s text this week. I found it fascinating and found myself frequently going to the margins to scrawl out examples to refer back to later. I’d like to begin with a focus on Nixon’s definition of ‘slow violence’ itself on page 2, in which he defines the subject as “…a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”  This definition is something that most of us understand innately, but something that requires us to pause in order to parse out its implications. Nixon’s definition comes in the context of a confidential World Bank memo advocating the large-scale dumping of waste in the poorest countries in Africa. My mind strayed to a short documentary I saw years ago while my sister was stationed in Albania with the Peace Corps.

Link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqkSH1YLXdg

The documentary, titled “Land of Waste,” provides an account of Albania’s import of waste from all corners of the European continent, much of which is designated as ‘recyclables’ as it leaves its countries of origin. Albania now faces growing mountains of foreign trash despite legislation that nominally bans the import of waste.  My first time viewing this doc years ago, I remember having the dueling thoughts of “These European countries should produce less trash” and “It’s the institutional corruption in Albania that enables this sort of accumulation.”

Years later and a bit more well-read, I find myself returning to the doc with fresh eyes. We are able to see the corruption inherent in Albanian government, yes, but also the complicity of capitalists throughout Europe that exploit that weakness in a foreign power’s weak democracy.  Nixon speaks frequently of the idea of “out of sight, out of mind” as a guiding force in politics, and the accumulating trash in one of Europe’s poorest countries bears witness to it. Not all coffee grounds and banana peels, this trash is rarely inspected for safety before being dumped in or near residential areas.

Elsewhere in the country, in cities like Elbasan, imported scrap metal is sorted by hand and smelted to make much of the country’s steel (17:55). The danger inherent in this process provides an example of both more ‘traditional’ forms of violence and Nixon’s idea of ‘slow violence.’ Scrap metal coming into Elbasan originates throughout Europe, though a major portion comes from neighboring Balkan states, where decades-old ordinance is commonly among the scrap. Workers have been killed in violent explosions while handling grenades and unused ammunition. Much like the lingering effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam (Dixon 14), human conflicts that were supposed to conclude decades ago are still creating human casualties.

Weakly-enforced environmental regulations in Albania mean that the foundries in Elbasan constantly belch dust and toxic fumes into the air around the city, resulting in a local atmosphere with 3 times as much pollution as the European average.  Residents have higher rates of asthma and lung disease, as well as a risk of respiratory cancer twice the national average. The risks associated with living in Elbasan capture Dixon’s idea of slow violence as “not just attritional but also exponential, operating as a major threat multiplier; it can fuel long-term, proliferating conflicts in situations where the conditions for sustaining life become increasingly but gradually degraded” (3). European countries like France and Austria have built a robust system of recycling and trash pickup that eliminates or renders invisible their waste, and the rest of the developed world looks on in wonder at these relatively spotless, idyllic lands. Meanwhile, that waste is shipped to places where the economy is depressed enough that processing French or Austrian waste is economically viable. There, the accumulation of waste proves slowly catastrophic for public health, whether through the literal poisoning of the populace or the more covert undermining of a country’s image abroad.

The global north places countries like Albania, Myanmar, Benin, et cetera under the pressure of improving their economies to the level of a ‘developed nation’ while exploiting those same countries for their labor or resources, or in this case, their ability to serve as expendable real estate. The end of the documentary draws attention to the state of Albania’s application for membership to the EU, stating that Union members still seem unconvinced by the small county’s reforms (28:40). Implicit in this statement is the country’s failure to address issues of normalized corruption. Despite this stance, economic entities in EU member states continue to contribute to this corruption in order to offload their garbage. They continue to take advantage of a neighbor’s economic precarity while denying that same country the economic prestige of EU membership. It calls to mind the old parental phrase, “Do as I say; not as I do.”

– Alex