Manabe Noriko’s The Revolution Will Not be Televised examines the initial and continuing pro-nuclear messaging in the aftermaths of the 3/11 Tōhoku Triple Disaster from the government, TEPCO, and broader media. Strict control of the radio, television, and news outlets along with increasingly strict laws mean those speaking against TEPCO, the government, or critiquing nuclear power grapple with personal, social, and financial risk. Such restrictive pressures as well as cultural expectations of social ease pushed anti-nuclear organizing, cultural production, and information sharing out of shared physical space and into online platforms. Manabe shows how the movement between physical and digital space is always in flux – an artist may share an anti-nuclear song/performance on YouTube, which may be played by individuals in public space (collectively like the Frying Dutchman’s Human Error parade or individually), cycling back to online discussions and then to public performances. Space and power are both physical and digital, embedded with architectures and resisted in place and online.

Manabe thinks with Henri Lefebvre’s concept of a spatial triad, a frame for how spaces, particularly urban spaces, are shaped over time by the interlocking dependencies of 1) quotidian daily practices of people in the space, 2) the idealized images of how the space could and should work, and 3) the representation of the space such as planning models, policies, and advertisements. Lefebvre understands space as a product shaped by the interests of the powerful. The interests and practices of the powerful are then mediated to the masses through consumption of media, through sponsored public performances and events, radio, festivals. Yet, physical spaces are not simply ideals and representations of power relationships, but are reshaped and remade by the daily routines, activities, and claiming of place by the people who reside within it. One can simply look at the paved sidewalks and the unpaved but well trod foot-paths to see this shaping and reshaping; the planned and the lived experience.

Similarly, while reading and listening to the artists Manabe highlights as engaged in this process of negotiation of who owns the space, who gets to speak in this space, who can transgress demarcations of ‘private’ and ‘public’ spaces, I remembered the 2014 Bustle article Vancouver’s RainCity Housing innovative Bench Shelters  and London’s anti-homeless spikes. Both architectures readily expand to the ideals and desires of those influencing public space, to the representations of city life in such space, and the use of the space. London’s (and Washington D.C.’s) spikes discourage leaning against buildings, sitting under windows, seeking shelter; whereas the RainCity bench-shelters unfold to offer light protection from the elements and an address and phone number for housing assistance. Manabe, discussing risks for anti-nuclear musicians,  highlights similar management of physical urban space by the Japanese government – such as limiting demonstrations to a single lane, wide-parameters of ‘interference of public employee’ (bumping into someone) for arrest and detention, mid-performance arrests, barricades, and limited to no mainstream media attention (24). Lefebvre underscores while there are top-down visions and representations of a space , these visions are locked into histories and realities of the physical and experimental uses of the space, the lived-in space.

David Harvey expands these interlocked negotiations of space into realms beyond the physical space, including mental and emotional space layered within and alongside the physical. Representations of space have substantial role and influence in the production of space – meaning, as Harvey extends Lefebvre – that spaces ‘intervene’ through construction, through architecture (London’s anti-homeless architecture vs RainCity’s shelter project). These representational contexts and textures do not vanish in the symbolic or imaginary realms, rather are guidelines for how ‘thought’ becomes ‘action’ in that space. Manabe shows how the affordances of the internet – with the myriad networking, information sharing, and musical production platforms – offered Japanese musicians and citizens an alternative place to identify and analyze the visioning and representational architectures offered by the Japanese government. The ability to asynchronously and anonymously gather and share information and experiences fosters a community networked together online, which occasionally emerges collectively and co-located in physical space in the form of anti-nuclear festivals and demonstrations.

Manabe details Lefebvre’s spatial triad is present within digital spaces – lived inequalities in physical space can translate to unequal access, either in limited data plans, access to mobile phones or computers, and quality of internet connections. The physical architectures of digital access shape how users can find and connect with online communities; social norms and expectations of behavior align to the representations of space. Manabe notes that a significant percentage of Japanese Twitter users do not share their real names or personal identification – more direct and frank critique and conversation happen on Twitter than Facebook, which required a real name and seeks to digitally connect users to their in-person networks. Manabe is careful to underscore that power relationships are not completely re-made online; anonymous online identities are not fully anonymous – careful measures are taken by artists and activists to distance themselves from online persona in real-life to protect family, jobs, and social and financial standings. She highlights the ‘visioning space’ online can be co-opted and formed by activists within the digital space, but online spaces are not completely free of the top-down visioning that often occurs in urban spaces by elites and governments. Lefebvre’s spatial triad with the attending contest and representations, the marking and re-marking of who speaks, for what causes, and when are in ongoing negotiation. Manabe shows the spaces that shape organizing and critique has fundamentally changed from physical co-located place to distributed digital space, however the power relations embedded within place and place-making have not.

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.

An argument unfolds. It is the last panel of a robust and vibrant conference hosted by the African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities (AADHum) project – what are the ethics of using linked-open data to aggregate dispersed and fragmented records of the Atlantic Slave Trade? In the minds of some, the lives and experiences of people who were entrapped within the horrifying system of slavery are honored by trying to piece together the fragments; to others, it is yet another dehumanizing act of violence rendering people into data, particularly as the original records detail the capture and commodification – including the sale, and relocation – of people who had few means to tell their own stories, to preserve their own records. When writing about slavery, Saidiya Hartman invokes the notion of ‘critical fabulation’ – or the method of blending archival records, scholarship, critical theory, and fictional narrative to map the limits of what is possible to know about the experiences of enslaved people. For Hartman, critical fabulation intervenes in the silences and gaps of the archival record and makes the ‘afterlife of slavery’ including the skewed health, economic, and social opportunities, incarceration rates, and violences against black people visible, knowable in the present.

While vastly different experiences, the challenges of retelling the experiences of enslaved people echo the tensions of grappling with the memory, imagination, and literatures of the atomic bomb. Does one attempt to aggregate and describe all the available pieces of information or do we sit with the fragments, silences, and gaps? Hartman’s framing of critical fabulation is another way of  leveraging the work of literature. This lever helps us grapple with ourselves, to wrap arms/minds around moments to large to understand in one sitting, to write into being possible pasts and futures. To reach for Toyoshima Yoshio’s urge that truth does not always equal fact, Ōta Yōko’s City of Corpses and Hayashi Kyōko Two Grave Markers responses to the atomic bombs weave memory and speculation as truthful engagements with the facts and statics.

Hayashi Kyōko’s Two Grave Markers struggles to remember – within moments after the atomic bomb destroys Nagasaki and days later, months later. Memory – the narrator’s and Wakako’s – is uncertain, seeking to understand not only what happened but the emotional responses that unfold. The absences and gaps are visible, though unspoken. Ōta Yōko’s City of Corpses also struggles to recall the atomic bombing of Hiroshima clearly. Ōta responds to – and through – the statistics and medical reports all the while returning to her personal memory, her observations, and the experiences of those nearby. While truth may not map directly to fact, the grappling with memory and emotions – fear, guilt, horror, relief – write into being a genuine narrative.

Hartman worries over the notion of critical fabulation – can a critical narrative imagine the emotional and mental landscapes of an individual girl trapped on a slave ship? If so, do we do her an injustice by imagining her experience or does such an imaginative journey bring us closer to understanding? Hartman asks how do we thread a careful path that neither offers up the horrors of slavery as a fetishizing spectacle nor obscures or erases the complex lives caught up within it. Within Ōta Yōko’s City of Corpses and Hayashi Kyōko Two Grave Markers similar tensions exist, both resisting a spectacular recounting of accumulated trauma while centering the tangled emotional and mental response of specific and truthful experience.

Saidiya Hartman; Venus in Two Acts. Small Axe 1 June 2008; 12 (2): 1–14. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1