Category Archives: Prompt 5

Prompt 5

A Force of Things

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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.

 

 

 

 

Prompt 5

Little Emissaries

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Prompt 5, #3

Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary (2018) can be seen as far-fetched for the contemporary reader. There are many instances within the work that are all, but inconceivable. For instance, the borders of Japan are closed to the outside world, its inhabitants are forbidden to travel abroad, and the internet ceased to exist at the start of the work. These are two things are almost inconceivable to contemporary readers, seeing as many consider globalization always present, even without willingness to participate in it. Even though some do not have access to the internet, few can consider living without access to the internet after exposure to it. Although these are only two examples, among many, that seem far-fetched for contemporary readers, there are many striking similarities between this work and Hitomi Kamanaka’s film Little Voices from Fukushima (2015). This is not to say that what is depicted in the film is the same as what is depicted in The Emissary, however Tawada’s depiction makes one wonder if the living circumstances described could be the future for the figures in Little Voices from Fukushima. Both works encompass notions of kin, care and catastrophe (although the catastrophe is never directly acknowledged in The Emissary like in the film). Both works encompass these notions because they take place in post catastrophe environments, again the catastrophe in The Emissary is assumed because of lack of direct acknowledgement, however with things like radiation, although rarely addressed, indicate that the setting is some sort of post catastrophe environment. Besides their settings both works focus on kin caring for their youngest kin as well. Two areas where there is striking similarity between the works are the anxiety/guilt of the elder kin caretakers and the food preparation for the youngest kin.

Examples of anxiety and guilt can be found throughout both works as caretakers come to terms with the effects that their decisions and events, even those that are out of there control, start to impact their children. In Little Voices from Fukushima most of the guilt and anxiety comes from caretakers not being able to move outside of the contaminated area/returning to the contaminated area.  This anxiety and guilt isbfound within the “Haha Rangers,” a group of mothers dedicated to improving the circumstances that their children are living in. Ruri Sasaki, one of the central figures of the film and the Haha Rangers, states within the first few minutes of meeting her and her family “while we were evacuated, I felt bad about the people who stayed on…I felt tremendous guilt. And I feel guilty towards my kids by staying here” (6:25). Statements similar to this one by Ruri Sasaki occur throughout the film and are made by her or her fellow Rangers. Although there are multiple caretaker figures in The Emissary, there is only one caretaker figure that is consistently followed throughout the work, Yoshiro. Like Ruri and the Haha Rangers, Yoshiro constantly worries about the health of Mumei, his great-grandson, for whom he is the primary caretaker. Although Yoshiro does not have the same guilt as some of the Haha Rangers, since he was not given the opportunity to bring Mumei into a safer environment, he still fears his great-grandsons future like the Haha Rangers do for their own children. “Though he tried not to think the worst about Mumei’s future, he often found himself sick with worry, with high tides of misery sweeping over him day and night” (Tawada 18). Also like the Haha Rangers, his fear and anxiety is practically a constant fixture of the work and can be seen throughout.

One aspect that causes fear and anxiety throughout both works is food and eating. Although the struggles associated with food and eating vary slightly between the works.  The Haha Rangers from Little Voices from Fukushima struggle to give their children food and drink that is not (heavily) contaminated. Yoshiro in The Emissary struggles with this as well, but he has an added worry because he needs to find food that didn’t cause negative symptoms like trouble breathing (kiwi), paralysis of the tongue (lemon juice), heartburn (spinach) and dizziness (shiitake mushrooms) (Tawada 45). Where Ruri needs to measure the cesium level in the milk that her children consume, Yoshiro must prepare Mumei’s food in a specific manner because even things like drinking juice can last 15 minutes, which was no easy task for Mumei (Tawada 33). Besides the added steps in food preparation, both figures, Ruri and Yoshiro, struggle to food that was suitable for their charges. Fortunately, for Ruri farmers whose crops are not contaminated send their excess crops to her village for the families to eat. However, this is not so simple for Yoshiro and other caregivers because things like fruit, never get sent to their area (near Tokyo) and as a result they must search “with bloodshot eyes for fruit for their great-grandchildren…wander[ing] like ghosts from market to market” (Tawada 45).

These are only two of many similarities between the two works. Where Little Voices from Fukushima calls viewers’ attention to the current situation, as of 2015, inside of the contaminated area The Emissary, taking place generations after a catastrophe, presents an eerily plausible future for people like the Sasaki family and the Haha Rangers. In Tawada’s work, things done to improve their children’s health like recuperation trips to non-contaminated areas, and importing food from non-contaminated, are virtually impossible due to travel restrictions and the shipping/trade of goods. Therefore, it causes the reader to consider what can be done now in order to prevent aspects of this presented future from happening.

 

Sources:

Little Voices from Fukushima. Directed by Hitomi Kamanaka, BunBun Films, 7 March 2015

Yoko Tawada. The Emissary. New Directions Paperbook, 2018.

 

Prompt 5

The Emissary: An Aesthetic Leap Towards Queer Ecology

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I believe that The Emissary is a tale about nature, moreover, about the ways in which humans map the intricate and everchanging narratives of nature —especially when those changes are the perilous consequences of “scientific progress”. The universe built by Yoko Tawada conjures up a psychological ecosystem weaved through biological structures, i.e. the way her characters (human and non-human) inhabit and comprehend both their inner and outer world is deeply determined by an altered-state-of-nature, possibly unchained by a nuclear disaster. Fauna and Flora are depicted under a strange but aesthetically enchanting light; they seem to thrive and grow in absurd and unpredictable patterns, creating new forms of life which, in turn, need new forms of comprehensive cataloguing for humans to digest them —both literally and metaphorically. Thus, new and strange ecological ponderings take place in this fictional universe, such as “are oversized dandelions chrysanthemums?”, as well as new political movements, such as “The [oversized] Dandelion support association”.

This new mutated neon-ecology[1] also carries with it a new mutated ecology of the mind which, unknowingly, strives to deconstruct, blend, and organize old and novel epistemologies, for how can we word-the-world when familiarity has vanish from daily experiences? Gregory Bateson, in his book Mind and Nature (1979), describes sixteen presuppositions that aim to guide both our understanding of science and of everyday life, and, interestingly, the second presupposition is called “the map is not the territory, or the name is not the thing named”, which mainly suggests that “when we think of coconuts or pigs, there are no coconuts or pigs in the brain” (30), or, in other words, that “in all thought or perception or communication about perception, there is a transformation, a coding, between the report and the thing reported” (31).

In this sense, our understanding and interaction with reality is never instant or direct, on the contrary, it’s always mediated by maps and names that determine our ways of knowing and, therefore, are subject to constant change. Now, in a very fascinating manner, Yoko Tawada’s novel does precisely this: it abruptly shifts the maps that govern both our abstract and concrete methods for navigating reality. A fictional urgency, one might say, that comes from an environment that has been violently transformed by technology and progress —defiled by a foolish desire for a fast-paced narrative and for easily-obtainable stuff. Yoshiro’s grandson, Tomo, is the best reflection of this modern form of “progress”: “Any machine that made big things happen with just the push of a button or two he loved, while he showed no interest in building blocks, Legos, or swings, either, which generally he gave up on after two or three bends of the knee” (76)[2]. Hence, The Emissary presents a postapocalyptic neon-world which seems to be the product of a thoughtless and greedy “push of a button”.

However, what has been transfigured through Yoko’s fictional lens? I would argue that almost all that guides our naturalized narratives of progress, linearity, and binarity, i.e.:

– Language
– Time
– Space
– Sex/Gender

All of these categories become fluid and uncertain after The Emissary’s unnamed (nuclear?) disaster. In the very beginning of the book, Yoshiro thinks that time didn’t “spread gradually, ring after ring, nor was it lined up neatly in a row; could it just be a disorderly pile, like the inside of a drawer no one ever bothers to straighten?” (6). Well, yes. The passing of time is a disorderly pile; however, it looked organized due to the fictional maps we created in order to feel safe-and-warm. After the disaster the neatly organized maps break: old people become energetic and immortal while the children get feeble and sick; men go through menopause and sometimes their reproductive organs swing from male to female; language slowly vanishes as it loses its foreign and oldest words; technology is set aside and thus tranquility and slowness become ubiquitous; and, in terms of space, Japan turns into a flat-land isolated from the globe.

Contamination, at last, pervades every form of familiar life where not even the permanence of species remains untouched —Mumei, for example, is basically a human-bird that deeply desires to be an octopus. Yet, the most fascinating detail of the novel (I believe) lies in the topsy-turvy understanding of lineage and family, for there are no more mom-dad-offspring assemblages/hierarchies. Yoko’s world deconstructs this tidy map, granting to the timeless great-grandfathers the power to skip generations (i.e. time) and become the spinsters of a new neon-ecology. In her essay Spinster Ecology, Sarah Ensor writes that “the spinster, not saving the planet for her own children, engages in a more impersonal mode of stewardship —one whose investment is neither linear nor directly object-based but instead, as Sedgwick suggests, somehow more ‘varied, contingent, recalcitrant [and] reforming’” (416).

And, indeed, the relationship that we see portrayed in the novel by Yoshiro and Mumei is determined by queerness (a queerness that travels through air, worms, and psychic states), and thus openly questions the epistemologies and cultural constructs of the present. It offers, at last, an alternative form of understanding futurity, where Tokyo can be revitalized, as Donna Haraway would say, by “making kin, not babies” (103). Even Yoshiro’s wife has stopped being a mother to a single child; she has become a sort of spinster-octopus with many arms that tend many children: “My real family, she thought, are those people I just happened to meet in that coffee shop. My descendants are the independent children in my institution” (88). Thereby, all the characters in Yoko’s novel reach a point of utter fluidity, challenging the norms that a fictional-Japan tries to impose with a desperate aim of normalization —an effort to make invisible the aftereffects of a (nuclear)disaster.

Finally, and because nature mutates and rebels in such a grandiose way (mostly by feminizing itself), The Emissary creates a tangential (i.e. a spinster) epistemology that gets weaved through a new form of narrative, or, as Bateson would argue, through new names and new maps. When Mumei says “the map is my portrait” (70), or when he thinks “if you cut the globe in a different way, when you open it up, you’ll get a different map of the world” (24), he seems to be acknowledging the purpose of the novel, which is to create through strange words, neologisms, and literary arrangements, a different map of the earth, where the future and its unfolding is understood non-linearly, that is, more like a disorderly (but interconnected) pile of stuff. As John Treat states about the “most creatively ambitious hibakusha writers”, Yoko Tawada also insists in filling the “unspeakable spaces with new words or even new language… We read, in other words, at the edge of our epistemological, aesthetic, and even emotional borders, always ready for the unfamiliar as well as the familiar” (30).

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[1] I somehow picture every-thing to be of neon-colors when it comes to a postnuclear disaster universe.
[2] This lack of thoughtfulness and pleasurable curiosity are traits that are also present in novels such as Christa Wolf’s Accident.
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Works Cited:

__Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. E. P. Dutton, 1979.
__Ensor, Sarah. “Spinster Ecology”. Duke University Press, 2012.
__Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
__Treat, John Whittier. Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb. University of Chicago Press, 1995.
__Yoko Tawada. The Emissary. New Directions Paperbook, 2018.

Illustration by Edward Gorey.