Category Archives: Prompt 8

Prompt 8

Solidarity, resistance, and the will to live freely

1 Comment

Naše země dostala příležitost prokázat absurdnost okupánských záminek a žalob, dostala příležitost veřejně osvědčit a demonstrovat solidaritu, odolnost, a vůli žít svobodně, a uskutečňovat jen humanitní socialismus (Our country has the opportunity to show the absurdity of the occupation’s pretenses and accusations, has the opportunity to publicly establish and demonstrate solidarity, resistance, and the will to live freely, and to realize humanitarian socialism). (3:46–4:04)

Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty Czechoslovak Broadcasting
28 August 1968

Context: the mood of restraint.

Alexander James Brown provides some helpful context for the anti-nuclear movement. He explains the “mood of restraint” in post-3/11 society, an “atmosphere” built on tragedy and spun with threads of ugly feelings: anxiety, uncertainty, failure (39). The Japanese people were “stupefied,” “overwhelmed,” and “confused,” in the words of activist Amamiya Karin, by the series of unknowns leading to and following after the triple disaster (qtd. 43). How can someone make sense of a disaster with unknown causes and unknown effects? As organizer Oda Masanori writes of the anti-war movement,

People dashed outside with this feeling of being at one’s wits end, of being unable to bear this suffocating feeling. (qtd. 46)

It’s suffocating—the static, stubborn not-knowing, the not-speaking, not-expressing, not-doing—such that a person might be compelled to “dash outside” in hopes of any change at all. And still, only silence.

As I wrote in my last blog post, without a catalyst, ugly feelings might continue without end alongside the everyday. That’s just what the mood of restraint called for, a catalyst for “emotional release,” and that’s what it found in the form of protest, according to Brown (41):

Affective protest creates space for the expression of emotions, particularly negative emotions, which otherwise may not be socially acceptable. (43)

Protest, in words and body, allows for the release of pent-up anger, frustration, and blame, and of the hopelessness that comes with inaction (64). Through the play of sound demonstrations, it can tend to “feelings of powerlessness,” or the impotence recognized and resisted by stuplimity (48). A sort of disorganization can help, too, as countering the mood of restraint didn’t have to mean defending a single argument or posing a single solution, but might instead take the nebulous shape of solidarity.

This is what we find in humanERROR—a performative protest that resists the mood of restraint by giving voice to the fury, the frustration, the indignation, and most of all the silence following 3/11. It’s a protest in the name of feeling, not reasoning; of experience, not ideology. When the vocalist is seen from a low angle, framed against clear sunny skies, we see this best. In those moments, he isn’t preaching to Japan, but screaming into the skies in a visceral act. “This is no time for hair-splitting arguments” (9:14).

Context: place, time, body.

By nature of performing, speaking, even being in public, Frying Dutchman put themselves at risk. Not bodily, in the strictest sense, as would be the case in or near exclusion zones, for example, but in mind or spirit. Breaking the silence, they enter into a state of being vulnerable to the censorship upheld as much by the powers of government, corporation, and media as by society and the self. That’s the price of confronting the expectations of group conformity, as Brown describes through sociologist Shibuya Nozomu (42). Vulnerability is the price of bodily assembly, which “puts livable life at the forefront of politics” (Butler 18).

The protest of bodies assembled in the street (and let’s not forget other forms of protest: by nature, such as those in virtual space, or by necessity, as in the hunger strikes of prisoners) calls attention to what Judith Butler calls interdependencies. humanERROR embodies the feelings shared by many Japanese, especially in this historical moment, but also the basic needs of human life—safe access to public space, air, mobility, land, shelter, sustenance—which are denied to some by the nuclear power industry and threatened for all of material life in the nuclear age. Butler explains:

What I am suggesting is that it is not just that this or that body is bound up in a network of relations, but that the body, despite its clear boundaries, or perhaps precisely by virtue of those boundaries, is defined by the relations that make its own life and action possible. (130)

Frying Dutchman are working to strive in concert, as Butler would say, to demonstrate the symbiosis between one body and all other bodies, one individual and all of society. They suggest, I depend on you, and you on me. We have to work together.

Frying Dutchman invite participation from anyone who crosses their path, on the street or with a flyer, to witness in the moment or replay after the fact. They “accept a kind of unchosen dimension to our solidarity with others” (Butler 152). The vocalist, especially, moves across speech, scream, and melody, giving voice to more than one response to 3/11. He moves across space, too, directing address to three crowds: passers-by pausing along the bridge, the audience standing on the shore, and viewers watching online. And the performance moves across time as well, as people go about their way, search for more information online, tell a friend, share a video, play the audio at home or in a demonstration.

Content: evocations and other effects.

For me, what’s most effective about humanERROR is its evocative potential. The cyclical, lo-fi rhythm as backdrop to exclamatory and at times harsh vocals reminds me of a song by the Velvet Underground, “The Gift.” Whereas “The Gift” privileges rhythm over speech, Frying Dutchman balance the audio with clear emphasis on vocals. Lou Reed tells the story of Waldo Jeffers, a lovesick teenager who mails himself to his college girlfriend, Marsha, only to be impaled by a sheet metal cutter, “(thud),” when Marsha’s friend opens the package. He narrates this without feeling, as if it were simply a matter of fact. The performance in humanERROR tells an equally absurd and morbid story, that of nuclear energy, with an affective tone. It’s not a comparison that works for everyone—but I can imagine endless associations for those who protest against precarity.

A more relatable example might be that of place. I’m not familiar with the specific setting of humanERROR, but, similar to the audio, the visuals resonate with personal experience. The setting reminds me of long afternoons sitting along Náplavka, the bank of the Vltava River in Prague, just below the busy street of Rašínovo nábřeží. There, on any given Saturday, you’d find local beer, live music, and food markets. Náplavka brings back a host of sensations—the sun in my eyes, a cool spring breeze—but most of all it reminds me of time, or the absence of time. It reminds me of whole days spent without a thought for time, the excitement of opening a new book, the wandering of good conversation. It’s the sort of place that makes a person appreciate the moments, and the infrastructure, that make life livable.

To conclude, “demonstrations do not need to make specific demands” (Brown 49). humanERROR may ask participants to “wake up” (like Shiriagari Kotobuki, as we read last week) to the propaganda in the media, the dishonesty of the government, and the exploitation throughout nuclear histories. It may advocate for hydroelectric and geothermal power. What it doesn’t do, though, is frame action between only two possibilities, a population targeted or protected (Butler 144). Rather, humanERROR embodies a call to act, and leaves open which specific action one might take: “Each of us must now carefully consider various information with an open mind and decide our own opinion” (humanERROR Parade).

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 8

The Challenges of Writing Nuclear Futures

1 Comment

“Nuclear Futures in the Post-Fukushima Age Conference” was an amazing opportunity to see the topics of nuclear time, nuclear risk, and especially writing about nuclear futures from a variety of professors from the fields of both Japanese and Germanic studies. A topic that I noticed was a theme in many of the presentations was the difficulty of writing about nuclear futures. The obvious choice when writing about anything to do with nuclear technology is to choose a desolate post-apocalyptic world with no government or social order. Although it can send an effective message about the dangers of nuclear technology, it rarely offers any way of preventing the disaster, dealing with disaster as it happens or recovering from the disaster. Usually the only solace in these stories is either overthrowing a tyrannical ruler or finding a hidden oasis of natural resources, neither of these solutions are realistic nor even a long-term solution. So creating a myth narrative that does not solely rely on a doomsday or apocalypse scenario proves to be both important and difficult. The importance of dealing with the problems of a nuclear disaster, both during and afterwards, is the myth narrative the scholars in the field of nuclear futures wants to emphasize. Donna J. Haraway calls it “Staying with the Trouble” and the “Chthulucene,” i.e. not relying on the future to fix our problems and instead focusing on the here and now.

Professor Suzuko Mousel Knott offered some incredible insight on the idea of writing nuclear futures as a myth narrative, about which she suggests “myth is a narrative of the past and also explains the present and tries to illuminate the future.” She suggests another problem for the doomsday narrative for nuclear futures is that the idea of an apocalypse is mostly a western and Christian-toned construct. Japanese myth and religion do not really have a doomsday or an apocalyptic event that ends the world: it has a more cycle of life and death, which is a more eastern ideal. She highlights the “untranslatability of catastrophe” as a challenge of writing about nuclear futures. Slow violence, changing time-scales and temporalities are very difficult concepts to explain or visualize in writing. She explains changing time-scales and temporalities of myth through the novel The Emissary by Yoko Tawada. Time-scales are challenged from the start by the two main characters, Yoshiro and Mumei. Yoshiro is over 100 years old and still rather naive and active, and Mumei the sickly child is wise-beyond-his-years. The temporalities of myth come into play as well, both di-temporality and synchronicity, when Mumei views the world map for the first time and passes out. He awakes around 10 years in the future, where he is in a wheelchair and his grandfather is still alive. He goes on to have a wonderful date with the girl he met outside his house wearing the strange suit, who has also aged around 10 years. He is allowed to experience a “normal life” for this short period of time, only to again pass out and awakens as a child again only to die shortly after. His last thought being “I’m all right. I had a really nice dream,” a rather fitting end for this child stuck between shifting temporalities. Dr. Knott stated it best that disasters “ruin known time-scales and temporalities,” as well as “make cyclical time seems impossible,” and “make untold futures seem more likely.” We have to face these problems and many others when trying to write about nuclear futures and environmental humanities.

Image result for the emissary yoko tawada

(https://www.ndbooks.com/book/the-emissary/)

Professor Bradley Boovy also offered fascinating concepts on the transcorporeality and transtemporality of nuclear radiation. He describe the boundaries between living organisms and the surrounding ecosystem as a “thin and permeable membrane,” through which radiation can easily pass. Relating this idea to human life may be difficult or confusing, so many authors use animals to describe the thin and permeable membrane between living organisms and their ecosystems. Professor Boovy uses the famous three-eyed fish Blinky from The Simpsons, who is mutated by waste from the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. He suggests the fish depicts how the water systems and fish are more susceptible to radiation and contamination, that the membrane between sea life and their ecosystem is an incredibly thin and invisible membrane. By using animals as an analogy or even as a whimsical lens helps us understand how the borders between our lives and ecosystem are thin, even if we try to ignore it with science and technology. While at the same time providing some relief with some of the difficulties of writing about nuclear futures. Professor Boovy also cites the book Bad Environmentalism and suggests that nuclear futures writers “reject the doomsday aesthetic.” He further suggests that nuclear disasters and radiation “transcend space and time,” and that there is “no ‘outside’ the contamination zone or death zone,” which are concepts that challenge conventional temporality and time-scales. These final suggestions, along with the difficulties of nuclear future writing, stood out to me as one of the most significant challenges facing the environmental humanities as a field of study.

Image result for blinky fish simpsons

(http://www.sfweekly.com/news/is-blinky-the-simpsons-three-eyed-fish-headed-for-san-francisco/)