Tag Archives: futurity

Final Prompt

An Exciting Summer for Nuclear Futures and Environmental Humanities – (Contains some spoilers)

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Since the end of our spring semester class, there have been two media blockbusters (the television miniseries Chernobyl and the film Godzilla: King of Monsters) that have made an immense impact on premium cable and the box office respectively. Chernobyl is an HBO historical drama miniseries that serves as a graphic and in-depth recounting of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster. Godzilla: King of the Monsters is the sequel to the 2014 Godzilla movie, but more than that it is a rather significant reboot of the new multimedia franchise and fictional universe, called the “MonsterVerse ” which also includes King Kong and his new movies.
Chernobyl is a five episode miniseries on HBO, a premium cable network, and was introduced right after the world-famous Game of Thrones series came to an end. The show itself is an excellent retelling of the specific events that happened in the early morning of April 26, 1986. The beginning of the show is the accident itself from the perspective of workers inside the nuclear power plant before, during, and after the explosion. It offers immense and accurate scientific background and information about how a nuclear power plant operates as well as what exactly went wrong inside the reactor to cause the disaster. Fortunately viewers will not get lost in a sea of nuclear physics jargon, because the scientific numbers and data get put in terms that everyone can understand for the sake of one of the main characters who is not a physicist but is a top bureaucratic official for Mikhail Gorbechev. In addition to the in-depth look we get at the nuclear power plant, we also get an equally fascinating view inside the Kremlin, the secret meeting spot for the top officials of the Soviet Union. It is here we get the full display of subterfuge, conspiracy theories, and the questionable decision making of the Soviet Union due to paranoia, pride and obsession.
One of the most significant aspects of the show is the in-depth perspectives of the main characters: an accomplished physicist with a terrible secret and a life-long bureaucrat questioning his lifetime of work. This gives us a chance to see inside two incredibly important communist institutions: the Kremlin, and the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. However, arguably the best part of the show is the graphic detail put forth to show the damage and dangers of nuclear radiation. The special effects showing the catastrophic power of the exposed core are phenomenal. One moving example is when the first of the firefighters on the scene accidentally touches a smoldering piece of exploded core material and within minutes viewers see that the radiation has eaten through his gloves and has already severely burned his hand. Radiation sickness is gruesomely brought to a new and hideous light in the show, as horrible disfiguring boils, lesions, tumors and scars eventually make the characters unrecognizable and virtually inhuman in appearance. The Chernobyl miniseries gives new material vibrancy to nuclear radiation, a topic which many people may not be familiar with, and gives the general public a horribly vivid example of slow violence. The damage slowly caused by nuclear radiation sickness that torments the human body and horrifically changes down to the cellular level.
There is one rather significant drawback to the show: all of the actors are British and nearly the entire script of the show is in English. This takes away from the full immersion of being in the Soviet Union during the Chernobyl accident and gives the sense of a British reenactment rather than an authentic Eastern European account. There are some parts of Russian dialogue and announcements and more often than not they were not translated, leaving us foreign in a supposedly genuine Soviet retelling. This does not make the show unwatchable, but it is definitely something viewers will notice .
Godzilla has represented the seen and unseen damage of nuclear radiation and technology for more than 50 years. He has gone from rampaging monster to protector guardian several times and has had his appearance changed as well. He has often reflected the general understanding and consensus of nuclear power of the time. However the impact of nuclear radiation on the environment has been a very strong premise in the Godzilla movie franchise. Godzilla: King of the Monsters changes that and makes it one of the major plot points in the movie.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters starts right after the disaster in San Francisco that Godzilla caused in 2014. Since that attack, many of the “titans” or gigantic radioactive monsters have been discovered and researched by a quasi-governmental agency called “Monarch.” As the movie quickly progresses, other titans are awoken by various means: some wake up on their own and some are awoken by an Eco-terrorism group that believes the titans will bring environmental balance back to the earth, a balance they believe humans have disrupted. In support of this claim, there is scientific and physical evidence of nature flourishing and thriving wherever the titans roam or rest. The movie also mentions how the nuclear radiation given off by the titans accelerates natural growth and actually heals the planet. The plot picks up when the Eco-terrorists awaken “Monster Zero,” or “King Ghidorah”: a three-headed, two-tailed, lightning-emitting, flying monster. King Ghidorah eventually awakens the remaining titans and causes them to go on a destructive rampage wherever they reside. However, Godzilla ends up defeating him, and the other titans submit to Godzilla and become peaceful once again. This resolution provides evidence for the first time in this movie series that Godzilla may actually be here to help the earth and humans.
Overall, Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a CGI-masterpiece thrill ride, but the acting and plot leave a lot to be desired. The struggle between Monarch and the actual government seems tedious and unnecessary, while the overall goals of the Eco-terrorism group is a bit one-dimensional. However, it brings a lot of new ideas and premises to the Godzilla “MonsterVerse.” There is a subtle yet powerful message of nuclear futurity and environmental humanities that cannot be ignored. Although the titans give off massive amounts of nuclear radiation and destroy entire cities, the simple solution of destroying the monsters is not a viable option as it only causes more destruction. The titans have become part of the planet and we have to learn to deal with the problems we create. The idea that we must learn from our past mistakes and work with them in order to fix them (like in the course text Staying with the Trouble) is a fundamentally important principle of Environmental Humanities. Hopefully this subtle yet powerful message is a recurring theme and message in the evolving “MonsterVerse” movie franchise.

Additionally, Dark just released its second season on Netflix today. So hopefully we will have more things to discuss about nuclear futurity.

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 2

Anti-Natal Futures

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As a queer person with no interest in raising children, I feel a personal stake in Sarah Ensor’s conception of avuncular futurity—an ecological perspective grounded in “nonreproductive (and indirectly invested) figures” (410). Ensor’s “spinster stands in a kind of slanted or oblique relationship to the linear, vertical paradigms of transmission that govern familiar notions of futurity” (416). As the strange aunt of the future, the spinster reminds us of contingencies, paths not taken, alternate relations, networks of non-linear being. Reading Ensor, I felt invited to imagine myself as the future’s confirmed bachelor uncle. And yet I wonder now if that is quite right. The spinster is, after all, specifically female and exclusively so in Ensor’s paper.

The spinster, we might say, is legible as a kind of social outsider precisely insofar as she has been abstracted from time. She becomes a spinster only once it has been determined that she likely has no marriageable future; when that happens, however, she also comes to have no past—or at least no past in which a future, or the desire for one, ever existed. (We need think here only of the oddly virginal resonances of the phrase old maid, which erases the spinster’s lived past in favor of a kind of ahistorical, perpetual innocence. (414)

It is the gendered social expiration date that in part enables the spinster’s out-of-time perspective and role. There is no male correlate to “old maid.” (Interesting that there is too no aunt correlate to avuncular.) Indeed, the winking “confirmed bachelor” suggests not a misfortune that befalls but a choice, a willful headlong orientation toward the (childless) future. Wikipedia offers a little serendipity here. “Confirmed Bachelor” redirects to an article called “He never married,” which is described as “a code phrase used by obituary writers in the United Kingdom as a euphemism for the deceased having been homosexual.” With “he never married,” often the last words of an obituary, the subject is identified as queer at the same time that he is written out of the present and the future. These are final words that relegate queerness to a past that is dead and disconnected. My point with this response is not to discredit or even really critique Ensor’s spinster futurity. Rather, I wonder what other kinds of queer futurity we might find that, like Ensor’s, reject or remediate the antisocial turn in queer scholarship. Further I think highlighting gender makes clear the feminist potential in Ensor’s work for opening modes of female futurity that do not depend on reproductive capacity. Spinster futurity, in resisting “do it for the children” kinds of environmental discourse with its oblique perspective, also opens up space to think about complex, slow, or cumulative environmental happenings outside of a neat chain of causality. In this way it seems almost the perfect match for orienting ourselves with respect to Rob Nixon’s conception of slow violence, perhaps unsurprising given both authors’ indebtedness to Rachel Carson.

In Staying with the Trouble Donna Haraway offers another reorientation toward the environmental future. Her troubled and troubling conception of the Chthulucene is similarly aligned with resistance to simple cause and effect environmentalism. Haraway’s exigence more than anything seems to be a profound awareness of limits—the limits of our ways of thinking, the limits of our narratives, the limits of our power as individuals and as a species. Haraway’s sympoietic tentacular chthonic Gaia is so impossibly complex that thinking only about one actor, element, or problem is laughably inadequate. She implicitly questions what the goal of environmentalism should be. It cannot end, she seems suggest; the chthonic ones laugh in the face of discrete goals. Her sense of a world that becomes-with is intimately connected to the Chthulucene: “an ongoing temporality that resists figuration and dating and demands myriad names” (51). I sense that it is no accident that her Chthulucene resists easy definition; in the time of the Chthulucene, present, future, and past seem to lose relevance to a billion different distributed and interdependent nows. Haraway’s embrace of “kin” over kids, a benign anti-natalism, is grounded in this profound sense of interconnectedness of time and effects as much as it is in a sense of “response-ability” for overpopulation.  In her introduction, Haraway articulates her resistance to the conception of a discrete future that leads to faith in technofixes or a sense of our efforts being “too late.” That latter futurity has a real danger of paralyzing activism. Haraway has done something remarkable in being able to overcome that panic without losing a sense of the urgency for action.

As in Ensor, I sense a potential in Haraway’s reorientation of the future to be able to better understand and represent slow violence. Indeed, slow violence seems positively tentacular. Taken together, Ensor and Haraway persuasively make a case for an alternative futurity being almost a pre-requisite for negotiating a less destructive relationship with the environment and, as Haraway suggests, moving us out of the Capitalocene (or perhaps the Neo-Liberalocene).

 

(“Future is so Queer” by Eltpics is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0)