Tag Archives: Nuclear Futures

Prompt 9

Reconnecting with Mother: A Musical Attempt to Restore Peace during the Nuclear Age.

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“Turn your back on mother nature:
—Everybody wants to rule the world” (Tears for Fears)

Perhaps because I was born in the 90s and lived most of my life in Chile, I grew-up somewhat oblivious to the veiled but seemingly inescapable nuclear-doom that took over the 80s collective imaginary. In fact, every summer vacation, while I traveled with my family to the beach, we sang along Righeira’s Vamos a la Playa (We Go to the Beach)—it seemed like the perfect anthem for our touristy goal of lying under sun and skipping the salty waves: vamos a la playa oh, oh, oh, oh.

Sadly and ironically, I was unaware that the upbeat disco song by the Italian duo Righeira was about the after-effects of the atomic-bomb; their lyrics sounded hallucinogenic and surreal and therefore fun to vocalize: “let’s go to the beach/the bomb exploded/radiation gives you a tan with a tint of blue/the radioactive air ruffles your hair/the sea is finally clean/no more stinky fishes, only fluorescent water” (vamos a la playa, la bomba estalló/las radiaciones tuestan y matizan de azul/el viento radioactivo despeina los cabellos/al fin el mar es limpio/no más peces hediondos, sino agua fluorescentes). Moreover, and until yesterday, I ignored that back in the 80s the song occupied the third place on the West German charts (Klimke and Stapane120), and that it was one among the many pop-songs that addressed both the fear and the absurdity of a very possible nuclear war. How eerie it is to think now that the songs that cheered our beach-trips were also the political and aesthetic representations of a stance against nuclear-annihilation.

Although this musical scenario appears to be both ludicrous and grotesque, I believe it vividly represents the zeitgeist of the 80s, for the “artists cosmos” of that time —with all its surreal rhetoric— sought to counterbalance the “new American nuclear weapons” that had the power to “trigger nuclear doom, threatening to destroy the planet” (Klimke and Stapane 123). As the artists from 1982’s Peace Festival in Germany put it: their music festivals were a strong opposing force precisely because they combined “criticism and joy”, “opposition and fun”. One may be prone to sneer at their colorful idealism, however, if it were not for the strategic use of music and ironic criticism, the world of today might be nothing but space-dust.

I believe it was this restless spirit that Germany’s Green Party decided to embrace, thus moving away from conventional politics and exploiting, in a very strategic and organized way, the non-rational aspects that music and art had to offer. The artists from the Grüne Raupe declared: “we have to appeal to more than just bare [rational] understanding […] activism arises not only through insight into necessities but also through an inner emotion that is often triggered by sung and structured lyrics, by music and dance” (Klimke and Stapane 131). In fact, back in the 1960s The Beatles had already stood on that ground, for they mocked American nationalism and muddled the underlying binarism of good (U.S.) versus evil (U.S.S.R.) by singing from the perspective of someone that is glad to be back in the U.S., back in the U.S., back in the U.S.S.R! As the letters “u” and “s” morphed into the unexpected assemblage of “u-s-s-r”, the feeling of “being home” became foreign, obliging the listener to engage with a different affective setup. The Californian melody that accompanied the lyrics helped to accomplish the perceptive trick of blurring the lines between the “u-s” (pun intended) and the “other”, consequently denouncing the absurdity of such conflict/affair between nations.

In this sense, the Green Party and its playful engagement with the musical scene of the 80s reminds us of the “spontaneous anti-aesthetic” (Klimke and Stapane 132) that has the power to lift people from a state of stupefaction and defeat, and, through a language that is essentially performative, stir people’s imaginations—ultimately giving rise to a collective space that fosters alternative forms of futurity, in which “dying young” and “living forever”[1] have become the central axis of an uncertain and barren present. This was also the main goal of the Grüne Raupe’s artists: i.e. “to have uncompromising courage to tell the truth and to seek utopia; to be a politics with imagination” (129). It seems that the only effective weapons for fighting the silent and stable violence that wobbles under the nuclear-nonsense are the electric and surreal sounds that speak of/from fear and rage[2]. The medium is the message!

From Germany’s music-scene we have the examples of Nena’s 99 Luftballons and Alphaville’s Forever Young—both artists sing in a cheerful manner about the childish and obstinate games that have the power to obliterate our sense of ecological-wisdom[3] and ecological-safety. We can also find earlier examples from the English music-scene: Kate Bush’s 1980s hit Breathing depicts the invisible toxicity that permeates a mother’s womb and feeds radioactive particles to the fetus; in a world in which after the blast chips of plutonium are twinkling in every lung, all living things seem to become tombs within the womb, or to perish before growth. Indeed, this reminds us of a home (a mother/a planet) that suddenly develops into a pool of toxic waste, thus devouring its own offspring in an attempt to defend herself from a fictitious enemy (an “other”, a “u-s-s-r”).


-Kate Bush dressed as a fetus inside a (plastic) womb-

The year before Kate Bush’s Breathing, Pink Floyd released the song Mother (1979), which also portrays the anxiety and the sense of loss that springs from war, deception, and threat. Its most striking image, I believe, comes from the lyrics that speak of a mother that promises protection, yet, as she attempts to keep her promise, she also implants the seed of fear and destruction in her son:

Hush now baby, baby, don’t you cry.
Mama’s gonna make all your nightmares come true.
Mama’s gonna put all her fears into you.
Mama’s gonna keep you right here under her wing.
She won’t let you fly, but she might let you sing.
Mama’s gonna keep baby cozy and warm.
Ooh baby, ooh baby, ooh baby,
Of course mama’s gonna help build the wall.

This cannot but remind us of the sense of protection that an age of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy tries to sell us, and in which nations (such as America in the 80s) become abusive mothers, building walls and making all our nightmares come true. However, there is only one thing that this monstrous-mother might let you do: she might let you sing. When the senseless threat of a nuclear war has permeated every corner of our homes, pleas can only take the shape of music, of melodic tunes that escape the conventional-rational arguments of a politicized universe. And, it is precisely this tangential mode of representation that challenged the state of affairs imposed by a slow but omnipresent form of violence during the 80s —momentarily breaking the ruling Kūki[4] of the time. In Lefevre’s terms, one could argue that during the Cold War the live-in space built by musicians was the antidote to the conceived-space built by an omnipresent and hegemonic nuclear empire (Manabe 16). By being boisterous, grotesque, and bold, music sought to create both a second chance and a second space where fetuses could be safely nourished through a non-contaminated umbilical cord.

In a New York Times’ article (2016), a writer argues that in recent years Nena’s 99 Luftballons has taken on a second life within karaoke-bars, where it has become a song mostly sung by women: “there’s something about the sense of doom in that song that female karaoke singers seem to respond to”—I wonder how much of this has to do with a sense of restoration, or with a sense of western relief regarding the almost complete loss of that which we call “home”/“mother”.

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[1]Lyrics from Alphaville’s Forever Young.
[2]It is interesting to pause on the 80s aesthetic, for the musicians’ hairdos and garments make them look like the survivors of a nuclear bombing, i.e. all disheveled and covered by a combination of dark and neon colors.
[3]This was one of the Green Party’s ideological pillars.
[4]This is the Japanese concept for “atmosphere”: “a system of social, psychological, and political pressures requiring compliance with group norms” (Manabe 112).
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Works Cited:

__Klimke, Martin and Laura Stapane. “From Artists from Peace to the Green Caterpillar”. Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fears, and the Cold War of the 1980s, Cambridge University Press, 2017.
__Manabe, Noriko. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Oxford University Press, 2015.
__Edwards, Gavin. Missed the ’80s? Nena, and ‘99 Luftballons,’ Alights Live in America. New York Times, Oct. 2, 2016.

Music Mentioned in the Blog-Post:

__Everybody Wants to Rules the World by Tears for Fears.
__Vamos a la Playa by Righeira.
__Back in the U.S.S.R. by The Beatles.
__Breathing by Kate Bush.
__Mother by Pink Floyd.
__99 Luftballons by Nena.
__Forever Young by Alphaville.

Images:
__1st image taken from Pink Floyd’s movie The Wall.
__2nd image taken from Kate Bush’s music-video Breathing.

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 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.

Prompt 4

Nuclear Cosmopolitanism

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I’m interested in Bronsky’s novel for how it can be read against what Sheri-Marie Harrison calls the neoliberal novel of migrancy.  Harrison writes that the novel of migrancy, while traditionally being an account of the entanglement between identity and place, takes on different exigence when contemporary stories “formally position migrant subjects as analogues of capital” (203). 

Two central imperatives that Harrison identifies in the classic immigrant novel are national assimilation, which suggests that a sense of rootedness (to place or nation) is the key to individual identity and cosmopolitanism (the movement between nations that instantiates that journey) which exists as its opposite number. In the classic immigrant novel, these two imperatives are joined. They operate together to inform the changes that identity undergoes as individuals move about within global structures.

Harrison’s intervention lies in her suggestion that the neoliberal novel of migrancy “breaks down the classic immigrant novel’s standard trajectory from ethnic identity to national cosmopolitanism, replaying this simple, linear trajectory with a free-floating transnational cosmopolitanism more akin to that of capital itself than that of the assimilated citizen” (203). However, rather than suggesting a full on critique of cosmopolitanism in its similarities to the flow of capital across borders, she argues that by allying the notion of human capital with the literal flow of bodies within cosmopolitanism, these stories highlight “a contradictory tension between cosmopolitanism’s endorsement of unallied global mobility and the rootedness of national assimilation” because the nation itself is no longer a fixed goal. The journey to a new nation in the novel, instead of standing for itself operates as mirror for “neoliberal capital’s paradoxical reliance on the nation as an economic mechanism that can facilitate competitive conditions for the free flow of capital and increasing globalized wealth (203-4).

Why I find Bronsky’s novel relevant to this discussion is in how it repudiates cosmopolitanism itself in how it privileges singular, isolated space as being central to identity in a world post-nuclear disaster.  Baba Dunja and the other returnee’s to Tschernowo operate outside of the generally recognized flow of capital in their isolated village.  As Bronsky describes it, it exists outside of the flow of a lot of things, a kind of silent oasis amongst the radiation. 

What I would never trade for running water and a telephone in Tschernowo is the matter of time. Here there is no time. There are no deadlines and no appointments. In essence, our daily routine is a sort of game. We are reenacting what people normally do. Nobody expects anything of us. We don’t have to get up in the morning or go to bed at night. For all anyone cares, we could do it the other way around. We imitate daily life the same way children do with dolls, or when they’re playing store. (Bronsky 95).

Tschernowo, despite its wastelandish makeup, is the perfect place to stage this discussion of identity and emplacement because it is a place that has no exploitable value under capitalism. Tschernowo and other locations within exclusion zones–or what Baba Dunja calls “death zones” trouble notions of the specific value of certain places within a neoliberal framework. While at the same time, the uneasy, blurred boundary prompts readers to consider larger questions of the impact of nuclear disaster because, as Baba Dunja notes, the notion that the death zones “[stop] at the borders people draw on maps” is facile (43). 

We’ve talked a lot about the importance of intentional community in class as well as the power found in emplaced thinking. Considering Bronsky’s novel as a means of re-reading migrancy under neoliberal capitalism allows us to probe what it means to return to, rather than escape from, disaster as a means of empowerment and solidarity. Baba Dunja’s Last Love models an emplaced knowledge that is based on both individual and communal identities. Individual in that Baba Dunja prioritizes self-reliance and personal responsibility. Communal in that she conceives of the above identities as thriving best within a place that prioritizes rhythm of life extensive with nature.  The characters’ return frames a different kind of cosmopolitanism–one predicated not on the flow of capital, but on a resistance to that flow for the sake of putting down deeper roots. 

One final point I’d like to add is in how Baba Dunja complicates neoliberal capital’s imperative to personal responsibility. While I do not believe that Tschernowo is a libertarian dream-land, as I noted above, the village exists in a space that has no value in economic terms, and all of the activity done there, by old bodies with no intention of increasing human-capital, sits outside the system laughing.

Also, as a side note, here’s this interesting essay I stumbled upon while Googling about place and identity in literature. I can’t really speak about it here, but it’s something I’m hoping to read over the break, and since it seems related to the work we’re doing in class, I wanted to share it here.

  1. “The Neoliberal Novel of Migrancy.” Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture. Edited by Mitchum Huehls and Rachel Greenwald Smith, Johns Hopkins, 2017. pp. 203-219.