Tag Archives: Timescale

Prompt 8

The Challenges of Writing Nuclear Futures

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“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/)

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

Time scales from the human perspective

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Question 3.  How does environmental devastation, and nuclear disaster in particular, challenge received human time scales?

 

Time scale is an arrangement of events used to measure the relative or absolute duration of a period of time. There are several different time scales that are used to describe different events and phenomena. We use geological time scale to describe the history of the earth, often in millions or billions of years. However, historic or human time scale is the one to describe the events of humans; it is usually described in days, months, years, decades, and/or centuries. This is very short compared to other time scales, seeming almost insignificant. To humans a year is a long time and a decade is even longer; humans can barely fathom what an entire century entails, without looking to their parents or grandparents.

Technology has changed or received notion of time scales, with innovations of transportation, construction, and distribution of information, travel and construction is done at a much faster rate. Thus environmental disasters that could disrupt the channels of transportation, construction and information could alter our current notions of human time scale. This is the precariousness of modernity and futurity. Assuming technology will always be there to make our lives easier creates precariousness that we do not even consider. Environmental disasters are always going to exist and affect the lives of humans and this creates a pervasive sense of precariousness. These effects compound and our modernist reliance on technology results in an even more precarious life.

The dangers of environmental devastation of ordinary fossil fuels are starting to be understood rather than ignored. Greenhouse gases, melting of the polar ice caps, acidification of the oceans are all things that are finally being discussed on a transnational scale. Their effects on the world challenge our notion of time because of how slowly they change the earth, over decades and centuries. Since humans cannot see this happen in their daily lives it is often dismissed as a problem for others, so scholars came up with the term “slow violence” to describe things that affect our lives but are not seen or felt in our everyday lives. Rob Nixon describes slow violence as, “gradual, out of sight, delayed destruction across space and time.”

Nuclear technology is a source of energy for many developed nations in the world. It is powerful, efficient and uses less natural resources than the technology of fossil fuels. It often seems like the source of energy of modernity, futurity, and neoliberalism. Unfortunately this technology has dangers that are not as obvious as smog, greenhouse gases, and the bleaching of coral reefs. The dangers of nuclear technology come from the radioactive materials used in the creating of the energy and the waste that is left over afterwards. One form of the technology is used for making bombs of devastating destruction. Besides the obvious devastation of the bomb itself, there is another dangerous form of violence that is left long after the bomb has detonated. Rob Nixon describes this “slow violence” by talking about the Marshall Islands after 67 nuclear bomb “tests” between 1948 and 1958: “In 1956 the Atomic Energy Commission declared the Marshall Islands ‘by far the most contaminated place in the world’, a condition that compromise independence in the long term.” This is a perfect example of how nuclear disasters, such as constant nuclear bomb “tests” can challenge our notions of human time scales. By simply testing our technology in a foreign country, we set back another nation’s entire independence for decades.

Cesium-137, the result of the fission between uranium and plutonium, has a half-life of about 30 years and is very common in nuclear technology. It has been released into the air from the accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima. Cesium-137 also spreads quickly in nature because of its high water solubility. Before nuclear technology Cesium-137 was not present on earth in significant quantities for around 1.7 billion years, again challenging our notion of human time scale. We know from Little Voices From Fukushima of how it would take over 40 years to clean Japan of Cesium-137. In Precarious Japan Anne Allison describes how the events of 3/11 in Fukushima reintroduced the stigma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, terms like genpatsu nanmin (nuclear-refugee) and hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors). Showing how nuclear devastations can span decades, generations, and even centuries further challenges our notion of human time scale.

The convenience of technology and the precariousness it creates, especially from nuclear technology, fundamentally challenges our notion of a human time scale. While technology enhances development of moving, building, and learning more efficiently over the course of decades and centuries, environmental devastation can take all of that away in a few minutes or hours and leave us with repercussions that last years, decades or even longer.

 

Jordan Foster