The Biocapital of Living–and the Art of Dying–After Fukushima

Nicole Shukin (bio)
University of Victoria

Abstract

After Fukushima, a tiny handful of “refuseniks” defied the government’s orders to evacuate a twenty-kilometer zone around the damaged reactors in the region. Rather than relocating to temporary shelters, several refuseniks remained in the zone to care for livestock who had been abandoned, and whose market value had been ruined by exposure to radiation. This essay formulates their defiance as an “art of dying” in order to amplify its potential to undermine resilience as a resource of the biopolitical and nuclear state, and to open up the possibility of a post-capitalist animality within the nuclear ruins.

Introduction: “After Fukushima”

The recent disaster referred to in shorthand as 3/11, that is, the meltdown of several nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in east Japan triggered by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, isn’t only a compound catastrophe that realizes the lethal gamble of nuclear energy. Despite the slash or tear in the historical calendar that 3/11 seeks to rend, the disaster shorthand paradoxically places 3/11 in lineage with the earlier rupture of 9/11. Far from the isolated event that a catastrophe ostensibly signifies, 3/11 throws the serialization of disasters in neoliberal times into relief, including even the anticipation of a sequel. Other resource or energy accidents prior to 3/11 may have similarly appeared exceptional in their scale and deadliness, yet the contingent singularity of each disaster is belied by an iterability that links them within a chain of neoliberal catastrophes to which we are becoming accustomed: Fukushima, Deepwater Horizon, Chernobyl, Exxon Valdez, Bhopal, and so on.

What characterizes this chain of disasters as neoliberal isn’t simply the unaccountability of resource multinationals whose aggressive economic activities are enabled, to a historically unprecedented degree, by a state that now “secures, advances, and props the economy” rather than protecting against its excesses, as Wendy Brown puts it (64). While “the socialization of risk accompanying the privatization of gain” is certainly illustrated by 3/11, this dynamic does not describe the full impact of neoliberalism (Brown 72). Following Brown, who herself builds upon Foucault’s lectures on the subject, the fuller achievement of neoliberalism is the enlargement of “economy” into an all-pervasive epistemology and ontology, raising “the market itself to a principle of all life or of government” (Brown 61). The economy is “detached from exclusive association with the production or circulation of goods and the accumulation of wealth” and attached to an array of arch-organizing “principles, metrics, and modes of conduct, including for endeavors where monetary profit and wealth are not at issue” (Brown 62). For Foucault and Brown, neoliberalism constitutes a “governing rationality” (Brown 9) capable of revolutionizing the very meaning and matter of life and death by virtue of stealthily implanting market reasoning into every sphere of existence, “from mothering to mating, from learning to criminality, from planning one’s family to planning one’s death” (Brown 67). It is no surprise, then, that even an environmental and social catastrophe like 3/11 gets reconstituted as a neoliberal object lesson and growth opportunity. Far from memorializing an unrepeatable tragedy, 3/11 betrays something about the ontological power of a hegemonic form of economic reason to systematically make allowances for, and subjectively condition us to accept, serial catastrophes as an inevitability of life in the twenty-first century.

Yet as Brown also notes, neoliberalism is neither inevitable nor homogeneous; how it manifests in the nuclear nation of Japan before and after Fukushima is clearly different from “the neoliberalism of the 1970s” or from “neoliberalism as an experiment on and in the Third World” (49). Neoliberalism “ranges and changes temporally and geographically” (49), a global phenomenon that is “ubiquitous and omnipresent, yet disunified and nonidentical with itself” (48). More crucially, how the seeming inevitability of a neoliberal nuclear industry and its ontological conditions and effects are contested after Fukushima is overdetermined in nationally and historically specific ways for the Japanese. After all, Fukushima represents both “the unthinkable return of radiation” in Japan (Lippit, “Instead”) and, as Anne Allison notes in Precarious Japan, a post-War quagmire of precarity arising from unprecedented forms of precarious labor, social insecurity, and environmental contamination (13). The nuclear nation’s exposure of its own population to radioactive risk through the “peaceful” production of atomic energy needs to be placed in historical relation with the specific forms of precarity accompanying neoliberalism in Japan as well as with the earlier acts of total war suffered by the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.¹

Jean-Luc Nancy notes that when he was asked to speak to what it means to philosophize “after Fukushima,” the question evoked for him Adorno’s declaration that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz, and he voices a concern that co-conjuring Auschwitz and Fukushima in this way risks minimizing the incommensurability of two separate horrors (1). Worried by the sinister rhyme of Fukushima with Hiroshima, Nancy cautions against confusing “the name Hiroshima–the target of enemy bombing–with that of Fukushima, a name in which are mingled several orders of natural and technological, political and economic phenomena” (13). And he recalls the insistence by philosopher Satoshi Ukai that “‘Fukushima’ does not suffice to designate all the regions affected (he names the counties of Miyagi and Iwate) …” (13).

Yet Nancy nonetheless probes for an actual commensurability that does require linking and thinking such different disasters together. Auschwitz can be likened to Hiroshima, proposes Nancy, when both are recognized as disastrous precursors of Fukushima, acts of annihilation made possible by the fusion of technoscientific rationality and a globalized system of general equivalence into a devastating combine that begins self-proliferating interests and ends in chilling indifference to the living. Regarding what is common to Auschwitz and Hiroshima, Nancy has this to say:

The significance of these enterprises that overflow from war and crime is in fact in every instance a significance wholly included within a sphere independent of the existence of a world: the sphere of a projection of possibilities at once fantastical and technological that have their own ends, or more precisely whose ends are openly for their own proliferation, in the exponential growth of figures and powers that have value for and by themselves, indifferent to the existence of the world and all of its beings. (12)

The subsumption of all spheres of existence, values, and activities into a “regime of general equivalence” (a market economy in which money, according to Marx, renders all things commensurable or exchangeable) in combination with a technological civilization whose “fantastical” projections become self-serving ends with no relation to existence: this co-proliferation of indifferent technology and indifferent equivalence is, in Nancy’s view, the continuous disaster within which Fukushima calls to be understood. He writes, “the regime of general equivalence henceforth virtually absorbs, well beyond the monetary or financial sphere but thanks to it and with regard to it, all the spheres of existence of humans, and along with them all things that exist” (5). To imagine philosophy, not to mention a future, “after Fukushima” requires, then, the possibility of existing aside or apart from an order of real subsumption that technologically metastasizes to the point of enfolding even disasters into capitalist chains of equivalence. At the same time, however, alternatives to global capitalism would need to emerge out of the impossibility of any “after” that could cleanly break with a history of capitalism whose technological infrastructures, toxic burdens, and radioactive traces are now irremediably insinuated into everything animate and inanimate. Thanks in particular to the radioactive resources and wastes of the nuclear economy, material life is laced with the poisonous legacy of a global nuclear industry to such an extent that even if capitalism were to be overthrown tomorrow, it would necessarily be lived as a deadly trace long into the future. In other words, any imagination of a life after capitalism, after Fukushima, will have to contend with its nuclear ruins.

In what follows, I therefore grapple with the lethality of neoliberal nuclear power in relation to a meltdown that began before 3/11 and that will persist interminably into the future. The term “meltdown” is my own shorthand for the disastrous equivalence or indifference discerned by Nancy. The unfathomable fallout from the ongoing meltdown in Japan confronts us, more particularly, with a nuclear sublime that has led other philosophers like Jacques Rancière to revisit Kant’s formulation of the sublime as the “imagination’s incapacity to present a totality to reason, analogous to its feeling of powerlessness before the wild forces of nature” (Aesthetics 89). Confronted with the sublime meltdown in Japan, I seek to direct attention to a resource that may not at first appear critical to comprehending the nuclear restart currently underway in Japan and the continuing production of nuclear energy despite (or, as we’ll see, because of) the “lesson” of Fukushima.² From the location in Canada where I write, the resource economy that might appear most pressing to engage is uranium mining. After all, the Canadian-based Cameco Corporation is a key supplier of uranium to Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), owner of the damaged nuclear reactors in Fukushima prefecture. When it comes to the resources of the nuclear economy, it would be equally tempting to excavate for the longer history of Canada’s role as a supplier of uranium through its part in the Manhattan project, recalling the national sacrifice of indigenous land, labor, and health in the mining of the uranium used in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.³ Much, no doubt, can also be said about the missing materiality of nuclear fuel after Fukushima, and about TEPCO’s attempt to locate the fuel rods in its ruined reactor No.1 by using muon tomography to produce images of a sublime core too deadly to be approached by humans (muon tomography uses the cosmic radiation of subatomic particles to penetrate matter and generate images) (“Muon”). However, as central as the mining of uranium and the sublime materiality of atomic fuel may be to the resource politics and aesthetics of nuclear power, I contend that this lethal form of energy is also heavily reliant upon a less obvious resource: that of human resourcefulness itself, or human resilience.

Resilient subjects constitute the positive, biopolitical “double” of deadly energy run amuck, given the phenomenal energy they release in reaction to/with catastrophe. As many critics of the burgeoning neoliberal interest in human and ecological resilience have noted, resilient subjects are in the first instance a product of adversity. “[C]ore to any definition of resilience,” write Brad Evans and Julian Reid, “is the ability to react and adjust positively when things go wrong; that is, resilience occurs in the presence of adversity” (32). Although resilience gets fetishized as a resourcefulness inherent to human nature and the ecosystems in which humans are embedded, it demands to be critically interrogated as a contingent form of biocapital that is shocked into existence by neoliberal catastrophe, which is to say, catastrophe allowed for and managed by an economic rationality now installed within every sphere of life. Resilience is exploited as a potent resource of flexible labor and life accustomed to the chronically precarious conditions of unlimited growth. If resilient subjectivity is accidentally produced by sudden disaster, it is also consciously cultivated and valorized by corporate and state institutions that have a stake in individuals’ and populations’ ability to subjectively manage objectively unbearable conditions of life. The capacity of resilient subjects to acclimatize to new thresholds of life and death that have been stretched beyond previously imagined limits emerges as an enabling condition of the reproduction of global capitalism and as a means of averting politicization of adversity. In short, resilient subjects constitute a resource that is invaluable in socially mitigating the deadly effects of disaster and in conditioning or preparing individuals and populations to weather future shocks that promise to be as, if not more, lethal.

By identifying capitalism with a logic of proliferation that amounts to a death drive in its indifference to “the existence of the world and all of its beings” (12), Nancy risks overlooking the degree to which the necropolitics of disaster are imbricated with the biopolitics of resilience. To put it another way, what Fukushima compels us to consider is the degree to which the inhuman rule of equivalence banks on the passionate resilience of living beings that cling to life in the face of disaster. The resilience of life-forms and life systems that, more than just surviving adversity, emerge with increased tensile strength, having learned an extreme lesson in the value of adaptability and flexibility, constitutes a species of biocapital. It does so by enabling an inflexible rule of equivalence to continuously (and disastrously) overcome not only what Marx termed “natural barriers” to capitalism (410), but also the self-impairing barriers capitalism poses to itself by damaging the very ecological conditions of life.⁴

I broach the biocapital of human resilience by focusing on a tiny but telling handful of people who defied government orders to evacuate the twenty-kilometer area around TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi plant, choosing to stay behind in unmitigated exposure to radiation. These so-called “refuseniks,”⁵ several of them bachelor farmers whose irrational stasis contrasts starkly with the mobility of thousands of nuclear refugees who relocated to temporary shelters according to the (hypocritical) biopolitics of population health and safety, arguably represent a radical rather than resilient fatalism. Their recalcitrance potentially undermines the biocapital of human resilience even as it is susceptible to recuperation by a nuclear industry and nuclear nation that would expose biological life to lethal experimentation and exploit the adaptability of those living subjects who survive. In the defiance of the handful of people who refuse relocation, the possibility of an “after Fukushima” may be glimpsed, in at least two senses. Firstly, the refuseniks show that an ontological counter-experiment from below is possible, a post-capitalist existence lived aside or apart from (yet in acute exposure to) the neoliberal nuclear economy. They ironically rehabilitate a sacrifice zone into a time-space of living and dying that opens an aporia within common sense. Secondly, the refuseniks appear to reject the available subject positions, particularly the resilient subjectivity that correlates with a neoliberal history of catastrophe and that sensibly agrees to cope with deadly capitalism. They do so, arguably, through what I call an art of dying, one that evades the pincers of both the biopolitical and the nuclear state by refusing the logics that mitigate and rationalize catastrophic capitalism.

The art of dying involves disabusing oneself and others of the illusion that the subjects of catastrophic capitalism are anything but the living dead. Yet the art of dying simultaneously robs capitalism of its sublime power, its threat, by both carrying on banal everyday life in an area declared exceptionally dangerous and by choosing a solidarity with dying that changes the subjective experience of that threat. Finally, as the comments of several refuseniks show, the art of dying takes the form of an identification or kinship with the animality of fellow creatures written off as useless once their convertibility into capital is ruined by radiation, an identification particularly with livestock that was supposed to have been culled in obedience to a government advisory but that largely ended up being abandoned to starvation in the panic of evacuation. Rejecting the self-preserving common sense of human relocation and other biopolitical strategies of building immunity to radiation, those who stay behind complicate the neoliberal language of resilience that enables deadly capitalism to have a future. But again, any “after” Fukushima or any post-capitalist existence that Fukushima’s refuseniks may germinate in the nuclear ruins is a ghostly hollowing out of a system by those who frontally face the blunt reality that the nuclear sublime ultimately makes all earthlings into the living dead. I ask, among other things, whether those residents of Fukushima who refuse to evacuate can be understood in terms of “the already dead” as elaborated by Eric Cazdyn (4), and if so, how the already dead might thwart the biocapital of resilient subjectivity and materialize the imagination of a future after, or aside from, capitalism.

In interrogating resilience as a resource of the nuclear sublime through the foil of Fukushima’s refuseniks, it becomes apparent that human resilience represents only the edge of a more specious terrain of biocapital. This terrain comprises the even greater resourcefulness of interconnected life-forms placed under severe duress that struggle to salvage basic conditions of life and, in the process, capitalism’s ecological conditions of existence. As James O’Connor emphasizes, “conditions of production” are now identical with ecological “conditions of life,” which means that any life-preserving resilience on the part of organisms or ecosystems effectively serves the reproduction of the system of capitalism (308). If the defiance posed by a scattering of refuseniks keeps open the alternative of a post-capitalist subjectivity or, more accurately, a post-capitalist animality, their example is again constantly at risk of being recuperated as a neoliberal object lesson in the value of stoically weathering deadly environments.

The Nuclear Sublime and Aesthetic Politics of (In)Visibility

The aesthetic concept that suggests itself most readily in relation to the ungraspable totality of meltdowns like Fukushima and their effects on earthly bodies is, unsurprisingly, that of the sublime. In The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico (2006), Joseph Masco troubles the fetishization of what he first called the “nuclear sublime” by asking: “What kind of cultural work is performed in the act of making something ‘unthinkable’?” (2). In relation to a Cold War American culture that was simultaneously building the atom bomb and rhetorically projecting nuclear war as unthinkable, he proposes that “to make something ‘unthinkable’ is to place it outside of language, to deny its comprehensibility and elevate it into the realm of the sublime” (3). The sublime, in Masco’s view, is ultimately an aesthetic ruse that functions to divert attention away from “the everyday social and material effects of the U.S. nuclear production complex” (4).

However, the invisibility of radiation together with the incomprehensible complexity of a system of global capitalism suggest a politics of the sublime beyond that of an aesthetic strategy of diverting attention. As Gabrielle Hecht has noted, nuclear power is a political ontology that constitutes material histories, geographies, and bodies, not to mention reorganizes the very substance of life and death (320). Masco himself illustrates the ontological politics of the nuclear economy when he notes that trace amounts of radiation from U.S. nuclear testing during the Cold War continue to be found in virtually all living tissue. “Every person on the planet now receives a certain amount of radiation each day produced by the cumulative effects of above-ground nuclear weapons tests and radioactive releases from within the global nuclear complex” (26). With the nuclear sublime, aesthetic politics become inextricable from the ontological and biological struggle of life-forms over their very conditions of survival and existence. And it is the question of what this struggle might look like, and how the living might ontologically resist rather than resiliently adjust, that becomes key to an aesthetic politics.

I’ve already suggested that the sublime disaster of the nuclear meltdown is historically supplemented by the biocapital of resilient subjects who manage to survive in increasingly lethal environments. Invoking Kant’s analytic of the sublime, Brad Evans and Julian Reid propose that the neoliberal philosophy of resilience “teaches us to live in a terrifying yet normal state of affairs that suspends us in petrified awe,” which is to say, in a de-politicized attitude before neoliberal catastrophe, dutifully soldiering on and powerless to imagine the possibility of future emancipation (16). Against this attitude of stoic acceptance, which ultimately lays the subjective conditions for unbounded capitalism, and against the negation of any possibility of making sense of or cognitively mapping a terrifying totality, Rancière proposes an aesthetic politics that would open an aporia of another kind within what he terms the “distribution of the sensible” (Politics 7). Unlike sublime terror, this aporia is produced from below, by the energy of emancipatory subjects who, unlike resilient subjects, refuse to accept continuous endangerment as their chronic lot. Rancière takes issue with Lyotard’s reversal of the Kantian notion of the sublime in the latter’s contention that matter itself (rather than supersensible ideas or reason, as in Kant’s third Critique) constitutes a sublime, inhuman “Thing” that exceeds human comprehension, and whose unrepresentability is the negative subject of postmodern art. For Rancière, Lyotard’s formulation of the sublime is tantamount to a renunciation of material history and social struggle by virtue of reducing humans to a passive posture of speechlessness before the unrepresentable. Rancière’s concern is not unrelated to the problem Evan and Reid have with neoliberal lessons in resilience designed to acclimatize subjects to the inevitability of insecure, dangerous life. As Stephen Zepke notes,

Rancière objects to how Lyotard’s sublime and avant-garde event refuses to link art’s specificity to a future emancipation, but connects it instead “to an immemorial and never-ending catastrophe” …. This, Rancière continues, “transforms every promise of emancipation into a lie” and makes “resistance” an “endless work of mourning.” (9)

Lyotard’s fault, in Rancière’s stringent view, is that he “disconnects artistic modernism from the ‘grand narrative’ of the emancipation of the proletariat and reconnects it to that of the extermination of the Jews” (qtd. in Zepke 10). In the context of Fukushima, such an aesthetic of the sublime would, in Rancière’s reading, consign people to being victims and witnesses of ongoing catastrophe rather than emancipatory actors able to intervene in material history to change its course.

The aporia of dissensus or disagreement, which Rancière formulates in place of the sublime, strikes or breaks differently into a given “distribution of sense.” As Rancière puts it, the creative struggle of people produces a radical “fissure in the sensible order by confronting the established framework of perception, thought, and action with the ‘inadmissible’” (Politics 85), introducing new claims previously deemed unthinkable or impossible. The unrepresentable, in other words, is converted into the politically possible through acts of dissensus that open a polity to “the part that previously had no part” (to echo Rancière’s terminology, 12). Rancière’s theorization of disagreement poses a stark challenge to the ontological compliance or agreement with catastrophe that is cultivated by neoliberal cultures of resilience, and his work insists that it is a positive ontology of creative existence and struggle for equality that is ultimately at stake in aesthetic politics.⁶

With this tense bundling of positions on the sublime in view, I turn to the twenty-kilometer exclusion zone declared around the Fukushima Daiichi plant following the nuclear meltdown, and to the scattering of humans who defied orders to evacuate. The occupation of this deadly geography by residents who, against common sense and governmental reason, insist on residing in homes and on farms rendered alien by radiation compels consideration of the aesthetic politics of the nuclear sublime as a political ontology involving nothing less than an art and politics of living/dying. Whether their disagreement amounts to dissensus in the Rancièrian sense, or whether it will be recuperated as resilience and as a resource of nuclear energy futures, remains to be seen. But by way of approaching this question, I want to briefly trace how the refuseniks’ irrational act of living in exposure to deadly radiation compares with other responses to the nuclear sublime that are more readily recognizable as aesthetic, possibly because in striving to make invisible radiation visible, the politics of the latter continues to inhabit a representational rather than an ontological register.

Akin to the resource aesthetics of the film documentary on Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of industrial mega-projects, Manufactured Landscapes (2006), a great deal of political art after Fukushima has revolved around the invisibility of the nuclear economy and the seemingly limitless threat of nuclear materials and wastes (recall that the half-life of a radioactive isotope like plutonium is 24,000 years, and the plutonium leaking from the Fukushima Daiichi plant will still be energetic in half a million years). The description of the Arts Catalyst’s Actinium exhibit on nuclear culture remarks on artists’ efforts to make the invisible or the concealed visible: “Artists are making the nuclear economy increasingly visible by rethinking nuclear materials and architectures, decay rates and risk perception, questioning the 20^th century belief in nuclear modernity” (“Actinium”). Both the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and the Japanese government have been scathingly accused of minimizing the amount of radiation released into the atmosphere, land, and ocean; understandably, many citizen groups and activists have sought to demystify the company’s and government’s pictures of the disaster in order to expose its hidden magnitudes. Thus an explosion of political art inside and outside Japan, from films like “The Radiant” by the Otolith group (2012) to Japanoise concerts to art exhibitions like Ken and Julia Yonetani’s display of uranium chandeliers, entitled Crystal Palace: The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nuclear Nations (2012), has sought to politicize the meltdown by making its impacts visible or audible, antagonizing nuclear nations like Japan and a global nuclear economy that exploits radiation’s invisibility to downplay its material effects.

Despite its interventions, however, political art devoted to critical visibility arguably can go only so far in producing a fissure or dissensus within the given distribution of sense, for the simple reason that visibility as a political means and end is imbricated in the very history and technologies of nuclear power that it would contest. The pursuit of visibility inadvertently participates in the logic of “the enlightened earth” that nuclear energy disastrously escalates. Masco invokes the words of Horkheimer and Adorno to sound the underlying resonance between Enlightenment thought and the rationalities driving nuclear energy and culture: “The Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant” (qtd. in Masco 1). As ideologically entangled as the pursuit of critical visibility may at times be in forms of enlightenment reason, the deeper complicity is material and literal. After all, Japan’s “peaceful” nuclear energy program exists to power an electrical grid that supplies current to human populations now existing in a “24/7” order of illuminated wakefulness. In 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary observes that late capitalism has effectively removed the “off” switch on electricity-powered lights, computers, and electronic devices, eroding the distinction between day and night. Electricity powers a perpetual, illuminated daytime and a “surplus” wakefulness, by which Crary refers to forms of surplus value generated by people who continue to consume and produce in what were previously the off-hours of the human sensorium, once closed to capitalist value-making in the unproductive state of sleep. The pursuit of critical visibility is complicated not only by this nuclear-powered hegemony of electricity and light over downtime and darkness; it gets even more complicated when one considers the intimate relationships between the modern histories and techniques of photography, cinema, and nuclear science. In 1896, the year the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered X-rays, the French physicist Henri Becquerel discovered spontaneous radiation by accident during an experiment on phosphorescent light. Becquerel had sprinkled uranium salts on Lumière photographic plates and happened to notice that the plates generated a photograph even though they hadn’t been exposed to an external light source such as the sun. In this way, Becquerel discovered the existence of invisible rays immanent to physical matter itself, rays strong enough in this case to produce visual images. As Thomas Pringle puts it, with radiation’s image-making effects it seemed “as though the earthly matter itself was reaching out and participating in photographic processes” (136).

The point, however, is that in both their means and ends photography and nuclear science share a history as well as material resources and techniques, particularly “exposure” of bodies to light, either in the form of visible or invisible rays. In the historical relation that he charts between radiation and celluloid film, Pringle elaborates on this shared logic, noting that with the atomic light released by the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, human biology itself was treated “as a kind of film” exposed to lethal light (142). Television and cinema have also been implicated in nuclear technologies and imaginaries; Jean Baudrillard contends that the

homology of the nuclear and of television can be read directly in the images: nothing resembles the control and telecommand headquarters of the nuclear power station more than TV studios, and the nuclear consoles are combined with those of the recording and broadcasting studios in the same imaginary. (53–54)

And Akira Mizuta Lippit reads postwar Japanese cinema in relation to what he terms the “avisuality” or excess visuality unleashed by atomic light (Atomic 82). Writes Lippit: “the atomic explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki turned these cities, in the instant of a flash, into massive cameras; the victims grafted onto the geography by the radiation, radiographed” (50). The desire for total visibility becomes, in Lippit’s analysis, simultaneous with the “thanatographics” of nuclear annihilation (50).

Understanding the task of political art after Fukushima as a making visible of the invisible therefore risks leaving the exchanges, homologies, and agreements between visibility, visuality, and nuclear power untroubled. The artist who seeks to illuminate catastrophe must be careful not to perpetuate it inadvertently by replicating the physicist’s, photographer’s, or even bomb’s pursuit of irradiated matter in this ongoing history of energy and light. Tokyo Electric Power Company, as I already mentioned, is using the inhuman in-sight of muons to penetrate and produce images inside its No. 1 reactor. Poison and cure become exchangeable in a nuclear pharmakon that relies on the invisible rays of radiographic matter to supply visual data of radioactive fuel that cannot be approached by any living body without reducing it to cinders.⁷ TEPCO’s accountability for the sublime meltdown takes the form of an exercise in generating visual evidence of the fuel rods’ location, ironically perpetuating Japan’s reliance upon an atomic imaginary and science at the very moment when a mass movement to decommission the nation’s nuclear reactors is at its strongest. If dissensus with nuclear power is to be found in Fukushima prefecture, in Japan, and beyond, it thus will arguably need to be of a kind that opens a fissure in this distribution of the sensible wherein the politics of visibility and atomic energy trade insights and techniques.

The politics of visibility also risk dovetailing with the politics of human biocapital in extreme acts of visual witnessing, such as video journalist Tetsuo Jimbo’s foray into the twenty-kilometer exclusion zone to capture images of the inside. With a camera and Geiger counter on his car dash measuring levels of radiation exposure as he drives into the zone, kamikazi style, Jimbo’s “Inside Report from Fukushima Nuclear Reactor” (2011) is spiced with a sense of suicidal daring that adds risk-value to his footage. Reporters like Jimbo risk their health (even if it is as much the perception of risk as actual risk that is excited by forays into the exclusion zone) in a way that raises the stakes of visuality. He undoubtedly exposes himself to the dangers of extreme radiation, but this endangerment is dramatized for political effect and carefully monitored. Visibly clocking the duration and degree of exposure becomes something of a cliché and caché in this genre of extreme reportage, and suggests that entrepreneurial acts of visual witnessing may already be trading tropes with a neoliberal culture of resilience that promotes disaster as an opportunity.

This is not to say that political art or activism that seeks to make intensities of radiation visible isn’t a crucial response to chronic government deception after 3/11, as well as a potent means of agitating for political change. The work of citizen science groups to crowdsource radiation data and generate detailed maps, for instance, has been invaluable in helping people in Japan navigate irradiated life after 3/11. However, by living in at once more extreme and more unspectacular exposure to radiation, the refuseniks embody a different aesthetic politics, one that is closer to the Rancièrian formulation of aesthetic politics. In embodying a “form of life” that is barely intelligible, or that doesn’t make sense in relation to the governing rationality of human life and health, one that involves an art of dying, they cause an ontological perturbation within political common sense.⁸

The Art of Dying

Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper describe resilience as nothing less than “a governmental philosophy of nature and society” (145), and they trace a genealogy of the concept from its neoliberal variations back to C. S. Holling’s seminal definition of ecological resilience: “a measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables” (Holling 14). The resource of resilience has clearly yielded value for those invested in Japan’s nuclear economy, considering how rapidly initial government plans to decommission all of the nation’s nuclear plants after 3/11 have been reversed. Neither the terrible ongoing meltdown in Fukushima nor the massive waves of anti-nuclear protest inside and outside Japan have been able to end a nuclear economy whose arsenal now includes a governmental philosophy of resilience that subjectivizes people into making the best of catastrophe. The rootedness of the concept of resilience in eco-systems theory suggests that it serves the survival of large-scale systems that seek to capture crisis within a feedback loop of self-improving information. If meltdown and mass protest aren’t capable of catalyzing radical change, how could I possibly suggest that a handful of stay-behinds in the exclusion zone might somehow jam the loop or hold the clue to a possible life “after Fukushima” in their art of dying? In suggesting this, don’t I run a risk of preposterously fetishizing a handful of individuals who are far from politically mobilized (in contrast, for instance, with the mobilization of the Mother’s Movement against nuclear power by Japanese women), who lead largely isolated lives in the zone, and who could easily be seen as the most vulnerable and politically resigned of all who managed to escape with their lives following 3/11?

There is much to support this other reading. Yet if the image of resistance one seeks is “political” in the narrow sense, then it will be impossible to see much at work in the aesthetic-ontological act of staying behind in the exclusion zone. Even looking for something “at work” is already a misdirection, since the kind of protest against the nuclear sublime and its accompanying cultures of resilience that, I propose, can be glimpsed in the zone is more akin to the unproductivity of the state of sleep that, Jonathan Crary worries, is increasingly eroded in late capitalism; the refuseniks represent something like the resourcelessness of a nighttime that used to limit how far capitalism could reach into and resourcify the human sensorium. Much as Eric Cazdyn says about “the already dead,” the refuseniks “do not constitute a political movement in the traditional sense. Rather, they portend a political consciousness that can inspire and inform political movements” (9). Tellingly, even as I write these words the Japanese government is planning to make the deadness of the exclusion zone productive again, whether by using it as a graveyard for radioactive waste materials or as a test site for drones and robots.⁹ So if the refuseniks belie the ostensible totality and inevitability of global capitalism by installing another ontology within its nuclear core, and if this ontology can be understood as analogous to the reemergence of a time (night) and an activity (sleep) not yet annexed into the 24/7 daytime of production and consumption, theirs is paradoxically a protest that will last only as long as it takes for the nuclear wasteland to be re-subsumed into the business of equivalence.

Many critics have noted that the seeming deadness of exclusion zones for humans and for capitalist value-production is belied by the explosion of feral and wild animal life in nuclear sacrifice zones such as those in New Mexico, Chernobyl, and now Fukushima (Broglio). Immediately following 3/11, the area around the Fukushima Daiichi plant was a radiation ecology weirdly teeming with life, with the singular exception of one species (humans). Significantly, a solidarity with the life in the zone written off by the market and the state is expressed by refuseniks when explaining their reasons for defying evacuation orders. In the first of two film documentaries entitled Nuclear Nation (2012), made nine months after the meltdown, Atsushi Funahashi follows some of the more than 1,400 residents of the town of Futaba who were evacuated and temporarily resettled at Kisai High School in Kazo City. Nuclear Nation also documents the defiance of some of the people who refused to evacuate, including farmers like Masami Yoshizawa. The brief but charged remarks of Yoshizawa, in particular, suggest to me the possibility that the so-called refuseniks might embody an unsettling subjectivity that runs counter to the biopolitical grain of the times, one that resembles that of “the already dead.”

The film first shows Yoshizawa distributing feed to his herd of cattle while talking about his decision to stay behind. He points to the cows: “They’re surviving proof of what happened. Of course, we are, too. Lots of people escaped, but we couldn’t, nor did we want to.” His next words suggest that the desire to stay in place, in unmitigated exposure to radiation, springs from a shared spirit of animal defiance rather than from a passive or resigned subjectivity: “These guys are protesting the nuclear accident too,” he nods at the cows. Yoshizawa ignored a government order to cull his cattle, and while many livestock animals starved to death in the days and weeks following 3/11, Yoshizawa refused to abandon his livestock to starvation. A 2012 article in The Guardian, “Fukushima’s rebel farmers refuse to abandon livestock,” relates that other farmers similarly ignored evacuation orders, and for similar reasons (McCurry). A mini-documentary on the rebel farmer Naoto Matsumura, entitled “Alone in the Zone,” importantly reveals a tendency to sentimentalize, indeed fetishize, men whose love of animals inspires such sacrificial devotion. Other media stories describe Matsumura as the “world’s most radioactive man” (Miller), and again demonstrate how highly susceptible the so-called rebels are to being recuperated as figures of super-resiliency. The heroicization of lone bachelor farmers like Matsumura excites depoliticized pathos in a way that could culturally undercut the anti-nuclear politics of another explicitly gendered movement that mobilizes for change outside the zone, namely, the Mothers Movement.

Yet one of the most succinct expressions of radical kinship with animals and animality captured by Funahashi in Nuclear Nation, and spoken by Yoshizawa, is not so easily dismissed:

I can’t sell these cows. Keeping them, feeding them, incurring expenses. What’s the use in that? I was conflicted. But my mind’s made up. I’m committed to letting these cows live. My destiny is linked with theirs.

The farmer’s words are charged, particularly the word “destiny” that simultaneously evokes the deadly exposure to radiation that he finally chooses in solidarity with his cattle and the aporetic anticipation of a future in which he has no longer agreed to reproduce the known universe of capitalist value-making and human exceptionalism. What does it mean to link oneself ontologically to the fate of creatures whose existence, previously circumscribed by their exchange-value as biological property or “animal capital” (Shukin), is suddenly void of value? Yoshizawa no longer owns three hundred “head” of cattle, exactly, although in the film this is the number of animals he says he continues to tend; the relationship of human ownership radically shifts when he begins to “incur expenses” without any hope of return on investment. Although the farmer has not evacuated the region, he has evacuated economic reason by fatalistically identifying with animals that, paradoxically, only have a chance of dying after Fukushima. When I say that they only have a chance of dying, let me emphasize that phrase’s double valence: Yoshizawa both identifies with the pathetic fate of animals that have been abandoned to radiation and anticipates the unexpected future that opens up of living with animals who only now have a chance of dying, once radiation poisoning has ruined them for the economy of slaughter. Only now, in other words, do his cows have a chance of living past the age at which they would normally have been sent to market. The ontological art of dying I’m attributing to recalcitrants like Yoshizawa is therefore one that emerges out of a kinship with animal death, out of the possibility that one’s death need not be finally decided either by the market or by the biopolitical rationality of a state. While there’s no doubt that this kinship or identification is prone to exciting a depoliticized cult of animal love in the nuclear wasteland, there is also a chance that it could ignite the possibility of materially imagining post-capitalist community.

Cazdyn’s theorization of “the already dead” is helpful in elucidating an art of dying opposed to the resilient subject’s adjustment to continuous catastrophe. For Cazdyn, “[t]he paradigmatic condition illustrating the already dead is that of the medical patient who has been diagnosed with a terminal disease only to live through medical advances that then turn the terminal illness into a chronic one” (4). As he notes, “[t]he disease remains life threatening, still incurable, even though it is managed and controlled, perhaps indefinitely” (4). Although Cazdyn doesn’t refer to the governmental philosophy of resilience per se, his likening of a catastrophic system of global capitalism to a terminal illness that is managed as a chronic condition as opposed to being radically contested speaks closely to the resource, or biocapital, of resilience. Rather than some zombie state cooked up by popular culture, the already dead, as he formulates it, is an ontological refusal to accept the unlivable conditions of capitalist life as a chronic condition. “It is only when the living remember that they are already dead that the possibility for liberation emerges,” he proposes (190). Cazdyn’s formulation of the already dead is unwittingly echoed by Evans and Reid’s invocation of death in their more explicit critique of resilient life: “Resilience cheats us of … [the] affirmative task of learning how to die. It exposes life to lethal principles so that it may live a non-death” (13). Yet Evans and Reid, while challenging neoliberal and biopolitical rationalities that have effectively monopolized the meaning and substance of life and death, finally propose an “art of living” rather than an art of death in response (175). Moreover, the art of living they elaborate hinges upon a

reconstituted understanding of the human as a fundamentally political subject; one empowered by its hubristic belief in an ability to secure itself from those elements of the world it encounters as hostile to its world, rather than being cast in a permanent condition of resilient adaptation to a biologized understanding of the nature of the world as such. (43)

Neither Evans and Reid nor Cazdyn consider how ontological protest against the capitalization of life might involve other animals. The art of dying in kinship with other animals that emerges in the Fukushima exclusion zone, however, suggests that it is precisely when humans are biopolitically reduced to resilient organisms and radiation experiments that it becomes crucial that animality be occupied as a counter-practice.

Foucault suggests something along these lines in The Courage of Truth (1983–84), when he says of the cynical mode of life (most infamously modeled by the Greek philosopher Diogenes, who shamelessly chose to live in the open like a dog) that by virtue of being “indexed to nature, and only nature, [it] ends up giving a positive value to animality” (282). More than just a “material model of existence” (283), Foucault proposes, “[a]nimality is an exercise. It is a test for oneself, and at the same time a scandal for others” (283). The art of dying after Fukushima involves confronting the deadliness of the nuclear economy with a “practice of animality” in this sense (288). As Cazdyn writes, “[t]he already dead refuse … either to die or to be alive until these categories can be remade to accommodate the unique and new existence the already dead experience” (198). Most importantly, perhaps, the question of the already dead is inseparable from the problem of trying “to imagine what comes after globalization” (Cazdyn 161). As Cazdyn declares, “[i]f you find this difficult, if not impossible, then perhaps it is because imagining what is beyond globalization is like imagining what comes before or after time–a mind-bending exercise indeed” (161).

Lessons from Fukushima

The governmental philosophy of resilience seeks to turn catastrophes like Fukushima into “lessons” that teach subjects, markets, and states how to better brace themselves for a future of chronic disaster. The neoliberal coding of catastrophe as a learning opportunity is emblazoned in a string of news articles that echo a 2013 piece entitled “Lessons From Fukushima, Two Years On.” The article opens like this: “Companies have valuable lessons in transparency to glean from the Fukushima disaster, [sic] said the author of an independent report on the accident that famously called it ‘Made in Japan’” (Yee). The callousness of branding disaster is blended with the moral imperative of positive thinking in discourses of resilience that turn disasters like Fukushima into learning opportunities. Positive thinking, and feeling, becomes a trait of resilient subjectivity and a resource of the nuclear economy. Consider the Japanese Health Ministry’s decision to raise the legal allowable limit of yearly radiation exposure in the Fukushima region to a level twenty times higher than it was prior to the meltdown.¹⁰ The health of Japan’s human population is governed through a capricious metrics that can be adjusted to minimize the effects of radiation, and to “encourage” new thresholds of biological resilience by virtue of adjusting subjective perception of the threat. Despite its visible arbitrariness, the manipulation of the allowable limit of exposure carries an expert power of veridiction that works to establish deadly radiation as an acceptable reality, absorbable by and rendered compatible with a body’s, and a population’s, conditions of life. Mere weeks after the nuclear meltdown, Shunichi Yamashita, a Fukushima Radiation Health Risk Advisor, delivered a public talk that crystallizes the moral imperative for people to think and feel positive in the wake of disaster. In his talk he helps to hail the depoliticized, resilient subject into being by reassuring the Japanese that so long as they keep “smiling” they won’t suffer any negative effects from radiation, whereas if they are not able to put a happy face on the situation they’ll be prone to its negative effects (“Unbelievable”). Yamashita’s advice reveals how the language of emotional as well as physical resilience downloads responsibility for the nuclear disaster onto the psychosomatic subject’s powers of feeling.

By contrast, farmers like Masami Yoshizawa resist harvesting positive lessons of this kind from the meltdown. Instead, they ontologically link their present and future existence to that of livestock animals whose market value has been ruined by radiation, and whose lives and deaths are much harder to resourcify either symbolically or materially. Although seemingly irrelevant to the sublime machinations of the global nuclear economy, the scattering of people who swim against the biopolitical tide of evacuation and self-preservation at least begin a defiant practice of animality that could change everything.

Footnotes

1. Nancy writes: we “must begin by calling into question the distinction … between military and civilian” (18). To this end, he invokes the philosopher Osamu Nishitani, who wrote a text one month after 3/11 entitled “Where is Our Future?” As Nancy notes, “Osamu Nishitani could speak, on March 19, 2011, of a state of ‘war without enemy.’ A war without enemy is a war against ourselves. The problem posed by the ‘peaceful’ use of the atom is that of its extreme, and extremely lasting, harmfulness” (16).

2. Japan’s more than fifty nuclear reactors were decommissioned after the Fukushima disaster, and intense public protests appeared to be successfully averting the resumption of nuclear energy in the country. Devastatingly, however, the current Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has since begun rebooting the nuclear nation, and in April 2015 the Japanese courts approved the first restart of a nuclear power station in the country.

3. For a history of Canada’s exploitation of the Dene people in the mining of uranium on their territory, see van Wyck.

4. In his formulation of an ecological Marxism, James O’Connor contends that Marx failed to consider how “‘natural barriers’ may be capitalistically produced barriers, that is, a second capitalized nature” (160).

5. I first came across reference to the “refuseniks” in Gilhooly.

6. It would be worthwhile to bring Rancière’s notion of dissensus up against the nuclear sublime in relation to another nuclear disaster, that of Chernobyl. As Adriana Petryna notes in her study of Chernobyl, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens After Chernobyl (2002), damaged life has been strategically mobilized as a biological resource by many survivors of Chernobyl, and in a manner that, I’d suggest, interacts in complicated ways with neoliberal discourses of resilience. Writes Petryna, human “biology, scientific knowledge, and suffering have become cultural resources through which citizens stake their claims for social equity in a harsh market transition” (4).

7. Muons are apparently atomic particles harmless to humans, animals, and plants, and benign in their radioactive powers.

8. As Rancière puts it in The Politics of Aesthetics, aesthetics is political not when its subject matter is political, but when it involves “the invention of new forms of life” (25).

9. See Humber and “Fukushima.”

10. The allowable radiation exposure limit before March 11, 2011, was one millisievert per year. For children in Fukushima, the limit has been reset to twenty millisieverts. Adam Broinowski notes that Japan’s “systematic program to adjust official radiation limits and to underestimate the dangers to health” has facilitated a deadly plan to begin resettling evacuees back in the exclusion area.

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