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

Fukushima
Nicole Shukin

Postmodern Culture, Volume 26, Number 2, January 2016, (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2016.0009

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/635538

Access provided by Western Ontario, Univ of (24 Sep 2018 14:22 GMT)
The Biocapital of Living – and the Art of Dying – After Fukushima

Nicole Shukin

University of Victoria

nshukin@uvic.ca

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
 Shukin 2

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
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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
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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
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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,
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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

 Shukin 7

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

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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
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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
 Shukin 10

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
 Shukin 11

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
 Shukin 12

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

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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
 Shukin 14

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 20th 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,
 Shukin 15

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
 Shukin 16

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
 Shukin 17

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
 Shukin 18

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
 Shukin 19

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
 Shukin 20

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
 Shukin 21

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

 Shukin 22

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
 Shukin 23

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.

 Shukin 24

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
 Shukin 25

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
 Shukin 26

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.

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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 Shukin 28

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