Fukushima’s Animal

After “After Fukushima” designates the epistemic time of arriving and leaving after the catastrophically unthinkable happened, and continues to happen, in Fukushima and in our world. Destruction situated itself as a series of arrivals, from the natural disasters of the Great East Japan Earthquake and its consequent tsunami on March 11, 2011, to the technological breakdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Yet the upheaval upon arrival was matched by the devastation of departures, of territory, and of life itself. This double movement of arriving and leaving constituted the enduring philosophical collapse of meaning amidst unresolvable numbness, absent bodies, and the monumental work of mourning after Fukushima. What remains? What is left after disaster’s crisscrossing motions of arriving and leaving? The question of the remainder after disaster challenges narratives of crisis, of events like Fukushima that cannot be — and remain an ethical imperative not to be — digested, normalized, and forgotten. This essay traces images of animals as a remainder after Fukushima, as seen in Pierre Huyghe’s film Untitled (Human Mask) (2014) and Yasusuke Ōta’s photographic series The Abandoned Animals of Fukushima (2011).Pierre Huyghe’s film Untitled (Human Mask) (2014) was on view in Pierre Huyghe: Human Mask from April 27 to August 9, 2015 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Yasusuke O¯ta’s photographic series The Abandoned Animals of Fukushima (2011) was on view as part of In the Wake: Japanese photographers Respond to 3/11 from April 5 to July 12, 2015 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The animal emerges after Fukushima to unwrite the possibility of moving beyond it, traversing the penumbra between nature and culture as the limit case of sovereignty’s suspension. Pierre HuygheUntitled (Human Mask), video stills, 2014.© Pierre Huyghe / SODRAC (2016)Photos : courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; Hauser & Wirth, London; Esther Schipper, Berlin; Anna Lena Films, Paris Unwritten Rhetorical tension converges around the possibility of writing, following the animal, after Fukushima — a two-fold undertaking to unframe the enmeshed precarity of animal and nuclear. Jacques Derrida’s L’Animal que donc je suis underscores the homonymic economy of the animal that “je suis” as both “I am” and “I follow.” Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 369 — 418. See especially 371 — 72. To write the animal decentres the human and undermines language by doubly positioning the animal as both the mirror of the human and that which the human always follows, evolutionarily and philosophically. Attunement to a similar sense of descriptive fracture has been tasked to the nuclear critic. Drawing on Maurice Blanchot’s notion that “the disaster de-scribes,” Akira Lippit maintains, “If a history of the atomic bombing is to be written, it must first be unwritten.” Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 7; Akira Mizuta Lippit, “Antigraphy: Notes on Atomic Writing and Postwar Japanese Cinema,” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 10 (1998): 63. Although Lippit’s context is different — the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — the statement resounds urgently after Fukushima’s traumatic continuation of nuclear disaster’s “thanatographic legacy.” On Hiroshima and Fukushima, see Nancy, After Fukushima, especially 9 — 14. For “thanatographic legacy,” see Akira Mizuta Lippit, “Phenomenologies of the Surface: Radiation — Body — Image,” Qui Parle 9, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 1996): 36. Writing the nuclear event poses a challenge to language by its necessary heeding to the atomic domination of nature and technology. Or, in Avital Ronell’s analogous characterization, which now mirrors the haunting footage of the March 11 earthquake, “This breaking of the ground is precisely what nuclear criticism must listen to.” Avital Ronell, “Starting From Scratch: Mastermix,” in Finitude’s Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 218. It is within the dissociated space between word and world that the animal remains for the human to follow after Fukushima in Huyghe’s Untitled (Human Mask) and Ōta’s The Abandoned Animals of Fukushima. Fukushima’s animal, like the nuclear power of its catastrophe, constitutes a spectral magnetism of attraction and repellence, arriving and leaving. Theorizing a hermeneutic of the “magnetic animal,” Lippit states, “The animal is magnetic because it draws the world-building subject towards an impossible convergence with the limits of world… effecting an economy of the figure that is metamorphic rather than metaphoric.” Akira Mizuta Lippit, “Magnetic Animal: Derrida, Wildlife, Animetaphor,” MLN 113, no. 5 (1998): 1118. The magnetic animal metamorphoses the figurative into the figured — from the poverty of language to the potentiality of its image. Through the magnetic apparatuses of cinema and photography, respectively, Huyghe’s and Ōta’s animals resist both metaphoric reduction and the nuclear fission of signifier from the real. Rather, they arrive — figured as metamorphic images amidst the ongoing irresolution of life after Fukushima. Pierre HuygheUntitled (Human Mask), video stills, 2014.© Pierre Huyghe / SODRAC (2016)Photos : courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; Hauser & Wirth, London; Esther Schipper, Berlin; Anna Lena Films, Paris Masks A fast and bumpy ride through Fukushima’s recognizable landscape of quasi-apocalypse opens Untitled (Human Mask). The pace of the short film is then slowed as it tracks an animal that presumably survived the catastrophe and remains in an abandoned interior. In Huyghe’s film, Fukushima’s animal is not any animal — it is a macaque monkey that is dressed in girls’ clothing and wears a long black wig and a Noh theatre-gone-cyborg white mask. Beyond the creature’s humanoid likeness, its masked miming of quotidian human gestures in a confused state of non-sovereign anthropomorphism comprises the majority of the film’s content. The animal’s fictional figuration in the contextual reality of Fukushima after disaster reflects Huyghe’s filmic aesthetic, “to ‘re-scenarize’ the real.” George Baker and Pierre Huyghe, “An Interview with Pierre Huyghe,” October 110 (Fall, 2004): 105. This hybridization of a fictional plot and protagonist into documentary reality, like the hybridity figured by the animal performing the human, necessarily serves as an unwriting of Fukushima from the ontological nullification of catastrophe’s allegorical afterword. Instead, Huyghe’s animal assumes a complementary image of what Giorgio Agamben theorized as the “anthropological machine”: “Man, looking at himself, sees his own image always deformed into the features of an ape.” Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 26 — 27. Huyghe’s film presents the other side of the same coin, in which animal misrecognition mediates the semblance of human life. Either way, this constitution of the human through the animal as figured in Huyghe’s re-scenarized post-Fukushima thus functions to image the waning of worlds in which the sovereignty of meaning was once bound to the living. Abandonment Two weeks after the natural and technological disasters of March 2011, Japanese photographer Yasusuke Ōta entered the restricted zone around Fukushima Daiichi to look after the animals that had been left behind when the region was forcibly evacuated. What emerged was The Abandoned Animals of Fukushima, Ōta’s photographic series that traces agricultural and companionate animals wandering in Fukushima’s urban ruins — animals and landscapes in parallel states of slow death. As Ōta writes, “This tragedy was for some reason not reported by the Japanese media at first…. I felt I needed to inform the world and leave evidence of what really happened.” Yasusuke O¯ta, “The Abandoned Animals of Fukushima,” Public Delivery, Seoul, South Korea. http://publicdelivery.org/yasusuke-ota-the-abandoned-animals-of-fukushima/. Despite Ōta’s investment in the precarious documentation of information, his photographs, like Huyghe’s film, additionally serve to “re-scenarize the real” for evidentiary ends. The tragedy of the animal is matched in the narrative thrust of Ōta’s photographic conventions, or, as Judith Butler elsewhere advances, “The photograph itself becomes a structuring scene of interpretation.” Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009), 67. Panoramic landscapes with centralized animals — a flâneur-like ostrich prancing down Fukushima’s empty main street or cows hopelessly roaming the parking lot of deserted outlet stores — aim for the viewer’s cathartic irruption of empathy by witnessing the animal’s desolation within the photograph’s “space of political relations.” On photography’s “space of political relations,” see Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008), 16. Yet, I want to suggest that rather than codifying suffering, culminating Fukushima’s tragic arc, or galvanizing a praxis of animal ethics, Ōta’s photographic animals unassumingly figure the remainder of life after disaster as a perpetual state of non-belonging.On photography and non-belonging, see Ulrich Baer, “Seeing the Future in an Image of the Past: Hannah Arendt, Garry Winogrand, and Photographing the World,” The Yearbook of Comparative Literature 55 (2009): 244. The animal’s return to urban spaces of capitalist leisure after Fukushima, with nowhere to go, thus leaves exposed the abandonment of the animal, the departure of human life, and the voiding of political community in the unending re-scenarization of “what really happened.” Yasusuke Ōta Deserted Town, from the series The Abandoned Animals of Fukushima, 2011.Photo : © Yasusuke Ōta, courtesy of the artist Undead Martin Heidegger notoriously asserted, “Only man dies. The animal perishes.” Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstader (New York: HarperCollins, 1971), 176. The animal’s absence of human language, according to Heidegger, delimits its claims to an essence of Being, and thus it is not “capable of death as death.” Ibid. Less acknowledged are Heidegger’s observations of the nuclear that frame his later claims on animal death in the same essay: “Man stares at what the explosion of the atom bomb could bring with it. He does not see that the atom bomb and its explosion are the mere final emission of what has long since taken place, has already happened…. What is this helpless anxiety still waiting for, if the terrible has already happened?” Ibid, 164. Heidegger structures arrival and departure — “could bring” and “already happened” — as “this helpless anxiety still waiting” for both nuclear annihilation and the animal’s not-death. Anxiety here marks the threatening possibility of the return of past terror in the present waning of the future. Reading the catastrophic persistence of anxiety through the animal of Fukushima, Huyghe’s and Ōta’s filmic figurations stake a different critical currency to the animal’s supposed incapability of death as death. Perishing as survival in the re-scenarized real, the image of what remains, Fukushima’s animal unwrites the negation of words in catastrophe’s wounds. Five years afterward in 2016, Fukushima’s animal, like us, remains undead with nowhere to go, beyond remaining exposed for one another’s arrival and departure. Carlos Kong, Pierre Huyghe, Yasusuke Ōta

Fukushima’s Animal

Suggested Reading

Landscape as Pedagogy: Dancing Sápmi

Dreams of “hijacks and bird accidents” Camille Henrot’s cult object