The affective loop is dizzying as it moves us between distant places and local homes, political upheavals and natural disasters, raging storms and individual stories, the serious and the absurd. Unable to catch my breath between blows or steady myself according to some sense of scale, I feel like so much has happened since the tsunami struck. And yet, I don’t know what to make of any of it.  Are we just bracing ourselves for the next thing?

In an April article entitled “The Half-life of Disaster” Brian Massumi discusses how this media cycle leads us into a perpetual state of foreboding that brings together natural, economic and political threat perception in a configuration that fuels what Naomi Klein termed “disaster capitalism”. The horror is never resolved or replaced; rather, it is archived, infinitely accessible over the Internet.  Cast into the web of other events, the unendurable tragedy of a particular event dissipates, or as Massumi says, “it decays”.  In today’s catastrophic mediashpere, observes Massumi, the half-life of disaster is at most two weeks.

Why have we let the situation in Japan recede into the background of other “big news”?  Massumi and others suggest that this “post-shock pre-posturing” increasingly delegates collective response to the national security apparatus, obscures the structural causes of “natural” disaster (Katrina as well as Fukushima illustrate this point well), and feeds the increasingly centralized global economy which capitalizes on the instability created by the very disasters it helps potentiate.

While I discussed responsibility and resistance in relation to mass-mediated affect in my last post, here I want to offer another mode of response: stepping out of the affective loop.  While feeling with others in the context of suffering is perhaps the only appropriate response when faced with the immediacy of another’s pain, undoing the social causes of suffering requires a continuously engaged critical perspective. I’d like to offer that the ongoing events in Japan are terribly important to us right now in an unfolding global context.

What’s perhaps most important about the aftermath of the disaster was not what happened in the first two weeks, but what is happening twelve weeks out.  Not only does the US public need to step out of the media-driven affective whirlpool, but we need to step back into the global conversation about energy sustainability and the political, social, economic, and environmental disasters brought about in the effort to maintain the current levels of profit.

The meltdowns at Fukushima temporarily unmask the social and environmental dangers always present in nuclear power.  Likewise, the uprisings in the Middle East reveal the grave economic disparities and instability generated in oil-based economies.  We mustn’t let these revelatory and revolutionary moments pass away.

As proposed by Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis in a letter addressed to Japan, the “international capitalist power-structure” is terrified that the disempowered will seize upon the explosive political potential of these moments.  Their letter suggests that if disaster capitalism runs on an ever-present low-level threat perception, its leading industrial sector—energy—runs on the public’s perception that everything is fine and dandy:

Company men and politicians are aware that the disaster at Fukushima is a tremendous blow to the legitimacy of nuclear power and in a way the legitimacy of capitalist production. A tremendous ideological campaign is under way to make sure that it does not become the occasion for a global revolt against nuclear power and more important for a process of revolutionary change. The fact that the nuclear disaster in Japan is taking place in concomitance with the spreading of insurrectional movements throughout the oil regions of North Africa and the Middle East undoubtedly adds to the determination to establish against all evidence that everything is under control.

Claims like these and others (insert link) about “ideological campaigns” in the name “global revolt” may be motivated by a romantic view of political agency. But the history of nuclear power in the US and Japan suggests that Federici and Caffentzis are right to expose the neoliberal interests that inform the framing of recent events.

Historically, the nuclear-friendly PR machine (with Eisenhower and the “Atoms for Peace” campaign at the helm) played a huge role in Japan’s acceptance of nuclear power.  Of course it did.  How in the world, we might ask, would a country like Japan—the only country ever gutted by a nuclear weapon—come to accept nuclear powered energy at the behest of the very country that dropped the bomb??

Historian Peter Kuznick answers precisely this question and explains the process of propaganda and acceptance in a recent essay.  Putting Japan’s nuclear history Pointo perspective, Kuznick writes: “their nuclear program was born not only in the fantasy of clean, safe power, but also in the willful forgetting of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the buildup of the US nuclear arsenal.”  While the human scale of suffering and loss initiated in northeastern Japan will always remain incomprehensible, the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown are being fashioned at this very moment into historically comprehensible events. The social, political and economic stakes in these repertoires of fantasy and forgetting are high.

Most blatantly, perhaps, we find these repertoires rehearsed in mainstream media stories about Fukushima.  Last week President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea and Chinese premiere Wen Jiabao visited Japan to speak with Prime Minister Naoto Kan in a tripartite summit in order to discuss Japan’s handling of the nuclear crisis and foster trade relations.  The conservative Yomiuri Shimbun (Japan’s most widely circulated paper, and one with long-held stakes in the nuclear industry…from the time it conspired with the CIA to promote nuclear development in Japan in the 1950s up until the present day) wrote:

Kan was particularly enthusiastic about realizing the visit by the three leaders to a quake-hit area… Some in the government expressed anxiety over security for the leaders. But Kan said: “The sight of us three eating produce from Fukushima Prefecture will definitely be reported overseas. That’d be the best protection we can get against harmful rumors,” and the plan went forward.

Kan links “security” to “protection … against harmful rumors” and asserts that foreign press coverage will provide the protection. One must assume that these “rumors” consist of statements about the ongoing harm by radioactive materials to people in the area of Fukushima and the hazards of all forms of nuclear energy more broadly.  By using the term “rumor” Kan is delegitimizing these claims, while simultaneously taking them seriously enough to situate their threat within the discourse of national security.  Regarding the stakes at play in controlling this information dissemination, Japanese scholar Yoshihiko Ikegami writes:

The government calls the information shared on the internet “rumors” and repeatedly urges the public not to believe them. In addition, a public advertising organization called Advertising Council Japan is airing a TV commercial asking people not to believe rumors and not to buy-up. (The head of the organization is the president of TEPCO.) The commentators in news programs single-mindedly repeat similar messages.

These widespread attempts to dismiss information circulating in the public sphere as “rumors” has led some anti-nuclear activists to re-appropriate the term in explicit calls for revolution.

The linking of rumor and revolution, however, is probably not the most pertinent point about Kan’s statements.  By shifting the role of “security” from that of protecting individual human bodies (Lee and Wen) to that of protecting the nuclear industry—and by exposing these same bodies to potentially poisonous produce—Kan’s statements foregrounds the devaluation of human life that Federici and Caffentzis attribute to capitalism: “What we are witnessing, most dramatically, in the response to the tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan, especially in the US, is the beginning of an era in which capitalism is dropping any humanitarian pretense and refusing any commitment to the protection of human life.”

If supporting Japan and Fukushima means eating poisoned produce, it is because maintaining current economic trajectories and the continued use of nuclear energy has become more important than the well-being of individual bodies.

At the time of the meeting between the three leaders, the Japanese government had raised acceptable levels of yearly radiation exposure for children from 1 mmSv (the limit set by the WHO) to 20mmSv and was failing to pay for removal of contaminated topsoil at schools.  Children were regularly being exposed to levels of radiation allegedly higher than Chernobyl and traces of radioactive material were being found in the breast milk of women as far away as Chiba and Ibaraki.

Like those displaced by the tsunami, many of the 80,000 evacuees from the 20km radius around Fukushima lacked adequate shelter and provisions.  What’s more, if human life has been undervalued, non-human animal life even more so.   Evacuees were not allowed to take their animal companions with them when they evacuated.  Despite appeals that intensified during the weekend of the summit (and continue thousands of cats and dogs, and ten thousands of farm animals have been starving to death.  Meanwhile, according to prejudices (with historical precedent) about nuclear contamination, people with license plates from Fukushima are being refused service at gas stations and turned away from hotels. Coding discrimination as “reputation damage,” the government is able to claim that supporting the people of Fukushima means ignoring exposure and buying their products rather than worrying over their exposure and accepting them into our communities.  (Japanese Political scientist Chigaya Kinoshita writes about these dual modes of containment in an essay about the uglier aspects of civil society.) In the midst of all this, the three leaders chewed their veggies and posed for the press.

On cue, as if obliging Kan’s earlier statements and this perverse show of solidarity, the first paragraph of the New York Times’ brief coverage of the meeting reads: “The leaders of China, Japan, and South Korea publicly munched on farm produce grown near the stricken Japanese nuclear plant on Saturday in a show of solidarity with Japan’s recovery efforts.”  Nowhere mentioning that this was the fourth in a series of annual meetings since 2008 intended to foster economic relations between the three countries, the article eventually continues, “Before entering the shelter, a converted gymnasium, Mr. Kan steered the group to a table displaying strawberries, cucumbers and other produce grown in Fukushima Prefecture. The leaders, who did not appear to have been surprised by the photo op, smiled and nibbled gamely. “Very delicious,” Mr. Wen said.”

The tone of the Times’ article seems slightly bemused as it acceptingly acknowledges, along with the Chinese and Korean leaders, that this was a highly choreographed theatrical spectacle. What’s troubling in such a tone, however, is the implication that an acknowledgement of posturing somehow exempts the reporting from any responsibility to analyze the scene—both what it stages and obscures.

Why doesn’t the New York Times explain exactly how munching on cucumbers displays solidarity with the people who can’t get the government to clear away debris, rescue their animals, and remove dangerous dirt from children’s playgrounds? Of course these are the very things obscured in the staged scene.  The Times seems to capitulate to the regime of “everything’s fine” that ensures Kan’s “security”.  No matter how ironic the tone, this article portrays solidarity as participating in an anti-panic business-as-usual patriotism, exactly the sort critiqued by Kinoshita in the essay mentioned earlier. While catastrophe and panic were appealing headlines in the initial weeks of the disaster, now in the moment’s fading half-life, they seem to have no place.

Addendum:

Since writing this piece the New York Times has just published an article that exposes the government’s exploitation of poor rural towns and the means through which it makes them financially dependent on nearby reactors.  Although this coverage finally starts uncovering the secrets silence hides, the emphasis on “a lack of widespread grass-roots opposition in the communities around [Japan’s] 54 nuclear reactors” fosters the impression that there isn’t much in the way of anti-nuclear activism taking place in Japan.  Hopefully, the New York Times will start covering the massive demonstrations (of scales rarely seen in contemporary Japan) like the one on April 10^th that brought more that 17,500 people onto the streets of Tokyo.  Cries of protest from the public have brought a halt to development of the Hamaoka Nuclear Plant, and forced the government to revoke the change in acceptable radiation levels for children.  Until these stories earn headlines in mainstream media, I ask you to find projects like Japan – Fissures in the Planetary Apparatus which is translating critical essays by Japanese activists and intellectuals about the ongoing situation in Japan.

As the contours of the disaster accrete into what is undoubtedly a pivotal event, the larger frameworks within which meaning hinges are highly contested.  How the disaster, now officially called the Great East Japan Earthquake, gets spun will depend on which historical and political contexts are acknowledged, and which are ignored.

About a week later, as the scale of suffering in Japan became clearer, I became less concerned with everybody else’s questionable investments in the pain of others and more suspicious of my own hesitancy to engage emotionally.

Although I frowned and cried as solicited upon seeing the unavoidable photos of people staggering through muddy ruins, I wasn’t sure how to feel the rest of the time.  Brian Massumi’s claim that

“power is no longer fundamentally normative, like it was in its disciplinary forms—it’s affective”

suggests that stories and images circulate and infiltrate strategically. Even though, as de Certeau reminds us, readers aren’t fools and we employ tactics with which to play and navigate the web of discourse, we’re still stuck inside of it—and it inside of us.  Our critique of media, savvy avoidance of manipulation, and resistance to being told how to feel are themselves already the threads of discourses that have been woven into us.

Part of me wants to believe that some basic feeling for the suffering of others arises before all of this, that there’s a relational web prior and in excess to the discursive one—and that it’s woven more tightly.

But if the mass mediated means through which we gain access to others is always already shaping how we feel for those others, how can we feel without capitulating to the powers that traffic in affect? In the case of catastrophes, which seem to (fairly regularly) punctuate the passage of ordinary life with significance, how do we resist the meaning-making machines while still engaging meaningfully?

I’ll explore these questions here and in a series of posts to follow by looking into the ways various media structure our experiences of disaster and construe “eventfulness.” Considering the political and social interests at stake in Japan and the US, I’m curious about how this particular disaster is being positioned in historical time, and what such placements obscure, or displace.  But mostly, as I meditate on my own relationship with Japan and reaction to the unfolding news, I wonder how to engage responsibly with media and the “real” event.   Helpful to this project is Diana Taylor’s model of the witness who, reflecting Louis Althusser’s model of dialectic spectatorship and Augusto Boal’s “spect-actor”, serves as a

“guarantor of the link between the I and the you, the inside and the outside”and “accepts the dangers and responsibilities of seeing and of acting on what one has seen.”

This task is not easy considering how often we are bombarded with images and news of disaster.  People tell me that they either feel distant and numb to the repeating images, or else they connect to the images through identification: imagining the people in the images are one’s own mother, brother, etc.  The problem with the latter approach is that it brings the other into one’s own ideological universe and blinds one to the political, cultural, and other factors that structure the experience of the event.

These modes of spectatorship are not unlike those of hegemony and identification criticized by Althusser in relationship to theater.  However, when we are dealing with the theater of the real, and its tendency towards catastrophe, the ideological agendas organizing devastation into spectacle elicit modes of relating, as well as detaching, that register in the body.

Quoting the work of Hal Foster regarding shock and subjectivity in America, anthropologist Allen Feldman points to the double nature of the subject’s pleasure:

“in its guise as witness the mass subject reveals its sadomasochistic aspect, for this subject is split in relation to a disaster; even as he or she may mourn the victims, even identify with them masochistically, he or she may also be thrilled sadistically by the victims of whom he or she is not one.”

Feldman raises the stakes when he explicitly links the creation of the “mass subject” in modernity to catastrophe and the visual technologies through which the catastrophic is ideologically produced and distributed.  Developing a theory of the “actuarial gaze,” which he describes as

“the visual organization and institutionalization of threat perception and prophylaxis,” Feldman asserts that “the visual culture of risk reportage circulates catastrophic images as a psychosocial and, ultimately, political desire and currency.”

The visceral intensities ignited and snuffed in these visual images constitute the subjectivity from which we establish ourselves as a public, and how we, as a public, are going to relate or not.

I’d like to say that my reluctance to participate in the disaster drama stemmed solely from a refusal to let this awful thing give me any sort pleasure, masochistic or otherwise.  Or that I harbored sophisticated political suspicions of risk reportage.

But I was primarily loathe to identify with the community of spectators I imagined excitedly rallying their concern on the receiving end of the mediated image.  It was the thrill of the social—the heightened sense of occasion—that I couldn’t stand.  Nothing, it seemed, would make me feel so far away, so alienated from the thing in itself than positioning myself from this A-frame cottage in Iowa somewhere inside the Big Deal Event.  As for approaching the thing in itself, I knew of no other means than those used by the community of spectators themselves: disaster footage.  But did I really want to go there?  As elaborated by Zizek, the “passion for penetrating the Real Thing” spirals into an increasingly violent pursuit of the Real within the images that structure our reality.  I did not want to experience the tsunami as the “thrill of the Real,” the ultimate special effect.

An internet search brought me to a video of the tsunami swallowing the coastal town of Kuji where I had stayed with a family nearly 10 years ago.   The dreadful thrill of the footage did indeed flood my body darkly, excessively, like the tsunami itself.  Feeling my own footing give way, despite sitting down, I braced myself.  Had someone been next to me, however, I would have reached out to them, without thinking, to steady myself.

I wonder now about that instinct.  Why, when something awful or awesome is about to happen, or has just happened, do we tend to grab on to the people next to us?  Surely, the support sought by such a gesture isn’t merely that of balance, but of affiliation.   I hadn’t wanted to get on the drama bandwagon, but here I was: wanting to connect.

The public I imagined gaping from a safe distance was probably not the public into which my friend had been calling me when she sent me that facebook message.   Rather than use the event to elevate the drama in our lives, she may have been reaching out to me in order to ground the drama in a shared reality. This is not to say she was trying to reduce the significance of the event; the ordinary world has its own sort of eventfulness.  As Kathleen Stewart describes it,

“modes of attending to scenes and events spawn socialities, identities, dream worlds, bodily states and public feelings of all kinds.”

The everyday eventfulness “resonating in bodies, scenes, and forms of sociality,” spreads in whispers and flourishes in indeterminacy.  Something is happening, is going to happen, to us.  The mode is one of suspension that fastens potential significance onto the tiniest of things.  The effect isn’t of elevating reality into ungraspable proportions, but of charging reality with limitless points of connection.

While the looming risk perception propagated in the “actuarial gaze” may make and mask the ways in which we always feel vulnerable to invisible, ever-present and threatening powers, maybe it fails to displace the ways we feel vulnerable to each other.   The witness, unlike the spectator, creates a zone of proximity in the “link between the I and the you”.   Amidst the spectacular scenes of ruin, my old friend took the risk of writing me after all this time, took the risk of hearing bad news and having to respond, and took the risk of being criticized or blogged about.  In doing so she offered me the first clue for thinking about mediated models for responsible action.

Using emergent technologies as profitable as well as political tools, these new media social entrepreneurs make or distribute visual and social media about transformative and experimental natural, biological, physical, and social sciences. Examples of systems they make include for-profit and NGO social platforms for medical providers and patients, documentaries about the science of human longevity, and next generation mobile technologies for philanthropic fundraising. In other cases, new media social entrepreneurs are not the engineers of technology but the early adopters, “social broadcasters,” and popularizers of the philosophy of transhumanism and technoprogressivism. Key examples I research include the technoscience of immortality, the social mediation of health care systems, the privatization of space exploration, ocean terraforming, and the “controlled serendipity” of “social broadcasting.” Based on a mix of ethnographic methods consisting of nonfiction production, conference participation, and virtual and actual socializing this research describes how science, technology, media, and sociality intersect in the futurological imaginaries, professional practices, and political economics of new media social entrepreneurs.

An Anthropology of Values

It takes years of study and practice before one even understands what the hell anthropology is or can become. For example, as a transplant from cinema and media studies to anthropology I’d been doing this ethnographic research on new media makers and I was increasingly confused by what made this work anthropology and not something else. Sure, I questioned my informants about their practices, politics, and class—and I made nonfiction videos with them—but all my conclusions seemed rather topical and antiseptic. It didn’t look at all like anthropology. Late last year I asked an informant who had just been fired from a job what was her biggest success and largest failure at her previous position. The question provoked the mediasmith to tell a detailed story of collaboration, struggle, and ambition and to reflect on the conflicting personal and corporate values. The question got me nearer to ‘culture’ than my questionnaire about class and education. This provoked me to engage more with my informants’ off-work passions, readings, hobbies—in the hopes of identifying core values—and less with the technical aspects of their non-fiction and entrepreneurial business operations. Above are some of my zygote findings.

I was at the first LA vigil on May 21 before Lisa Ling’s public involvement. There were seven people on a dog path along Venice beach. One person looked like Jason Schartzman. He wasn’t. He along with all others whorshipped at Laura’s church. At the second LA vigil at a swanky restaurant in Santa Monica I had to elbow through the valet, concerned beautiful people, television personalities, and cable news reporters to get my professionally premade “Save Laura” sign. After months of silence, when these media insiders wanted the attention it was instantaneous. I won’t say that this is an instance of media producer nepotism. It is a good story for ratings; a real news issue. We should campaign for the pardon of these two unfortunate journalists. However, the media blitzkreig explains much about the cultural capital and complicity of cultures of media production.

I want to think about individual cultural capital, namely Lisa Ling’s, and her use of that capital to advocate for the release of her sister, and how it relates to institutional cultural capital, namely the advocacy powers of American television networks. The play between institutional and individual cultural capital can be understood through the structure-agency dualism within the anthropological tool of practice theory. However, practice theory usually works within calculations of oppositionality and tensions. In the classic view, individuals, particularly activists, are in an antagonistic relationship with media institutions. The case of Lisa Ling and American news networks, on the contrary, consists of individual agency and institutional structuration overlapping. In the process, entertainment and activism synchronize. Let me explain.

There was a key moment, an event, that exposes the presence and strategic deployment of cultural capital in this case. Lisa Ling is a correspondent for CNN, National Geographic Channel, and ABC’s The View. Mitch Koss, who was with Ling and Lee in North Korea, is widely known to have been the mentor of Lisa and Laura Ling, as well as Anderson Cooper. These media insiders waited months to thumb threw their address books to get the numbers of Larry King, Anderson Cooper, and Matt Lauer (Today Show). With all due compassion to Laura and Lisa, it is important to note that in a world of increasingly edutainment-geared television news programming this is a “good” story complete with evil despots, nuclear weapons, and teary-eyed family members. Even without this engaging nonfiction narrative, I would argue, Lisa Ling would be able to get on every show, and have celebrity-dense, simultaneous vigils in several American cities coordinated with her television appearances.

What if Lisa wasn’t Laura’s sister? What is Al Gore hadn’t founded Current TV and weren’t involved? Would this issue had gotten on all major networks at primetime hours had Lisa not had these contacts and been so camera-ready and photogenic? These concerns could be somewhat tempered if we consider the class and cultural capital of the people who gain full-time employment in the creative industries. It isn’t Lisa’s ease and practice on camera which makes it possible or her connections, but a mix of these issues and more that constitutes her powerful cultural capital. While Current has branded their business as entrepreneurially democratizing media production and distribution to the masses, the people who are under the benefit packages and full-time salaries of these companies are unusually well-connected through family, elite schools, or other insider and backdoor operations.

With practice theory, we often conclude that agency is structured and the higher the agent gets within spirals of power the more structuration occurs. Activism, usually associated with individual agency, quickly is structured to death and transformed into spectacle. Strangely enough in the Ling situation, the individual and institutional cultural capital synchronize. This coordination usually happens only to elites. However, usually even to them, their political intentions are stripped in the pursuit of entertainment. This is not so in this case. Through personal favors, shared political concerns, and co-benefits in the economics of spectacle, the Ling family and major news networks coordinated to publicize the reprehensible situation of these journalists.

Also at the vigil for the first time were employees of Current TV, in my next blog I am going to investigate the political and capitalistic drive behind the censorship and denial by Current TV of this issue and the failed promise of the democratization of citizen journalism and participatory culture.