Ecosophy and Planetary Writing: On Chernobyl II
In this article, Toshiya Ueno proposes to bring in dialogue Félix Guattari’s ecological thought with the post-Fukushima novella Chernobyl II published in 2014 by the Fukushima-born writer and media activist Eiichi Seino. Drawing in particular on Guattari’
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Ecosophy and Planetary Writing: On Chernobyl II Toshiya Ueno Introduction Just three years after the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, Félix Guattari published an influential work in ecological thinking entitled Three Ecologies.1 The book generated a breakthrough in the theory of ecology by arguing for the necessity to juxtapose three ecological registers: the ecology of nature (natural environment), the ecology of society (social and political sphere), and the ecology of mind (mindscape and psycho- sphere). This trilogy was inspired by Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind.2 Now, five years after the Fukushima disaster that followed the earthquake and tsunami of March 2011, it is appropriate to apply the arguments and concepts developed in Three Ecologies to the present situation in Japan and the world. This essay, however, does much more than simply apply Guattari’s concepts to analyze the issue of Fukushima. Beyond mere appropriation, it attempts to develop this thought through a close-reading of Chernobyl II (2014), a novel written by Fukushima-born Japanese novelist Eiichi Seino.3 Seino has published several novels and travelogue essays while being actively engaged with the organization of free open-air techno parties as DJ and party organizer since the mid-1990s. He traveled in many places
T. Ueno (*) Wako University, Tokyo, Japan © The Author(s) 2017 C. Thouny, M. Yoshimoto (eds.), Planetary Atmospheres and Urban Society After Fukushima, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2007-0_8
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around the world from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, and after “3.11,” he has been commuting back and forth between Fukushima and Tokyo in order to care for his elderly parents. He has long been interested in contemporary philosophy, such as post-structuralism and some anarchist theory, as he explains in numerous essays and blogs. Being part of the “new breed” (shinjinrui), the Japanese equivalent of the X generation in Europe and North America, although he has never claimed this appellation for himself, he is relatively familiar with the legacy of contemporary thought and critical theory which would include Deleuze and Guattari. Building on this intellectual genealogy, I would like to propose in this essay a reading of Chernobyl II that draws on both Guattari’s ecosophy and recent discussions in object-oriented ontology. This essay argues for a form of ecological writing that both mirrors the present closed state of Fukushima Japan and, in this mirroring, imperatively calls for a re-attunement to the atmospheres of the planet. To begin, I briefly summarize the novel. Chernobyl II is a first-person narrative in which the male narrator tells the reader about the events that happened in his life. The nameless protagonist, who lives in Kaizuka, a suburb of a rural city. The novel only gives hints of what happened, but it seems that the town was ravaged by the tsunami, and is now part of the area polluted by the nuclear incident that ensued. In Japanese, the term “kaizuka” denotes the archeological garbage sites
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