Fukushima: The Geo-Trauma of a Futural Wave

The enduring effects of the March 2011 tsunami and nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan are explored in this paper through the notions of “geo-trauma” in the authors’ work and geophilosophy in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy. At the fulcrum of the 2011 global disaster was the nuclear meltdown and the emittance of radioactive material such as Caesium-137 and Strontium-90. This event mattered and matters, dispersing and deterritorializing organic, non-organic, and anorganic life in all of its articulations. In the wake of the singularity of Fukushima and the Anthropocene epoch more generally, it is timely to ruminate upon in what way this event as a futural wave makes “us” as the present generation both responsible for and part of the ongoing Fukushima meltdown. The questions that Fukushima provokes are not about the specific clean-up operation and environmental impacts around the plant, but more about how we can understand Fukushima as an event in nuclear history, or a singularity of “geo-trauma.” The folly of Fukushima and its aftermath, points to something fundamental about the Anthropocene, in the sense that the interconnected patterning that one may derive from the site of the disaster, gives new life to understanding the darker/non-human sides of ecology, the media, the unconscious, contamination, and space. The posthumanism of Deleuze and Guattari combined with the extinctional impetus of the Anthropocene will drive this analysis forward in terms of uncovering new forms of understanding about the Earth, World, territory, land, and Nature