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(SERAS Southeast Review of Asian Studies Volume 35 (2013): 190-203

Nihei Tsutomu and the Poetics of Space: Notes Toward a Ecology

KEITH LESLIE JOHNSON Georgia Regents University

The work of artist Nihei Tsutomu 弐瓶勉 (b. 1971) is here examined in terms of its extraordinary use of space. Not only does Nihei’s work present us with sophisticated renderings of architectural space, it also makes novel use of the manga format itself: the space within and between panels. The uncanny spatiality of Nihei’s manga resonates with an equally uncanny sci-fi ecology, one that no longer distinguishes between living and non-living matter, between creature and datum.

Introduction

Perhaps more than any other manga-ka, Nihei Tsutomu has explored the central visual trope of cyberpunk, namely, the (negative) impact of on space. Cyberpunk worlds are claustrophobically urban, overwrought, choked with garbage, first-world shanty-towns shot through with access tunnels, arterial bundles of fiber-optic cables, dark warrens of tenement buildings, defunct factories and churches, repurposed, riddled with antennae like an immense, moribund body undergoing some perverse form of acupuncture. Technological imperatives have come to outweigh human ones. In compensation for- and complicity with this deterioration, technology offers up a virtual space into which humans may escape and in which they increasingly dwell. Cyberpunk largely registers the incontinence of the world in terms of a diminished capacity for dwelling, in both the practical and Heideggerian senses. , then, bears a considerable symbolic burden in cyberpunk. In terms of architecture, Reyner Banham reminds us, technology has both an “enforcing” and “facilitating” mode— enforcing when accommodations must be made in the name of technology and facilitating when create new possibilities for accommodation.1 In works like Blame! (1998–2003) and Biomega (2004–09), Nihei explores the deep ambiguities of each mode and in the process constellates architecture bracingly with the broader philosophical and biological issues of cyberpunk.

1See The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, ch. 5. Nihei Tsutomu and the Poetics of Space 191

This short paper analyzes Nihei's worlds at both the aesthetic and conceptual levels via those thinkers with whom he engages in near- explicit dialogue, thinkers like David Gissen, Gaston Bachelard, and Karatani Kôjin, whose works examine the relations between humanity, architecture, and thought. More specifically, I will draw out a concept from each of these thinkers—“subnature,” “intimate immensity,” and “the will to architecture,” respectively—as part of a critical appraisal of Nihei's oeuvre which sees it as a sprawling allegory of the ambiguous nature of poiesis itself. In Nihei's worlds, the act of creation is intimately linked with destruction, as space is with speed, violence with beauty, and alienation with pathos. Turning to Nihei’s ongoing series, (Shidonia no kishi シドニアの騎士, 2009– ), the last section of this brief analysis will therefore attempt to theorize the ecology proper to such worlds, an ecology constructed not upon the interdependencies of living organisms, but the ambiguous, uncanny “cyborgized” or denatured relations of data in a vast transmedial network.

FIGURE 1 Nihei Tsutomu 弐瓶勉 (b. 1971). Panel from Biomega, vol. 1 (Shûeisha, 2007).

Biopolis

Some few brief descriptive remarks might be helpful to underscore this ambiguity and provide a basic anatomy of these worlds, which bear a family- resemblance if not a strict continuity. It's not entirely clear, first of all, that they represent an imagined future Earth. If so, it is an Earth uncannily altered, stripped of reference points, geographical, historical, and political. The resemblance is deeper, for all that. These worlds are politically enthralled by rival corporate factions, military-industrial-medical. A shadowy entity known as Toha Heavy Industries (Tôa-jûkô 東亜重工) figures in most story-lines, as do the DRF or Data Recovery Foundation (Gijutsu Bunka Isan Fukkô Zaidan 技術文化遺産復興財団) and Public Health Department (Kôshûeisei Kyoku 公衆衛生局), their subsidiary. In Biomega, the main character, Kanoe Zouichi (庚造一), attempts to retrieve Eon Green (イオン・グリーン), a genetically-enhanced “human,” on behalf of Toha Heavy Industries in order to combat a virus released by the DRF. This so-called N5S-virus reduces humans to protoplasmic 192 K. Johnson

“Drones” (fig. 1), a condition favorable to the DRF's plans for world- domination. In fact, though, their plans go beyond mere political control. They seek to reconfigure the fabric of life itself. In what must be a kind of 's dream—Nihei himself was trained as an architect— a polymer is released that can transform matter into an infinitely malleable substance responsive to the will. Once the polymer has been dispersed, the mastermind of this plot (Nyaldee ニアルディ) instantly transforms the earth into an immense straw-like city fortified and striated by a massive Megastructure (fig. 2). The world of Blame! does not exist in strict continuity with that of Biomega, but there are nonetheless many similarities, not least of which is an immense straw- or tube-like world held together (and apart) by a Megastructure. In Blame!, the artificially-intelligent FIGURE 2 Nihei Tsutomu 弐瓶勉 (b. 1971). Panel administrators are from Biomega, vol. 4 (Shûeisha, 2008). referred to simply as the Authority (Tôchikyoku 統治局) but although they are mostly benevolent, they are also ironically powerless, barren matriarchs and sages over a dying City. The Authority consist of artificially-intelligent administrators of the “Netsphere.” The Netsphere used to orchestrate most automated activities in the real world, but the connection has been severed. To protect the Netsphere from a new order of beings—rogue artificial-intelligences who can create bodies at will and refer to themselves as Silicon Life, who strive to assert their evolutionary dominance by eradicating human competition—the Authority at some point created a genetic security protocol. Only humans possessing so- called Net Terminal Genes (Netto tanmatsu idenshi ネット端末遺伝子) could access the Netsphere. Over the millennia, however, humans possessing these genes have disappeared, either from genetic isolation/mutation within the immense City or continuing attrition by Silicon Life. What's more, a security program called the Safeguard has reinterpreted its original mandate—to protect the Netsphere from unauthorized infiltration (hackers)—to killing all humans without Net Terminal Genes. A cyborg named Killy (Kirii 霧亥) has therefore been Nihei Tsutomu and the Poetics of Space 193 dispatched by the Authority—who are marooned in the Netsphere—to seek out humans with Net Terminal Genes in order to reconnect with the real world. Such a reconnection would not only allow the Authority to combat Silicon Life, but even its own anti-virus software, the Safeguard, over which it has lost control. “Base reality” (kitei genjitsu 基 底現実), meanwhile, which consists of an enormous Dyson-city stretching millions of miles into space (roughly from Earth to orbit and incorporating all the planetary matter in between), is perpetually being reconfigured by the Builders (kensetsusha 建設者, lit. “”): enormous automated machines over which humans and the Authority lost control ages ago and which blindly construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct the environment. In rendering the worlds of Blame! and Biomega, Nihei combines Palladian and Gothic splendor with non-Euclidean, organic complexity—roads and catwalks strung between leaning buildings like creepers in an overgrown forest, or at its most extreme, a seething, primordial, Lovecraftian swamp: no longer metropolises, but living cities configured as a kind of massively distributed single organism or biopolis (figs. 3–4).

FIGURE 3 Nihei Tsutomu 弐瓶勉 (b. 1971). Panel from Blame!, vol. 9 (Shûeisha, 2002).

FIGURE 4 Nihei Tsutomu 弐瓶勉 (b. 1971). Panel from Biomega, vol. 3 (Shûeisha, 2007).

194 K. Johnson

Subnatures, Intimate Immensities, and the Will to Architecture

While such cities are alive, they do not support life as we know it, at least not human life. In essence, because humans can no longer access the Netsphere, they are exiled to the twice-fallen “real” world, no longer natural but subnatural, in David Gissen's sense. “Subnature” refers to all of those “peripheral and often denigrated forms of nature...envisioned as threatening to inhabitants or to the material formations and ideas that constitute architecture” (Gissen 2009, 21–22). He divides these forms of nature into three categories: atmospheres (including dankness, smoke, gas, and exhaust), matter (including dust, puddles, mud, and debris), and life (weeds, insects, pigeons, and crowds). While for most architects and urban planners, these subnatural forms are to be avoided or mitigated, Gissen examines those who attempt to “negotiate a rapprochement with subnature” or even actively produce “subnatural forms and experiences” (Gissen 2009, 22). From this perspective, Nihei's worlds essentially imagine the ascendence of subnatures: biozones divided by infrastructure (Megastructure), access tunnels, exhaust and electronics ports; leaking, derelict water mains mingling with cooling liquids, contaminated run-offs—in other words, all that is “inherently uncontrollable, filthy, and fearsome” about urban environments that “confront[s] the stability of architecture itself” (Gissen 2009, 211). Nihei, like Gissen, does not set out to revel in decay as such, but rather to challenge “the reductive and naturalistic aspects of…architecture-nature dynamics” in order to promote “a dialectic that radically rethinks both architecture and nature” (Gissen 2009, 214). Such a notion puts to the question humanist assumptions about architecture and nature both. For Nihei, the world is alive in its deadness, but it does not necessarily live for us. One of the most obvious indications of human irrelevance in this new biopolis is its vast scale. —In one instance, Killy navigates through a room roughly the size of Jupiter (fig. 5); between two panels more than a million hours of endless FIGURE 5 Nihei Tsutomu trudging pass. The protagonists of Nihei's 弐瓶勉 (b. 1971). Panel from worlds navigate immense, depopulated Blame!, vol. 9 (Shûeisha, 2002). zones corrugated with defunct circuitry, Nihei Tsutomu and the Poetics of Space 195 supporting a scattered rabblement of post-humans. But there is something serene in all this emptiness that recalls a key passage from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space:

It would seem, then, that it is through their 'immensity' that...the space of intimacy and world space [by which he means sublime conceptualizations of space like those found in Romantic poetry]...blend. When human solitude deepens, then the two immensities touch and become identical. (Bachelard 1969, 203)

The immensity of Nihei's worlds is, to use Bachelard's term, an “intimate immensity,” in which internal and external space become inextricably folded. The spatial and temporal scales, particularly in Blame!, are so vast as to utterly negate the “coordinates” by which we typically parse the panel format of sequential art. The inky depths of some panels obscure planetary spaces; the blank sliver separating other panels contracts eons. Some actions occur so quickly as to beggar representation—Nihei in these instances shows us, disconcertingly, an effect without an apparent cause; other actions, which occur just as quickly, are dilated across multiple panels. The result of these scalar distortions is a space-time which simply cannot be processed in “physical” terms, which must either be “transposed” onto some relative human metric or “sublimed” (i.e. recast as spiritual or psychological metaphor, as thought-figure). In their very immensity, such distorted spaces become strangely private and contemplative. The coincidence of thought/consciousness and an experience of space is central not only to Bachelard, but is developed by Karatani Kôjin as well, most notably in Architecture as Metaphor. Simply put, Karatani’s thesis in this work is that Western rationality involves what he calls “the will to architecture,” which is to say a metaphorical and structural attraction to architectural images in connection with the mechanisms of thought itself. Where Karatani feels this metaphor demands critique is in its implicit assertion of “the world as a product of making” as opposed to “becoming” (Karatani 1995, 6). Architecture is (quite literally) a concretization of thought. What then, are we to make of Nihei’s ? What sort of “thought” do they evince? I have already noted the inhuman scales featured in his manga, but what affords his architectures a further uncanniness is their breadth of reference—a gobbledygook of styles spanning human history—not only traditional Japanese, but Greco-Roman, Gothic, Bauhaus, Brutalist, and on and on. Some structures seem lifted from the sketchbooks of Gaudí, while others in their austerity recall nothing so much as Soviet missile 196 K. Johnson silos. The result, however, of this encyclopedic parade of styles is less a testament to human ingenuity than a mounting sense of architecture as profoundly inhuman. In part, that is because Nihei’s protagonists pass through architectural zones with no sense of logic or contiguity—one “moment” they are in a space resembling a submarine, say, with exposed ductwork, narrow gantries, and reinforced bulkheads; and the next they are in some sort of open, industrial space, immense davit arms suspended over abyssal air-shafts; and the next they are in a castle-like structure, and so on. The arbitrariness of architectural style, zone to zone, denatures architecture, which is transformed into a museum of itself or an immense diorama. Nihei's environments, in their scale, design, etc, are not designed with humans in mind. They are, in fact, machine , emerging from the Builders’ database of architectural options—a kind of parody of . Even when people live in these environments, the feeling is of compromise, something jerry-built atop a pre-existing structure; it is humans who must accommodate themselves to architecture and not vice-versa. They are squatters in their own homes. People, in short, are an afterthought. One of the most compelling implications of this condition—one that supports Karatani's thesis by a kind of via negativa—is the notion of post-humanism as a byproduct of architecture, rather than evolutionary or cybernetic processes. The built environments in Blame! are so vast, so labyrinthine, that scattered human populations have become genetically isolated. In Biomega, the practical requirements to merely traverse (let alone navigate) such environments involve any number of radical cybernetic enhancements. In both instances, humanity has had to adapt to an environment recognizable in detail but alien in scale. If the inhabitants of these spaces are post-human, they are also in very real ways post-cognitive, no longer processing their environment in terms of meaning (how could they?), but rather in the crassest terms of brute animal survival. Like hermit crabs, the few human communities that remain must periodically relocate owing to encroachment of the Builders or Safeguard or the deterioration of their current dwellings— structural collapses, power outages, etc. Nihei's worlds help us to think a speculative trajectory of architectural theory, one that has fascinating consequences not only for the future, but for the present as well. He helps us to see, concretely, how bound up are the resources of thought with those spaces in which they function. To alter that space is to alter our thought, to disrupt that space is to disrupt our thought. Confronting such disruptions, we have the very real sensation of butting up against a limit, not only a limit of what manga can accommodate as a narrative Nihei Tsutomu and the Poetics of Space 197 medium, but a more abstract terminus on the far side of which human categories decohere.

Terminality

The worlds Nihei creates exist, therefore, within an ontological zone of terminality, but in a double-sense: terminality first of all as a state of exception, a threshold of crisis, a profound moribundity; but also terminality in the sense of nexus (as in “computer terminal” or “Net Terminal Genes”—genes that are (apparently) dead, but that would allow humans to connect the mundane and virtual spheres), where one possible mode of existence bleeds into another, where new sorts of connections (biological, social, political) are as it were forced upon us, where we have to adapt. This sense of terminality finds its most intense articulation in Nihei's ongoing manga series Knights of Sidonia, which on the surface presents a neatly schematized allegory of sexual politics. The story follows the last surviving remnants of humanity, adrift in space on the seed-ship Sidonia and beset by monstrous, tentacular creatures called gauna (奇居子). The gauna are an organic collective, each consisting of an egg-like “true body” (hontai 本体) sheathed in “placenta(l)” bio-armor (ena 胞衣). They resemble nothing so much as nightmarish uteri turned inside out—the placenta, now on the outside, no longer a nurturing membrane, but a threatening surface. These gauna, inexplicably bent on eradicating humanity, give chase in enormous “mass union ships” (shugafu-sen 衆合船) comprised of thousands, even trillions, of individuals: they are malleable, able to combine in various forms, to be re-purposed, as stem cells, according to the inscrutable needs of the species. Existing en masse or singly, they exemplify not only Deleuze's liberating vision of a “body without organs”—a corporeal surface over which desire can flow freely—but also Žižek's inverse notion of “organs without bodies”—deathless partial objects.2 Humans, in stark counterpoint, inhabit an enormous seed ship (hashusen 播種船), almost comically phallic (emerging from a scrotal asteroid (reaction mass) at its base). They fend off the gauna with guardian armed with “kabizashi” (カビザシ): special lances which alone are capable of penetrating the gauna's placenta. In its thousand-plus years of drifting in space, humankind has evolved. They

2For more on the “body without organs,” see Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense pp. 82–93 and Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, ch. 2; for “organs without bodies,” see Slavoj Žižek's Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences pp. 172–75.

198 K. Johnson reproduce asexually, through cloning; they photosynthesize, rather than eat (in fact, “mutual photosynthesis” is the new intimacy); they've created a third, neutral sex, etc etc. The conceptual coordinates of the conflict seem clear enough, if not a little stale: a masculine of rational society, of “clean,” controlled technological reproduction versus a maternal, embodied, non- hierarchical sodality, an anti-culture (fig. 6). This initial description seems to conform to the convention s of the genre (as outlined by Susan FIGURE 6 Nihei Tsutomu 弐瓶勉 (b. 1971). Panel from Knights of Napier and Sidonia, vol. 1 (Shûeisha, 2009). others 3 ): a human society in retreat from its own biology and from the biological in general, following technical imperatives which, for Nihei, always seem to mask ethical foreclosures in the name of other “freedoms” (from disease, from self-consciousness, from fear, etc). Such a situation, however, is practically set up for subversion. Nihei increasingly stages not only the resistance of biology, but the insistence of the biological, as the gap between humans and gauna begins, uncannily, to close. The gradual closure of this gap can be mapped onto an accelerating trend in both biopolitical and scientific ontologies, namely their flattening. To quickly enumerate just a few recent figures associated with this flattening: Gilles Deleuze, whose notion of a life designates a paradoxical experience/duration in which individuality fades and becomes "a singular essence," an empty time of singularities or virtualities existing in between what we take to be the defining moments of an individual's life4; Giorgio Agamben, whose notion of bare life

3See from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle, chs. 4–5. 4Deleuze draws an enigmatic example of a life from Dickens' Our Mutual Friend. He notes a curious episode in the novel wherein “[a] disreputable man, a rogue, held in contempt by everyone, is found as he lies dying. Suddenly, those taking care of him manifest an eagerness, respect, even love, for his slightest sign of life. Everybody bustles about to save him, to the point where, in his deepest coma, this Nihei Tsutomu and the Poetics of Space 199 designates that condition of political abjection wherein the human is reduced to a mere body without interiority or subjectivity5; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, whose notion of multitude designates “the productive force that sustains Empire” while at the same time “call[ing] for and mak[ing] necessary its destruction” (Hardt & Negri 2001, 61)— in essence the faceless mass of networked humanity that can be manipulated at will by sovereign power, but can also, by virtue of that self-same network, mobilize resistance to sovereign power with unprecedented rapidity and coordination; Timothy Morton, whose notion of the mesh designates the often disturbing entanglement of all living and non-living things, an “ecological thought that has no center and no edge” (Morton 2010, 33). For good measure, we might also include Japanese cultural critic Azuma Hiroki, whose notion of animalization (dôbutsu-ka 動物化) designates, in the words of Thomas LaMarre, a “new mode of cultural reception” (LaMarre 2007, 175), that is, consumption based on the satisfaction of (animal) needs as opposed to (human) desires. Rather than narratives, Azuma contends, many otaku prefer to consume character-traits (or moe-elements) directly; their consumption of manga, anime, and related media is keyed to a “database” of such elements—their personal tastes—to which narrative as such is extraneous.6 This is only a sketchy, preliminary list, but what do these ideas have in common? They all assume the collapse of age-old hierarchies and divisions around which life has been organized philosophically, politically, and scientifically. The site of that collapse is one of radical ambiguity—one finds there both liberating ecological vision (in which the profound relations between all living things are glimpsed) and troubling political calculus (whereby new forms of apartheid can flourish without moral impediments).

wicked man himself senses something soft and sweet penetrating him. But to the degree that he comes back to life, his saviors turn colder, and he becomes once again mean and crude. Between his life and his death, there is a moment that is only that of a life playing with death” (Deleuze 2001, 28). 5The paradoxical figure of homo sacer is for Agamben the avatar of bare life: an obscure figure from Roman law who, owing to some unnamed crime, found himself disqualified from sacrifice but at the same time subject to murder with impunity— in the eyes of the law, he no longer “counted” as properly or fully human. Agamben traces the logic of bare life to its obscene culmination in Auschwitz. See Homo sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life pts. 2.1 and 3.7. 6See Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, ch. 2.

200 K. Johnson

Why should all this be important in the context of Nihei, particularly Knights of Sidonia? For one, this manga was at the outset criticized by some fans as aesthetically and narratively conventional. Gone, certainly, is the cybergothic splendor of the earlier works, their sketchy intensity and inky mystery; instead, Knights of Sidonia features a clean, bright unadorned 3-tone style complete with (relatively chaste) fan- service (fig. 7—a running gag in the series involves the protagonist, Tanikaze Nagate ( 谷風長道), inadvertently barging in on female squadmates in various states of undress, for which he suffers violent reprisal). The plot structure, initially, seems to adhere to all the melodramatic tropes of the “mechacademy” genre: the stresses of teen maturation plus those of total war. But it has become increasingly clear as the series has progressed—the tankôbon edition is ten volumes at present—that Nihei's capitulations to convention ultimately set up a series of remarkable subversions. FIGURE 7 Nihei Tsutomu 弐瓶勉 (b. 1971). Panel from Knights of The antagonisms that define the Sidonia, vol. 6 (Shûeisha, 2011). relation of humans toward gauna— that hold the species apart—are mirrored or replicated within human culture (which contains not only photosynthesizing post-humans, but clones like Nagate, sentient programs, genetically modified bears, cyborg “immortals,” and so on). In other words, the human species is itself a site of extraordinary definitional flux. The fate of a fallen squadmate, Shiraui Tsumugi (白羽衣つむぎ) further complicates things: “placenta” from the gauna who killed her and absorbed her genetic material is recovered and used to create a new kind of biomecha, a sentient biological machine imprinted, loosely, with Tsumugi’s personality and identity. Because Tsumugi in life felt affection for Nagate, so too, disconcertingly, does this creature, as if human emotion itself was a function of genetics or “mere” neurochemistry. The transmission of affective and cognitive information, however, seems (to use a computer term) “lossy” and the gauna-Tsumugi disturbingly child- or pet-like as a consequence. In fact, “she” tends to follow Tanikaze around with puppyish enthusiasm and devotion, though owing to her immensity, she is forced to do so by extruding a Nihei Tsutomu and the Poetics of Space 201 bizarre tentacular appendage, a congeries of human (and not so human) genitalia (fig. 8).

The upshot or message here suggests that humans are not being aggressed by something alien to their biology so much as something immanent to it—philosophically, of course, but also literally in the narrative, where it is hinted that there is some deeper connection between the two species. This possibility is broached when gauna begin to assume or mimic the shape of fallen mecha and even their pilots. The human high command interprets this gesture as a clumsily obscene subterfuge, if not taunt, but what if in fact it were some attempt at rapport or communication? What then do the gauna learn about FIGURE 8 Nihei Tsutomu 弐 humanity when it does not hesitate to 瓶勉 (b. 1971). Panel from Knights fire at “its own”? If we react in horror to of Sidonia, vol. 8 (Shûeisha, 2012). gauna, is it because we see in them some loathsome possibility within ourselves, something unfinished or malleable, something unstable and, therefore, destabilizing? What sorts of ethical structures are commensurate to this brave new world; how can there be an ethics where there is no (clear) difference? Whatever else he is doing, Nihei is perpetrating a very sophisticated meditation on philosophical, political, and aesthetic implications of flat ontology, one that implies what I’m calling a “cyberpunk ecology” in order to differentiate it from the more familiar paradigms that precede it (fig. 9). Cyberpunk ecology is an entirely speculative term, it goes without saying, but one that seems the logical continuation of intellectual trends at least a century in the making. We can see the itinerary of this ecology by examining but a few seminal texts, from Vladimir Vernadsky’s The Biosphere (1926) to Timothy Morton’s Ecology without Nature (2007). Each of the texts indicated is a liminal text, shading one discourse into the next. Vladimir Vernadsky’s tripartite categorization of geosphere, biosphere, and noosphere reveals startling connections and dependencies between the “inert” mineral world, “dynamic” organic world, and “sublime” intellectual world; Lewis Mumford integrates the city into our notion of “ecosystem”; Rachel Carson looks at the impact of human industry on “pristine nature,” Gissen at the integration of 202 K. Johnson abjected nature into architecture, Morton at inter-connectedness without transcendental (e.g. Romantic) categories. Ecology is increasingly conceived as a network of attachments between things within a flat ontological schema: life under conditions of collapse, moribundity, catastrophe. Nihei in effect is articulating a vision of life on the far side of such collapse, one replete with eerie resemblances to our own. In sum, if John Muir is the poet of traditional ecology and William Carlos Williams the poet of urban ecology,7 then, I submit, Nihei Tsutomu is the poet of cyberpunk ecology. From his breakthrough work Blame! to the current series, Nihei consistently experiments with and stretches the formal and thematic potential of his medium.

Traditional Ecology Urban Ecology Cyberpunk Ecology Arché Nature—a self- Metropolis—cities containing Network—rhizomatic sustaining, various zones or fusion of material hierarchy of living “microclimates”: shopping and digital/virtual realms matter districts, green spaces, etc. Condition Harmony Accommodation Terminality Discourse Life Resources Media Ontology Categorical— Political—reality structured Flat—Being conceived as substances + by and reflecting “interacting accidents; social desire and power; a parts and emergent hierarchies; modification of wholes” general to specific; social desire/power would (DeLanda 2004, 58); self- things primordial result in a organizing to modification of reality; neo- systems and “dynamical qualities liberal processes” ideology: We Can Fix This (DeLanda 2004, 57) Through Awareness Programming Ethic Environmentalism Conservationism Anarchism Technic Paganism— Architecture—landscaping, Cybernetics—information nostalgia, materials sciences, flows; pastoralism, prim- resource management, transient assemblages; itivism, simplicity, energy efficiency, signals de- greening, etc.; conscious processing; various forms industrialization shaping of the of data environment to best serve storage and retrieval human ends

7Writing of Paterson, eco-critic Lawrence Buell notes that its “desire to break down fixed boundaries between man, poet, [and] dog” (Buell 2001, 115) is matched by a “bioregionalist grasp of its city in relation to its vicinity” (ibid, 118); in other words, Williams’ is an integrative poetry that doesn’t countenance sharp distinctions between human and animal, city and nature. Nihei Tsutomu and the Poetics of Space 203

Texts Vernadsky, Biosphere (1926)àMumford, Culture of Cities (1938)àCarson, Silent Spring (1962)àGissen, Subnature (2009)àMorton, Ecology w/o Nature (2007)

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press. Banham, Reyner. 1984 [1969]. The architecture of the well-tempered environment (2nd ed.). Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. Bachelard, Gaston. 1969. The poetics of space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press. Buell, Lawrence. 2001. Writing for an endangered world: Literature, culture, and environment in the U.S. and beyond. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press. Delanda, Manuel. 2004. Intensive science and virtual philosophy. London: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles. 2001. Pure immanence: Essays on a life. New York: Zone Books. ——. 1990 [1969]. The logic of sense. Trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1977 [1972]. Anti-Oedipus: capitalism & schizophrenia 1. Trans. Mark Hurley, Robert Seem, and Helen Lane. New York: Viking Penguin. Gissen, David. 2009. Subnature: Architecture’s other environments. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Hardt, Michael & Antonio Negri. 2001. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press. Azuma, Hiroki. 2009 [2001]. Otaku: Japan’s database animals. Trans. Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. Karatani, Kôjin. 1995 [1989]. Architecture as metaphor; language, number, money. Trans. Sabu Kohso. Cambridge: MIT Press. LaMarre, Thomas. 2007. Introduction. Mechademia 2. Ed. Frenchy Lunning. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. 175–77. Morton, Timothy. 2010. The ecological thought. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press. Napier, Susan J. 2005. Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle. New York: Palgrave. Žižek, Slavoj. 2004. Organs without bodies: On Deleuze and consequences. New York: Routledge.