The Theater of the Disaster: What Can We Say about Pure BANANA girls class and Fukushima?

Hyun-Suk Seo

The disaster does not put me into question, but annuls the question, makes it disappear--as if with the question, "I" too disappeared in the disaster which never appears. The fact of disappearing is, precisely, not a fact, not an event; it does not happen, not only because there is no "I" to undergo the experience, but because there cannot possibly be any experience of it. - Maurice Blanchot

The disaster is an impossible demand. It evades representation and forces silence, the immeasurable weight of which is mistranslated as the need to break it. Knowledge of the disaster is inconceivable. Or rather, it is only conceivable in that, as Maurice Blanchot puts it, "knowledge - not knowledge of the disaster but knowledge as disaster and knowledge disastrously - carries us, carries us off, deports us straight to ignorance, and puts us face to face with ignorance of the unknown so that we forget, endlessly."2 The "of" in such expressions as "knowledge of the disaster," as one realizes in Blanchot's texts as well as in the language of the disaster in general, promptly unsettles what it was assigned to establish as the syntactical convention and performs a kind of alchemic reversal through which the linked words become ceaselessly interchangeable. The disaster overturns everything according to the senseless, limitless law of reciprocity; knowledge of the disaster is the process of self-annihilation. It is in this way that the call for knowledge of the disaster activates and necessitates the innate fate of knowledge; knowledge in essence belongs to the disaster. Hence the impossible question, the desire in which is mocked by the apathetic symbol of the unqualified impossibility of knowing, the question mark: "What can we say?"

It has been said. From the impossible point of view of the disaster, the F/T 11 slogan is an avowal that there's nothing that can be said, not even the proclamation of one's absolute ignorance. The sentence is indeed a statement, rather than a call, uttering in vein the utter impossibility of knowledge as well as the desire for it. The rhetoric justice in this statement even annuls the imposed need to face the seeming impossibility for the artificial purpose of rendering itself futile. The disaster, like the law, only executes its pure indifference. The disaster cannot be properly remembered. Inside the disastrous immensity of nothingness, one only forgets - forgetting without that which is to be forgotten, forgetting with no memory, forgetting the very act of forgetting. One cannot speak of what cannot be forgotten; one cannot remember what cannot be spoken. The disaster is beyond memory, outside memory. It is an "un-story," as Blanchot calls it, or "that which escapes quotation and which memory does not recall - forgetfulness as thought."3 The disaster ruins everything including the temporal order, the banal construct of historicity. The disaster is absolute; the disaster is absolutely. It is in the impossible tense; it belongs neither to the past nor to the future. It is nowhere.

BANAGAKU★☆Super Spunky Sports Autumn Grand Tournament!!!!! belongs to the disaster. It does so in a radically different way from how any direct dialogues about Fukushima belongs to the disaster. If intended allegories, metaphors, references, and discussions falsely belong to language and thus return to the disaster through their falsity, BANAGAKU becomes the disaster. Betrayed by language and betraying language, it falters, murmurs, and equivocates, as if such is the only way possible to "say anything about the disaster," which is not to address it but to embody and show its very effect upon representation. Left behind or thrown by the disaster at the edge of the terror, it cries out nothing and cries for nothing.

The commonsensical fact of chronology that the infamous Pure BANANA girls class events precede the Fukushima crisis is swept away by a certain false dialectic, through which the absence of silence conveys the very essence of silence. The disaster reaches BANAGAKU through a cut in time, forcing it to overturn its own ontological foundation and to submit to the inevitable reversibility, precisely the performative aspect of the disaster, or the haunting of the impossible question, "What can we say?" BANAGAKU unwillingly becomes the hollow pre-inscription, as it were, of that which was, is, and will be in the constant state of coming, the disaster. What it belongs to is not just the Fukushima crisis as the singular historical event but the supreme cruelty of something more fundamental that is always on the verge of bursting and is always repeated. An artifact of irrationality, it denotes the loss of Time's grip on reality, a premonition as well as an aftereffect whose temporal status is violated by the rupture of impossibility. The disaster, after all, "always takes place after having taken place."4 If BANAGAKU serves the pure death drive at all, it is because of the disaster's anachronic grip, which theater in its general impure state only pretends to evade. BANAGAKU is in the impossible tense; it belongs to nowhere.

Pure BANANA girls class erases the possibility of mourning and submits to the absolute necessity of suffering; it suffers in a radically different manner from any attempts to directly face suffering. It becomes a threat itself, at once threatening and threatened. As such, it is a witless laugh at the hasty effort to break the absolute silence that the disaster forces open. If one desires the likes of aesthetic innovation "after" the disaster, something like the post-war innovation in Japanese cinema and theater, or the European avant-garde after WW I, Pure BANANA girls class is an unwitting mock of such desire. It rejects to be an "art" or a response to reality likewise, rendering the modernist inquiry (upon the role of art) not simply irresoluble but blatantly pointless: "What can art say?" It's been said, there's ultimately nothing that can be said. The art of the disaster is a lost grip on history, a non-art. Theater is dead.

The double collapse inherent in the Pure BANANA girls class event is in that it attempts to forget the disaster as well as the false need to say anything about the disaster; it activates a bleak state of absolute oblivion. No reference. No quotation. The barren "un-story" obliterates time, or vice versa. It pretends at no knowledge, evading the slightest temptation for an allegorical relation to reality. The disaster returns precisely because it is profoundly and ignorantly oblivious. The oblivion that it performs is of course filtered through a number of defense mechanisms, gestures of resistance against the absolute silence; the Pure BANANA girls class event is doubtless the antithetical opposite of silence. It nevertheless falls into the abyss of futility. Less than resistance and far from satirical mimicry, the rhetoric infertility it acts out so unyieldingly is terrifying to the limited extent of seeing the possibility of seeing language fail but not seeing the actual act of falling. The bodies remain intact just as does the broken language; the effect of failure hovers as afterimages. What we see is a mimicked crisis, eluding pleasure and taking flight from desire prematurely. Its stage unknowingly hosts the uncaring law of the impossible, as a whore house would blindly serve the desire of the other. Thoroughly lacking, but self-annihilating the residues of the lack, the pure otaku mass even declines jouissance. Only the utter indifference of the disaster prevails. It is a semantic disaster and aesthetic catastrophe; it's a rhetoric tsunami.

The law of the disaster is merciless. As if showing its effect, the bodies of the BANAGAKU students are determinate in acting out the sweeping waves of chaos, or rather the sovereign primacy of the unknowable law. Disguised as a ruinous muddle, the stage is in fact seized by a shared will to conform, a strictly choreographed uniformity and harmony, which can only be executed after hundreds of hours of devotion and passion, a collective will that is possibly more resolute than that of any communal commitment upon social changes. The domineering collectivity that the "girls" in uniform conform to leaves no room for dissension. They firmly affirm that the hegemonic uniformity they submit themselves to is a form of insisting violence, of which the irresistible intensity devastates the innermost vacuum of subjectivity. This is a methodic ritual, in which the shivering shamans become the sacrificial offerings themselves and turn the throes of dying into a pumping rhythmic mess, or vice versa. (One cannot tell whether the intensified muscles connote pleasure or pain, celebration or mourning over the death of theater.) The bodily flux is at once a slim effort to fudge on absolute silence and an eventual submission to its inhuman magnificence. The violated stage becomes a falsely catastrophic representation of a certain ferocious homogenizing order, a contradictory representation of the unrepresentable, and it is this pounding falsity through which silence is condensed. Silence, which the staged disarray initially falls out of, returns to us posthumously after the death of theater that it announces, after the final curtain call that deports subjectivity. Like a ghost, silence affects us through its eventual corporeal absence.

It becomes clear then the vociferous inauguration of "we" on stage - the most irrational enunciation of which is carried out in the absurdity of the banner that reads: "Wanted: Pilots for Self-Defense Forces" - at once defers and hastens the exposition of the frivolity of the communal bond. Silence thoroughly demolishes subjectivity; in silence, the errant dynamism of the collective bad faith defies the foundation of the plural subjectivity not to mention the sense of responsibility in excess presupposed in the rhetoric establishment. What can "we" say about "we" after all, that vacillating shell trapped inside the disaster of language, or language of the disaster? As "we" all know, the hollow nominator is but the name for an endless fall without terror.

1 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995, p.28.

2 Ibid., p.3.

3 Ibid., p.28.

4 Ibid., p.28.