Speaker: Nakano Yoshihiro

Abstract

Politics of Suiten: Prolegomena to Cartographic Strategies for Relational Degrowth

Nakano Yoshiro (Rikkyo University)

The acceleration of climate crisis, coupled with the heightened geopolitical tensions such as the Russo-Ukraine war, has nurtured a new security discourse in the Global North, which reinforces the merging of productivism and technofix ideology in the climate governance and ecological transition policies. A new form of ‘eco-fascism’ (Illich 1973) is emerging at the expense of democratic deliberation and grassroots alternatives, as illustrated in the recent conflict between the French government and Les soulèvement de la terre. This tendency can also be found in Japan, as the Green and Digital Transformations (GX and DX) policy discourses seek to update the national energy plan in favor of the renaissance of nuclear power projects.

Against the backdrop, the paper explores an activist-research strategy to identify conditions for the emergence of what Latour and Schultz (2022) calls a ‘new ecological class’. For this purpose, I will elaborate a relational degrowth approach that brings visibility to alternative local knowledge and ontologies against the social imaginaries and spatial power of development and economic growth. First, the paper introduces degrowth and discusses its theoretical shortcomings in thinking relational ontology. Second, I introduce Minakata Kumagusu’s concept of suiten, interpreted by Kazuko Tsurumi, as an alternative framework for illuminating human-nonhuman entanglement of local ontology. Third, the paper proposes a study of the politics of suiten. I will briefly examine the case of nuclear power project in Kaminoseki and outline a new cartography to map out a human and nonhuman meshwork and its diverse ontological arrangements (e.g. local taskscape and traditional livelihood) against the GX discourse.

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