Precarious Encounters

Abstract

This paper explores the conceptual implications of the proliferation of radioactive wild boars in the Fukushima exclusion zone after the 2011 nuclear meltdown. Shukin uses this striking example as an occasion to conceptualize a “becoming-species” of precarity—a way of accounting for how nonhuman lives and multispecies relationships are caught up in and impacted by conditions of generalized insecurity under global capitalism.

Building on feminist and posthumanist critiques, Shukin argues that most theorizations of precarity remain limited by anthropocentric assumptions that only humans can subjectively experience precarity. In contrast, the political framework of the becoming-species of precarity is attuned to how human and nonhuman lives are entangled and co-constituted. Shukin positions encounters with animals as infrastructural supports for governing precarity and repairing damaged life. The boars’ resilience in Fukushima’s radioactive ruins represents an ungovernable autonomy that disrupts sovereign attempts to restore capital accumulation and circulation.

Shukin suggests that precarious encounters with the boars catalyze an ambivalent, “transitional infrastructure” that opens onto alternate multispecies commons, beyond compulsive efforts to repair a “malfunctioning world.” Rather than symbols of ungoverned vulnerability, the radioactive boars emerge as figures of ecological remembrance and symbolic reminders of the precarity intrinsic to all life under capitalism.