Space Mobility and Crisis in Mega Event Organisation Tokyo Olympics 2020 S Atmospheric Irradiations Rodanthi Tzanelli

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“The connections between critical studies of mobility, sociology of emotions,
and social criticism are clearly conveyed in this book by Rodanthi Tzanelli.
Risk, time/​space, and experience are comprehensively analysed, and readers
collect important cues that help them to understand 21st-​century society.”
Adrian Scribano, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina

“Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources and concepts, Rodanthi


Tzanelli’s latest work on the Olympics as problematic mega-​event tackles the
pandemic-​afflicted Tokyo 2020 games. As always, Tzanelli’s work is thought-​
provoking, astute, and blends a sharp critical eye for fine details with a
phenomenal grasp of the larger issues.”
Philip Seaton, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan

“In this fascinating book, Rodanthi Tzanelli explores the philosophical


dilemmas revolving around the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. Centred on the
effects of disaster and technoscientific reasoning over local place-​making
cosmologies, this is a must-​read book that merits attention in the specialised
literature.”
Maximiliano Korstanje, University of Palermo, Argentina

“This truly interdisciplinary book provides a ground-​breaking analysis of


the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games. Tzanelli provides an incisive analysis of
how the crises surrounding this globally mediated mega-​event are revealed
atmospherically and provides an original analysis of intertwined human and
post-​human mobilities.”
Monica Degen, Brunel University London, UK

“This stimulating ‘Tzanellian’ foray into critical cultural theory upends


mobilities theory, mega-​event theory and critical cosmopolitanism, holding a
dark mirror to the crises of the Anthropocene. Shimmering across tropes of
pilgrimage, ceremonies, dreams, atmospheres, and embodied movement, she
leads us through the Tokyo Olympics in her inimitable style.”
Mimi Sheller, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA
Space, Mobility, and Crisis in
Mega-​E vent Organisation

This book advances an alternative critical posthumanist approach to mega-​


event organisation, taking into account both the new and the old crises which
humanity and our planet face. Taking the delayed Tokyo 2020 Olympic
Games as a case study, Tzanelli explores mega-​event crisis and risk manage-
ment in the era of extreme urbanisation, natural disasters, global pandemic,
and technoscientific control.
Using the atmospheric term ‘irradiation’ (a technology of glamour and
transparency, as well as bodily penetration by harmful agents and strong
affects), the book explores this epistemological statement diachronically
(via Tokyo’s relationship with Western forms of domination) and synchron-
ically (the city as a global cultural-​political player but victim of climate
catastrophes). It presents how the ‘Olympic enterprise’s’ ‘flattening’ of indi-
genous environmental place-​making rhythms, and the scientisation of space
and place in the Anthropocene lead to reductionisms harmful for a viable
programme of planetary recovery.
An experimental study of the mega-​ event is enacted, which considers
the researcher’s analytical tools and the styles of human and non-​human
mobility during the mega-​event as reflexive gateways to forms of posthuman
flourishing. Crossing and bridging disciplinary boundaries, the book will
appeal to any scholar interested in mobilities theory, event and environment
studies, sociology of knowledge, and cultural globalisation.

Rodanthi Tzanelli is Associate Professor of Cultural Sociology and Director


of the Mobilities Research Area in the Bauman Institute, University of
Leeds, UK. She is a social and cultural theorist of mobility (tourism, social
movements, mega-​events, and technology) with particular reference to the rep-
resentational discourses, regimes of consumption, and crises induced by cap-
italism and climate change. She is author of numerous critical interventions,
research articles, and chapters, as well as 14 monographs, including Cultural
(Im)mobilities and the Virocene: Mutating the Crisis (2021).
Routledge Advances in Sociology

348 Framing Social Theory


Reassembling the Lexicon of Contemporary Social Sciences
Edited by Paola Rebughini and Enzo Colombo

349 Space, Mobility, and Crisis in Mega-​Event Organisation


Tokyo Olympics 2020’s Atmospheric Irradiations
Rodanthi Tzanelli

350 Class Boundaries in Europe


The Bourdieusian Approach in Perspective
Edited by Johs. Hjellbrekke, Cédric Hugrée, Étienne Penissat and Alexis Spire

351 Covid-​19 Responses of Local Communities around the World


Exploring Trust in the Context of Risk and Fear
Edited by Khun Eng Kuah, Gilles Guiheux and Francis K. G. Lim

352 Remaking Culture and Music Spaces


Affects, Infrastructures, Futures
Edited by Ian Woodward, Jo Haynes, Pauwke Berkers, Aileen Dillane and
Karolina Golemo

353 Capitalisms and Democracies


Can Growth and Equality be Reconciled?
Edited by Carlo Trigilia

354 Debates Around Abortion in the Global North


Europe, North America, Canada and Asia
Edited by Fabienne Portier-​Le Cocq

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routle​dge.com/​


Routle​dge-​Advan​ces-​in-​Sociol​ogy/​book-​ser​ies/​SE0​511
Space, Mobility, and Crisis in
Mega-​E vent Organisation

Tokyo Olympics 2020’s Atmospheric


Irradiations

Rodanthi Tzanelli
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 Rodanthi Tzanelli
The right of Rodanthi Tzanelli to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data
Names: Tzanelli, Rodanthi, 1974– author.
Title: Space, mobility, and crisis in mega-event organisation : Tokyo Olympics 2020’s
atmospheric irradiations / Rodanthi Tzanelli.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. |
Series: Routledge advances in sociology |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022021144 (print) | LCCN 2022021145 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781032323404 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032323428 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003314547 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Olympic Games (32nd : 2021 : Tokyo, Japan) |
Special events–Japan–Tokyo–Management. | Risk management–Japan–Tokyo.
Classification: LCC GV722 2021 .T83 2023 (print) | LCC GV722 2021 (ebook) |
DDC 394.206809752135–dc23/eng/20220509
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022021144
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022021145
ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​32340-​4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​32342-​8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​31454-​7 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/​9781003314547
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Newgen Publishing UK
For Majid, who must be getting tired of my dedications.
‘Shinto is for when you are born; Buddhism is for when
you die’
Asakusa-​n inja Shinto temple anecdote, Tokyo.
Contents

List of figures xi
Acknowledgements xii
List of abbreviations xiii

1 Introducing a risky experiment 1


Serendipitous events 1
Adjusting the new mobilities paradigm 11
Critical atmospheric mobilities and the Olympic project 16
The structure of the book 20

2 Pilgrimage in Tokyo  23
Tokyo as a cosmion: ‘tracing’ affective mobilities 23
Archipelago imaginaries of (im)mobility 31
Space, power chrononormativity, and the Olympic project 36

3 The birth of the Japanese CineKiki  47


Risk assessment in Aleph 47
Entanglements of spirit/​matter (or, a genealogy of Japanese risk) 50
Irradiation: kiki as an atmosphere 63

4 The dreams of the Japanese CineKiki  69


Dream monitoring 69
Ancestral roots and economic networks 73

5 The ceremonies of the Japanese CineKiki  82


Emakimono planetarianism redux 82
Host selfie as blueprint utopianism: on to France 2024 102
x Contents

6 The life and death of the Japanese CineKiki  109


Resolving aimai: mobility and mortality 109
Virulent fields: volumetric poetics and amplified sounds/​noises 111

7 The journeys of the Japanese CineKiki: bodies and no-​bodies 


119
Beyond utopianism 119
Style 1 –​Homegenising 119
Style 2 –​Foraging 128

8 Conclusion: the chronicles of a biotechnical crime  142

Bibliography 149
Index 184
Figures

1.1 Captured by a viewer: the Japanese flag paraded by Olympic


athletes during the opening ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics  2
5.1 Crafting the Olympic rings  89
5.2 Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games: monument of Olympic rings  90
5.3 Boxes from ceremony  92
5.4 Lighting the cauldron  97
5.5 Aerial formations over Trocadéro  104
6.1 COVID-​19 countermeasures involved stringent checking
of Olympic labour and visitors. This is a view of the Japan
National Stadium’s checks  113
7.1 Security outside Japan’s National Stadium on the day of the
opening ceremony  120
Acknowledgements

Books improve through interaction with friends and colleagues. My thanks


go to some of the contributors to events organised in the Mobilities Research
Area, Bauman Institute at the University of Leeds in the academic year of
2021–​2022: Noel Salazar, Ole Jensen, Dominic Lapointe, Jennie Germann
Molz, Mimi Sheller, Matilde Córdoba Azcárate, Vassilis Ziakas, Maximiliano
Korstanje, Jonas Larsen, Michael Haldrup, Kamalika Jayathilaka Gauthami,
Manuel Ángel Santana Turégano, Ilia Alvarado-​Sizzo, and Richard Ek.
Thanks also to Adrian Favell for organising the Bauman Underground
discussions, in which useful ideas were shared and articulated by participants
on questions concerning planetary survival and the academic scholarship on
futures. As ever, a big thanks goes to my companion in life, Majid Yar, for his
patience and love.
Most of the images included in this book originate from Flickr Photostreams
made available under creative commons licensing: Figure 5.1: France
Olympique Attribution-​NonCommercial-​NoDerivs 2.0 Generic CC BY-​NC-​
ND 2.0. www.fli​ckr.com/​pho​tos/​132011​981@N04/​5133​0974​529/​in/​phot​ostr​
eam/​; Figure 5.2: Dick Thomas Johnson Attribution 2.0 Generic –​CC BY
2.0. www.fli​ckr.com/​pho​tos/​31029​865@N06/​5121​4528​037/​in/​phot​ostr​eam/​;
Figure 5.3: France Olympique Attribution-​NonCommercial-​NoDerivs 2.0
Generic –​CC BY-​ NC-​ ND 2.0. www.fli​ckr.com/​pho​tos/​132011​981@N04/​
5133​0974​274/​in/​phot​ostr​eam/​; Figure 5.4: France Olympique Attribution-​
NonCommercial-​NoDerivs 2.0 Generic –​CC BY-​NC-​ND 2.0. www.fli​ckr.
com/​pho​tos/​132011​981@N04/​5133​0974​234/​in/​phot​ostr​eam/​; Figure 5.5: Eric
Salard Attribution-​ShareAlike 2.0 Generic –​CC BY-​SA 2.0. www.fli​ckr.com/​
pho​tos/​airl​ines​470/​5136​5369​298/​in/​phot​ostr​eam/​; Figure 6.1: Dick Thomas
Johnson, Attribution 2.0 Generic –​CC BY 2.0. www.fli​ckr.com/​pho​tos/​31029​
865@N06/​with/​5149​4417​197/​; Figure 7: Dick Thomas Johnson, Attribution
2.0 Generic –​CC BY 2.0. www.fli​ckr.com/​pho​tos/​31029​865@N06/​with/​5149​
4417​197/​.
Finally, I want to thank Emily Briggs and Lakshita Joshi (Routledge),
Amanda Anstee (copyeditor), and Hemalatha K. (Newgen Knowledge Works
Pvt Ltd) for their help in putting together this submission.
newgenprepdf

Abbreviations

ABC American Broadcasting Company


AFC Asian Football Confederation
BWI Building and Wood Workers’ International
CCTV Close-​circuit television
COP-​26 Conference of the Parties (summit of countries that signed
the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1994)
COVID-​19 SARS-​CoV-​2 (a virus that induces severe acute respiratory
syndrome coronavirus 2)
IOC International Olympic Committee
IWC Integrated World Capitalism
JSC Japan Sports Council
NGO Non-​Governmental Organisation
RPG Role-​Playing (computer) Game
SDGs Sustainable Development Goals
TMG Tokyo Metropolitan Government
TOCOG Tokyo Organising Committee for the Olympic Games
UN United Nations
UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization
WHO World Health Organisation
Chapter 1

Introducing a risky experiment

Serendipitous events
In August 2021, global reports swamped the internet on an unfortunate inci-
dent: the celebrated artist Yayoi Kusama’s giant sculpture that had stood on
the pier of Naoshima in the Seto Island Sea since 1994 had been swept off its
base during a tropical storm. The so-​called ‘pumpkin’, a yellow and polka-​
dot vegetable-​like structure, had served as an international tourist attraction
and an Instagram pilgrimage for years. For a nation that had just delivered the
Olympic Games, its partial destruction by strong winds 400 miles south-​west
of Tokyo carried immense symbolic weight. In 2017 a brand-​new museum had
opened in Tokyo to host Kusama’s celebrated artwork. The disaster immedi-
ately prompted art experts to consider whether the ‘pumpkin’s’ restoration
plans should include its installation in the original spot or its relocation to an
enclosed space. Thanks to the sculpture, the pier had turned into a ‘mediated
centre’ (Couldry, 2000) for Japanese avant-​garde-​ness and a focal point for
the international ‘travel glance’ (Larsen, 2001). Filmed and immortalised
by millions of amateur and professional photographers and artists, it had
produced a new spatiotemporal narrative of ‘cool’ travelling art made by the
Japanese creative class for the world (Florida, 2002).
The ‘pumpkin’ was not a lightweight travelling balloon. It took immense
natural force to unhinge it, so its unhappy dip into the sea told a story of
planetary proportions. The event’s storytelling involved the ways a crisis is
implicated in the unpredictable ‘undoing’ of cultural and civilisational devel-
opment. Such ‘undoing’ appeared to have psychic, cognitive, and physical
dimensions. When placed next other contemporaneous incidents, the story-
line produced a ‘map’ of material and immaterial complexities: only a few
days before this incident, extensive reporting on the high temperatures in
Tokyo had turned Tokyo 2020 (but really, 2021) into the hottest mega-​event
ever, putting at risk the lives of athletes and native audiences alike. Prominent
among the reports concerning the heat-​ affected athletes was that about
Russian archer Svetlana Gomboeva’s collapse while checking her scores; other
such sensational storylines involved the fact that some wheelchair athletes

DOI: 10.4324/9781003314547-1
2 Introducing a risky experiment

were forced to abandon the Paralympic competition for similar reasons (Lo
and Jacobsen, 6 August 2021). After a whole year’s delay of Tokyo 2020 and
an eventful preparation by the Tokyo Organising Committee for the Olympic
Games (TOCOG), nature responded with vengeance. Not only did climate
events mess with material structures but they also affected those networked
socialities most associated with athletic excellence and urban regeneration.
The governor of Tokyo had to concede moving the prestigious concluding
event of the Marathon and other walking events 800 km north to Sapporo,
where the average August high temperature was supposed to be 5C degrees
lower than that in Tokyo (Lo and Jacobsen, 6 August 2021).
None of these problems truly entered the opening and closing spectacles
of the Olympic Games –​far from it. From my living room, I watched a har-
monious ceremony with traditional undertones culminating in the procession
of a small group of renowned Olympic athletes, who carried the Japanese
flag to the podium for the national anthem (Figure 1.1). The atmosphere
was sober and befitting the gravity of an Olympic spectacle plunged into
mourning for COVID-​19 (SARS-​CoV-​2) deaths and infections, with remem-
brance references to disasters that had hit Tokyo in the past and rumours
concerning the sacked director of the ceremonies, who was caught making

Figure 1.1 Captured by a viewer: the Japanese flag paraded by Olympic athletes during the
opening ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.
Source: Rodanthi Tzanelli.
Introducing a risky experiment 3

inappropriate racist comments. To this constellation of controversies, we


could add South Korea’s demand that the symbol of the Japanese nation,
the Rising Sun Flag, be banned from the Olympics. Seen by the Koreans as
a symbol of Japan’s imperialist past, which they rank next to the swastika,
the Rising Sun served as a reminder of a painful past (Pilling, 2014, pp.231–​
232). This almost subliminal affective background was amplified from the
camera’s and my couchsurfing’s angle: unexpectedly, the athletes titled the
flag, and the Rising Sun at its centre formed a heart. However, in my make-
shift journey to Tokyo’s mediated centre, I would come to realise that this
unintended glimpse into Japanese banal nationalism (Billig, 1995) in the
cosmopolitan spaces of a mega-​event would not really be my focal point. In
the summer of 2021, the Rising Heart was breaking into several pieces on a
live Olympic platform by a multiplicity of contemporary crises unfolding on
a planetary scale. Crisis in mega-​events, rather than a nation or Japan, would
stage my unlikely ‘journey’.
These three events cannot be nominated ‘crises’ or ‘controversies’ on their
own. A ‘crisis’ develops on judgments a mind/​body/​soul enunciates about the
environment where it resides, whereas a ‘controversy’ points to disagreements
between two or more actors in the sociocultural field. Controversies can be
discursively shaped into a crisis, but they may also fall short of an essen-
tial criterion: the ‘threat value’ they demonstrate. Venturini and Munk (2022)
propose a method of mapping controversies by distinguishing conflicts
involving attempts to manipulate public opinion from the conflicts guiding
sociotechnical organisations, vital to collective life. However, theirs is a pro-
ject of ‘civic mapmaking’, whereas my main concern is the tools we use in
our research. To return to my couchsurfing example, a researcher would step
back from this particular ceremonial moment, de-​sociate their spontaneous
reading of it, and consider it in relation to three sites: that of production, of
the image itself as a globally broadcast statement, and of audience (Rose,
2014). However, I am looking for ways not to separate the viewer/​researcher
from their tools and methods altogether but to reflect upon the ways they ‘feel’
their way through them. What Gillian Rose (2014, pp.16–​17) has developed as
a critical visual methodology that ‘takes images seriously’, I reshape through
theories of affect and emotions into a critical atmospheric paradigm. By ana-
logy to Latour’s (1987) studies of ‘science in action’, I set out to investigate
how we may assemble judgements about what is going on, implementing
them in our research and then the world as we think it is (Latour, 2005).
Otherwise put: this book’s central theme is an exploration of the modalities or
styles of judgement about what a crisis is, as this is revealed atmospherically
in two overlapped fields: that of the actors shaping its perceptions and the
researcher(s) who relay such perceptions to academic audiences. In Tokyo
2020 as well as previous mega-​events or mega-​events to come, in the first
field this is demonstrated in different virtual and architectural spaces of the
mega-​event’s multi-​host (Degen et al., 2017; Tzanelli, 2017, 2018; Sumartojo
4 Introducing a risky experiment

& Pink, 2018). In Tokyo’s case, it was demonstrated by a viral pandemic and
numerous mobile groups of professionals, travellers, and vagabonds at a par-
ticular moment in the history of humanity and its home, earth. My focus on
‘atmospheres’ supports an investigation into the ‘traces’ these (mega-​) events
leave on the urban landscape and the human experience of living in such
difficult times. If I move between my two fields again: tracking the traces by
myself places such atmospheres in a digitised world, from which I retrieved
data about the mega-​event –​this is also part of my critical atmospheric port-
folio (see also Degen and Rose, 2022).
However, talking about a ‘methodological diagnostics’ would not fully
articulate my epistemological stance that becoming a crisis hotspot or a mega-​
event host is a process never complete. I am closer to Rauh’s (2018, pp.105–​
106) idea of transforming ‘atmospheres’ into a ‘project diary’ of places but
disagree with the way he limits this to photographic documentation. My
‘project diary’ is more fluid than his. Elsewhere (Tzanelli, 2015a, 2016, 2020),
I used the idea of a ‘travel’ as an epistemological device anchored to eman-
cipatory synaesthetic methodologies with cognitive and affective dimensions.
I have already used the term ‘journey’ more than once, so I need to stress that
I will not be discussing tourism or travel but will also not be discarding its
absent presence during Tokyo 2020’s Olympics, or particular travel/​tourism
theories as methodological tools. ‘Travel’ is a polysemic term I will repeatedly
use to transcend the limitations of objectivised and subjectivised knowledge.
The rift between objectivity and subjectivity has also featured as a binarism
between ‘globe’ and ‘sphere’ in humanities and social science scholarship
(Ingold, 2011). A step up from such economies of perception, we encounter
the ‘planetary’ sphere as defined by Dipesh Chakrabarty (2018); however, his
definition does not align with what I proceed to develop. Weibel and Latour
(2007) argue that design interventions share an experimental fundamental
that they call ‘thing-​ing’. This refers to the materialisation of a world that
users can explore and experience. For me, ‘thing-​ing’ works better when we
use atmosphere theory to bind matter to the invisible world of affect. So,
one could read in my ‘journey’ a virtual-​performative intervention in reality,
which induces reactions and produces knowledge. This forms the basis of my
materialist phenomenological heuristics.
So, how does my thesis differ from Chakrabarty’s and why is ‘travel’ so
important? My key premise is mobility as action on the world –​something
I will critique in subsequent chapters. Chakrabarty’s ‘planetary’ is for me a
constellation of purposeful movements of animate and inanimate things that
shape/​affect the environment, the social and the cognitive/​affective domains
of being and becoming. Journeys have travellers and pilgrims, but a trav-
eller of the Anthropocene would become a haphazard ideal type, when not
contextualised. However, I do not perform traditional ethnographic analysis
here; I develop big ideas ethnographic researchers may test and of course cri-
tique and adapt to their own research. My key term, planētis (ancient Greek
Introducing a risky experiment 5

πλανήτης –​plural planētes [πλανήτες]), which is used in the place of the afore-
mentioned ideal types, suggests that we rethink the significance of ordinary
enchantments in the ways we act on the world around us. Since we cannot
access the logic of ‘nature’ and ‘climate’ (besides what we access scientific-
ally as feedback loops in localised climate catastrophes), I revert to an inves-
tigation into the attitudinal roots of movement as an ‘affective commons’,
an ‘atmosphere’ animated by human-​nature-​built-​environment encounters
(Bennett, 2010).
Suffice it to stress at this stage that originally a planētis designated the
roamer or the vagabond (Tzanelli, 2013a), and soon thereafter the one who
apoplaneí (αποπλανεί): enchants and deceives (Tzanelli, 2020). Such stereo-
typing survived in some regions of the world, where vagabonds transformed
into the psycho-​motors of movements for social justice, as Ray (2021) con-
vincingly argues. The original assumption of such roaming was that a
hidden plan was in place behind this deception, driven by a nefarious agent,
who gazes at the world and acts on their gazing to shape the perceptions
of fellow humans. It is significant that πλανήτης and αλήτης (from aláomai
[αλάωμαι] =​to wander) share both in etymological origins and engagement
with place-​based movement and theory in ancient texts (Tzanelli, 2013a,
­chapter 1). The travel mindset they purport is that of a topophilic scientist
(Tuan, 1997) and an ego-​enhancing globetrotter (Dann, 1977), a tourist-​child
full of curiosity. In fact, a contemporary mega-​event’s guests and visitors can
also be considered a form of planētes: they are both the primary recipients of
hospitality and the source of controversial mobilities. One of the key debates
in critical Olympic scholarship involves how Olympic visitors, who engage
in technologically mediated and embodied flânerie in spaces of consumerist
fascination, enhance the Olympic city’s cosmopolitan horizons but also gen-
erate social conflict. If anything, when it comes to human actors on the world,
we deal with forms of phantasmagoric, digitally enhanced cosmopolitanism
(Schmid et al. 2011, pp.7–​8; Germann Molz, 2004).
However, a planētis can also afford a perspective on such controversies and
crises when they research these phenomena. If we also acknowledge contem-
porary understandings of ‘planning’ and ‘plane’ as a surface of inscription,
then a planētis becomes an invitation to move away from (apó) an established
spatial (and thus conceptual) arrangement: thing-​ing is challenged at the
most fundamental level. So as not to sound irrelevant to my example’s con-
text (Tokyo 2020), there is a serendipitous concurrence between this def-
initional introduction and the ways that travel and the moving subject are
conceptualised in Japanese culture. This cosmopolitan convergence is philo-
sophical and pragmatic, as it organises Japanese society and political action
on planetary rules at the same time. Planetary thinking is a movement that
commences with deception (pláni) because the human mind suffers from
its nurturing limitations (how it is socioculturally inculcated to think about
the world), including the fact that its body always traverses a physical plane.
6 Introducing a risky experiment

Scribano (2021) speaks about a ‘practices-​made-​body’ which becomes the


topos of formation of a moral-​political economy. To adapt this to my argu-
ment: this economy is, above all, habitual, hence ethical, in that it weaves
‘must’ and ‘ought to’ rules into the natural lands and sociocultural landscapes
it traverses. The very critical discourse on the Anthropocene as the era of
human spoliation of our planet is based on the exploratory nature of all these
planētes (Prigogine and Stengers, 1984). Undoubtedly, this approach has a
biopolitical theme, but as I proceed to explain, to reduce planetary analysis
to postcolonialism or biopolitics in our era is yet another anthropocentric
construction.
Such metaphorical thinking needs analytical backing. To this end, I draw
on: the rich sociological and geographical traditions associated with Richard
Brown’s reflections on illustrative and iconic metaphors as the basis of model-​
construction in sociology (1977, p.107); Zygmunt Bauman’s (1996a, 1996b,
2000) writings on the vagabond, tourist, and pilgrim and his observations on
the magical-​realist nature of hermeneutics (Bauman, 2021, pp.84–​102); John
Urry’s (2000, pp.21–​48) extensive analysis of metaphors of mobility, in which
he includes some notes on Japan’s place in contemporary global contexts;
Soja’s ‘thirdspatial analysis’, which I interpret as a voyage with a collection
of pathways and arrivals (1996, pp.26–​52); Susan Sontag’s (1991, p.90) obser-
vation that science has always relied on metaphors; and Rosi Braidotti’s
(1994) transversal model of female mobility resisting phalologocentrism. In
my several stops we will also meet some decolonial theorists, such as Walter
Mignolo, and ‘situations’. These challenge the aforementioned scholars
through non-​Western styles of modelling, knowing and being in the worlds
that surround us or that we envelop. All these perspectives can also assume
gendered or racialised dimensions, as different forms of vision and different
prioritisations in somatosensory apprehension align with different cosmic
views and different experiences (Massey, 1994; Skeggs, 2004; Kaplan, 2006;
Sheller, 2016). A lapse from ‘travel’ or ‘journey’ to ‘pilgrimage’ will become
increasingly more felicitous but also contentious, given the role of pilgrimage
in shaping religious ideology.
I use Tokyo in my research journey as an example of contemporary com-
plexity in being and becoming a world-​leading urban formation in the era of
overlapping crises. I support my analysis by drawing occasionally on other
urban formations which previously served as Olympic city-​hosts. I argue for
a re-​conceptualisation of atmospheric epistemologies and urban footprints
that challenge dominant understandings of space, time, and belonging in the
era of urban crises. This will push me to re-​examine the validity of Western
epistemological paradigms and endorse an alternative critical/​posthuman
‘cosmopolitan’ poetics of becoming, to better support connections between
planetary needs, on the one hand, and regional lifeworlds and their theo-
sophical ecosystems, on the other. This adjustment will occasionally mobilise
established arguments on globalisation as adaptation, hybridisation, or
Introducing a risky experiment 7

uncompromising conflict and systemic malfunction. However, I will pri-


marily be using a critical mobilities approach to spiritual-​material develop-
ment, which I aspire to reshape into a ‘critical atmospheric paradigm’. This
approach acknowledges the presence of compromise, blending, and conflict,
often in the same space of movement and belonging.
My emphasis is on the ways ‘crises’ produce new ways of knowing,
hoping, and designing the future (Urry, 2000, 2016), while triggering reflexive
changes in collective and individual identities and collective subjectivities
and becomings, especially without the West as a conceptual and ideological
domain. However, I do not intend to reduce this book to a postcolonial or
traditional decolonial thesis on ‘multiple modernities’ (Eisenstadt, 2003) or
social inequalities. Rather, I want to transcend the modern notion of cause
and effect to consider futuristic design invention as the product of dis-
aster –​what I consider under the rubric of ‘serendipity’ or more-​than-​acci-
dental discovery. For this, we need a stratigraphic appreciation of the ways
our planetary ecosphere (including human, floral, faunal, and geo-​spheric/​
atmospheric habitats) is perceived of and put into use in sociocultural
contexts that exceed those of national borderlines. I understand ‘stratigraphy’
as the layering of times (Alcock, 2010, p.12). This often draws attention to
the ways different temporalities may overlap or even mix (Nederveen Pieterse,
2006) as social, cultural, physical, or technological warps (Urry, 2000, p.112,
p.120). Because my stratigraphic account taps into different domains in which
the staging of Tokyo 2020 took place (including actual venues, ceremonies,
and their reporting by different representational actors), it is far more useful
to stress the importance of ‘serendipity patterns’ in perceptions of, and
actions on, crises. These patterns produce what is called a ‘trope’ in literary
theory (White, 1978), a ‘refrain’ in postmodern analysis of affects (Bertelsen
and Murphie, 2010), and a ‘strategic datum’ in sociology: an opportunity to
develop new theory or extend an old one by focusing on key moments and
places (Merton, 1959, p.176). We could consider this as an account of spatio-
temporal vignettes.
My ‘vignettes’ are used to interrogate planetary atmospheres of affective
quality, replete with normative beliefs. Their implication in the production
of’ ‘home’ and ‘travel’ (as pilgrimage) are ‘chrononormative’ through and
through: they make spatiotemporal maps in which human bodies and their
cultural-​political extensions are reshaped as institutional properties (Freeman,
2010; Sharma, 2014; Tzanelli, 2015b). Of course, in our global hypermobile
contexts, such essentially biopolitical sorting leaves its clearest stratigraphic
footprint in mediated formats and media sites/​platforms, if we follow Maren
Hartmann’s (2019, pp.45–​46) work on time. My stratigraphic method is based
on deep spatiotemporalities for which we need to prioritise an analysis of
‘hidden rhythms’: forms of experience that appear natural to those whom
they privilege because they were inculcated in them (e.g., Freeman, 2010, p.3).
Digging into the organisational logic of Olympic mobilities allows for an
8 Introducing a risky experiment

appreciation of the ways the global mandate of ‘sustainability’ and ‘security’


pushes hosts to discard their own rhythms in favour of a hegemonic template
of planetary (mega-​event) production. The host’s refrain emerges out of this
context of emergency (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p.315). If we are patient
enough to appreciate its specificity, we may also appreciate how earth itself as
our home moves our collective futures.
In organisational contexts of event management, abiding by a series of
structural rules is supposed to yield positive results (Nohria in Ziakas et al.
2021, p.19). However, invention and excellence require more than following
a map of predetermined tasks. Horace Walpole’s double (experiential and
training) journey to the mythical Serendib or Ceylon (contemporary Sri
Lanka), from which ‘serendipity’ comes as a word, suggests that invention
and innovation are not possible without the experience of loss or misfortune
(Morley and de Rond, 2010, pp.3–​4). Paul Virilio (2003, p.6) also suggests
that invention is a way of approaching/​seeing things, ‘of grasping accidents as
signs, as opportunities’. But nowhere can one find a more astute observation
on the phenomenon than in the revised writings of the sociological expert in
serendipity, Robert Merton. Merton ponders on the contemporary ‘science
wars’ with particular reference to Thomas Kuhn’s public presentation of what
science is. He finds inspiration in developmental psychologist Jean Piaget’s
division between one’s thoughts and the order in which these are presented
to others (Merton and Barber, 2004, p.270). Could futural planning be based
on the ways ‘internal conversations’ (Archer, 2003) are brought to public dis-
course in viable and just ways in the form of ‘hidden rhythms’? The urban
stage is the most suitable venue to actualise this ‘revelation’ (Tzanelli, 2021a,
­chapter 6) –​a proposition I intend to put in practice in the following chapters,
with reference to Tokyo as a global creative city.
‘Justice’ is not just for the poor or the disenfranchised, but for all in equit-
able proportions, reflecting different capabilities (Sen, 2009). We must always
remember that not all of us have the same starting point, so our liberalism
may have to be kept in check. Even bodily health is entangled in/​with other
capabilities, including the right to citizenship, emotional health, interspecies
coexistence, dignity, and control over the environment (Nussbaum, 2011,
pp.34–​36). Let me then begin with ethics before backtracking to pragmatics: to
think about viable and fair urban futures in the era of crises we must recog-
nise that different parts of the world came from different cultural contexts –​
hence our map-​makings deserve to be produced with greater care than that
provided by mono-​modernist gurus. It is not enough to explore how Tokyo
staged a delayed Olympics with impeccable precision. We must also be aware
of the ‘internal conversations’ that took place within various local and inter-
national communities of experts to arrive at the finished product. My genea-
logical approach to designing a safe mega-​event involves placing the whispers
of spiritual wisdom next to (post)modern scientific and artistic performances
to see what Tokyo really is in its plurality of intimate and public worldviews.
Introducing a risky experiment 9

Achieving even a fraction of this convoluted journey will shed new light on
‘justice’ –​not as a generic mobility good, but a desire grounded in the specifics
of geopolitical and cultural experience (Sheller, 2018). Injustice thrives not
just through its spatial spread: for example, national systems are incremen-
tally infected by it, in temporal instalments that cannot be acknowledged if
we assume only a synchronic analysis of events. The skills national systems
display in their arbitration of injustices are not immune to their struggle for
recognition on the international plane. Thus, their public articulations of the
future may lose in agility, fairness, and spiritual uniqueness, and their dreams
may turn into privatopian properties in international markets.
As both one of the most ancient cultures and most developed contem-
porary Asian states, Japan has had its own (un)fair journeys to the future.
As its modern capital, Tokyo bore the burden of this development more than
other peripheral urban formations. Since I began with an excursus on seren-
dipity and sustainability in mega-​event spectacles, I will keep on the same
genealogical path with a few notes that I expand later in the book. However,
at this stage I am only relaying public articulations of Tokyo. As official
narratives go, once under British economic and subsequently American eco-
nomic and cultural influence, Tokyo proceeded to develop into a true world
player in cultural-​industrial terms, with a strong anime and manga inter-
national industry, which drew on native forms of culture. This was coupled
with postwar economic recovery that lasted until the 1980s, when reces-
sion affected Japan’s international urban standing, without diminishing the
country’s development altogether. Culture and economy interact, but this
interaction is more complex than what Frederick Jameson (1986) argued in
his celebrated excursus on allegory. In the case of Japan, the interaction par-
tially follows the rules of what I will call ‘magical’ development as these were
set across several continents and cultures since the emergence of artistic-​
social movements and discourses of scientific innovation. I do not intend
to refute the damage capitalism does to these creative mobilities, only to
stress that Jameson favours one aspect of this damage and simultaneously
ignores its contribution to the rise of new movements for planetary recovery
and homemaking. This homemaking can be metaphorical, but it can also
be loaded with normative notions of belonging, which are anything but
progressive.
Thus, I use hybrid artistic-​like movements as pathways to creative thinking,
not art-​ styles or art-​worlds in a conventional sense. I am particularly
interested in intellectual movements. These replace ‘art’ as a creative activity
with the ‘creativity of action’ (Joas, [1996] 2005), which can include artistic
performances in mega-​events. As windows to imaginaries of the future, they
craft serendipities that are not available to techno-​scientists, often revising
techno-​scientific language (Cluley, 2012). Subsequently, I do not intend to
sing the praises of artists nor denigrate scientific discoveries and styles of
thought and action. My suggestion is rooted in the belief that there is always
10 Introducing a risky experiment

an agonistic complementarity between disinterested art-​making and scientific


intentionality. This interplay helps me to rethink key ideas developed by some
of my favourite interlocutors, such as John Urry, Steve Fuller, Bruno Latour,
Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, and Mimi Sheller.
An appeal to figurative articulations is already part of debates on climate
and climate change. In thinking about future scenarios on climate change,
John Urry (2016, pp.159–​162) draws on Bronislaw Szerszynski’s (2010)
exploration of the decision to drop from ‘sciences’ the term ‘weather’ in
favour of a postdisciplinary framing of ‘climate’, which maps human behav-
iour. The same observation guides Mike Hulmes’ (2017, pp.94–​103) thesis,
which also delves into the cognate domains of creativity, including virtual
climates, visual arts, and literary fiction to discuss their contribution to
representations of ‘weathered’ phenomena, which are not approached phe-
nomenologically in hard science. To get the best from these two agonistic
fields, it is better to place ‘creativity’ on a continuum with ‘invention’ out-
side the oculo-​technical formats of prediction (Szerszynski, 2016; Tzanelli,
2020a). Other scholars, such as Steve Fuller (2011, 2012), venture in the
grander plane of the philosophy of social science to argue that humanity is
rationally organised into communities of interest, one group of which is the
ecological and the other two the biomedical and the cybernetic. However,
Fuller forgets the creativity stemming from arts-​based activities –​prob-
ably, because he places it under one of his three categories. Thus, what
comes before scientific invention –​the ‘internal conversation’ (Archer, 2003,
­chapter 1) as it were –​is silenced, and the first leg of a grand journey to col-
lective wisdom disappears.
Of course, I am interested in what happens to our comprehensions of just
planning when we talk about ‘science’ but not beauty as harmony for all,
when we draft ‘scenarios’ to deliver impeccable spectacles and calculate hospi-
tality deliverables exclusively on the basis of economic returns, and when our
‘home garden’ is not just systematically weeded to often accidentally discard
beautiful weeds, to paraphrase Bauman (1992, p.178), but also pumped with
so many pesticides that the buzzing of life eventually stops cold. But I am
rushing here and may give the impression that I am interested in the fortunes
and mishaps of the capitalist system instead of the conditions under which
we respond to contemporary crises and the tools we use to explore this. This
brings me to the apodeictic nature of our tools and especially the reductive
nature of visualism rather than vision (Jay, 1993, p.49). Instead of blaming
experts, I point the finger to the erosion of ex-​perio (from experience) which
plagues humans and emotionally numbs them. Visualism needs affect to
translate into reality-​making, but this does not guarantee that it will produce
irrefutable ‘truths’ (Boltanski, 2014, p.6).
In The mushroom at the end of the world (2015) Anna Tsing performs similar
acrobatics to interrogate the stylistics of contemporary multispecies resilience
to what seems more and more like the ‘end of our times’. I am snuggling into
Introducing a risky experiment 11

a crack she generates by an ambivalent take on precarity, which she links


mostly to labour insecurity but occasionally also to our appreciation that we
face the risk of extinction. She oscillates between the two throughout her
book, partly because of her rhizomatic narrative, which is not intended as a
problem-​solving exercise, but the journey of a curious ‘forager’ in mushroom
forests. I will be discussing ‘foraging’ as an activity performed by particular
groups in Tokyo 2020’s spaces. The ‘foragers’ of the mega-​event can be curious
travellers collecting impressions, but some would argue that they can also
be numbed to the suffering of others. I would problematise this statement,
because it does not do a good chrononormative job, assuming that we always
have to be carers devoid of the ability to preserve our emotional and cognitive
health in the roles we are asked to discharge as social beings. Hence, Tsing’s
foraging raises questions applicable to mega-​event and urban development at
large: what does it mean to pre-​care? Who pre-​cares for whom at the end of
times, when climate catastrophe, viral pestilence, and terrorism seem to des-
troy human civilisations? How is this made possible (and how do we know we
pre-​care well)? Talk about capitalist disasters just scratches an ossified epis-
temological surface; through the crack I also see errors of translatability, and
thus a rather blurred vision specialists tend to favour. Heretofore, my own
reading of pre-​care addresses a meeting of different horizons of unbound
risk and hospitality as grossly misunderstood affective capital. Translatability
can foster cosmopolitan meeting points but can also lead to a variety of eco-
logical mishaps, including cultural and environmental disasters. Mega-​events
can serve as incubators of such mishaps.

Adjusting the new mobilities paradigm


It is time to return to Urry’s (2000) inclusion of Japan in the ‘rim’ of developed
countries, on which, about ten years before his mobilities manifesto, he built
together with Scott Lash the celebrated thesis on disorganised capitalism
(Lash and Urry, 1987). Because I dedicate the first chapter of this book to the
study of Tokyo as a miniature of Japanese attitudes to mishaps (serendipity),
here I limit my observations on a paradox. The paradox is unique to cultures
that experienced some form of subjection to other cultural forces, even if
this never extended to full military subjection or administrative restructuring
of their indigenous management styles (Herzfeld, 2002). Unlike all the other
countries included in Urry’s model of mobilities, Japan –​and Tokyo as one of
its main urban nodes –​has remained stranded between organisational worlds
to date. This in-​between-​ness cost in self-​reliance at not a material but a psy-
chic/​spiritual level, ‘teaching’ the country that following the twin political
and aesthetic paradigms of the West would help it to climb up the hierarchy
of value in a fully urbanised ecumene (Herzfeld, 2006; Nederveen Pieterse,
2006). The end of the Cold War system removed Japan’s legitimacy as a
partner of the United States in the Asia-​Pacific region and fostered a climate
12 Introducing a risky experiment

of insecurity and frustration, with regard to both security issues and the
country’s economic, political, and cultural standing (Klien, 2002, ­chapter 4).
In contradistinction with understandings of place in relation to everyday
practices of placemaking and homemaking, political games unfold on a
political-​doxic matrix that encourages abstraction (Foucault, 1968, pp.9–​40;
Bourdieu, 1993, p.33). The understanding of this doxic matrix is shared by all
players in the political field. My excursus on the meaning of place does not
discard decades of spatial analysis developed by Western theorists such as
Bachelard, Lefebvre, Massey, or Soja. Instead, I want to show how traditions
are based on structures of thinking that are themselves products of spatialised
reasoning (for the ‘deep psychic’ extensions of such reasoning see Bhaskar,
2011, pp.109–​110). We do owe Lefevre for his determination to rectify the
pitfalls of Marxist materialism, by exposing the problems introduced by the
Cartesian res cogitans in understandings of ‘lived space’ and the experience
of placemaking. The production of space ([1974] 1991) commences with a cri-
tique of the principles of Western Logos. However, Lefebvre is also hostile
to the postmodern ontological theses developed by Kristeva, Derrida, and
even Foucault, because he sees them as the prelude to a circular journey
from crypto-​ideological forms of mental space to practice theories (Lefebvre,
[1974] 1991, pp.5–​7). His argument guides to a great extent Soja’s analysis
of ‘thirdspace’, and both of them are indebted to Bachelard’s ([1958] 1994)
ground-​breaking poetics of spatiality, which outlined the vectors of intimate
and public spaces in everyday and numenal contexts. I would insert Doreen
Massey’s (1994, 2005) thesis into these debates as a resolution for those
who are interested in the experiential production of space. I would argue
that we cannot study vectors of hospitality, intercultural engagement, and
civilisational growth in the development of Olympic urban hosts without
Massey’s phenomenological sojourns, which are closer to non-​Eurocentric
paradigms. Her approach matches far better Japanese cultural forms of
engagement with others that can revise the ossified structures of the collective
Japanese self. Her phenomenology of space/​place points to the mystery of the
non-​Western ‘incommunicative worlds’ to which Lefebvre and Soja refer but
cannot really explain without having recourse to the very modes of commu-
nication they criticise: the visionary/​creative arts and urban design (Lefebvre,
[1992] 2015, p.27; Soja, 1996, pp.64–​65).
Aside from Massey, Bachelard ([1958] 1994, p.xxxiv) seems to be the one
who better anchors European social philosophies of becoming to my argu-
ment. On the one hand, his poetics of space rectify Bergsonian gaps and inac-
curacies pertaining to the role of image-​making (as space-​making) in what he
calls the ‘productive imagination’. On the other, he is among those few grand
theorists who showed how the material presence of houses as spaces of bodily
movement (he discusses this as the ‘human living’ of the house and connects
it to its ‘objectivity’ –​ibid., p.48), also serves as the locus of cosmological
‘daydreaming’ and thus of humanity’s ‘intimate imagination’. In Imaginary
Introducing a risky experiment 13

cities, Darren Anderson (2019) places his observations on the ways intimate
spaces mimic human consciousness in material ways under a section he play-
fully titles ‘home is where harm is’. For him, in contemporary metropoles
such as Tokyo, an ‘internet of things’ meddles with human connectivity in
material and immaterial ways and to beneficial and evil ends (i.e., to connect
us emotionally but also monitor our behaviour –​ibid., p.27). Although I do
not intend to reduce (or even attribute) the harms of Olympic development
to the digitisation of urban spheres, Anderson’s conception of domestic harm
chimes with some theses that place an internet of things under the mantle
of mental colonisations, which eventually assume material proportions
(Scribano, 2021).
If we shift attention to the scholarship on phantasmagorias (after Walter
Benjamin’s [2002] ‘arcades project’) and the controversial ‘themed spaces’
of postmodern consumerism (Sorkin, 1992; Ren, 2007), it becomes obvious
that for Western scholars ‘space’ as a series of contained places exists only
when it becomes nominated by its human dwellers, organisational forces, or
the nation-​state that controls it. I cannot but ask two crucial interconnected
questions: does the material presence of a space necessarily precede that of its
cosmological production as a place? If only the latter is ‘real’ as the procession
of simulacra (Baudrillard, 2009), is it analytically right to examine its socio-
cultural presence, structure, associations, or functions in normative styles?
Here Lefebvre’s irritation with ‘hauntologists’ and postmodern feminists is
relevant: all too often moralist discourse dismisses context. He claims that
the separation of epistemology from ideology reproduces the logic of bureau-
cratic organisation (Lefebvre, [1974] 1991, p.13) but does not acknowledge
that hauntologists actively refute this separation. To know from experience
places us in contexts of not only self-​and other-​emergence but also the emer-
gence of our studied fields and their communities. We need hauntology as the
prelude to material becoming. To access the nuances of Japanese notions of
‘space’ we need a different cultural grammar, in which borders and centres
are perceived and materialised differently. Such difference forms relationships
between the body and space in registers that can both communicate with dom-
inant worldviews of culture, civilisation, and nature and enable us to depart
from them. This is one of the reasons Japan features among some studies
of ‘critical cosmopolitanism’ as a culture allowing for fusions of horizons
(Delanty, 2014). I will return to this in subsequent chapters as even critical
cosmopolitanism has its limitations. First, I must explain how we arrive at
such communications and the consequences of this achievement.
Japanese understandings of personal and public space have their cosmo-
logical roots in clashes that occurred at the level of religious civilisational
development. To denote physical and emotional distance and proximity
between individuals the Japanese use the terms hedataru (to separate one
thing from another, but also alienate in friendships) and najimu (to become
familiar or attached to someone or something) (Davies and Ikeno, 2002,
14 Introducing a risky experiment

pp.109–​ 11). The ability to keep one’s distance from others is a sign of
respect for their viewpoints –​until the moment they understand them and
re-​establish respectful proximity. The Japanese ‘way’ (dō) of making space
orchestrates both physical (embodied) and psychosocial distance to produce
uncluttered socialities. We cannot separate this from discourses of urbanisa-
tion in a city suffering from congestion, pollution, and a housing crisis. What
appeared at first to be mere philosophical observation now becomes crucial
for our understanding of two consecutive analyses: the projection of Tokyo’s
(and Japan’s) historical and contemporaneous pluriworlds on the Olympic
ceremonial stage and the big stadium screen, on the one hand (Chapter 5),
and the performance of embodied urban mobilities and immobilities in the
Olympic city, on the other (Chapters 6 and 7).
These observations seem to endorse a transfer of Western symbolic inter-
actionism of the Chicago school of urban studies and the philosophical
writings of George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer, but also the studies
of pragmatic-​ embodied symbol-​ manipulation by Howard Becker (1982)
and Arlie Hochschild (2005), to Japanese space. However, we must pay
attention to goal orientations: in Japanese contexts, emphasis is placed on
achieving harmony and symmetry, so more important in vernacular Japanese
symbolology is to arrange relations between humans and things in ways that
maintain harmonious cosmic structures. This should prompt us to rethink
space in planetary terms, especially in the era of overlapping crises. However,
at this stage, I use this observation to bring to discourse a growing rift between
Western and Eastern ways of doing (Hall, 1999). My field of practice emerges
where these discourses unfold and unfurl in urban policy and postindustrial
practice, with particular reference to the Olympic Games.
I ask a simple question then, to make this debate relevant to my study: is
it enough to think about mobilities in Tokyo as an Olympic city by using
Western anthropocentric conceptions of space and movement? How many
modes of being, belonging, and moving or staying put should we account
for to do justice to what exists and develops in Tokyo’s contemporary urban
lifeworlds? Given the cultural emphasis of Olympic ceremonialism, which
incorporates art, how do these lifeworlds connect with the organisational
‘artworlds’ discussed by Becker (1982)? I declare aversion to Sinophilia as
well as Chinese and Japanese nationalism (all play a major role in my crit-
ical analysis), but in subsequent chapters I will not excise my own meth-
odological ‘kinetic patterns’ from their spatiotemporal coordinates. It will
become obvious that what theorists of mobility understand as ‘lived space’
and movement across different human and non-​human domains does not
always coincide with the plurality of living, moving, understanding, and
feeling in this Olympic city and any Olympic host. We should be concerned
that the Olympic ‘Kinocene’, if I may borrow Nail’s (2019) term, may be
developing within the organisational coordinates of a Western, Eurocentric,
and anthropocentric imagination. For this reason, I replace this conceptual
Introducing a risky experiment 15

model with my own phenomenalist concept of the ‘Virocene’, which is both


a reference to a material crisis threatening to eliminate the human body (the
COVID-​19 pandemic) and natural environments (climate change), on the one
hand, and a socio-​political crisis of representation and recognition (racism,
sexism, class-​ism, and disablism) (Tzanelli, 2021a). All these crises form and
inform bundles of social action (à la Joas, [1996] 2005). Who does what within
their spatiotemporal coordinates tells us a story about the environment, space,
culture, and power in the era of globalisation.
What urban praxeological sociologists (e.g., Pierre Bourdieu or Luc
Boltanski) may call ‘ontological practice’ or what postcolonial and polit-
ical sociologists identify as the ‘slow violence’ of mobility systems (Sheller,
2020, pp.29–​30) necessitate a change in perspective on the production and
construction of reality. In fact, Sheller’s (2020) recent turn to discourses of
extractivism in postdisaster contexts generates two different perspectives
on the violence of mobility as a universal good. To consolidate this thesis,
Foucault would ask us to ‘excavate’ and so would decolonial theorists from
the strongholds of postcolonial and the philosophy of social science. As
Bhaskar (2011, p.102) warns us, ‘only a discourse in which the explanatory,
as well as the critical, condition is satisfied can be intrinsically emancipatory’.
To re-​adjust Sheller’s thesis, a science of ‘kinomenology’ (Nail, 2019, p.443)
does not exist as a uniform field outside the watchful eye of Western scholar-
ship and systemic politicking. Instead, we deal with a series of regionally spe-
cific ‘kinopolitics’ that employ communicative infrastructures and codes to
regulate borders within borders (Sheller, 2020, pp.32–​36). Sheller debates the
invisible aspects of bordering as forms of identity sorting across categories
of sex, gender, and race (ibid., p.31). This regulation endorses a slide from
the figurative to the material domain, doing material violence. I suggest that
we do not use this slide as an innocent epistemological tool. Further down
the line, such epistemological decisions will affect the aesthetic and moral
outcome of our scholarship. I favour interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary
exchange when it is productive and felicitous. So, for example, in the second
part of Being and motion, Nail (2019) develops a series of ‘ideal kinetic
patterns’ which have a clear affinity with established histories and method-
ologies of pilgrimage and sociologies of religion, as well as theories of visual
and popular culture.
Respecting context does not equate with endorsing regional ideology –​a
lesson we learned from Lash and Urry’s (1994) analysis of the power that
economies of sign and space carry to determine labour and living standards
across categories of class, race, and gender. Herein resides the invisible world-​
shaping force to which I suggest that students of mega-​events turn their
attention: the affective refrains of the hosts and their guests in the era of crises.
Unlike Tsing’s (2015) use of precarity, the ‘labour’ to which I refer focuses
on affective and figurative ambiguities of the kind residing in mobilities as
part-​conscious and motivated movements. The production of such ways of
16 Introducing a risky experiment

‘knowing/​affective movement’ in institutional contexts (academia) exposes


the crypto-​political glitch in kinocenic programmatic statements. The geo-
political resonance of such staged mobilities agrees with Derek Gregory’s
(1995, p.447) argument that a ‘cartography of identities ‘discloses how geo-
graphical imaginaries supplement the Euro-​modernist interest in time with an
equivalent understanding of spatiality’. But perhaps we should examine the
consequences of this cartographic inscription within a multispecies frame-
work that mobilises rhythmical juxtapositions (‘contrapuntalism’ [Said, 1994,
pp.78–​79]) to study posthuman contexts of terrorism (Korstanje, 2017),
extreme urbanism, and climate crisis (Sheller, 2018).

Critical atmospheric mobilities and the Olympic


project
Mega-​events have been discussed in academic scholarship as fragments of
utopian planning and model privatopias of the twentieth and twenty-​first
centuries (Gaffney, 2013; Vainer, 2016). The new mobilities paradigm has
developed a plural framework of studying such events as manifestations of
systemic inequalities, cultures of secrecy and corruption, and urban strain
and pro-​rights social movements (Salazar, 2016). The mega-​event’s actors and
acted upon subjects and environments to which I pay tribute are so diverse
that they invite me to consider the development of a post-​postcolonial contra-
puntal study of their phenomenal mobilities. This would suggest that I place
the local social and natural/​environmental rhythms against those of Western
paradigms of knowledge. I also opt to join these purposeful movements as
part of my affective/​performative analysis. My ‘travel’ articulates a full model
of mobility-​in/​and-​stasis that draws on traditions of (1) magical realism as
a critical manifesto and (2) pointillism as an art of mapping. My journeys
are characterised by directionality (I drafted my own map with a starting
point and a point of arrival –​Ahmed [2010, p.32] would recognise this as
part of my practical horizon) and intentionality (my end is to demonstrate
how arrivals are not politically or socioculturally neutral zones but ‘interior
colonies’ [Fuss, 1994] occupied by categorisations of humans on the basis
of class, gender, ethnicity, and race and non-​humans as ‘actants’ or acted
upon objects). Scribano (2021) draws on an even more potent metaphor to
debate the ways world capitalism has captured individual and social bodies,
completing the ‘colonisation of our inner planet’. In short, my journeys are
enacted both within and against structures of knowledge to challenge them.
Directionality and intentionality are the rules of pointillist mapmaking.
Pointillism was a revolutionary technique in modernist painting, which was
pioneered by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac in mid-​1880s Paris. Pointillism
emphasised the following: (1) painting by dots (otherwise known as ‘div-
isionism’ or ‘chromoluminarism’); (2) using pure colours; (3) meticulous and
measured technique in dotting canvas surfaces; and (4) rethinking art through
Introducing a risky experiment 17

the science of optics. At first, pointillism was based on French chemist’s


Michel Eugene Chevreul’s Principles of harmony and contrast of colours, which
suggested that producing striking tapestries was not due to colour chemistry
but appropriate combinations of colours, which complemented each other in
subtle ways (Kandinsky, 1977, p.30; Sotherby’s, 21 May 2018). The technique
influenced Pablo Picasso and Wassily Kandinsky in their early careers. Picasso
would go on to produce a poignant optics of European modernity in Guernica,
which relayed the transmutation of one of the most insidious emotions (res-
sentiment) into a self-​destructive revolution (civil war). Picasso cast the lan-
guage of revolution in artistic styles: visual fragmentation in unity reflected
the modality of silent envy, or envy of perceived sociocultural superiority
that can transform into (self-​) destructive pessimism (Urry, 1978, p.64). Sabu
Kohso (2020, pp.8–​10), whose work on postgrowth nuclear Japan features
prominently in what follows, remarked that such eschatological fatalism in
real(ist) apocalyptic contexts, such as that of the Fukushima thermonuclear
disaster, has also led to a liberating transcendence of victimhood.
As humanity lives the scenario of a total disaster, in which planetary
becoming also features as a possibility after total death, we enter a plane of
open possibilities. The binary is embedded in my analysis of atmospheres as
contingent formations. Thus, Sarah Ahmed (2010, pp.30–​31) stresses that
happiness originates in the old English ‘hap’ or chance, which can be ser-
endipitously related to good or evil opportunities, pleasure, or pain. Death
and rebirth are possibilities and opportunities at the end of the world. In
subsequent chapters, I explain that Sabu Kohso’s (2020) thesis represents
one of the imaginaries of the future currently circulating in Japanese public
discourses but also some discourses in other parts of the world. Another
‘strong imaginary’, which is more favoured in Olympic contexts, combines
ceremonies of mourning with refrains of solidarity and resilience. We must be
mindful that this imaginary (explored in more detail in Chapters 2 and 3) is
endorsed by native movements and some Japanese creative classes affiliated
with Eurocentric visions of hope. In such frameworks, scholarly evaluations
of happiness and prosperity may fall prey of one’s inculcated normative vision
about what is right to support or feel in public. This also applies to what cul-
tural institutions aspire to communicate to their audiences in mega-​events,
which represents only one aspect of what Hui (2014) calls ‘effervescence’
as our ‘ability to relate’ (Hui, 2014, pp.172–​173) through a multiplicity of
intersecting mobilities of affect and history (Tzanelli, 2017, p.126; Bærenholdt
et al., 2004). My critical take on pointillism is in fact an invitation to decolonise
our understanding of alternative visions of life and death by not valorising
them. In terms of atmospheric residue, such conflicting imaginaries adhere to
ressentiment, in which they are not de facto ‘good’ or ‘evil’.
Let me explain some more: Kandinsky’s eventual combination of an
interest in atmospheric attunements between painting compositions and
what spectators feel about them is important. He used the term ‘Stimmung’
18 Introducing a risky experiment

(atmosphere) to discuss the production of feeling through this communion


between human subjects and objects of art as the ‘essential spirit’ of visual art
(Kandinsky, 1977, pp.1–​5). Despite acknowledging the uncommunicability of
this spiritual experience, he would advance pointillism through the study of
triangles, which, according to his essayist analysis, move upwards towards an
end, akin to Platonic perfection. He envisaged this aesthetic perfection as a
‘spiritual revolution’ that is progressively more ‘godless’ (as is the case with
Marx’s Capital, which he cites –​Kandinsky, 1977, pp.11–​12). However, he also
warned that as much as the visionary engineers of modernity (‘architects’,
‘mathematicians’, and ‘politicians’ –​ibid.) wish to maintain urban har-
mony, their project of triangular perfection is enveloped in insecurity and
all planning ‘may be shaken suddenly by the uncontrollable force of nature’
(Kandinsky, 1977, p.12).
Although artistic pointillism excelled at manifesting how aesthetic singu-
larities contribute to understandings of an organic whole, the very practice
of joining the dots is more akin to state strategies of mapping difference and
demarcating borders. Paramount to the production of spatial intelligibility,
the geographic and military logic of mapmaking is based on reducing life to
geometrical design (Scott, 1998, pp.54–​55). Descartes expressed alone among
Enlightenment scholars a ubiquitous aesthetic preference for the production
of straight lines and visible order –​a habit guiding the God’s-​eye view we asso-
ciate with the planner’s gaze (Mumford, 1961, p.369). Achieving a synoptic
view of a collection of otherwise indecipherable lifeworlds, urban designers
could gloss over the spatial irregularities of the real ‘dots’ (neighbourhoods,
houses, and woodlands, where bridges would eventually mushroom), while
also emulating their pointillist appreciation as miniatures. The technique,
which in Tokyo 2020 would develop into a technology of governance, is not
that alien to contemporary Japanese contexts of design. Based on ocular
reductionism and the principles of photographic captures of reality, it
informed Katsumi Masaru’s attempt to develop the Tokyo 1964 pictograms
(ekotoba) in the tradition of Otto Neurathʼs concept of the ‘isotype’, a sym-
bolic way of presenting information via easily interpretable icons (Traganou,
2009, p.66). If anything, ‘joining the dots’ produces images that Japanese
enunciators use to develop a universal language, which conforms to externally
dictated rules. Pictogramic design was developed at a time the country had
to stage an international mega-​event but was yet to adopt the principles of
International Traffic Signs. Masaru’s objective was to communicate Baron de
Coubertin’s universalist vision in intelligible ways, thus allegedly ‘deciphering’
the intractable aspects of Japanese culture.
Tokyo’s governance can be examined with the help of some atmospheric
‘barometers’ that cast the ways crisis is perceived in affective terms. A uni-
fying factor in crises such as the ones faced by Tokyo pertains to the human
ability to perceive and be moved by events, ultimately moving material worlds
and sociocultural values with them. For this reason, although I use various
Introducing a risky experiment 19

media templates to access information, I am not interested in turning this


into a media studies and methodologies book. Our souls mirror the world
we perceive ‘but not the mirror itself’, exclaims Klages (in Griffero, 2014,
p.14), so, media images and formats are useful only to the extent they help us
project atmospheres. Unlike philosophical understandings of ‘atmospheres’,
I recognise a pragmatic relationship between what those affected by crises
perceive and the auratic component of what is perceived. Ivan Illich goes as
far as to see an analogy between each person’s aura and the non-​dimensional
properties of a given space, especially an urban space. If a city’s aura does
not exist (i.e., cannot be perceived), then we deal with a malformation of ou-​
topia as a nowhere with no purpose (Illich, 1985, p.52). Active urban utopias,
even in times of crisis, are formed from shared sensory and political-​aesthetic
atmospheres –​what Illich (2002) sees in the conspiracies (cum-​spiro) or
sharing of revolutionary spiritedness in a social group or across social groups.
Much like Simmel’s (1997b, pp.117–​118) belief that the other emerges first as
an olfactory phenomenon, a city’s material-​and-​phenomenal presence in the
world is radiated in its atmospheric signatures.
Simmel and Illich’s theses need interpretation as atmospheric objectivities in
the ways groups breathe in and sense the air of crisis –​what Ichiro Yamaguchi
discusses along the lines of the Japanese ki (気) or inhalation (Yamaguchi
in Griffero, 2017, p.29). For anyone puzzled by this excursus, I am trying to
explain the gap between the poetics and politics of life in the era of COVID-​19
mortality and climate change in the Olympic city-​host. The Japanese spirited-
ness of the virus stands miles apart from Beck’s ‘risk society’, but it is only the
latter a spectator accesses in the form of kiki or risk –​a term I develop in sub-
sequent chapters. Ziakas et al. (2021, p.56) note that professional event man-
agers are always asked to make ‘judgements’ under uncertainty in operating
environments ‘characterized by multiple situational inputs’. This uncertainty
can be exacerbated by the environments in which risks manifest, so a social-​
constructionist approach is often employed in event analysis. However, social
constructionism of this type calls for prior knowledge and personal embodied
experiences in the design of safety planning at a regulatory-​industrial level
(its atmospheric inhalations). For this to work, experts must discard naïve
realist or techno-​scientific styles of judgement and acknowledge that ‘cogni-
tive psychology’ can address user/​audience perceptions but not avert disaster
or avoid misreading the host, their cultural worldview, and environments.
Hence, we need a sociocultural (Lupton, 2013) and ecopractical approach
to risk perception, with the latter forming part of my experimental journey.
Although the sociocultural debate stands at the margins of my analysis, it
helps me ground my genealogical analysis of cultural reality constructions.
It is my intention to show that, when we look past the necessity of ration-
alisation, Western anthropocentric imports of ‘risk’ disrupt local rhythms
and strangulate variations of difference. Such disruptions take time to mani-
fest and solidify –​which is why I will be working on long time stretches that
20 Introducing a risky experiment

exceed those of a generation or the spell of an Olympic bid to assess Tokyo


2020’s now-​time. Here it is helpful to directly quote Lefebvre’s pronounce-
ment of the organisational roots of psychological materialism as the cause
of rhythmic disruption: ‘those institutions of growth, of the population, of
exchanges, of work’ ([1992] 2015, p.53).
Transitions from the poetics to the politics of culture in hyper-​urbanised
contexts generate tension in collective self-​presentation (rather than ‘media
representation’), advocacy, and mobility. Lefebvre’s ‘trialectics’ ([1992]
2015, ­chapter 1) of physical, mental, and social space are in fact renditions
of Raymond Williams’ (1961, pp.57–​70) inscriptions of culture as ideal,
documentary, and social. Where the social produces formalised and
institutionalised versions of self and/​in community, which are enacted in
habitual forms in everyday life, the documentary regresses to these aspects
of intimate belonging and self-​recognition that may survive the slaughter
of contemporary hypermobility. Karl Mannheim’s ([1933] 1968) documen-
tary method extricates these intimacies from their hearth, turning them into
methodological tools. I will have to do such violence to the local matrix of
the mega-​event host that I use as an example to advance my argument –​or
we risk never bringing to light the invisible core of what I call ‘pre-​carity’,
prioritising instead technical analyses of crisis. Such ‘cultural intimacies’
(Herzfeld, 2005) may crack a shy smile during the staging of an important
mega-​event; however, more often, they take refuge in unwanted performances
of collective and individual ‘selves’ that institutions demonise and exclude
from the show. At times, the very same sources of power remember aspects
of them, but make sure that they project them in ornamental styles. Such
‘ornamentalism’ does not copy postcolonial analysis on race and class (e.g.,
Fanon, 1963; Cannadine, 2001) but invites us to think beyond two warlordist
planetary discourses based on religion in cultural and economic development
(Spivak, 2012, p.341). The ‘beyond’ will replace postcolonial with posthuman
perspectives (Braidotti, 2008, 2013) and help me to explore how the aesthetic
complexities of Olympic mega-​events shape the management of planetary
crises.

The structure of the book


Chapter 2 explores Japanese conceptions of space as part of the politics and
poetics of cultural placemaking. It interrogates the social sensibilities of
Japanese urban identification with established/​dominant tropes of cultural
mobility and hybridisation as pathways to cosmopolitan flourishing and
belonging. Adopting a diachronic approach to Tokyo’s development from a
crypto-​colonial outpost to a global city, it places to work the ‘travelling soci-
ology’ introduced in Chapter 1. Tokyo’s urban growth is characterised by a
displacement of discourses of civilisational development to the domain of
culture, in which technology is transformed into a technique of glamour or
Introducing a risky experiment 21

phantasmagoria. This is based on the affective logic of competition or res-


sentiment as a centrifugal Japanese force (away from Chinese heritage) and a
centripetal project (towards the creation of a coherent urban identity aligned
with Western cultural-​industrial globalisation so as to move up global hier-
archies of worth). Japan’s cultural centripetalism/​centrifugalism is used to
further refine mega-​event theory as a field of critical atmospheric mobilities.
Chapter 3 develops a critical theory of atmospheres in relation to mega-​event
organisation. It is argued that culture is increasingly subjected to technocratic
rationalisation in event-​management contexts. On the one hand, such ration-
alisation enables the rise of professional assemblages and the translation of
place-​bound cultural specificities and risks. On the other, the process enforces
cultural homogenisation, thus impinging upon the Olympic host’s cultural
autonomy. In turn, the host reduces the autonomy of native forms of human/​
social and non-​human/​natural life and ecology to ensure safe and impeccable
mega-​event delivery. Tokyo 2020 is used as an example of this process. To
this end, Chapter 2’s genealogical investigation into Tokyo’s simultaneous
spectacularisation and militarisation is connected to the management styles
of the 2020 mega-​event by native and global experts explored in Chapter 3.
Such structural-​organisational homogenisation has various implications for
the host’s recovery from the multiple crises they attempt to keep in check
during the mega-​event, but also for planetary survival and flourishing.
Chapter 4 is a theoretical introduction into the place of Olympic ceremonies
in the mega-​event as: (a) embodied and digital meaning-​making apparatuses
(dispositifs) of the city-​host and the nation to which the city belongs, but
also (b) opportunities for the researcher to examine the cultural and political
attitudes of its leading creative classes towards national and global socio-
cultural problems. Weaving refrains of risk into those of social inequality
(gender, sex, able-​body-​ness, and race/​ethnicity), this prelude to ceremonial
analysis provides a form of methodological diagnostics that is stylistic in a
cultural-​sociological manner. Expanding the materialist meaning of ‘crisis’ to
figurative fields, the chapter provides an alternative exploration of ceremony
as an affective site, in which the host conflates different domains of human
activity (imagination, compassion, and art vs surveillance and control), with
harmful consequences for human populations and the environment.
Chapter 5 is dedicated to a detailed analysis of the opening ceremony of
the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, as well as some key snapshots from the
closing ceremony and the entire Antwerp (handover to Paris 2024) ceremony.
Considering all three of them (after Chapter 4’s analytical introduction)
as figurative examples of globalisation of the city-​host, it further advances
the argument that native cultural forms, environments, and landscapes are
‘museumified’ in the Olympic mega-​event. This museumification achieves
a simultaneous denaturalisation of human nature and native environments
and a museumification of both in managerial ecologies. The strategy of
museumification remains auxiliary of realist risk-​management portfolios, in
22 Introducing a risky experiment

so far as it ‘tames’ variations of risk and danger at a figurative level. This figura-
tive taming also enables the convergence of digital/​cybernetic representations
of the city-​host, a biopolitical sorting of the entire nation-​host’s sociocul-
tural diversity, and an ossification of ecosystemic/​ environmental vitalist
movements, to advance the objectives of late capitalist networks.
Chapter 6 is an analytical prelude to Chapter 7, which focuses on contexts
of mega-​event mobilities, by following two groups that move within the
Olympic city. Its aim is to announce revisions to the project of critical cosmo-
politanism, which is often used in critical mega-​event analysis, to accommo-
date the planetary changes introduced by multiple crises that affect the earth.
Drawing on the social-​philosophical principles of pragmatism, posthuman
decolonial epistemologies, and mobilities theory, it departs from organised
ideas of climate technics as well as their scholarly analyses. It argues that
crises affect human and non-​human behaviour in the mega-​event, prompting
them to forge action ‘on the go’. The emergist styles of such behaviours are
studied stylistically and affectively so that a new type of mega-​event analysis
is produced.
Chapter 7 follows the embodied and affective movements of two different
groups in different spaces of the Olympic city of the Tokyo 2020 Games.
Both groups act as aggregates of more than one social group, thus forming
ideal types of movement in the Olympic city during any mega-​event. The
first is termed ‘homegenisers’ and includes native, regional, and international
protesters against the staging of the mega-​event during such a period fraught
with risks and crises. The second is termed ‘foragers’ and includes mobile
professionals visiting the city for the mega-​event (athletes, journalists, and
volunteers). Outlining the differences between their styles of affective and
embodied movement, the chapter suggests an alternative study of mega-​event
mobilities as products of Anthropocenic crises.
The conclusion (Chapter 8) inspects the results of the experiment that this
study enacted across seven chapters. It elaborates on the futures of ‘hybrid’
events, which have lost touch with the deep cultural plots of hybridity, as well
as native understandings of space and the world. Mega-​event ‘hybridity’ is
criticised for its technocratic grammar that simultaneously stifles human cre-
ativity and the free-​play of planetarian vitalism. However, by the same token,
‘native knowledge’ is exoticised or used not as an organisational panacea but
as a tool in the process of expositing the ways technocratic regimes of event
management suppress diversity (human/​cultural and multispecies) from their
design of risk-​aversion policies.
Chapter 2

Pilgrimage in Tokyo

Tokyo as a cosmion: ‘tracing’ affective mobilities


To engage in cognitive travel to Tokyo means, above all, to be open-​minded
about definitions of ‘travel’. My travel is elastic in its spatiotemporal
coordinates: it will stretch back to the Meiji period to create connections to
the futurity of Tokyo as a ‘global city’; but it will also blend the spiritual
dimensions of ‘contents’ with contemporary understandings of ‘contents
tourism’ as a capitalist-​technological assemblage of business, so as to facili-
tate cultural-​political pilgrimage to Tokyo and Japan (Coleman and Eade,
2004; Coleman and Eade, 2018). This kind of pilgrimage extends the cor-
poreal dimensions of movement and sociality in times of crises, such as the
one explored by Jensen (2021), to the worlds of the virtual. Such ‘travel’
borrows from the ‘infraempirical’ qualities of embodied experience to
produce ‘supraempirical’ experiences (Massumi, 2002, pp.145–​159). On the
one hand, these experiences rely on image density and thus on representations
of the world ‘out there’. On the other, because they reach human bodies in
large groups, they affect collective perceptions and may actualise them as
social conventions. We are talking about the body’s internal sense of its own
movement as a projection of collective movements (styles of travel) that
different human communities frame in different ways.
I am not arguing that Tokyo’s audio-​visual technologies are not responding
to the demands of consumer capitalism (hence my emphasis on a political
economy of pilgrimage à la Coleman and Eade, 2018). Instead, I argue that
(a) groups of bodies are called upon to transform through cognitive/​affective
movement what is formless or irrelevant to their needs into a project that suits
them (Hansen, 2000, 2004). This means that (b) the styles on which such tech-
nologies are based either become imbued with meanings that simultaneously
actualise a sense of Japanese identity, or the meanings were there in some
affiliate form, and now demonstrate resiliency to the homogenising forces of
global markets. These styles become a ‘horizon of integration’ and eventually
also a self-​organising principle for those who enter markets. Cultures produce
such integrative horizons, which pulsate like affects (or, rather, ‘tendencies’

DOI: 10.4324/9781003314547-2
24 Pilgrimage in Tokyo

and ‘motions’), deploying themselves in time and thus as time (Hansen,


20004, p.253). The Japanese ‘body’ of Tokyo 2020 is a biomediated body with
paranoid tendencies: moving towards the markets that affect it adversely, and
inwards to a ‘national soul’ that is the figment of this collective paranoia,
allows it to comprehend crises (Clough, 2010, pp.219–​220). The turbulence
these crises introduce to its surface generates lines of communication between
different energy forces, such as viruses, humans, animals, and computers
(Hansen, 2004, p.134).
‘Contents mobilities’ as a form of travel and organised tourism sit at a
conjunction between indigenous and global forces of meaning-​production.
As explained in the introduction, their monogatarisei (narrative) or tēmasei
(theme) qualities are conducive to the projection of localised atmospheres
and affects (Yamamura, 2020, p.1). Nevertheless, the travel behaviour these
contents organise mobilises the digital both as a phenomenal travel-​movement
and as a brand manipulated by creative industries such as manga, anime film,
and computer games (Seaton, et al., 2017, pp.3–​4). Thus, we do not deal
with ‘film-​induced tourism’ (Beeton, 2016) or ‘cinematic tourism’ (Tzanelli,
2010) but an organised mobility that cuts across different media forms and
formats to produce narratives (Beeton et al., 2013, p.150; Tzanelli, 2013a).
International ‘contents’ scholars view this as a process of mediatised ‘adap-
tation’, a series of dynamic ‘practices/​experiences motivated by contents’
(defined above as ‘information, narratives, characters, locations, and other
creative elements’) (Seaton et al., 2017, p.5; Yamamura, 2020, p.4). This def-
inition is sufficient for a study of the Tokyo 2020 industry but not enough for
my analysis.
Because ‘contents travel’ cuts across virtual, embodied/​affective, and phys-
ical/​geographic sites, it forms a more resilient style of heritage than those
based exclusively on natural and built environments. At the same time, its
heritage qualities are more susceptible to official appropriations of temporal
narrative (Kirschenblatt-​Gimblett, 1997) –​which is why the style/​industry
is today managed by networks of state and corporate interests (Yamamura,
2020). The 2020/​2021 crisis nexus pushed an extra envelope under the city’s
door, asking its managers to adapt multiple ecologies to the new era of ‘sus-
tainability’. This was cast as an enterprise incorporating labour, the natural/​
built environment, and biology/​health, among other things (for comparisons,
see Lapointe et al., 2019). However, it is wrong to consider its biopolitics inde-
pendently from concerns about environmental decline. Such concerns date
back to the 1980s’ development of island areas into energy-​generating plants
and sites where trash could be disposed of, as well as the simultaneous devel-
opment of concrete blocks and mass leisure sites in Tokyo Bay which eroded it
environmentally and aesthetically (Kietlinski, 2020, pp.5–​6). As a biopolitical
project, kontentzisation’s physical location is outside Tokyo’s territory; but as
a virtual project, it is a heritage managed by urban phantasmagorical centres,
such as Tokyo. The countryside Williams explored as modernity’s dwindling
Pilgrimage in Tokyo 25

utopia of social harmony places environmental concerns among the Olympic


enterprise’s priorities. So, which contents territories is a scholar truly treading
(or should cover) to explore this mega-​city in times of crisis? The question of
cover applies to any mega-​event study on entanglements of biopolitics, ecol-
ogies, and cybernetics.
When he envisioned an alternative epistemology of difference and othering,
Soja (1996, p.81) created a ‘trialectics’ of ‘thirdspace’. This imaginary space
was supposed to move scholars of urban regions away from ‘firstspatial’
(physical/​material spatialities) and ‘secondspatial’ configurations (the discur-
sive representation of space, often by networks of intellectuals and experts).
Thirdspace is where the first two ‘spaces’ meet and blend into an alternative
ontological dialectics of spatiality-​historicality-​sociality. The new trialectics
promises to take seriously this three-​dimensional development of human
nature in its diverse forms (cognition, materiality, and affective revolution).
Soja’s thesis is useful for an exploration of human pluriworlds in the city; how-
ever, when applied to Tokyo 2020, it assumes that planetary entanglements are
defined by the significance of one species, even though urban ecologies involve
more than economies of scale and movement (Tsing, 2015, p.38; Sheller, 2020,
pp.146–​147). The city is a living multi-​organism currently suffering by the
collapse or concerted elimination of its animated subsystems of flora and
fauna, in favour of proliferating technological actants. Entanglements of
being and belonging enclose tropes of heritage and indebtedness (Barad,
2007, 2010) to more than our human ancestry. To adjust Soja’s vision of the
city as a ‘possibilities machine’, I propose that we rethink the very notion of
space as an anthropocentric construct and property.
Soja’s magical realism attains two different perspectives across two of his
major publications. In Thirdspace, he uses Jorge L. Borges’ evocation of ‘a
place where all places are’ (Soja, 1996, p.54) to redefine the ways Los Angeles is
or can be as urban space. The lengthy passage he cites from Borges’ Labyrinths
to this end leads the pilgrim/​narrator’s vision to ‘Aleph’, a ‘small iridescent
sphere of almost unbearable brilliance’ (Borges, 1971, pp.11), which can be
seen ‘from every point and angle’, while seeing in it ‘the earth and in the
earth the Aleph’ (ibid., p.14). There, Soja identifies an opportunity to define
‘thirdspace’ as Aleph, which brings together ‘subjectivity and objectivity, the
abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined’ (Soja, 1996, pp.56–​57),
and so forth. To follow the blended Japanese philosophy of holism, I recog-
nise here an opportunity to conceptualise the atmospheric dimensions of space
as environmental symbolism. In Tokyo 2020, embodied, environmental, cogni-
tive, and effective entanglements produce a magical-​real locale irradiating its
self-​narration in a variety of perceived but invisible modes.
When it comes to the staging of the Olympic mega-​event, Tokyo’s ‘Aleph’
as a ‘smooth’ narrative surface has been co-​opted by state-​corporate interests.
The surface itself helps me to glide towards the plural worlds of the city
not in ‘pure’ objectivised ways, but as a critical atmospheric investigator.
26 Pilgrimage in Tokyo

My oscillation between ‘content’ and ‘politics’ is in sync with the place’s


experience of multiple temporalities and constant cross-​cultural exchange,
as these were explored by magical realists. Unlike the ‘New Objectivity’s’
European proponents, who tried to politicise the existential angst of a war-​
ridden humanity, the contribution of Latin American magical realists to
the genre fostered an atmospheric alliance between realism and materialism
that emphasised the uniqueness of land and its people, as well as its climatic
specificity (Bowers, 2004, pp.8–​19). This opened up new possibilities for the
inhabitants of non-​European spaces to interpret themselves and their home.
A whole ‘fourth space’ opened up to them as the space of self-​recognition and
growth with distinctive environmental-​phenomenal properties (Huntington
and Parkinson Zamora, 1995, p.75). Fourthspatial mobilities began to speak
the language of activism, but their progressive nature always varied. Their
most vociferous proponents tend to be the native educated classes and artistic
groups, which, under the best circumstances, may berate parochial localism
while also treating the soft patronage of external ‘friends’ with caution, or
even suspicion. This is the theme of a separate study on reflexive modernisa-
tion and global professional mobility (Lash, 1994, p.162) which I explore in
the following chapter.
In Japan, contact with other cultures resulted in blends of local and foreign
cosmologies originating both in cultural neighbourhoods (China) and the
lands of its Western guests (first the British and then notably the Americans),
who would turn into ‘soft’ colonists. Because Westerners brought with them
the spatial logic of materialist progress, the ensued cosmic clashes produced
a neither-​nor space of symbols that existed before and above their makers.
Today, the ‘fourthspatial’ logic is based on entanglements of matter, body,
spirit, and emotion constantly acted out on the field of cultural production.
In this field, notions of ‘ecology’ and ‘environment’ commence their life as
‘native’ atmospheric forms and develop into complex biomedical, cyber-
netic, and ecological projects (Fuller, 2011; Tzanelli, 2020). To fully under-
stand and correct their glitches, we need to work backwards with a forward
vision: to collect and piece together anew the surviving slivers of their ori-
ginal utopian essence. For this, we have more than one tested method at our
disposal, including Soja’s (1996, p.15) critique of the bicameral vision of
space (spirit vs matter), but also Urry’s (2016, pp.97–​99) and Porritt’s (2013)
‘backcasting’ that helps us to excavate ‘problems’. There are two issues with
these technologised propositions: first, they may make us think that we
‘excavate’ the past and not a version of it; and second, they assume that we
really know where to look and what to prioritise in our deliberations outside
human interests. Before honing our ‘art of relevance’ (as per Tsing’s [2015,
p.10] ‘art of noticing’ and Back’s [2007, pp.76–​77] ‘art of listening’), we are
thrown to a movie auditorium to methodologically replicate the Olympic
spectacle.
Pilgrimage in Tokyo 27

In Postmetropolis, Soja (2000) extends his notion of ‘magic’ to examine the


capitalist logic of simulacra. His new term, ‘magical hyperrealism’, adds an
even darker dimension to his urban analysis. It implies that mediation leads
to the colonisation of the public sphere but with an extra layer of virtuality
that lacks real reference. Now drawing on Baudrillard (1973), he addresses
grander questions of globalisation, in which cities orchestrate various scapal
contiguities (e.g., finance, creative labour, infrastructural expansion, and
more –​Sassen, 2002). As the hyperreal encroaches on reality, an extra layer
of ancient wisdom is eliminated, and the atmospheric patina of everyday life
is changed into a commodity that does not connect to place and history at
all. Likewise, the critical study of such urban mobilities benefits from Gernot
Böhme’s (2016, 2017) critical theoretical approach, which addresses questions
of techno-​cultural urban development in architecture and design. This clearly
matches the new mobilities paradigm’s emphasis on development and mul-
tiple economic, cultural, and social flows in globalised contexts (Urry, 2007),
as well as the problems encountered in the design of liveable and fair urban
spaces (Jensen, 2014, 2019).
If we follow Soja, we are bound to enact an updated version of diffusionism
in the Anthropocene. Where Blautt’s (1993) Coloniser’s model of the world
stressed dichotomies between coloniser/​colonised and Said (1978) stressed
how the model asserted the unique European qualities of race, culture, spirit,
and mind, I will be adding a layer of ‘environment’ as both a metaphor of
native ways of life (an existential ecology) and a natural ecosystem subjected
to our rules of mind-​walking and rhythmanalysis. Others have already paved
the way for an analysis of East Asia as a region in which Olympic mega-​
projects install a disciplinary regime, colonising mind and bodies (Horne and
Manzenreiter, 2012). Instead of thinking solely about the material dimensions
of these instillations, I interrogate their atmospheric residue, which produces
reality (travel) glances (see also Hollinshead and Suleman, 2018, for an alter-
native approach). Chilisa (2012, ­chapter 3) argues that in studies of such non-​
European spaces we must eventually ask: ‘Whose reality counts?’ Counting
is about revealing where such phantasmagorias come from and what forms
of reality they institute as an Olympic ideal. In such an interrogation we
look past ‘Third World’ narratives of development (Mowforth and Munt,
2015, pp.45–​46). The ‘Third World’ is today a controversial term, having been
introduced in 1952 during the Cold War by politician and economist Alfred
Sauvy to refer to countries aligned either with the United States or with the
Soviet Union. ‘First World’ designated the most powerful economies in the
world and ‘Second World’ was used to designate the satellite Soviet states
(Slemon, 1990). The term ‘First World’ was also used in contexts of decol-
onisation to describe economically progressed (therefore deemed successful)
ex-​colonies, such as Australia and Canada. The success of these decolonised
polities was predicated on their ability to generate networks of alliance with
28 Pilgrimage in Tokyo

global capitalism and European and American defence strategies and policies
(Lawson, 1991).
I contend that our scholarly compass malfunctions when we generate clear-​
cut categories on the basis of such materialist criteria (see also the critique
by Rimmer and Dick, 1998). I consider Japan as a ‘First World’ figment,
a self-​made simulacrum of Western markets. Mirroring an unmodified
version of Simmel’s reflections on the metropolis, Tokyo easily ‘passes’ as
a ‘web or network of intersecting spheres of the division of labour, distri-
bution, communications, the money economy, commodity exchange, intel-
lectual and cultural circles’ (Frisby, 1992, p.73). But in another reality, that
of native atmospheric experience, Tokyo occupies an interstitial perspective,
which resembles the ‘Third World’s’ exclusion from Western progress. This
interstitial dwelling projects a form of fourthspatial affective deficit –​akin to
Simmel’s attention to the ‘social bordering’ (Frisby, 1992, pp.75–​76, p.82),
only transposed onto a cross-​cultural field. Mobilities scholarship is yet to
explore such interstices of recognition, which produce domestic exclusions.
Quite often, a leap is made to these exclusions and the chain of effects is
ignored.
Echoing to a great extent bell hooks (1990, p.31), Sheller (2020, p.166,
p.170), Urry (2000, p.210) and Soja (1996, p.84–​84) advances an activist
border-​talk that can address the politics of difference. Where Soja celebrates
hooks’ elective marginality, Urry calls for the defence of a mobile intellec-
tual community’s ‘creative marginality’ and Sheller invites the powers that be
to sustain those sociocultural borderlands that climate catastrophes threaten
with extinction. I think there is more to be said here –​for, elective marginalisa-
tion is a double-​edged sword in institutional circles. As mobile communities,
our new mission should be to bring to discourse and thus centralise a ‘fourth
world’ beyond the emerging global economies of sub-​Saharan Africa that
have shifted to a structural position of irrelevance (Castells, 1993, p.37). In
international domains of exchange, ‘irrelevance’ is defined by markets, which
silence worldviews and sociocultural difference alike. Tokyo as a global city
‘homes’ and ‘hosts’ such human and non-​human pluritopias. Regardless of its
undenied hypermodernisation, to walk its streets in the same rhythms as those
of Paris may not always produce comprehensive comparative sociologies and
geographies of citizenship. This shortcut returns us to the description of a
generic other that ‘go[es] deeper, last[s]‌longer, and do[es] more damage’ to a
shared (cosmopolitan) fabric of knowledge (Chambers in Chilisa, 2012, p.82).
The materiality of this fabric is not the meadows of out-​of-​the-​way Japanese
villages but the country’s very urban core, which encloses palimpsests of all
these sociocultural ecologies.
This is not romantic talk but an invitation to engage in post-​Anthropocenic
utopian practice. In Experimental museology, Haldrup et al. (2021, p.2) call
for an ‘experimental’ turn in museum design to make space for a more holistic
approach to knowledge. I am confronted with a similar call, but as I declare
Pilgrimage in Tokyo 29

bicamerality and backcasting ‘not enough’, I am in trouble. However, I am


where I want to be –​facing and ‘staying with the troubles’ (Haraway, 2016)
of a long trail of misunderstandings and successes in Tokyo’s cross-​cultural
encounters. In scholarly circles critical of the primacy of the gaze, contem-
porary urbanism is often examined from a performative stance. It is argued
that variations of extraordinary and everyday performances (from mega-​
events to commuting or just walking) allow us to better inspect the ‘urban
archive’ (Solga et al., 2009, p.6). To avoid unnecessary romanticisations of
Tokyo though backcasting (e.g., see critique by Edensor and Jayne, 2012,
pp.23–​24) and bring centre-​stage the argument that all cities endorse social
palimpsests, modifying local memories (Huyssen, 2003, p.155; Hopkins and
Solga, 2013, pp.3–​5), I switch to a synaesthetic perspective that respects
atmospheres. The orchestration of senses as an extension of embodiment/​
cognition demotes the usual emphasis on hard politics and economics to
auxiliary analytical portfolios and makes space for an aesthetic politics of
belonging in the Anthropocene.
Long before the posthumanist turn, urban and globalisation theorists
used Alfred Schütz’s (1967, p.336) term ‘cosmion’ to explore the dynamic
of localised and centralised, collective self-​presentations in phenomeno-
logical terms. Such interpretative processes are associated with the ways
members of a community use to describe their alleged ‘natural attitude’ –​
their heritage registers and collective memories. As a process, the cosmion
describes the world city as a micro-​globalised environment articulated by
its dwellers, who end up externalising their experiences, thus ultimately
creating worlds of symbols. The tension is already part of the mega-​event
mobilities agenda. As Salazar (2016, p.5) explains, mega-​events serve for the
host city as ‘crucibles in which the nature of society and alternative social
constructions are explored’. Despite their ‘intimate’, internal structure,
the world of urban symbols is shared with strangers (Dürrschmidt, 1997,
p.65). Big cities become ‘encosmic’ (they place themselves in the world)
by engaging in such self-​interpretations in global public arena. However,
belonging to a national polity, an international cultural network of world
cities and several global networks of capitalist mobilities all at the same time
posits challenges for a city’s cultural self-​recognition and identity. Robert
Park and Ernest Burgess’s (2019) vision of the city as a laboratory in which
human nature and socialising forces reveal themselves as study arenas and
Mumford’s (1961, p.639) presentation of world cities as ‘compendiums of
the world’ are apposite. I do not refer specifically to strategic managements
of image in world markets, but the mobilisation of centuries-​long residual
self-​narrations for the production of a coherent identity in the present. Such
challenges multiply for urban polities, which develop out of world domin-
ation into strong forces in contemporary global scenes: undoubtedly, Tokyo
is part of the ‘First World’, but its inner worlds stay in the shadows, awaiting
fourthspatial recognition.
30 Pilgrimage in Tokyo

My alternative magical-​realist mode of reading Japanese contents though


atmospheres focuses on this posthuman cosmion. Because the Hegelian
notion of ideational movement is crucial in Japanese folk and popular cul-
ture, I do not impose a pure Marxist reading of crises in the 2020 Olympics.
Instead, I look for ways to critically refract Marxist revolutionary philoso-
phies through symbolic arrangement of artefacts, lifestyles, and embodied
experiences of technology and performance in the global city. For this, I see
a felicitous meeting between Lefebvre’s (([1992] 2015) emphasis on repeti-
tion as a mechanism of uncovering difference and Guattari’s ([1989] 2000,
p.26, p.30) refrain (otherwise also ritournelle and réitération). Refrains struc-
ture affects into existential territories: they produce in Tokyo 2020 the spir-
itual basis of contents mobilities. I am not talking about the proliferation of
image-​based symbols in Tokyo 2020’s stage –​these are the reductive effects
of capitalist phantasmagorias, which operate on the circulation of ‘signs/​
images’ to satisfy the voraciousness of international markets and audiences
with little local knowledge (Hiller, 2006). I refer to the ways the affective
distribution of crisis narratives on the mega-​event’s production and perform-
ance contexts produces new existential territories (Bertelsen and Murphie,
2010, p.143).
Contents pilgrimage and, by extension, the native design of ‘contents
tourism’ are ‘intonated’ –​to use a musical-​grammatical metaphor –​by
reflective repetitions of contemporary and ancient styles. My task is to
study a rift between the Japanese dō (way of doing) and Western business
practice, which wins the race of globalisation. Notably, unlike the commer-
cialisation of native contents pilgrimage by Western business, the ‘environ-
ment’ in which this battle unfolds is a techno-​cultural mélangé composite
of the digital and the natural. This environment is not entirely foreign to
Tokyo, because it connects to the histories of digitality in Japan via contents
tourism. Property developers and administrative apparatuses attempt and
succeed in mastering its nature (Lefebvre, [1992] 2015, p.62). Ultimately
then, the clash and/​or hybridisation of organisational styles regarding the
management of multiple crises speaks of the way a double meta-​crisis keeps
returning every time a mega-​event is hosted by a city, but with non-​Western
hosts having to deal with extra challenges. This doubling includes a crisis
of representation (of the host’s intimate existential territory of cultural pro-
duction and everyday mobilities) and presence (their ‘lessened’ cultural and
political voice in global arenas, even when they are considered powerful
agents). The very histories of hybridity have been connected to projects
of the bourgeois elites across the world (Nederveen Pieterse, 2019), so an
examination of crises of (re)presentation may also have a social identity. To
understand how these meta-​crises (or second-​order crises) form rhizomatic
connections to contemporaneous material, sociocultural, and political
crises (first-​order crises), I explore their aesthetic and political genealogies
in Japanese geographies.
Another random document with
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KIRBY, ELIZABETH. Adorable dreamer. *$1.90


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KIRKALDY, ADAM WILLIS. Wealth: its
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KIRKLAND, WINIFRED MARGARETTA.
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KIRKPATRICK, EDWIN ASBURY.


Imagination and its place in education. $1.48 Ginn
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KLAPPER, PAUL, ed. College teaching; studies


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them how to give themselves a course in observation and how to
assess spiritual values. The contents are in five parts: The mss. that
fail; On keeping your eyes open; The help that books can give; Points
a writer ought to note; Author, publisher, and public.

“The author gives much good advice (a great deal of it very


elementary) to literary aspirants.”

+ − Ath p445 Je 6 ’19 120w

“Practical in many respects, the book is of little use in teaching the


‘would-be author’ how to become an artist. Miss Klickmann’s
instruction is from an editorial standpoint, not from the artist’s, and
as such her volume has its value for the novice who knows no better
than to believe that literary greatness and fame come with a
successful appearance in the magazines.”

+ − Boston Transcript p10 Ap 17 ’20 550w


+ Ind 104:247 N 13 ’20 20w
“Her book is remarkably well done, and may very well help some
real talent on its way; and, apart from that, it is written in so lively a
style, so full of piquant anecdote and illustration, that it is a pity that
the more sophisticated reader, who would really much more enjoy it
than the ‘would-be’ author for whom it is written, is not likely to
encounter it.” R: Le Gallienne

+ N Y Times 25:8 Je 27 ’20 900w

“Miss Klickmann’s work is adapted not only to people without


knowledge but to people without brains. There is an iteration of the
familiar, an elaboration of the simple, an elucidation of the clear.”

− Review 2:400 Ap 17 ’20 650w

“It might be said that if a young writer fails to profit by this


inspirational book he had better leave off his attempts to write.”

+ R of Rs 62:224 Ag ’20 100w

“The substance of the teaching is helpful, and the manner


encouraging without being effusive.”

+ Spec 122:737 Je 7 ’19 300w

“On the professional side, her suggestions are of great practical


value. If any adverse criticism can be made, it is that she does not
classify thoroughly her comment on the various types of material
discussed. Miss Klickmann’s advice is not effusively or obscurely
pedantic. It is all breezy and to the point.”
+ − Springf’d Republican p6 Ap 12 ’20 800w

“She wields herself a very bright and ready pen, and out of the
abundance of her experience she gives in a flow of headed
paragraphs helpful advice on every side of the subject.”

+ The Times [London] Lit Sup p314 Je 5


’19 100w

KLUCK, ALEXANDER VON. March on Paris


and the battle of the Marne, 1914. il *$3.50
Longmans 940.4

(Eng ed 20–10378)

“Alexander von Kluck, generaloberst, has written a book about his


Belgian and French adventure. It was completed in February, 1918,
on the eve of the great German offensive in Picardy. It is the personal
observations, impressions and opinions of a commanding general
who reviews his own actions in the quietude of his study and
illustrates them with the orders issued to him and by him, but with
very little information beyond the manoeuvres of his own army in the
field and almost none of the enemy. Evidently the sub-title to the
book, ‘The battle of the Marne,’ is a characterization of the British
editors, for the author calls it ‘The battle on the Ourcq’ and devotes
the last third of the book to it. Still, if the British editors have given
the book a title which shall more pointedly appeal to readers of
English, they have also furnished the book with something far more
important: Footnotes by the experts of the Committee of imperial
defense. These notes check up von Kluck’s data, correct his errors,
and often qualify his conclusions.”—N Y Times

“His book lacks the attractive personality and humor of


Ludendorff’s, the intimate observations of von Hindenburg’s. There
is nothing picturesque about it. All the same, as has been said, the
military historian will find therein a mine of academic information
which he cannot afford to leave unexplored.” Walter Littlefield

+ − N Y Times 25:19 Jl 25 ’20 2650w


Sat R 130:12 Jl 3 ’20 1150w

“A valuable contribution to military history.”

+ Spec 124:729 My 29 ’20 430w

KNAPPEN, THEODORE MACFARLANE.


Wings of war; with an introd. by D. W. Taylor. il
*$2.50 Putnam 940.44

20–15470

“This book describes in detail the contribution made by the United


States to aircraft invention, engineering and production during the
world war. Five of the most important chapters are devoted to the
origin, development and production of the famous Liberty engine.
Mr Knappen is among those who believe that in spite of all the
revelation of Congressional investigations made during the past two
years the aircraft achievements of our government, considering our
unpreparedness at the outset, were highly creditable.”—R of Rs

Outlook 126:202 S 29 ’20 60w


R of Rs 62:445 O ’20 110w

KNIBBS, HENRY HERBERT. Songs of the


trail. il *$1.50 Houghton 811

20–19670

Poems of the far West and the cattle trails. Among the titles are: I
have builded me a home; The pack train; The hour beyond the hour;
The sun-worshipers; Gods of the red men; Arizona; Trail song;
Waring of Sonora-Town; The long road West; Old San Antone.

+ Booklist 17:146 Ja ’21

“This is the West, seen first hand but seen through the perspective
of Mr Knibbs’ Harvard training. One may suspect that these
westerners are a bit more intellectual than the average cowpuncher,
but the poems perhaps are the more readable for it.” C. F. G.

+ Grinnell R 16:332 Ja ’21 290w


“Good, honest work of its kind, with occasional beauty and much
narrative interest. ‘The wind’ is a strong and individual poem,
especially fine in atmosphere and imagery. Mr Knibbs is far more of
a poet than the much advertised Robert W. Service.”

+ N Y Evening Post p17 N 13 ’20 150w

KNIPE, EMILIE (BENSON) (MRS ALDEN


ARTHUR KNIPE), and KNIPE, ALDEN
ARTHUR. Mayflower maid. il *$1.90 (3c) Century

20–16501

A story of the coming of the Pilgrims. Barbara Gorges is a timid


motherless girl who starts out with her father from Leyden in the
Speedwell. When the Speedwell and the Mayflower are obliged to run
in to Plymouth, Barbara’s father becomes the victim of a fatal
accident and she is left an orphan. Fortunately for her, she is taken
under the protection of Myles Standish and his wife Rose. The story
then follows closely the historical narrative, and describes the trip
across the Atlantic, the landing at Plymouth, the first hard winter,
the death of Rose Standish, the relations with the Indians, the love
story of John Alden and Priscilla Mullens, and finally that of Myles
Standish and Barbara herself.

“More interesting than Taggart’s ‘Pilgrim maid,’ gives a good


picture of life in the colony.”

+ Booklist 17:78 N ’20


KNOWLES, MORRIS. Industrial housing. *$5
McGraw 331.83

20–16847

“Morris Knowles, an engineer of vast experience and the chief


engineer of the housing division of the United States Shipping board,
understanding the need of the interdependence of engineer,
architect, town planner, landscape gardener, sanitarian, utility
designer, contractor, real estate agent and the public spirited
business man and city official in the development of a successful city
plan and in the solution of the housing problem, has written the
book, ‘Industrial housing.’ Housing is taken in its broadest meaning,
with all its relations to other problems. The town plan, streets and
pavements, water supply, sewerage, waste disposal and public
utilities are some of the specifically municipal problems treated in
this work. Illustrations and charts, a good bibliography and an
analytical index complete its usefulness.”—N Y P L Munic Ref Lib
Notes

“Comprehensive and readable presentation of the subject of


industrial housing.”

N Y P L Munic Ref Lib Notes 7:55 N 17


’20 150w

“The book is a store of invaluable information.”

+ − Survey 45:258 N 13 ’20 1000w


KOBRIN, LEON. Lithuanian village; auth. tr.
from the Yiddish by I: Goldberg. *$1.75 Brentano’s

20–6127

“In a series of sharp vignettes the book presents to us an


environment almost extinct today—the environment of a drab little
village in the pale. In restrained and simple language a restrained
and simple folk is depicted dragging its weary body and soul through
the whole cycle of the monotonous year. You read how those Jews
half strangle each other in their efforts to earn a kopeck or two; you
hear those bitter wives curse at their stalls, and see those stunted
husbands pore over their holy books; you feel the grimy superstition
that clogs the daily life of those villagers, know the smallness of their
horizon and the narrowness of their vision—and you love them
nevertheless. And somehow you are impressed that the hegira of
their offspring to the land where ‘Jews can be policemen,’ was a far
from woeful event in the history of the soul of the new world.”—New
Repub

+ Booklist 17:34 O ’20

“The whole work is frankly realistic, softening no oaths and


tempering no vices. Yet withal, it is a refreshing bit of reading, for
despite the bitterness and ugliness floating like scum on the waters of
that ghetto life, one never quite loses consciousness of the great deep
cleanness beneath it all. In that Kobrin proves himself a master: his
realism is suggestive and translucent, not blunt and opaque.” L:
Brown
+ New Repub 24:25 S 1 ’20 920w

“Leon Kobrin has lived the life he writes about. His bitter realism
is no creation of fancy; the atmospherical color is without blemish.”
Alvin Winston

+ N Y Call p11 Ap 25 ’20 420w

“Once in a while, a race produces an author capable of presenting


its message in language of so great simplicity and force that his
writings can be appreciated anywhere in an adequate translation.
The Jewish race possesses such a writer in Leon Kobrin.”

+ Springf’d Republican p10 My 7 ’20


240w

KOEBEL, WILLIAM HENRY. Great south


land. *$4.50 (5c) Dodd 918

A20–884

The book treats of the republics of Rio de la Plata, and southern


Brazil of today. These countries the author, in his introduction
compares to the ugly duckling which turned out a swan. Already
before the war they had steadily risen in importance and “there is no
doubt that the shifting sands of international politics and the racing
centres of power have left these South American states in an
economic position stronger than any which they have previously
enjoyed.” Part 1 contains: Buenos Aires of yesterday and today; The
Argentine capital in war time; Cosmopolitan influences; Some

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