Lingering Infrastructure
Danny Hayward x Takamura Kōtarō
Chieko became more earnest about her study of Western painting. Then suddenly she married Takamura Kōtarō. I don’t know anything about how this love came about, but I thought this marriage would not be bad for her artistic pursuits. Yet once she married, Chieko distanced herself completely from me and from the world. — Hiratsuka Raichō, quoted in Modern Girls, Shining Stars, the Skies of Tokyo: 5 Japanese Women, Phyllis Birnham (Colombia, 1999), p.80
Chieko Shō (1941) is a collection of poems and essays written by the sculptor and poet Takamura Kōtarō, touching on his wife Chieko’s life and work as a visual artist, her decline into schizophrenia after a suicide attempt in 1932, and her eventual death from pulmonary illness in 1938. One of the monuments of modern Japanese literature, Chieko’s story was novelised by Satō Haruo in 1957, and adapted into an Academy Award winning film directed by Nakamura Noboru, titled in English Portrait of Chieko, in 1967. Chieko Shō was revised and expanded several times, initially by Takamura, and then in a number of editions made by his editor Kusano Shinpei after the poet’s death in 1956. In its final published version the Chieko collection includes a 1950 sequel called Chieko Shō Sono Go, and a number of fugitive pieces gleaned from the archive. The most famous of all these writings is the poem inscribed on Chieko’s memorial in Tokyo, レモン哀歌, Remon aika, ‘Lemon Elegy’, a free verse narrative in eighteen sharply defined lines. They tell a simple story. Takamura Kōtarō brings Chieko on her deathbed a lemon, for the bitter savour of which she has been yearning. Chieko bites down on the fruit. She is momentarily restored to sanity and vigour, and as suddenly dies. Later, the poet leaves a lemon at Chieko’s memorial shrine. It is an astonishing poem, even in translation, in which all that Takamura’s writing sets at stake in the representation of his relationship with Chieko crystallises into a symbolic array of extreme communicative intensity.
The moment of Chieko’s death is represented by Takamura, in Satō Hiroaki’s wonderful translation, addressing his lost beloved in apostrophe, like this: ‘you let out a great sigh | and with it your engine stopped’. The word translated as ‘engine’ is 機関, きかん, kikan, sometimes rendered in English translations of ‘Remon aika’ as ‘organ’. The explicit meaning is straightforward. The mechanism of Chieko’s body, the organ of her heart, has stopped. But since human beings are not only machines, or at least, since we know that Takamura does not believe that human beings are only machines, though he called himself a materialist, we may reasonably surmise that something else of Chieko, something other than her engine, is implicitly being said to have continued. Takamura does not use the word 心, kokoro, ‘heart’ here, though he uses the term quite frequently throughout Chieko Shō. Western commentators with a deeper knowledge of Japanese than I possess, which I should stress is not very deep at all, have found the term kikan objectionable, as though in choosing this word Takamura had fallen short of his normal standards of elegiac beauty. But my feeling is that the choice of kikan is important both to ‘Remon aika’ and to Chieko Shō as a whole, because in addition to the meanings already noted, the word is commonly used to mean ‘institution’. This meaning represents, in my understanding of this text, more than an alternative gloss or nuance. Throughout Chieko Shō, Kōtarō tells us over and again that his wife is ‘everything’. His relationship with Chieko is the organising system which prevails in his world. That world may contain Chieko, or the mechanism bearing her name, but is constituted as a world only in relation with that one unique content. ‘Chieko is in dimension A’, runs Soichi Furuta’s translation of Takamura’s last Chieko poem, ‘to play with Chieko’ (1951), and whereas ‘dimension A is absolute reality’, dimension B, where Kōtarō by necessity must dwell, exists only as a refraction of Chieko’s schizoid absolute.
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‘The only way to write a poem in which everything counts is | you make someone else feel that they’re not unique.’ — ‘Another Poet’ in Danny Hayward, It Was Like Watching (Last Books, 2026), p.68.
I’ve known Danny Hayward since about 2007, when he was an undergraduate student at the University of Sussex, a participant in a new circle gathered around a poet I knew from Cambridge who had just started teaching there. I helped Danny share one of his early books through a small press I was involved with, and invited him to read a couple of times at events I contributed to organising when he was a postgraduate student at Birkbeck and I was doing piece work as a university teacher in Cambridge and London. Like me, although Danny had started out as an eighteenth centuryist, his studies had migrated into other fields and questions, leaving it precariously established between institutional and disciplinary boundaries. Unlike me, Danny had been able through his work not only in poetry and criticism, but in activism and advocacy, to work with that liminality, and to magnetise an attentive audience. I haven’t been with him in person for many years. The last time I saw Danny was in 2015, at a reading event for poets and theorists organised by David Grundy and Lisa Jeschke, held in the Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio in Cambridge, at which his partner, the philosopher Marina Vishmidt, gave a talk of celestial brilliance. The occasion stayed with me, not only because Marina’s work was so glorious, but also because of an unusually clear visual impression I carried away from the room, a simple but very definite picture of Danny listening to Marina enraptured, his face in the dark studio bathed in coloured light from the projector screen.
Marina died in 2024, following a long illness, at the age of 47. Danny’s new book It Was Like Watching assembles unpublished poems and fragments of poetry from Marina’s archive, in the guises of the many poets whose styles she wore, with narrative and reflective writing of his own. It is one of the most moving elegiac works I have ever read or can imagine reading — a monument to the lost beloved toward and around which my thoughts and feelings will bend and flow until I die. Marina was not known as a poet, but rather as a theorist, with a particular interest in the interaction of forces and subjects in visual culture. In talks and writings after 2016 Marina had begun working out the terms of a special dialectic she called infrastructural critique, iterating on the Bourdeuian discourse of institutional critique, associated with prominent theorist-practitioners including Andrea Fraser and Michael Asher, which has been somewhat prevalent in avant-garde art and curatorial theory over the last thirty years. Institutional critique is ostensibly intended to reveal how power concentrates in the finance and management components of capitalist cultural organisations, to investigate the effects of that concentration on the apparatus as a whole, and to stimulate thinking about ways of releasing that power for the use of those involved in the practical productive labour which such institutions otherwise enclose and immiserate. In its weaker forms, institutional critique has been comfortably accommodated by the ownership and governance layers of our universities, galleries, and museums, and instrumentalised to modulate institutional functions towards a more perfect harmony and sustainability without its revolutionary implications being taken seriously. The distinction between this tendency and Vishmidtian infrastructural critique is not so much a matter of intention and alignment therefore as of determination and capability, which Marina sways us to develop though the discipline of ‘self-relating negativity’, a vortical inward turn that forces the critique to disclose its own infrastructurality, and enables the critic to develop moments of restorative access to the abstracted powers of production from the ruptures created by its torsion. In a 2021 essay emitted from deep within the folds of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the phrase, otherwise current only in oncological jargon, acquired a moment of notoriety in public discourse, Marina mordantly suggested we might call this outcome a ‘gain of function’.
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Cameron Rowland’s intensively researched and conceptually adroit projects zero in on the apparatus of racialised capitalism as a spectrum of real abstractions. These real abstractions, or, abstractions with deadly effects, include race, property, and value, as they work through prisons, police, and cultural and state authorities, now and in the abiding past. These abstractions in turn provide both formal and practical tools for an aesthetics that is not so much “forensic” as it is prismatic. — Marina Vishmidt, From Speculation to Infrastructure: Material and Method in the Politics of Contemporary Art, On Curating 58 (2024).
In the James Hill Hospital in Shinagawa to which she was confined after 1932, Chieko, who had abandoned painting, made paper cut-outs. Hundreds of them. Beautiful things, bright images of flowers and food. She was still making them and giving them to Kōtarō on the day she died. Her husband thought them her best work. ‘They constitute’, he wrote, in the Furuta translation of a prose memoir included in Chieko Shō titled ‘the latter half of Chieko’s life’, ‘a record of her abundant poetry, her life, her joyful creativity, color harmony, humor, and an expression of her delicate compassion. In this art she is alive and truly healthy’. (p.60) For some months after his wife’s death, he remembers in the same text, Kōtarō lost interest in his own art. Without his partner’s loving eyes to see the things he made, which he now understood to have been drawn forth from him by the pleasure Chieko took in seeing them, his work had no purpose. The internally shattered absolute reality which contained Chieko, into which she had been twisted and sealed, may have mandated the restricted reality which contained Kōtarō, but the forms of action it stipulated were not onerous duties. They were nourishing acts of creative play, carried out in anticipation of shared delight, which generated meaning and function in their lives. Without Chieko, even that sick Chieko quarantined in dimension A and locked up in the James Hill Hospital, Kōtarō’s world was senseless and enervated. Yet this too would change, in time. Following an epiphany under the full moon, Kōtarō learned that ‘Chieko had in fact become a universal being to me’, and was able to continue his work with a sense of her real presence at his side. He began to think of Chieko as a concretion of spirit, a material element of all being. Chieko was now everywhere, in everything. The absolute had broken open to be reintegrated with restricted reality, the end of the crazed Chieko organisation revealed as a condition for the activation of a sudden restoration of capability to its subject.
In a 2022 Berlin presentation of ‘From Speculation to Infrastructure’ uploaded online, the phrase which appears as ‘the abiding past’ in the published text quoted above was given as ‘the lingering past’. When she speaks this word, it seems to me, though this might be a projection or invention of my own, Marina momentarily hesitates, in recognition perhaps of the difficulty the term has caused, or is about to cause, in editing the text. It’s a slight but troublesome distinction. A past that lingers does not remain in the present with the same quality of assumed volition as a past that abides. In terms of prose colouration the difference is subtle. But small changes in tone can produce significant effects. Moments of aporia and tentativity, cuts and folds in discourse, really can generate conditions for new movements, making room for what Marina would call transversal thought and action. Everything may hang on the interpretation of a single word or kanji in Chieko Shō. In the deathbed scene with which It Was Like Watching ends, from the wholeness of which I can not bring myself to extract a line in quotation, the husband also shares food with his wife, and leaving her body behind takes from the hospital a silence which he later calls gratitude — oceanic, rhythmical, infinite. But Danny’s work does not develop its internal pressures in the same way as that of Takamura Kōtarō. What is most impressive and perhaps also most affecting to me about It Was Like Watching is that at a certain level it is not a poetry of images and words, but of spaces and silences, in which the connective emptinesses between Danny’s and Marina’s texts, and the organisation they structurate across the whole assemblage, within and between its several segmented phases, bears a heavy communicative burden. It’s necessary to persist with this contradistinction a little longer, because in several important respects It Was Like Watching is not like Chieko Shō at all. In developing his work’s architecture of space and silence Danny gives voice and elevation to Marina as a poet — as any number of poets, in fact — whereas Takamura’s work remains exposed to accusations of a complicity in the sexist muting and screening of Chieko, the Seitō painter whose feminism and art were vanquished in marriage. I have nothing to say about the merits of such accusations either way. I simply don’t know enough to reach a judgement. And partly for that reason, the comparison I’ve begun to develop in these paragraphs can not be taken very much further than I have now brought these ambivalent, abbreviated reflections. But Danny Hayward’s It Was Like Watching also parallels Takamura Kōtarō’s Chieko poems, in ways I find provocative and difficult, and do not want to set aside or simplify. It does so most compellingly in its representation of the relationship between the poet and his lost beloved as an ongoing generative struggle between the subject and the invalid absolute, which the bereaved is not only called upon to love and serve, but in some sense to contend against, in a passionate work of self-relating negation, a critical analysis of the content of memory so intensified that its torque opens, with a precise and salutary care, apertures in the lingering past to a futurity on which the lover, and those readers able to stay with him in this work, may credibly hope.
Danny Hayward’s It Was Like Watching is just published and available from The Last Books in Amsterdam. More of his work, including People, the book I helped Danny to publish in 2013, may be found here. A bibliography of Marina Vishmidt’s work is maintained here.