Camp X-Ray

A U.S. Trial by Its Looks, but Only So

WILLIAM GLABERSON [July 29, 2008]

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — On the surface, the proceedings unfolding inside a makeshift courthouse on a hill here resemble an American trial… But behind the judicial routine at the first trial for a Guantánamo detainee lies a parallel universe of law and lawyers. Secret evidence held in red folders is not revealed in open court. The gallery is mostly empty, because there are no members of the public. In what would be the jury box, every occupant wears a military uniform.

In the first week of the trial of Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver, law enforcement officials recounted what he had said during interrogations in the years since he was detained in 2001. But it was also disclosed that some of the interrogations had been conducted in the middle of the night and by men wearing masks, and that Mr. Hamdan did not have a lawyer during those sessions, nor was he warned that he might be prosecuted….

The interrogations of Mr. Hamdan have caused him to sometimes think the trial is just another method of interrogation, a psychiatrist who interviewed him here testified. “He doesn’t know if this court is real,” the psychiatrist, Dr. Emily A. Keram, said.

In June, the Supreme Court ruled that detainees here had a constitutional right to challenge their detentions in federal court. Some lawyers said the ruling suggested that other parts of the Constitution, like the Fifth Amendment’s right against self-incrimination, might apply here.

That could have undercut the case against Mr. Hamdan. But the military judge, Capt. Keith J. Allred of the Navy, ruled that “the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution does not apply to protect Mr. Hamdan.”…

When a reporter noted that in America reporters were permitted to see witnesses and evidence, a spokeswoman for the Office of Military Commissions at the Pentagon, Maj. Gail Crawford, responded, “This is not America.”

(See the full article in the NY Times, here)

Damage control?

This short text by Giorgio Agamben, published one year after September 11, gives the most concise possible insight into the neoliberal practice of crisis-management. He is concerned primarily with the military and police strategies of the so-called war on terror, but I think it’s important to point out that this practice of of crisis management was inaugurated with the monetary crises of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and then exemplified by the so-called “Asian Financial Crisis” of 1997-98. The British political theorist Peter Gowan in his text Global Gamble (available here) shows that the United States has been able to use its position as premier financial center and holder of the international reserve currency (the dollar) in order to provoke financial crises and ride them out towards resolutions engineered for their increased profit and control, as clearly occured in Korea in the late 1990s. What Agamben does in this text is to  name the risk-taking regime “security” and to put its principle in a nutshell: security does not seek to create order but to “guide disorder.”

Security as the basic principle of state politics dates back to the birth of the modern state. Hobbes already mentions it as the opposite of the fear which compels human beings to unite and form a society together. But not until the 18th century does the paradigm of security reach its fullest development. In an unpublished lecture at the Collège de France in 1978, Michel Foucault showed how in the political and economic practice of the Physiocrats security opposes discipline and the law as instruments of governance.

Neither Turgot and Quesnay nor the Physiocratic officials were primarily concerned with the prevention of famine or the regulation of production, but rather wanted to allow for their development in order to guide and “secure” their consequences. While disciplinary power isolates and closes off territories, measures of security lead to an opening and globalisation; while the law wants to prevent and prescribe, security wants to intervene in ongoing processes to direct them. In a word, discipline wants to produce order, while security wants to guide disorder. Since measures of security can only function within a context of freedom of traffic, trade, and individual initiative, Foucault can show that the development of security coincides with the development of liberal ideology.

Today we are facing extreme and most dangerous developments of this paradigm of security. In the course of a gradual neutralisation of politics and the progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the state, security imposes itself as the basic principle of state activity. What used to be one among several decisive measures of public administration until the first half of the twentieth century, now becomes the sole criterion of political legitimation. Security reasoning entails an essential risk. A state which has security as its only task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to turn itself terroristic.

We should not forget that the first major organisation of terror after the war, the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS) was established by a French General who thought of himself as patriotic and who was convinced that terrorism was the only answer to the guerilla phenomenon in Algeria and Indochina. When politics, the way it was understood by theorists of the “Polizeiwissenschaft” in the eighteenth century, reduces itself to police, the difference between state and terrorism threatens to disappear. In the end it may lead to security and terrorism forming a single deadly system in which they mutually justify and legitimate each others’ actions.

The risk is not merely the development of a clandestine complicity of opponents but that the hunt for security leads to a worldwide civil war which destroys all civil coexistence. In the new situation — created by the end of the classical form of war between sovereign states — security finds its end in globalisation: it implies the idea of a new planetary order which is, in fact, the worst of all disorders. But there is yet another danger. Because they require constant reference to a state of exception, measures of security work towards a growing depoliticization of society. In the long run, they are irreconcilable with democracy.

Nothing is therefore more important than a revision of the concept of security as the basic principle of state politics. European and American politicians finally have to consider the catastrophic consequences of uncritical use of this figure of thought. It is not that democracies should cease to defend themselves, but the defense of democracy demands today a change of political paradigms and not a world civil war which is just the institutionalization of terror. Maybe the time has come to work towards the prevention of disorder and catastrophe, and not merely towards their control. Today, there are plans for all kinds of emergencies (ecological, medical, military), but there is no politics to prevent them. On the contrary, we can say that politics secretly works towards the production of emergencies. It is the task of democratic politics to prevent the development of conditions which lead to hatred, terror, and destruction — and not to reduce itself to attempts to control them once they occur.

Published in Theory & Event 5:4, 2002; translation by Carolin Emcke

Sangdon KIM, Discoplan

Along the river bank in the city of Dongducheon, some twenty miles north of Seoul in the Republic of Korea, the artist Kim Sangdon organized a hilarious public performance. Participants were invited to create slingshots, kites, catapults, flying machines – in short, to hurl every imaginable homemade projectile over the rusty razor wire separating them from the recently vacated U.S. Army base of Camp Nimble. The missiles carried a payload of clover seeds, which in the best of cases could scatter on impact, sprout, flourish, cover the ground and begin remediating the poisoned soil left behind by decades of military occupation. The players got ready, took aim, failed miserably for the most part, and burst out laughing with each fresh attempt. The inhabitants enjoyed some pointed comments about the hidden costs of the U.S. force relocation plan, and they speculated about possible consequences for their city. The video of the event shows moments of collective reflection and heartfelt comic relief – the feeling that you’ve finally got free of something.1

I am an American, and like most, I’m ignorant of what’s done in the name of democracy by the U.S. military. Whether it’s the raw facts of land occupation by sprawling bases, the tangled histories of collaboration with host nations, or the latest plans for the use of these lethal installations, I have everything to learn. When I arrived I didn’t know the name of Yun Guem-i, and I couldn’t imagine that the artistic performance at Camp Nimble was also intended to commemorate the day when the 26-year-old club girl was brutally raped and murdered in Dongducheon by Pvt. Kenneth Markle, on October 28, 1992. But I did know that prostitution around American bases in Asia has been a continuous scandal since WWII, and when I was asked to give a lecture on the Dongducheon project, images of neon-drenched R&R districts and men in enormous armored vehicles swirled confusedly to mind. How to approach such an issue? The inspiration that struck me was a 1975 radio hit by Paul Simon, where the singer explains – or rather, has explained to him – that there must be 50 ways to leave your lover. Though it’s all about an ending, you realize something new is also in the works:

You just slip out the back, Jack
Make a new plan, Stan
You don’t need to be coy, Roy
Just get yourself free.
Hop on the bus, Gus
You don’t need to discuss much
Just drop off the key, Lee
And get yourself free.

After eight long years of the Bush administration’s useless wars, I want OUT of the obscene and seemingly endless love affairs between the U.S. and its army, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea or in our own country. But despite what the song says, there is so much to discuss, so many questions, which the works in this exhibition also raise. What’s between us, as the 16 Beaver Group asked a group of Korean artists and activists during a trip to the new American megabase at Pyeongtaek?2 What would it take to exit from a sixty-year relationship that has defined the United States no less than the Republic of Korea? Above all, what does it mean to be free in an age of liberal empire?

Little Chicago and the Silver Screen

While walking around Seoul looking at the city’s splendid museums, my guide for a day, Lee Seul Bi, suggested that we try something interesting for lunch. Pude chige, it was called: “troop soup.” I found myself looking into a boiling metal pot full of tofu, udong noodles, sliced-up frankfurter sausages and macaroni. Perhaps it is when you eat something like that, and recognize the familiar tastes among the strange ones, that you start to realize what we’ve really gotten ourselves into, through the mixing of cultures and nations.

During Kim Sangdon’s research into the oral history of Dongducheon, he learned that the troops had nicknames for the local districts, like “Queens,” “Manhattan” and “L.A.” This kind of G.I. banter is familiar, because it’s the staple of novels, stories and Hollywood movies. The older residents Kim interviewed recalled the fantastic cynicism of the early days: camptown life was all about money, whether it was the soldiers selling black-market goods from the PX, the prostitutes and club owners selling sex and whiskey, or the police selling protection. One of the residents recalls the popularity of the cinemas, along with real events that seem to match the detective flicks and gangster fictions:

Around the theater, the soldiers used to sell the “Made in USA’s.” But at that time, people would just take the stuff and run. Lots of murders! The soldiers did a lot of killing, too. It was horrible! … Prostitutes getting killed, soldiers running away… Mother fuckers! Same when the 7th division was here too. Lots of fires and lots of incidents. I mean, they called here “Little Chicago,” with so many incidents!3

Of course, everyone must eat and money doesn’t grow on trees, but it pours out where people congregate in pursuit of their pleasures. Plus everybody loves the movies. Another thing you learn from Kim’s interviews are rumors about the conversion plans for Dongducheon’s immense American bases – Camp Casey, Camp Hovey, Camp Mobile – which, it’s said, some of the town leaders wanted to turn into giant entertainment complexes with casinos, like “a Korean version of Las Vegas.” Gambling and the latest forms of electronic spectacle would replace the outdated nightclubs. In reality, a massive sporting complex has already been built, destroying part of the Sangpae-dong public cemetery as a step toward a “Free Trade City” of the future.

All this appears somehow natural, when you know that after the Second World War, those involved with the geopolitics of the region – American military brass, Washington officials and local elites – made the wager that an influx of billions of defense dollars could save Asia from communism, through epic battles and dramatic armed standoffs, but also through huge procurement contracts with host-country suppliers, untold thousands of clinging cash registers at local businesses, and all kinds of shady under-the-table deals.4 This is what’s hinted at in the mottoes that Kim Sangdon inscribes on photographs of banal urban furniture inside Camp Nimble: “Don’t tell the truth though it’s cold and you’re starving,” reads one. “Don’t tell the secrets though it’s hot and you’re starving,” replies the other. Everyone is supposed to keep quiet and cover everyone else’s deal.

By documenting oral histories and giving them form and context in exhibitions, artists like Kim are helping make public the close-lipped and contradictory texture of existence that has been woven around the American military deployments in East Asia since the close of the Second World War. The casual conversation of Dongducheon reads like a chapter of transnational history, lived out at intimate scale in people’s daily lives, and reflected in the violent glamor of the silver screen.

visit the website of the work

The lived experience of the popular media is exactly what’s at stake in Roh Jae Oon’s web-based piece, Bite the Bullet!, which explores one of the defining genres of cinema: the war flick. The work is an original interpretation of the spectacle society. Dramatic images of war are administered as an ersatz anesthetic, distracting the patient from an operation being performed on his or her own body. The 12-part work proceeds by short excerpts, sometimes from two or more films. What’s left out can be as important as what’s put in. By highlighting just a few sequences, Roh is asking us to reflect critically on a corpus of films that have defined the imaginary of the Republic of Korea, mostly through North American eyes.

The introductory scenes are from The Bridges at Toko-Ri, a 1954 Hollywood production about a stern admiral, a concerned wing commander, and a reluctant naval reservist flying bombing missions against North Korea. It all begins with love: a woman’s goodbye kiss to her husband departing on an aircraft carrier. Cut to a sky full of bursting anti-aircraft shells, filmed from the pilot’s perspective; then a shot of bombs destroying a bridge. The movie won an Oscar for its special effects, which were already carried out in collaboration with the US Navy; and the military-entertainment complex is a major focus of Roh’s investigation. But another significant aspect is the famous closing line of the film, which is not included in the excerpt. Reflecting on the discipline that led his pilots to a successful mission and their own deaths, the admiral asks “Where do we get such men?” What is the operation that produces them?

American combat films are about the formation of a national character in battle, a theme played out again and again in Roh’s selections. But what’s at issue in the artwork is also the influence of that process on the population of a client-state engaged in a bitter civil war, elevated to world-historical proportions by Soviet, Chinese and American rivalries. Among the South Korean films that cast their light on the complexities of this relationship is Shin Sang Ok’s 1958 classic, Jiokwha, aka A Flower in Hell, represented with an excerpt from a steamy dancing scene. What casual Western viewers won’t realize, however, is that in the film, these highly erotic sequences are interspersed with others, showing a small-time Korean gang stealing government-issue supplies from the distracted American viewers…

Much of the interest and cinephilic pleasure of Bite the Bullet! lies in the ironic combinations that each viewer is free to make, between the scenes that are actually shown and those whose memory is left floating. But this free-floating memory is exactly that condition that Roh sought to encompass in a larger frame. The poster for the piece shows an ellipsoid satellite orbit, with a screenlike “wall of F/X” (or special effects) raised bright in the sky, and a deep blue “Sea of Memories” floating down below, on which bull’s-eyes have been meticulously placed, each at its specific level. The implication seems to be that in the networked system of contemporary media distribution, each spectacular bullet is self-targeted at the memories of individuals, administering its singular anesthetic.

In the last group of excerpts, propaganda images of the US Army’s “Future Combat Systems” confirm the implicit reference to the military-entertainment complex. On a text panel, network-centric warfare guru Art Cebrowski proclaims: “Either you create your future or you become the victim of the future someone creates for you.” That’s a statement by the former director of Rumsfeld’s Office of Force Transformation, which initiated the entire relocation concept that is shifting South Korea’s military geography. Quoted by a Korean artist, it becomes an intensely ironic expression of the high ambition and deep anxiety that the Dongducheon project is trying to communicate to its viewers.

From Militarized Modernity to Liberal Empire

The exhibition looks back at the past without nostalgia or resentment, in order to grasp the complexities of the present and in that way, share at least some hope of shaping the future. Even after considering barely half the pieces, one can sense that each detail and nuance has been discussed intensively during the research process, working to create that most rare of events, a group exhibition (and not just a selection of works to fit a curatorial concept). One can wonder, then, about the absence from the show of a theme that would seem to be central to its whole proposal. I am thinking about the specifically Korean form of productive discipline that Moon Seungsook calls “militarized modernity” – and of the ways that it relates to, and differs from, more characteristically American patterns of character-formation.

Moon describes how a particularly harsh form of discipline, based in large part on practices employed by the Japanese Imperial Army, was generalized to the entire male population of South Korea by means of universal conscription. It was then extended to industrial production through the Military Service Special Cases Law of 1973, which allowed men trained either at vocational at schools or science and engineering institutes to forgo military service for paid employment at defense factories or in heavy and chemical industries. The distinctly gendered male subjectivity that was developed in the military-industrial ranks through the exaltation of masculinity and the parallel denigration of female sex-objects was then reinforced in society by positive images of the man as historical hero and family provider, in contrast to the domestic and subordinated role of women.5 Reinforced by the massive presence of US troops and the maintenance of an extremely tense Cold War stand-off with the North, this pattern endured in its strongest expression all the way to 1987, when the democracy movement finally led to liberalization and the end of the dictatorship.

It would have been important to explore how militarized modernity took form – and continues to reverberate – in the triple relation between the American occupiers, their ROK allies and procurers (in every sense of the word) and the population of the city. To be sure, such subjects were raised by the Minjung painters of the 1980s, with their satirical pop-art vocabularies.6 But they are far more difficult to tackle in the living reality of video. The only place in the show where they begin to surface is in the evasive replies of local inhabitants interviewed for Kim Sangdon’s video piece, Foreign Apartment, which inquires into the past functions and current ownership of a ruined white building near Camp Casey, used for prostitution in the 1960s and 70s. Just a few shreds of conversation allow us to imagine the virile discipline of the young Korean man waxing the helicopter of the 7th Division commander who occasionally dropped by to oversee the foreign apartment.

What remains largely invisible in the show, therefore, is the lived experience of militarized modernity and its consequences on Korean subjectivities today. Rho Jae Oon has perfectly captured the dynamics of this kind of invisibility, but on the American side only. In Bite the Bullet! he presents an audio excerpt from the 1992 courtroom drama A Few Good Men, which he superimposes over touching scenes of a blind woman selling flowers, taken from Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights. On the soundtrack, a hard-bitten Marine colonel from Guantánamo, played by Jack Nicholson, defends his decision to apply deadly punitive force to one of his soldiers, reiterating the classic arguments that every American has heard in a hundred different forms: “Son, we live in a world that has walls… and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the freedom I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it!” But his outburst of passion is exactly what allows the young lawyer, played by Tom Cruise, to trick the colonel into admitting his own guilt before the judge.

Here we have the fundamental contradiction that structures liberal empire. On the one hand, a continuous insistence on the necessity of force, to be applied under “states of exception” in distant outposts such as Guantánamo; and on the other, an unshakable confidence in the rule of law, which can always be reestablished back home by the infallible procedures of American democracy. Roh’s ironic superimposition of the blind flower seller onto the courtroom dialogue offers two possible readings of this situation. From the colonel’s point of view, the blindness is obviously that of a sheltered and effeminate civilian world that cannot the face the very force of arms it lives by. But from the post-9/11 viewpoint that is ours today, the blindness lies in civil society’s naive belief that traditional legal instruments are still enough to restrain the immense, unbridled powers of the Pentagon. One wonders, for example, how many people are ready to believe that the solicitation of prostitution by American soldiers has really been stopped by the law of 2005 that makes it grounds for dishonorable discharge. The ongoing dispute in the US between the two opposing positions – are we an empire? or are we a law-governed power enforcing a liberal international order? – becomes yet another way of refusing to face the imperious reality of this effective contradiction.7

What are the actual consequences of militarized modernity and liberal empire on our societies today? This is the question that critical artists and intellectuals should never avoid, either in Korea or in America. Take, for example, an intellectual for whom I have tremendous respect: Chalmers Johnson, an American academic, experienced Asia hand and former Cold Warrior, who coined the concept of the “developmental state” in 1982.8 Johnson became well known in both America and East Asia for his analysis of state-led industrial development in Japan – a model of successful central planning which many projected onto Korea under the Park and Chun dictatorships. Johnson had already begun to learn about the secret history of U.S. foreign policy in the library of former CIA director Allen Dulles, while working as a consultant for the National Intelligence Estimate in the late 1960s. However it was only after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the Cold War ended and American troops did not demobilize but instead remained on their vast array of outposts throughout the world, that he began to revise his views. In 1996, he visited the Japanese island of Okinawa at the request of its governor, Ota Masahide, in order to investigate the rape of a twelve-year old Okinawan girl by two Marines and a Navy seaman. There he began work on another major concept: the “empire of bases.”9

More than any other single author, Johnson has revealed the secretive, abusive and fundamentally undemocratic character of U.S. military operations overseas. His latest and best book, entitled Nemesis, warns of the possible end of American democracy, if the CIA’s covert operations, the Pentagon’s secret budgets, and above all, the President’s “executive privilege” are not brought back under civilian control.10 But despite all this, Chalmers Johnson has not, to my knowledge, ever revised his positive evaluation of the “developmental state” – a social order that corresponds precisely to the industrial component of militarized modernity. Korean development boomed during the Vietnam war, when the country manufactured wartime matériel for the US and sent some 350,000 soldiers to fight in the jungle, by far the largest contingent of allied troops to fight with the Americans. In the absence of a critical reflection on this model of industrial development it is impossible to understand the particular forms of Korean democracy today, as it shifts from state-centered militarized modernity toward full integration into the self-contradictory, crisis-ridden regime of liberal empire that is now being extended all over the world.

Johnson has led the way towards a geopolitical understanding of American militarism, by describing the network of over 750 U.S. bases on foreign soil, inhabited by approximately half a million soldiers, support staff, private contractors and dependents, and underwritten by a partially secret budget of approximately a trillion dollars a year. Mark Gillem, an architect working critically inside the U.S. Air Force, takes a further step. His recent study of military urbanism is entitled America Town, in reference to the gated bar and prostitution district constructed outside Kunsan airbase with the active complicity of South Korean officials and businessmen. But America Town is everywhere. What Gillem describes, on the basis of first-hand research, is the “cultural landscape” of contemporary American consumerism as expressed on a plethora of overseas outposts. This is the overdeveloped landscape that the liberalism of open borders and free financial flows has done everything to create, since the heyday of Reagan and Thatcher in the early 1980s. Gillem’s book is invaluable for helping us to understand how that landscape has been structured by the American version of the developmental planning – namely, military expenditure. Take, for example, the description of Kadena airbase in Okinawa, as seen from a viewpoint in a Blackhawk helicopter:

The base, with its sprawling subdivisions, strip malls and streets wide enough to land fighter jets, abutted the compact urban fabric of Okinawa-chi, Kadena-cho and Chatan-cho. The golf course stood ready to defend the base at its western edge. The split-level ranch homes had yards big enough to land several Blackhawks. The main shopping center’s parking lot was bigger than the dense town center of Okinawa-chi. What was the U.S. doing building like this in a place so short of land that airports are constructed on artificial islands? How did this happen and what does this tell us about the culture of America’s military and the complicity of the “host” nation?11

Here, no doubt, are the most concrete subjective consequences of contemporary U.S. imperialism, now being cast to the four corners of the earth by the tremendous financial dynamics of neoliberal economics. But to speak of the financial sphere is one thing; and to see how it touches the ground is another. What Gillem has assembled is the portrait of a bloated society living on borrowed money and time, under the shadow of current and impending battles for the ultimate developmental resource: the oil needed to run all those grotesquely oversized cars, trucks, ships and planes. The slick, hedonistic world of contemporary hyper-consumerism has brought on the imminent risk of resource wars.12 The title of Johnson’s book, Nemesis, expresses this threatening situation very well, with its reference to the Greek deity of vengeance and retribution for hubris, or overweening pride. But how could Johnson have failed to notice that Nemesis is also the goddess who cursed the proud young man Narcissus, causing him to fall fatally in love with his own reflection?

Pretty Things that Glitter in the Dark

Here’s another question, closer to everyday experience. Is it possible to see through the cheap façades on which the history and the future of our desires are reflected? This is what siren eun young jung has attempted in a video installation entitled The Narrow Sorrow. She begins with a freeze-frame on one of the tiny doorways barring the walk space between two clubs. The passageway leads back to the lodgings of the Filipino girls who are now brought over by the hundreds to work the strip joints and brothels of Dongducheon. Moving images then begin to appear on the various rectangular spaces: first the gate itself, then the façade of the Bridge Club, the sign of the J.C. Beer Bar Lounge, etc. We see street scenes, construction sites, landscapes and rather ghostly images from the Sangpae-dong cemetery, accompanied by an incomprehensible hubbub of voices and muted music. Towards the end of the video, a woman’s body is wrapped in rough cloth for burial. The soundtrack is actually street noise mingled with the organ music from a service in the local Filipino church. The seduction of twinkling lights forms the subject of an elegiac poem that hangs on the wall nearby the installation.

siren eun young jung, The Narrow Sorrow

Artistically and politically, The Narrow Sorrow tries to walk through the eye of a needle, groping for a representation of the lives and struggles of women who are doubly excluded from Korean society, because they are sex workers and because they are Filipino immigrants. Here, the artistic critique comes to focus on the Korean side of the prostitution business, asking questions about the exploitation of the young Filipino girls by local pimps, and about the racism they must face in Korea. At the same time, one learns from a scholarly article that the departure of peasant girls from the countryside to the city has left a wife-gap, which is presently being filled by mail-order brides. “By 2004 approximately 27.4 per cent of rural South Korean men were married to non-Korean women.”13 Vietnamese women are particularly prized, because of their Confucian heritage. Behind one out of every four rural façades there are messengers from distant worlds.

The work entitled Driveling Mouth, by Koh Seung Wook, explores the destinies of so-called “Western princesses,” who left Korea in the tow of their G.I. husbands and found themselves within four American walls haunted by memories. Their pictures, in glittering party dress, can now be found on Internet homepages. The video installation invites you inside the darkness of a camouflaged tent, where no time is wasted on the niceties. “No matter how hard I work, I couldn’t see a future ahead,” reads a text panel. “I had to become a hooker, and a hooker’s grandma if I could.” The narrative that unfolds is one of marriage and departure, disappointment and bitterness; and then it is told again, with the same pictures symmetrically reversed, from the viewpoint of an Amerasian boy who was abandoned by his father before birth. At one point we are told that the nameless dead in Sangpae-dong cemetery are called “whores” by some, “Yankee princesses” by others, or “Sisters of the Korean people” by those who resent the violence of the American soldiers. “But what should I call them?” the text asks. “No, why should I even want to call them?” The drivel that pours from two contemporary figures’ mouths seems to embody the obscenity of all those useless words. But it is also the moist inner life of a woman and a man, leaving a wet stain on clean, pressed clothes.

What emerges from the multiple layers of representation in the Dongducheon project is both subtle sociological investigation and an outpouring of intimate expression, bound inseparably together by the challenge of the future. There may well be a clue here for those who are wondering how to definitively move beyond the attitudes of the 1980s generation, when the democracy movement violently confronted the forces of order on the streets, while the Minjung artists excoriated militarist discipline on their canvases. That step beyond is clearly being taken by contemporary Korean activism, which, curiously enough, has also been seduced by pretty things that glitter in the dark. I think it’s worth noting that the first candlelight demonstrations arose in late 2002, with the massive protests against American bases after the deaths of Shin Hyo-soon and Shim Mi-sun under the treads of a US Army tank; and that those nation-wide protests came about spontaneously, at the instigation of an inexperienced youth who spread the idea over the Internet. Here, as in the art exhibition, one might point to the influence of a cooperative and egalitarian feminism, following the arguments of Moon Seungsook who sees a specifically gendered difference in the forms of political engagement developed by women after the end of the dictatorship. But on the basis of my own experiences in Europe and North America, I wonder if the generational question is not equally important. This is now a deeply flexibilized economy, where mainstream unions can help vote in a conservative president like Lee Myung-bak in reaction against the perceived threat of casualized and immigrant workers who are themselves required by the neoliberal policies of that same president. Under such conditions, the impossible and unrepresentable struggles of Filipino club girls could be more relevant to the political landscape than any exclusively working-class tradition would allow us to imagine.

In response to my questions about the aims of the recent protests against the importation of American beef – and against the “bulldozer” approach of the new president – the activist and professor of peace studies, Lee Daehoon, replied that in his view “the people are searching for their soul.” The reason why is clear: in the contemporary period, both political adversaries and political goals are hard to name. Driven by the volatile winds of finance, liberal empire is inherently crisis-ridden; and the chaotic swings of its transnational economy can provoke a conservative return to order at any time, as we’ve seen in the most ugly way in the United States. Under these conditions, the claims of democracy and the rule of law can easily collapse into a state of exception. But it is the ordinary, lawful, democratic functioning of liberal empire that provokes the crises, above all when the endless productivism and consumerism of industrial modernity meets its limits and gives rise to resource wars. How a more sustainable form of society can be found is the ultimate question. The search to articulate political subjectivities with a foundation in personal experience and a consciousness that goes far beyond it is what interests me most today. This articulation isn’t easy, and among other things, it involves changing the definition of what art is and what it can be. That’s almost impossible to do when you have repressive regimes on your back. Yet the shaky footing and extraordinarily poor press of militarism in South Korea, and elsewhere in Latin America and Europe, gives some hope that the worst may be avoided, and that more long-term problems may come to the fore again.14

I said at the beginning, quite naively, that I was looking for an exit from liberal empire, and I still am. But beyond the moment of exodus comes a season of new beginnings. Maybe what’s needed to redefine freedom in our time are 50 ways to find your lover.

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Demonstrations against US bases, Seoul, 2003

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NOTES

When I was a child, my grandparents from the old country reserved a familiar surprise for their young visitors. A black lacquered box was produced at bedtime. It opened with a great creaking sound; a ghostly white hand emerged, gesticulated, disappeared. Strange as it may seem, the shiver of fright was supposed to ease us into sleep.

Those were the mid-1960s, when U.S. power trembled and a critique of American democracy began, inspired by liberation movements at home and abroad. Over that decade the country went through immense changes; after Nixon’s resignation it seemed as if a heavy trance had lifted. Never did I imagine that the ghostly hand of Cold War power would reemerge from the black box of the 1990s, to become the new imperialism.

Culture is the waking dream through which we experience the transformations of our civilization. Why has artistic practice at the outset of the 21st century added so little awakening to our ongoing nightmare? We are transfixed by the spectacles of imperial power, yet we do not grasp its functions, its roots, its consequences. There has been no fundamental critique of empire in the world, or in our daily lives. And therefore no desire for liberation.

Art is a visionary practice that can open up new realms of perception, new thoughts and feelings, new styles of communication and interaction with others. But it needs a backdrop of analysis. Cultural critique sets the stages on which artistic experimentation takes place, by identifying geographic contexts, social relations, economic processes, legal and psychological trends. And never has there been so much to do: world society has mutated beyond recognition, since the fateful year of 1989. The opacity of the present is what permits the resurgence of executive privilege and blind military force. We’ve lost the mental representations that helped earlier generations press for equality and solidarity.

These are the reasons for Continental Drift. It’s a long-term, collaborative project for the development of critical maps and world pictures, detailed enough to reveal the determinants of a globalizing society, succinct enough to create new common senses, radical enough to shape possibilities of action. The first thing we’ve tried to do is grasp the contradictions of liberal empire: how it extends individual freedoms, democratic elections and a so-called level economic playing field, while at the same time enforcing labor exploitation, ecological devastation, social exclusion and open war. But it’s just as important to see how this liberal empire is already breaking down – and to gain some inkling of how we might live in its aftermath.

Those who believe the ghostly hand of power can be conjured away by a mere change of president are wrong; they want to be lulled into sleep. Let’s hope that artists won’t be tricked. It will take a tremendous investigation of real conditions to transform culture back into an awakening dream.

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Like Britain before it, the United States has assembled an empire on which “the sun never sets.” And even more than Britain’s before it, the U.S. empire is a strikingly liberal one. This is the driving paradox of the contemporary period.

In his book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, the great critic of empire Chalmers Johnson makes these observations:

“Most empires, ancient or modern, have not felt the need to establish a legal basis for their activities in sovereign countries. Might makes right, and imperialists normally do as they please…. But in this area, American administrations have proved legalistic sticklers, crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s of the largely one-sided agreements they make to garrison the planet.”

The U.S. spends more on “defense” than all other nations of the world combined. It admits to maintaining upwards of 750 overseas bases, with critical counts that vary according to how a base is defined and how many unavowed locations are considered. Its hi-tech electronics provide commanders and even ordinary troops with “the kind of Olympian perspective that Homer had given his Gods,” as General Tommy Franks has explained with all due modesty. Its Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs) ensure conditions of extraterritoriality with respect to local regulations and criminal codes, which is why the United States has refused to adhere to the treaties constituting the World Court. Since the invasion of Iraq in March of 2003 for the oil, on the basis of trumped-up “evidence” that recalls the pretexts for the first Gulf War (or earlier, the so-called Tonkin Gulf Incident off the shores of Vietnam), it’s abundantly clear that U.S. power serves a sovereign imperialist project of the most classic stripe, comparable to European or Japanese incursions around the world in the late 19th century. Why, then, this insistence on the letter of the law? How does U.S. imperialism differ from the others that have gone before? What is liberal empire?

These questions will appear nonsensical, and above all hypocritical, to an Iraqi or Afghani whose sister, father, brother or daughter has been killed by an American bomb, raped by a G.I. or thrown into the Bagram, Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo prisons on grounds that no one even bothers to specify, given the Bush administration’s brutal refutation of the elementary right of habeas corpus (the legal obligation to produce valid charges against any and all detainees). The hypocrisy of liberal empire is extreme. Yet the naked arrogance of power seems to fade into the background in a prosperous and peaceful country like the Republic of South Korea, home to one of the largest overseas deployments of American troops on bases maintained permanently across the country since 1950-53 war against its Communist doppelganger to the North. Under U.S. protection and tutelage, more-or-less dictatorial regimes led South Korea to industrial modernity and consumer abundance until 1987, when free elections brought entry to the democratic community of nations. For over sixty years, the American version of liberal empire has been the cradle of middle-class prosperity in the Republic of Korea and over much of the surface of the earth. A condition that could not be attained without what many perceive as a more-or-less legitimate use of force. To the point where anyone who would argue today that this imperial condition should be analyzed, denounced and overcome, must provide not just a catalogue of isolated or even systematic military horrors, but also a deep and clearly formulated understanding of the how the American economic, political and security system actually works across the world, and what unnecessary abuses and deadly contradictions flow directly from its operating principles. Only if such an understanding were broadly internalized could even a significant minority of the world’s middle classes participate, alongside the exploited and the oppressed, in an attempt to dismantle the current military and trading regimes and allow the sun to set, as gracefully as possible, on a complex and interlocking set of protocols and procedures that have definitively outlived their democratic purpose. Yet intellectual arguments are not enough, however clear and penetrating they may be. We must also touch and feel the poignancy of failed chances and forgotten dreams beneath the banal and anaesthetizing surface of consumer prosperity: and we must glimpse the possibility of a better life to come, after the imperial sunset.

Origins

The modernized societies that we move through every day took on their characteristic forms in the period of the Second World War and its aftermath, extending as far as the 1980s. At the root of this globe-shattering conflict was a long-term geopolitical struggle for resources and markets, waged through shifting alliances and rivalries between three maritime powers, the U.S.A., Great Britain and Japan, and two land-bound continental blocs, the U.S.S.R. and Nazi Germany. As the major victor in 1945, the U.S. set about reorganizing the world economy to minimize the chances of any new Great Depression, widely understood as the fundamental cause of the war. Seeking to ensure an adequately large zone of monetary circulation, and consequently, a wide range of well-functioning national markets that could absorb its vast industrial production, American economic strategists conceived a free trade regime covering all of Western Europe as well as the sphere of former Japanese hegemony, in addition to Latin America which had been under its sway since the 19th century. The economic collapse and imperial rollback of its major ally, Britain, along with the absorption of the scientific and technological prowess of its chief adversary, Germany, set the stage for the foundation of a new type of empire which would no longer rely on colonies and exclusive currency blocs or trading zones (which the U.S. itself had cultivated to a minor degree around the turn of the century). Instead, it would establish open markets with freely convertible currencies, where the premier industrial and financial power could easily dominate the field and set the terms of exchange. The Bretton Woods conference of 1944 institutionalized this preeminent role from the very outset, by making the gold-backed American dollar into the benchmark value of the international monetary system. The preference for open markets regulated by one stable currency, already pioneered under the British-managed gold standard of the 19th century, would also take on an ideological importance through its identification with political democracy, in opposition to the Soviet system of centrally managed industrial production and direct political control over populations. In this way the installation of the liberal free-trade regime became inseparable from the simmering quarrels and explosive conflicts of the so-called Cold War.

In the West, the massive export of American industrial machinery for European reconstruction under the aegis of the Marshall Plan is commonly misrepresented as a simple transfer of money, and remembered as an exceptional act of generosity. The Americans were liberators and benefactors — a role that still looms large in their own national imaginary. But the reality of postwar generosity should not hide the fact that the offer of publicly subsidised credits to Western Europe was a way for the American state to keep the wartime economy rolling domestically: the dollars that were given to Europe never actually left the United States, but instead were used by the recipients to purchase key infrastructure elements from American producers. The reconstruction efforts thus established the material conditions under which Germany, in particular, could function as a new productive platform for American industrialists and financiers, at the center of a vast European market operating under liberal rules. Nor should one ignore that U.S. military support for the Greek colonels against the popular Communists, followed shortly thereafter by the formation of North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the outbreak of the Cold War, represented a pursuit of America’s postwar industrial boom under the new and deadly guise of subsidised arms exports to the European allies, always accompanied by military supervision, joint training exercises and the installation of permanent bases on European soil. The alliance of democracy and free trade, in opposition to the Soviet Union, gave rise to a militarized economy in which state-sponsored arms production played a key economic and political role. NATO was the way in which the circulation of dollars and goods through the European theater would be secured. And the formula was extended to Japan and Asia, with even more highly militarized characteristics, through the fortuitous opportunity offered by the Korean War.

How, one might wonder, did the Japanese yen recover from economic devastation, to ultimately form, along with the German deutschmark, the third major pole in the currency system established in 1944 at Bretton Woods? The answer lay in the American export of finances and capital goods to Japan, in order to launch the tremendous military production required by the American-led battle against Communism in Korea, which claimed upwards of a million lives. The future Japanese steel, shipbuilding and automotive industries, which would dominate the Asian regional economy all the way through the 1980s, received their jump-start from the destructive furies of the Korean War, just as South Korea would later establish its own industrial base during the boom years of the Vietnam War. Thus the productive network of Japan and the East Asian Tigers grew in parallel to the European Economic Community. The “military-industrial complex,” which the outgoing American President Dwight D. Eisenhower identified as a danger to the American democracy in 1961, had been at the economic and geopolitical foundations of the democracies and dictatorships of both Western Europe and East Asia, all throughout the 1950s. And the psycho-social consequences of those militarized foundations have been enormous.

The postwar free-trade system, with its theoretically democratic mode of regulation and legitimation by civil society, was predicated in fact on the crucial economic contribution of a state-controlled core of military production which could only be justified and maintained when it was periodically used in battle. Or to put it another way, only the real threat of attack by an external or internal enemy could convince national populations to go on making sacrifices to the coercive regime that upheld the nominally democratic order. Outbreaks of violence became the social glue of a permanent war economy, which was militarized even in peacetime, far beyond the specific sectors of armaments production. The high frequency of dictatorships among the U.S. client-states in Africa, Asia and Latin America, where the insurgencies and wars were actually fought was thus an inherent necessity: only wartime discipline could reorganize the existing economic order and set the country on the path to American-style modernization, which itself had found its culminating form in the total mobilization of WWII. The complementary structure of external threat and internal discipline was most perfectly exemplified at the national level by the unresolved Korean conflict, maintained throughout the Cold War and even to this day. But it was also visible at the continental scale over a period of some forty years, in the relations between Western and Eastern Europe; and above all at the world scale, in the nuclear standoff of the two superpowers, which America used as the motor for the research and development of its new hi-tech industries (computers, jet transport, nuclear power, communications, satellite technology, etc). Here, in an industrial system that could only supply the goods of free trade at the price of military regimentation and the constant threat of planetary war, lies the historical core of the immense contradiction that I am calling liberal empire.

Turning point

How then did we move from the clearly demarcated battle-lines of the military-industrial order to the complex exchanges and endless corporate restructuring of a financialized world-economy, oscillating at the light-speed of electronic communications? And how do the psycho-social underpinnings of interstate rivalry continue to inform a transnational economic order which appears on the contrary to be based on the infinitely fickle choices of global individualism? To answer these questions we have to look at the geopolitical consequences of what seemed, at the time, to mark the end of U.S. hegemony: the unraveling of the world monetary system in the early 1970s, accompanied by domestic social turmoil, the first OPEC oil shock and the defeat of the American military in Vietnam.

To begin it must be recalled that the forty-four nations whose representatives gathered in 1944 at the Mount Washington Hotel in the otherwise insignificant American town of Bretton Woods accomplished something truly unprecedented: the consensual negotiation of an international monetary order. What this entailed was an all-inclusive system of currency pegs fixing the exchange rate of each country’s money with respect to the U.S. dollar, which became an international reserve currency which was “good as gold,” since it could be exchanged for gold bullion by all central banks (at the fixed price of $35 per ounce). The national currencies could, however, fluctuate within a narrow band of 1% on either side of their target or “par” value, to adjust for variations in their balance of payments with the outside world; and the need for any larger fluctuation could be negotiated with the newly created International Monetary Fund (IMF), which would supply dollar credits allowing the country to buy up its own currency and thereby prop up its price on the world market, thus bringing its money back to the agreed-upon par value. The aim of all this was to avoid the closed trading spheres and currency blocs of the 1930s, and foster a wide-open yet secure monetary system under which every country would find a market for its goods at stable prices.

The U.S. was doubly advantaged under this arrangement for it controlled both the supply of the international reserve currency and the IMF itself, according to quotas which demanded the largest contributions, but also accorded the most votes, to the countries with the highest gross national product — thus giving the U.S. a 25% stake and a unilateral veto power over any decision unfavorable to its interests. In addition the IMF and also what would become the World Bank were both located in Washington, and primarily staffed by American citizens. Nonetheless, the benefits to the elites and middle classes of the entire non-Communist world were enormous: participation in a stable world market opened up tremendous opportunities for the development of resource-extraction operations and local industries. Partnership with America was therefore a chance to modernize the country and get the social elevator moving, through the creation of national education and university systems as well as educational and scientific exchanges with U.S. universities. What is more, America at the close of WWII not only possessed by far the most efficient and productive industrial system, which it had developed at the scale of its huge internal market since the late 19th century, but through its role as wartime supplier and lender to the European countries it had also accumulated some 65% of the world’s gold reserves; and with this backing it was able to distribute the industrial and military largesse described above, pouring dollars out into the world to provide the necessary liquidity for a universal free market and also to ensure that that there would always be buyers for its abundant goods. American hegemony was therefore not only military, far from it; and nor was it based only on the generosity of wartime liberators, the alluring sound of jazz and the popularity of Hollywood movies. Important material and political rewards were offered to whoever could help keep international Communism at bay. And of course, at WWII had so well shown, the help of the Marines or the Air Force in a pinch could be extremely useful to the local elites and middle classes…

In the course of the 1960s, three things happened to unbalance this seemingly perfect equilibrium. First, after the initial period of American investment had injected the latest capital goods and the most efficient business processes into their economies, both Japan and European Economic Community began to outproduce the U.S. in key sectors such as automobiles and electronic, putting an end to American industrial dominance. Second, rising demands from the American working classes, both in terms of wages and of welfare-state provisions, put a further crunch on the profitability of the great U.S. corporations. And third, the politically expedient refusal of presidents like Johnson to tax the national population in order to pay both for rising welfare expenditures and for the astronomical costs of foreign military adventures in places like Vietnam led to enormous balance-of-payments deficits. These could only be countered with an immoderate use of Treasury printing presses, flooding the world with increasingly dodgy U.S. dollars which faithful allies were supposed to merely hold in their central banks, and not exchange for gold, so as not to jeopardize the baseline value of the international reserve currency. But U.S. insolvency and aggression were not universally appreciated, not even by its European allies. No one will be surprised that critical leaders such as De Gaulle perferred instead to cash in the large stocks of dollars earned by French corporations doing business with the Americans in Vietnam, exacerbating the outflow of gold from Fort Knox and eventually helping to precipitate a crisis in the value of the U.S. currency. That crisis began in earnest during the same fateful year of 1968 that saw unheard-of levels of domestic unrest, labor struggles and agitation against the war. The upshot of this crisis was Nixon’s closure of the so-called “gold window” (or the possibility to convert U.S. dollars into gold) in 1971, and the formal abandonment of the entire Bretton Woods parity system in 1973, exacty when the first oil shock was unleashed by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), leading the way for significant increases in raw materials prices from a broad range of Third World countries. Currencies now began to “float” against each other, with no consensual price-fixing system or rational anchor; and at the same time, inflation began to sap the very foundations of the American economy, just before defeat in Vietnam brought U.S. military prestige to an all-time low.

Nixon’s response to all this seemed to border on the absurd: at the time it was called “ping-pong diplomacy.” At stake was a new rapprochement with China as a counter to lost prestige in Southeast Asia, a diplomatic and economic ploy whose effects would only become clear long afterwards, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. What happened in the short run, after Nixon’s ejection from office, was merely further percolation of the crisis, coincident with a short reprieve for Third World countries, but also for the American working classes and the new alternative social movements, which had their brief hour in the fading sun under Carter. Indeed it undoubtedly seemed, at that point, that the sun was already setting on liberal empire. But a new oil shock in 1979, combined with a major hostage crisis in the new Islamic revolutionary state of Iran, led to Carter’s eclipse and the advent of Ronald Reagan, whose administration would change the rules of the game entirely, discovering a way to profit from the floating curency regime, and to relaunch American industry while at the same time landing a last decisive blow on the long-term Soviet adversary. Here was the turning point, the fulcrum on which world society would shift its bases. Reagan would in fact be the rising sun of a whole new formula of American empire.

Voodoo neoliberalism

(to be continued…

What kinds of places are these? Why the urban garden, the row of trees? What’s this bridge, this town you see when you raise your gaze? Where exactly are we today, in Dongducheon, Korea?

The garden belongs to an invalids’ center, the artist Kim Sangdon explains. The bridge is known to the locals as Drum Bridge. The ochre buildings and the chequered water-tower in the distance are Camp Nimble, recently vacated by the Americans. In the past they built the span as a goodwill gesture, where only a floating structure of oil-drums was before. Today the grounds of former Camp Nimble are too poisoned for the locals to use. Look closely at the gardens: if there is such a space in the middle of the city, it’s because of photos that you do not see. There was a simple factory on this site before, where the club girls worked when they had gotten old, fashioning the photo albums of the soldiers: group portraits arm in arm with their drinking buddies, or maybe trophy pictures with the younger prostitutes, to prove the imperial life was good. We clambered up the hillside where the kijich’on or “camptown” women were buried as pariahs, often in unmarked graves. Nobody knows how many. The blazing hot sun, the thorns, the overgrown weeds. Someone had tasted the berries. Were they sweet?

I don’t know what I expected to discover in the city of Dongducheon, halfway between Seoul and the DMZ. Tangled coils of barbed wire? Camoed jeeps on the roads? Soldiers with rifles? Trashy bars, Dunkin’ Donuts, Burger King? No-one had to show me these things, the already-seen. What I didn’t understand was the white stone statue at the entry to the village, or the crazy wooden sculptures they had built up the hill.

When the U.S. tanks moved onto the so-called “reserved lands” of Soemuk Village, the locals did not yield. The firing ranges down the road were already close enough. They built pagoda-shaped cairns to block the roads to all but their own narrow vehicles. They drove their tractors to the gates of Camp Casey and made their anger clear. But the white stone statue that commemorates their victory was not made for the tales that it tells today. Instead it was an homage to the two thirteen-year-old girls, Shin Hyo-soon and Shim Mi-sun, crushed by Sgt. Nino’s AVLM on the country road near Samguh-ri on June 13, 2002. Carelessness, fatigue, the everyday disdain of the military’s business. Exercises on narrow country roads, for nothing. All over Korea there were candle-light vigils, and the money for the statue was raised by thousands of donations. But the uncle of one of the girls, who owned the land where they died, crumbled before the pressures rejecting this monument of popular grief; and it’s the U.S. Army’s memorial that stands proud at the roadside today. By a strange twist of fate, the candle-bearing dove was recovered from the stone-mason’s dump and given new purpose: it recalls not the girls’ but the village’s story. As for the wooden carvings — go ask the locals what they mean!

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This was my first day in Korea, driving around the camptowns with Kim Sangdon, Lee Seul-Bi, and Kim Heejin at the wheel. Next Wednesday, July 16, the exhibition of the Dongducheon project opens at Insa Art Space in Seoul.

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