Filiation, Continuous and Discontinuous: Two Recent Anthropological Approaches to North Korea

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Notes

^1. Spivak 1999.

^2. As Spivak has done for “postcolonialism.”

^3. Agamben 1998, chap.1.

^4. Spivak 1999.

^5. Ibid., 7–8.

^6. The German word for the singular “culture” is Kultur. For brevity and accessibility, I am here heavily interpreting Spivak's frequently opaque language with the help of Matthew Arnold's more accessible terms (1903). This, however, risks conflating the specificities of the German and the British contexts. This “translation,” however, is encouraged, if not authorized, by my exposure to Qadri Ismail's reading of Spivak in his forthcoming work (untitled) on the history of the concept of culture. I thank him for that exposure.

^7. Nonlinear in that as a “calling,” it is humanity's “nature,” but as a “destination,” it is at once that which needs to be “re-called.” The act of re-call is equivalent to freedom in Immanuel Kant's sense. To paraphrase Spivak, Kant's modern theological task was to show how to re-cover our continuity with God through our discontinuous freedom (Spivak 1999, 11–37). This gesture of re-calling the image of God that is already in us through our free will is manifested in the German idea of Bildung, the word for “education” made of das Bild (or image).

^8. Spivak 1998, reprinted from the same title Diacritics 15 (4): 73–93.

^9. Marx 1990 [1976], 166. For clarity's sake, I refer directly to Marx's texts rather than Spivak's frequently inaccessible text.

^10. Ibid., emphasis added.

^11. Marx himself seems to be aware of this contradiction, as can be seen from the following: “Commodities must be realized as values [by exchange] before they can be realized as use-values. On the other hand, they must stand the test as use-values before they can be realized as values” (ibid., 179). For Jacque Derrida, on the other hand, this passage reveals the fundamental contradiction in Marx's project (1994: 202–3).

^12. By objective/subjective, I do not mean the Durkheimian society/individual. I mean it in Henri Bergson's sense (2012 [1913], 71–72, 75–76, 218–19). For Bergson, something is “objective” when its possible differentiation is “already visible” as an “image” even before the differentiation took place. Number is the paradigmatic case of the objective, as its divisibility is already part of its definition (i.e., before it has taken place). The subjective, on the other hand, is something that is actualized only in “duration” that is lived. The subjective, for Bergson, is the “condition of possibility” for the objective. It is because standing for the very movement through which things come to be, the subjective is also the very movement through which the objective becomes what it is. For Marx also, the subjective illusion—i.e., the origin-myth here—is the condition of possibility that propels capitalism, and constitutes it an objective phenomenon that can be captured as the science of history in hindsight. The benefit of this Bergsonian reading of two different temporalities in Marx can be brought out clearly when contrasted to Louis Althusser's reading of the same (Althusser and Balibar 2009 [1970]; see especially the chapter entitled “Marxism Is Not Historicism”). Althusser equated what we call continuous temporality here with the historicism (of bourgeois economists). But his equivalent of our discontinuous dimension is entirely different. For him, it is the dimension of absolute knowledge, whereby the true objective science of capitalism's history can be directly accessed via the subjective experience of the present, arguing that Marx's own historical present was a privileged one that manifested capitalism's contradiction in its immediate visible reality (ibid., 136–39).

^13. Spivak summarizes how use-value is deployed in these two temporalities differently as follows: “[Marx allows] use-value the normative inside place of the host as well as banishing it as that which must be subtracted so that Value can be defined” (1998, 224).

^14. Parallel to the two temporalities in Marx are two different German concepts of representation: Vertretung and Darstellung (see Spivak 2010, 243–47). In the first, there is a continuity between the objectively describable class position and its political representation. In the second, there is a discontinuity. Such was the case when the French small peasant proprietors sought their representation in the figure of Napoleon, who acted as a mere proxy or mask (ibid., 246). It is this discontinuity that renders history as theater for Marx.

^15. Middleton and Winter 1963, 4. For a critical view, from which the section epigraph was drawn, see Peacock 2007.

^16. On the illuminating genealogy of this phrase/notion, which Kwon and Chung (2012) employ, see Lefort 1986, chaps.1 and 2.

^17. “Instrument” is Kwon and Chung's word (2012, 63, 129).

^18. Viveiros de Castro 2010.

^19. Marx 1990 [1976], 168.

^20. Marx wrote his Capital not only against the bourgeois economists, but also against the populist critiques of capitalism who deemed it a mere constructed fiction. For him, both rely on the post-festum perspective. And to that extent, both are complicit with capitalism, which needs its origin-myth (of use-value) along the past-to-present temporal continuum. But he is varyingly aware of how his own “objective” history of capitalism is susceptible to the same fate.

^21. There are three occasions in Kwon and Chung's book (2012) where the body politic comes to the fore. First is the issue of political monuments and architecture (chap. 4). These are largely “read” in their intended “messages” (e.g., 111–13, 121, 130). Second is the North Korean Leaders' legendary “on-the-spot guidance,” for which they cite Carol Medlicott: “Through the visits, the state was transformed from a distant impersonal dictatorial authority to a parental figure.… The national territory then becomes a father's household ‘writ large,’ and the ‘Great Leader’ is the father…reaching out to physically touch and embrace the members of the nation” (59). In short, the practice is deemed a process of personalizing (my word) the otherwise “impersonal dictatorial authority.” Third is propaganda theater such as Arirang, which receives much attention throughout the book for being one of the main vehicles generative of the Leader–people relationship. The authors write: “Performing individual bodies participate in the making of a collective social form, and an ideal image of collective unity participates in the spirit and consciousness of the rite-performing bodies” (73–74). Their analyses center on Emile Durkheim's notion of collective consciousness (74). As such, the “body” here is in actuality bodily sign or “image,” whose collective signification is legible by the intended audience as well as by the performers themselves, eventuating a different state of consciousness. All three notions presuppose continuous temporalities: sender-to-receiver (in message), impersonal-to-personal, and individual-to-collective.

^22. Lefort 1988.

^23. Ibid., 276. See also, Asad 1993, 125.

^24. Although Weber cites the traditional as another more enduring form of polity, his prescriptive choice of the rational-bureaucratic is evident. When Weber speaks of the ephemerality of the charismatic, it is as though he speaks from the winner's vantage point, from the form of polity that is itself practically immortal. Weber's prognosis might be called an eschatology of the rational-bureaucratic (see Derrida 1994, chap.1).

^25. See particularly 1988, chap.12, titled “The Death of Immortality?”.

^26. See Kantorowicz 1957. Lefort is careful not to state that the Christ is the origin of such an idea of legitimacy. The Christ, for him, is only the “modern” origin of that idea (269), thus allowing the non-Christian genealogy of the idea. For a similar idea discussed in relation to the Hawaiian kingship, see Wundt 1916, 308. Wundt's discussion, in turn, inspired Freud 2000, in which we find a discussion very much reminiscent of Lefort's reasoning here.

^27. Lefort 1988, 268–69.

^28. Ibid.

^29. Lefort 1986, 306; emphasis added. It is also both “above the law and subject to the law,” he writes (ibid.). Hence the oxymoronic term sovereign-subject.

^30. Marx frequently describes the relation between value and surplus-value as that between God the Father and God the Son as in: “as soon as the son has been created and, through the son, the father…” (1990 [1976], 256).

^31. Lefort goes on to show how this body of indeterminate continuity gets misconstrued in modernity, resulting in the “loss of substance” in the body politic of democracy (1988, 268–69).

^32. Ibid., 279; emphasis added. For the similar idea of dual body, whereby immortality is inscribed precisely by death, see Hubert and Mauss, 1981, chap. 5. For the long list of relevant literature on this view, see Santner 2011.

^33. Groys 2012, 8.

^34. Deleuze 1988, 37–38. For a concise summary of Bergson's critique of this notion, see ibid., 58.

^35. Copjec 1994, 171, 45.

^36. See Deleuze 1988, 47–48.

^37. Ibid., 48, 59.

^38. Groys 2012, 18–19.

^39. Ibid., 19.

^40. See Strathern 1988, for example.

^41. This is Ryang's word. See the “Introduction” and “Conclusion” in Ryang 2012.

^42. For the role of literature as a paradigmatic “voice of the Other,” see Siegel 2006, chap. 3. Siegel likens the supra-intersubjective voice of the oracle in divination to Maurice Blanchot's notion of “narrative voice” in the novel.

^43. For a theoretical history of this assumption, see Keane 2007.

^44. Ibid.

^45. Here, I have in mind Sigmund Freud, for whom the paradigmatic “object of satisfaction” is the “lost object” (which is re-found). Freud 1966, 356.

^46. See Kondo 1990.

^47. Bataille 1993, 201.

^48. Lefort 1988, chap. 12, passim. Some of the clearest demonstrations of this dynamic are given by Marx. As is well known, he made numerous references to sovereign figures in order to demonstrate by analogy the rise of unequal status in commodity exchange. In Capital I, such analogies are particularly numerous while demonstrating the idea of “equivalent form.” It is the body of a commodity that expresses the value of other commodities, whose form eventually evolves into the most prestigious “money form.” How the equivalent form “expresses” is precisely our point here. For Marx, every commodity has hidden within itself an internal opposition between use-value and value. Only when a commodity's value is expressed by the equivalent form of another commodity is the former's value, which is normally hidden, brought to the surface (1990 [1976], 153). That is exactly what we mean regarding “citizenry,” as it is brought to the surface just like this value.

^49. Weil, quoted in Ryang 2012, 83.

^50. Ryang puts high stakes on adopting the Christian idea of sovereign. It is a rhetorical move bequeathed to her by a pedigree of scholars who turned on Christianity as an internal critique of the West. Particularly relevant are those who question the West's conventional understandings of totalitarianism. Ryang similarly deploys the unwieldy notion of the Christological sovereign (as inflected through Bataille). Thereby, she attempts to undermine from within the self-identity of the Western modern at its own Christian-theological root. Rather than “rehabilitate” North Korea in the eyes of the West, as it were, she implicates the very instability of the category of the “West” as part of her exegesis on North Korea.

^51. The thesis first appeared in Ryang, ed. 2009.

^52. Freud 2000, 31–64.

^53. Ryang 2012, 200.

^54. Lévi-Strauss 1971.

^55. I follow Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's reading of Lévi-Strauss (2011). For a similar reading, see Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 162.

^56. Incest is impossible, and its prohibition thus “redundant,” because a person cannot be reduced to a unilateral category of “sister” or “mother.” For example, “my sister is my sister in so far as she is the wife of another, and vice versa” (Viveiros de Castro 2010, 237).

^57. On the arrow-like gestures, such as incest taboo, which renders culture “magical,” Viveiros de Castro writes: “straight line between its point of departure and its point of arrival cannot be traced…as if these points belonged to heterogeneous dimensions…” (2011, 141).

^58. The flip side of this logic is the figure of the enemy: “When there is not enough rainfall…it is because of US imperialism; when people starve to death, it is because of US imperialism” (Ryang 2012, 137).

^59. For an inaugural description of this state in the context of Europe, see Foucault 2008, 1–25.

^60. This is most apparently the case in Agamben 1998.

^61. For example, see Agamben 2011 (Kingdom), 2011 (Sacrament).

^62. Particularly, see Agamben 2011 (Kingdom), 10-19. “Substance” is his word.

^63. Agamben 2011 (Kingdom). For the West's figure of the “substantively” monstrous totalitarian “Egocrat,” specifically in contrast to the Christological sovereign, see Lefort 1986, 306.

^64. Agamben's The Kingdom argues for the Christian theological origin of the notions “economy” and “government.” According to Agamben, the latter notions were articulated for the first time in the Medieval theological efforts to augment the extant “primitive” (my word) General Providence, according to which all things originated from one God “substantively.” That is to say that the introduction of the ideas of “economy” and “government” marked Christianity's decisive breaking with its origin from magical thinking. See Agamben 2011 (Kingdom).