WE ARE ALL GUILTY HERE

Apparently, there was, perhaps still is, a sign in downtown Pyongyang that reads, “We are all happy here.” I picture people on the street—rushing home from work, going to school, thinking about making dinner, a sick child, and that fight with a husband, etc.

Ordinary life makes for horrible propaganda.

It just can’t meet the 5-year plan. Take Henry Stimson, FDR’s Secretary of War who controlled the Manhattan Project. He goes to work, makes plans to obliterate Hiroshima and goes home for a nap.





War is supposed to be about good and evil. But, at the end of the day, it’s millions of ordinary people who each decide to kill millions of other ordinary humans.

This is from Philip Allott’s, radical Eunomia (I wonder what the other profs at Cambridge and his British foreign service chums thought of him after this):

“And they (the nation-state) have ordered the consciousness of their societies in such a way as to cause their citizen’s to accept value-forming theories to the effect that the ultimate identity of other human beings is not their sense of humanity, but their national identity—ultimate, in the sense that, as members of one nation-state, we may be required to act, preferably of our own willing (and, if not, under the compulsion of the willing of others), to kill or maim human beings who are members of other nation-states.”

Little Drops, my next novel, looks at the history of U.S. involvement in Korea as a way to explore mythologies of national identity, particularly my own.

The idea began with a newspaper article I’d read in the NYT about a Japanese tourist kidnapped off a beach by North Korean frogmen and taken back to Pyongyang. The complete absurdity of the story tickled me. I immediately envisioned a slapstick scene of some poor housewife being wrestled into a Zodiac by men in wet suits and Bozo-the-clown size flippers. Humor is subversive by nature. Laughter is difficult to control. In fact, it works by defying reason. It points out our own ridiculousness and forces us not to take ourselves so damn seriously.

Seriously. 3.5 million Koreans died in the Korean war. 2.5 million were in the North. One quarter of the total population there.

When I started doing background research. I realized all I knew about Korea was that we’d gone to war to protect the democratic South when the communist dictatorship of the North invaded.

THIS IS CALLED PROPAGANDA.

It’s the Cold War doctrine and I got it pushed into my head probably in eighth grade and stuck.

First of all, the South became democratic only in the 1990’s. Second, the 38th parallel was put into place by two colonels who went into a room and came out a few hours later with a map. Third, no one ever asked what the Koreans wanted. In fact, the U.S. military had the appalling idea that they would just keep the same people in power to ease transition. Of course, the Koreans had just a bit of a problem accepting that they’d continue to be ruled by the occupying Japanese and their Korean collaborators. The North did, in fact, invade, contrary to what the NK textbooks spit out about Yank imperialists, but Syngman Rhee, the President of South Korea wanted to do it first and was only held back by his U.S. handlers. Of course, this was all played out against the Cold War which had started almost immediately after Japan surrendered in World War II.

Let’s play the blame game. How many of those three million Koreans were guilty? Let’s make it easy—we won’t even define the crime. 5000? 100,000? A million?

And the others?

And me?


Of all the tragedies of this peninsula’s history, I think the one that makes me, an American, the saddest, is the March First movement of 1919. After President Wilson issued his Fourteen Points, which included the right for countries to have self determination, a group of Koreans (living under Japanese occupation) issued this declaration of independence:

“We herewith proclaim the independence of Korea and the liberty of the Korean people. We tell it to the world in witness of the equality of all nations and we pass it on to our posterity as their inherent right.
We make this proclamation, having 5,000 years of history, and 20,000,000 united loyal people. We take this step to insure to our children for all time to come, personal liberty in accord with the awakening consciousness of this new era. This is the clear leading of God, the moving principle of the present age, the whole human race's just claim. It is something that cannot be stamped out, stifled, gagged, or suppressed by any means.”

I read this, and that naïve part of me thinks, yes! America, of all nations, would certainly recognize this yearning for freedom.

Right?

This from Wikipedia:

A delegation of overseas Koreans, from Japan, China, and Hawaii, sought to gain international support for independence at the ongoing Paris Peace Conference. The United States and Imperial Japan blocked the delegation's attempt to address the conference.[5]

In April 1919, the State Department told the ambassador to Japan that "the consulate [in Seoul] should be extremely careful not to encourage any belief that the United States will assist the Korean nationalists in carrying out their plans and that it should not do anything which may cause Japanese authorities to suspect [the] American Government sympathizes with the Korean nationalist movement."[6]


This novel is my way of looking at my own national identity and my country’s mythology. The Cold War background of U.S. Korean relations and the stuck-in-a-time-capsule politics of North Korea itself provide a ready-made historical backdrop for this exploration. Afterall, it was during this time, that the United States begin to sell the image of itself abroad as an alternative to Communism, even as, at home, it pursued Joseph McCarthy’s decidedly un-American agenda of persecution. Moreover, I want to explore power dynamics on the domestic front in the form of traditional and non-traditional gender roles in the U.S., Korea, and Japan, as well as Japanese genderbending in manga and Kabuki.



It seems to me that the current political scene can be read as a desperate attempt to revive a vision of small-town, middle class America that hasn’t existed since 1950, if ever. The lives of everyday Americans (a majority of whom use some form of birth control and have pre-marital sex and have never fought in a war and have no problem buying cheap Chinese air conditioners at Walmart) as well as the world will be altered, perhaps irrevocably, by our misplaced nostalgia for a past that never was and a future that never will be.

My work changes as I go but right now I see the novel as a road-trip game. Using Google maps, you begin with planet earth, then hone in on marked cities in the U.S., Japan, Korea, (and probably Moscow and Beijing) and there discover objects and structures which have been superimposed onto the landscapes. Sound will be very important, and possibly different types of gesture or other direct user interface such as camera function. In this way, I hope to capture concomitant intimacy and distance of individuals to historical events. Also, important to consider would be the concept of group play influencing individual trajectories and outcomes. Maybe you have to pool your tiny drops or ask for help or work together on a project.



Google maps on street level possesses a vaguely apocalyptic emptiness. It's time standing still. It reminds me of the oddly normal yet eerie city scenes in Neon Genesis Evangelion (que to 2:00)
I want the process of history to become one of discovering it from multiple sources both fictional and historical. The novel itself will be in an organic architectural structure either a tree (like Miyazaki) or underwater which is a really nice idea conceptually because it’s adding your tiny drops to an ocean that is “grown” when you collect enough tiny drops. I’ll also consider shooting out the novel in “chapters” as text plus ephemeral data (photos, vids, soundfiles etc.)

I have a few ideas for “games” within the game. One would be to add neon propaganda signs to “Vegas” –I would love to see “We are all guilty here” in flickering neon. Also, I would like the 38th parallel to consist of a thicket of words—people can post political tweets regarding Korea, and players have to maneuver over and around the collective morass to get to the other side. Also, have an idea for a dress-shop, where you could dress yourself in new look designs. I have always wanted to make my JFK’s White house dinner party seating chart (Arthur Miller and Robert Rauschenberg and Saul Bellow!) ballgown a reality.

Machine Narratives and Database Animals

Hiroki Azuma argues in his book “Japan’s Database Animals” that the grand narratives of modernism were replaced, first by multiple small fictions of postmodernism, and more recently by attractive character elements (moe) that emerge from and relate to a database. He calls this process animalization as it constitutes a kind of compulsive affective grazing that does not require or even encourage the construction of narrative. He relates the relative social/political isolation of otaku as a symptom of this animalization.

Partially agreeing with Azuma, and, like him, rejecting a Lacanian model of subject construction in favor of one based on information systems, Thomas Lamarre argues that the database or “distributive field” is not an “infinitely symmetrical material structure without horizon or limits. Material limits emerge in the form of attractors and they emerge with affectively linked cooperators.” The distributive field does not generate subjective asymmetries. Rather it generates affective asymmetries, which, if reinforced over time, can become subjective positions/asymmetries. Or put in the language of Felix Guattari: “Machine is ontologically prior to structure and the subjective asymmetries that may come to inhabit the field.”


If we concur with Lamarre’s idea of subject position emerging from the distributive field (as opposed to being imposed from without) then we see that the distributive field, in so far as it is asymmetrical, is necessarily political. (That is not to say that asymmetries arise in an entirely predictable way. Because they are emergent, the sum is necessarily more than its parts.) I would argue that Azuma’s database animal is the end-position of the human subject in a late-capitalist system. With the bankrupting of the narratives that support the dominant political and economic structures, all that remains is the mechanism for empty/meaningless repetitive consumption, emotional lollipops devoid of historical or even grand fictional flavor.


For Lamarre, the move from grand narrative to database/moe elements does not necessitate the end of narrative, rather, storytelling “is a function that appears upon the distributive field which builds on the emergence of attractor-cooperator asymmetries and tends to settle on characters.” With manga’s exploded view of perception and affect, and action spread across pages, it is the character function that allows for a controlled explosion of the action image. Lamarre relates character to embodiment in the visual realm or form. This is critical, I think, because although the compulsion to construct an ontologically consistent subject position is subverted in limited anime and manga, the embodiment of the viewer remains. Material limits –physical, psychic, political, economic and cultural will determine the asymmetries that exist in the database at any given time. Moreover, attractors connected to the body have a gravitational pull that is difficult to overcome, though not impossible. Illness and pain usually have the effect of constricting the distributive field. In extreme pain, there is nothing but the experience of pain.


In relating otaku obsessions with various moe elements, Azuma is astute to point out that “the desire to remain with a transitional object in PERMANENT transition is precisely realm of perversion.” Perversion as such exists because the Law, which it defies, is acknowledged. Practiced within a social group or privately, it is a form of resistance to the Law. In the database model, reinforcement of multiple lines of sight including narrative, through which other asymmetries emerge, creates transitional or multiple subjects as opposed to fixed, singular, Cartesian subject positions.
It is unsurprising then, that manga and limited anime disrupt the most important of Capitalist/Lacanian subject positions/power relations—that of gender. The anime version of The Rose of Versailles (manga by Ikeda Riyoko, 1972) is perhaps the earliest example. Here, we see Oskar, the beautiful captain of the Queen’s Guard, raised as a man but clearly female, announcing her decision to join the Revolution and to remain with her husband, a fellow soldier.


The phallacy of the Lacanian/capitalist subject position is that the experience of lack is based upon the possibility of and desire for a fully constituted subject. If the idea of wholeness, completeness, that is to say selfhood and self-ownership is abandoned, then what was previously experienced as lack is experienced as ecstatic excess, not too little, but too much. The phallus turned inside out is a space, both receptive and generative. The truth is that an ontologically consistent subject is only one possible asymmetry among many. A viewer-retriever of information follows a sight line that depends on his or her own attraction. If the consistency of a line of sight is maintained, a traditional gendered object/subject may emerge, but this is also not necessary. For Lamarre, “asymmetry begins to implicate perception and imply emergent positions which hover between a viewing position (subject) and sheer delight, terror, disgust, or lust (affect).”



If I analyze my own hybrid media writing in terms of the Azuma/Lamarre database/distributive field model, it’s clear that I am interested in creating a non-random distributive field of information containing an attractor called a story. My predilection for using melodrama and genre codes makes this line of sight apparent while at the same time positing it in an exploded field of information elements. “Reading” the novel, the viewer experiences not lack, but an excess of information (this, in part, because I use an open system of collaboration, in the case of Mayakovsky through links rather than embedded information, and in Queerskins through appropriating objects from virtual communities Youtube and Flickr. ) Just as the filmmaker uses editing to overcome the partial/lacking view provided by the frame, the viewer/reader sews together fragments of text, image and sound-- suturing becomes overt and the spaces between them apparent. Thus, the process allows the viewer to perceive the limits of perception related to embodiment and to his or her own desired subjecthood. In constructing a narrative whole (or not) the viewer becomes aware of his or her decision to pursue certain asymmetries. Continuities of form and action is replaced by multiple possible asymmetries created through resonance, iteration, affinities of affect, media form, character, action, and rhythm (time) which can be followed, or not, according to the reader’s own desires/limitations.

Reading: Hiroki Azuma, Otaku: Japan's Database Animals
Thomas LaMarre, The Anime Machine