Senses of history: colonial memories, works of art, and heterogeneous community in America's Asia-Pacific since 1945

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Senses of history: colonial memories, works of art, and heterogeneous community in America's Asia-Pacific since 1945

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Content SENSES OF HISTORY:

COLONIAL MEMORIES, WORKS OF ART, AND HETEROGENEOUS

COMMUNITY IN AMERICA’S ASIA-PACIFIC SINCE 1945

by

Mayumo Inoue

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPARATIVE LITERATURE)

May 2012

Copyright 2011 Mayumo Inoue
ii
Table of Contents
Abstract iii

Introduction Senses of History 1

Introduction Endnotes 26

Chapter 1 Politics of Objects: Charles Olson’s “Objectism” and Kiyota 28
Masanobu’s Poetics of “Objets” in America’s “Asia-Pacific”

Chapter 1 Endnotes 59

Chapter 2 “Mediauras” of America’s Vietnam War: Allen Ginsberg’s 64
“Wichita Vortex Sutra” and Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s Sur Name
Viet Given Name Nam

Chapter 2 Endnotes 91

Chapter 3 The Postcolony’s “Phantomnation”: Cinematic Specters and 94
Choral Ensemble in Theresa Hak Kyung Chan’s Dictee

Chapter 3 Endnotes 121

Chapter 4 A Poiesis of Dissensus Communis: Kim Shijon’s Kwangju 125
Fragments and Myung Mi Kim’s Commons

Chapter 4 Endnotes 157

Conclusion 160

Conclusion Endnotes 169

Bibliography 171

iii
Abstract
This dissertation attempts to locate a nexus of aesthetic theory, historical memory, and
potential constitution of "community" that is inherently heterogeneous and does not
revolve around an exemplary subject. It does so through a reading of canonical and non-
canonical post-World War II American, Asian American, and some Japanese-language
literary and cinematic texts. The authors and filmmakers analyzed include Charles Olson,
Kiyota Masanobu, Allen Ginsberg, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Myung
Mi Kim, and Kim Shijong. It examines and proposes a type of ghostly materialism
where the barely sensible aspect of historical memory at once solicits the becomings of
its witnesses and transformative differentiation of the very memories themselves.

1
Introduction

Senses of History in America’s Asia-Pacific since 1945
This dissertation traces the movement of twentieth-century colonial and imperial
memories across the Asia Pacific as they are mediated, formed, and transmitted through
literary and cinematic works of art. As I will demonstrate below, certain American,
Asian American, and Japanese-language literary and cinematic texts bear witness to
various colonial and imperial events in which dominant states such as Japan and the US
have reduced the Asia Pacific into a representational “picture” or “target,” enabling their
military domination and biopolitical administration of places such as Korea, Okinawa,
China, and Vietnam. In and against such frame, the works I will discuss by writers and
artists such as Charles Olson, Kiyota Masanobu, Allen Ginsberg, Trinh T Minh-ha,
Theresa Hakkyung Cha, Kim Shijon, and Myung Mi Kim resist representational
disclosure of the very events and, instead, aesthetically formalize their memories as
secrets that cannot be adequately represented.
1
These works bear witness to colonial and
imperial events through a dissonant “ensemble of senses” such as vision, hearing, and
touch whose sensuous capacities remain inadequate to the magnitude and uniqueness of
the events.
2

Such dissonantly sensuous remembrance of historical events in artworks
necessarily renders both the maker and recipient of the works as incomplete and
inadequate witnesses of history. By drawing upon theoretical insights offered by
Theodor Adorno, Jean-Luc Nancy, Walter Benjamin, and Jacques Derrida on aesthetics
and testimony, I will argue that such incompletion of historical witnesses through art does
2
not undermine our continuous effort to remember and act justly for the past wounds of
history. But, rather, the Asia Pacific historical memories ciphered in artworks call for an
emergence of a heterogeneous community that has yet to exist, a collective of multiple
singularities who pass their sense of incompletion and inadequacy as a historical subject
to one another. Resisting a bounded totality of cultural identities or social groups, such
community simply clears a space for mutual exposures of singular beings that emerge
after they are touched by the aesthetic mediations of the past. Thus, my emphasis upon
the term “community” necessarily causes a tension with both Asian Americanist
invocation of a multicultural “coalition” that bridges together predetermined social
groups and transpacific literary studies’ attention to “intercultural” literary dialogue that
subsumes differences under the rubric of mutually commensurate intersubjects.
Two Forms of Closure: Asian American Cultural Critique and Transpacific
American Literary Studies:
Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (1996) is generally
seen as a work that has significantly extended Asian American studies’ geographical
imagination by posting “Asia” as a “reservoir of memory” of war, occupation, and
displacement that energizes Asian immigrant and Asian American political activism in
the US (29). Despite the continuous relevance of Asian Americanist attempt to embrace
their critical memories and liminal positionality within the US national culture, my
project critically reexamines the way in which Asian Americanist “cultural politics” since
Lowe’s work could potentially reinstitute a conservative aesthetic culture that teaches its
students to identify with its canonical works that are, in turn, seen as the unmediated
3
reflections of their Asian American authors’ life narratives. For example, in Lowe’s
work, even the most experimental forms and non-linear narratives are constantly read as
anti-hegemonic political commentaries that still verisimilarly represent the larger social
reality: Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha’s use of non-linear historiography in Dictee that evinces
her Korean American critique of the American expansionist narrative (33), Maya Lin’s
anti-representational design of the Vietnam War Memorial that exemplifies her Chinese
American feminist refusal of the nation spectacle to work through its defeat in Vietnam
(4), Jessica Hagerdorn’s Dogeater that reveals her Filipina American ambivalence
toward both the US and Filipino nationalisms (112).
3

As Viet Thanh Nguyen aptly points out, such Asian Americanist reliance upon
some aesthetic works as examples of Althusserian “bad subjects” that resist the
interpellative drive of the national culture unfortunately enacts a “gradual slide from a
politically necessary strategic essentialism to a co-opted and commodified essentialism as
the dominant, if not sole, form of Asian American identity” (150). A similar problem
persists in other Asian Americanist books that follow Lowe’s dialectical methodology.
For instance, Laura Kang’s Compositional Subject: Enfiguring Asian/American Women
(2002) valorizes so-called “1.5 generation” Korean North American women artists’
works as they evince “[formal] tactics and strategies that actively contend with—rather
than simply reject or bypass—” the discursive construction of “Asian American women”
by and across various academic disciplines such as literature, film criticism,
historiography, and ethnography (26). Here, Kang, perhaps unwittingly, tends to
exceptionalize these “1.5 generation” Korean American female artists as their use of
4
fragmented, intertextual, and self-reflexive forms are capable of critiquing both the
hegemonic discursive construction of “Asian American women” and their own socio-
economic privileges. Thus, Kang’s study may further buttress rather than question the
exemplary status of these artists who figure as not only liminal, critical, but also self-
critical “bad subjects” (269). While self-reflexivity is necessary at times for subjects
endowed with undue class position and mobility, it ultimately risks, to quote Maurice
Blanchot, “an elevation of the self through the very gesture of self-
denigration“(Unavowable Community, my translation from the Japanese edition).
While Asian American critics have moved beyond its previous “cultural
nationalist” agenda that exclusively valorized socially realist aesthetics, experimental
forms are now seen as relatively transparent reflections of liminal, marginalized
positionalities of Asian Americans in the transnational world. Thus, the critics commit
something like essentialist formalism whereby the very forms, as markers of identities,
not only interpellate the students but also limit the Asian Americanist conceptualization
of solidarity with other oppressed groups in the US.
Asian Americans can articulate distinct challenges and demands based on
particular histories of exclusion and racialization, but the redefined lack of
closure—which reveals rather than conceals differences—opens political lines of
affiliation with other groups in the challenge to specific forms of domination
insofar as they share common features. (Lowe 70, emphasis mine)

Because the seemingly open coalition Lowe proposes quarantines in advance
characteristics that are deemed too distant from or not conducive to the given group’s
political agenda, the said group can easily exclude or exploit differences it sets out to
welcome. By keeping certain othernesses outside the gate of the community, it also
5
forgoes the possibility that these others’ presence could disrupt, question, or even at times
transform the putative identities of the community’s constituents. Judith Butler points
out this danger whereby democratic coalitional politics nevertheless constitutes itself by
excluding differences:
Despite the clearly democratizing impulse that motivates coalitional building,
the coalitional theorist can inadvertently reinsert herself as sovereign of the
process by trying to assert an ideal form for coalitional structures in advance,
one that will effectively guarantee unity as the outcome. Related efforts to
determine what is and is not the true shape of a dialogue, what constitutes a
subject–position, and, most importantly, when “unity” has been reached, can
impede the self-shaping and self-limiting dynamics of coalition. (20, emphasis
in the original)

While one can argue that both non-American Asian and non-Asian American artists
whose works equally thematize alternative histories of Asia/America are excluded from
the “ideal form” of Asian Americanist coalitional politics, it is necessarily important to
avoid a mere expansion of Asian American literary canon that now embraces these
artists’ works provided that they evince “common features.”
However, in recent years, critical works in the emerging field of transpacific
American literary studies tend to valorize precisely such smooth transfer of literary and
aesthetic forms from East Asian literatures to its American counterpart. Moreover, these
studies problematically maintain a transnational cultural hierarchy within which the
significance of “Asia” is secured only as that which contributes to the formation of the
more powerful “American” literary canon. For example, Yunte Huang’s study of
American Imagist poets’ appropriation of Chinese classical aesthetics as instances of
“intercultural translation” and Timothy Gray’s reading of Gary Snyder’s “transpacific
dialogue” with East Asian poetics do not sufficiently question such unidirectional and
6
hierarchical literary encounter between East Asia and America.
4
Huang asserts that
Chinese poetic traditions have been “indispensable to the creation of American literature”
(6). Further, his intention to articulate the two traditions non-hierarchically is
immediately undercut in his argument that “the so-called minor is recognized as vital to
the formation of the major [so that] . . .the polarity of minor versus major is destabilized”
(6-7). In Gray’s study, Snyder appears as a 20th-century American Odysseus who has
acted as “a mobile leader [among the San Francisco Renaissance poets] willing to trace
the contours of a larger domain, made contact with a wide array of its citizens, and return
with this knowledge in tow.” In both works, the hegemonic centrality of America vis-à-
vis East Asia is assumed even when it is partially critiqued.
If both Huang’s and Gray’s constructions of the “intercultural” or “dialogic”
transpacific rely upon James Clifford’s notion of the “routes” of cultural encounters
among globally mobile cultural workers and displaced “natives,” Clifford’s
conceptualization of “global cultural flow” only affirms “the wider global world of
intercultural import-export in which the ethnographic encounter is always already
enmeshed” (23, italics mine). The problem inherent here is that such mutually
beneficial relationships can occur only after the exclusion of certain cultural and
historical memories that are perhaps held by the dead and structurally irrecoverable,
destroyed already by official authorities, or painfully repressed within the informants’
unconscious. Clifford’s “routes” therefore do not attend adequately to these memories
that resist the regime of “intercultural export-import” through which the ‘old” narratives
are easily endowed with “new” meanings and recognition. If Clifford imagines a
7
residual modernity in which “[e]veryone [is] more or less permanently in transit,” one
must rethink such transit more rigorously as a temporal gap without teleological closure,
a moment of standstill in which memories and narratives have yet to be translated,
comprehended, or recognized.
5

Archive Fevers: Beyond Asian American “reservoir” and transpacific “routes”
Routes of “global cultural flow” contain and exclude their own remainders or ghosts that
testify that certain memories still exist but resist translation or have been rendered
invisible. While this is close to Lowe’s formulation of “Asia America” whereby
“Asia”—as a supplementary “reservoir” of colonial memories—necessarily haunts
“America,” politically progressive, exemplary Asian American subjects are not the only
hosts of such memories. If these memories remain in transit, they still lack their proper
addresses or destinations. Jacques Derrida, for example, argues that an archive of
memory can only appear when the very memories it houses are in peril of disappearance,
repression, or oblivion.
As the death drive it also, according to the most striking words of Freud himself,
an aggression and a destruction (Destruktion) drive, it not only incites
forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory, as mneme or anamnesis, but
also commands the radical effacement. . .of that which can never be reduced to
mneme or to anamnesis. . ..[T]he archive takes place at the place of originary
and structural breakdown of the said memory” (11).

It is such a structural breakdown of the archive that conditions our desire to rescue
memories from destruction and erasure: “There would indeed be no archive desire
without the radical finitude, without the possibility of a forgetfulness which does not limit
itself to repression” (19). “Archive fever” for Derrida names an intersection of these two
different desires: archive’s suicidal desire to withdraw itself from the world and an
8
addressee’s desire to retain the very memory from erasure. Furthermore, like a postal
technology that remains fundamentally vulnerable to the possibility of lost mail, delayed
delivery, or reception by wrong addressees (17), the archive does not determine its own
audiences in advance and, instead, retains the fundamental possibility that anyone,
anywhere, can potentially witness the self-suicidal erasure of memory from the public
sphere of visuality.
Twentieth-century transpacific historical memories do not arrive as a property of
an identitarian coalition or cultural goods to be exchanged within the global routes of
cultural “import-export.” Rather, they enact multiple archive fevers whose appearances
as disappearances make us yearn for historical justice and thus potentially constitute a
“we” that remains heterogeneous without identities, multiple without a governing
principle.
6
In this sense, transmission of cultural memory operates like “heterolingual
address” elaborated by Naoki Sakai, an act of enunciation that transmits itself precisely in
the absence of a predetermined community of addressees. According to Sakai,
heterolingual address is a wager for a certain “we” precisely because it has yet to exist:
“‘We’ as a case of the vocative designation cannot be confused with a group of those who
are capable of communicating the same information with each other” (5). This also
implies that the addressees who in retrospect seem to comprise such “non-aggregate We”
“would respond to my delivery with varying degrees of comprehension, including cases
of the zero degree at which they would miss its signification completely” (4). For Sakai,
certain artworks including Cha’s Dictee are “a paean to the social,” conceptualized here
9
as a space in which human encounter is aleatory and communicative success is never
guaranteed.
7

Mad Rationality: Art and Construction of Historical Memories
This project, therefore, reorients the studies of aesthetics already engaged in both Asian
American studies and transpacific American literary studies and foregrounds the ways in
which post-1945 artworks on the Asia Pacific instantiate their archive fevers: formal
mediation of historical memories’ appearance and disappearance and their transmissions
to a non-aggregate, heterogeneous community that may come one day. For this purpose,
it is useful to rehearse some key aspects of Theodor Adorno’s conceptualization of
“aesthetic rationality” as both formalization and transmission of historical memory not
through its content-based depiction of the past as it was but in its “ciphering” of the past
as what is yet to be understood.
Aesthetic mediation of history, according to Adorno, requires the twin tasks of
the subject’s mimetic affinity to the empirical world and its rational conceptualization of
the object in the world through aesthetic formalization. Already in Dialectic of
Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that the enlightenment protocols of
rational self-preservation and calculative “mastery over nature” (31) cannot be critiqued
through a regressive return to unmediated nature but can be critiqued only through the
“remembrance of [second and hence socialized] nature within the subject” itself (32).
Mimesis is required for such “remembrance” of the destroyed world suffused with what
Adorno calls “the wounds of society” (Aesthetic Theory, 237). For Adorno, mimesis
names the subject’s non-dominative “affinity” toward the world of the objects, a method
10
with which it desires to acknowledge and respect “the real preponderance of nature” vis-
à-vis the subject (Dialectic, 11). Adrono and Horkeheimer illustrate such human affinity
with the world by using a case of mana, a natural force that, according to Marcel Mauss’s
ethnographic study of Polynesia, permeates the world and incites a sense of awe, respect,
and wonder among the Pacific Islanders: “[p]rimal and undifferentiated, it is everything
unknown and alien; it is that which transcends the bounds of experience, the part of the
primitive experiences as supernatural is not a spiritual substance in contradistinction to
the material world but the complex concatenation of nature in contrast to its individual
link” (10)
But the mimetic demand immediately redoubles itself as a need for formal
conceptualization or “construction” of the very memory in art because a “mere imitation”
of the object cannot respect the “elements that remain unidentified” in it and risks
reducing its strangeness into a part of an already known species or social category
(Aesthetic Theory 138). Thus, in order to truly “aid the nonidentical,” art must use a
“minimal” aesthetic technology that rescues the strangeness and uniqueness of the
material (Ibid, 166). Construction refers to the process of such necessarily rational
integration of the object’s enigma that formally retains “the indelible traces of mimesis”
(Ibid, 138). If art’s historiographical task is not “conservation of the past but the
fulfillment of past hopes” (Dialectic, xvii), then, construction must create a new form to
accommodate such “past hopes” because “thought determined by society (which is to
say, thought determined by society’s reigning concepts of itself) can never give a
satisfactory, even provisionally true picture” that redeems past hopes (Kaufman 711).
11
However, art’s “aesthetically rational” formalization of the “new” image of the
past is necessarily incomplete as the image it gives neither represents the past nor
provides an adequate picture of a utopia to come.
The new is the longing for the new, not the new itself: That is what everything
new suffers from. What takes itself to be utopia remains the negation of what
exists and is obedient to it. At the center of contemporary antinomies is that art
must be and wants to be utopia, and the more utopia is blocked by the real
functional order, the more this is true; yet at the same time art may not be utopia
in order not to betray it by providing semblance and consolation. (Aesthetic
Thoery, 32)\

Art, then, is a strangely rational improvisation toward the impossible figure of utopia, an
operation whereby art’s own rationality paradoxically seems only “blind” and “crazy” (1,
34).
8

As many commentators of Adorno have already pointed out, such madness of
aesthetic rationality engages in a certain radicalization of Kantian aesthetic experience
that similarly situates the subject in the aporetic disjuncture between the singularity of a
particular object of judgment and its quasi-universal validity to anyone. Kant argues in
the Third Critique:
Judgment in general is the faculty of thinking the particular as contained under
the Universal. If the Universal (the rule, the principle, the law) be given, the
Judgment which subsumes the particular under it . . . is determinant. But if only
the particular be given for which the universal has to be found, the Judgment is
merely reflective.

The determinant Judgment only subsumes under universal transcendental laws
given by the Understanding; the law is marked out for it, a prior, and it has
therefore no need to seek a law for itself in order to be able to subordinate the
particular in nature to the universal.—But the forms of nature are so manifold,
and there are so many modifications of the universal transcendental natural
concepts left undetermined by the laws given. . .These, as empirical, may be
contingent from the point of view of our Understanding, and yet, if they are to be
called laws (as the concept of a nature requires), they must be regarded as
12
necessary in virtue of a principle of the unity of the manifold, though it be
unknown to us.—The reflective Judgment, which is obliged to ascend from the
particular in nature to the universal, requires on that account a principle that it
cannot borrow from experience. . .[T]he reflective Judgment can only give as a
law from and to itself. It cannot derive it from outside. (11-12, emphases in the
original)

What Kant also calls “[a] singular judgment of experience” of the object (e.g., “a
moveable drop of water in an ice-crystal”), or, the “mere reflection upon the form of an
object without respect to any concept,” must necessarily claim “the agreement of
everyone” (21). Thus, in aesthetic experience, one can only operate as if a claim to
universality could be met since the very experience remains devoid of “objective
necessity” and can “lay claim to no a priori validity” (21). Unable to adjudicate the abyss
between the contingencies of the particular and its communicability across the universal,
Kantian aesthetic judgment takes on a structure of testimony whereby the enunciation of
truth claim cannot be matched by its verification but by a belief. The universal appeal
one perceives to be present in the singular object remains groundless and seems to repeat
a supplication, “I am the only one to have seen this unique thing, the only one to have
heard or to have been put in the presence of this or that, at a determinate, indivisible
instant; and you must believe me because you must believe me” (Derrida, Demeure, 41).
In many ways, Adorno’s theorization of aesthetic experience retains the same
constitutive impasse seen in Kant but transports it to the world already suffused with
socio-political sufferings. This is why, for instance, Duttmann argues that Adorno’s
artworks are forms of judgment that move “ambiguously and heteronomously between”
an “is” of the empirical experience and an “as if” of its fictive communicability across
the universe (90). But Adrono seems to further accentuate the insurgent potential of the
13
reflective judgment’s claim for the universal and finds in it a certain demand for a “We,”
“a social whole on the horizon of a certain indeterminateness” that is not “socially
univocal” or is not predetermined by a specific “class or social positions” (168).
But what remains perhaps somewhat unexplored in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is
the necessary link between such fundamentally “social” and “collective” aspirations of
art and its manifestation in multiple arts and multiple senses. For example, in the very
paragraph where Adorno pinpoints to the artworks’ desire to institute a heterogeneous
“We,” he sees such collective hope to be operative separately in at least three different
divisions of art: music, literature, and visual arts such as painting (167-168).
Music says We directly, regardless of its intentions. . . .In Western music it
would be possible to demonstrate how much its most important discovery, the
harmonic depth dimension, as well as all counterpoint and polyphony, is the We
of the choric ritual that has penetrated into the material. . . .Literary forms, by
their direct and ultimately inescapable participation in communicative language,
are related to a We . . . The plastic arts speak through the How of appreciation.
Their We is simply the sensorium according to its historical condition pursued to
the point that it breaks the relation to representational objectivity . . .(167-168).

Likewise, Adorno constantly suggests that the subject’s “collective sensorium” is a
“dissonant” ensemble of vision, hearing, and tactility, each of which paradoxically bears
witness to what it cannot see, hear, or touch. What artworks can recuperate from history
can only be recognized, therefore, as “radical blackness,” “eloquent silence,” or “painful
touch”(39-40). This is perhaps why Jean-Luc Nancy critically points out that Adorno
“barely evokes in proper terms the diversity of the ‘kinds’ of art, which he tends to let be
covered over by the multiplicity of ‘works’” (3). Then, why do we need multiple arts and
multiple senses in order to transmit history’s stunted hope to a “we,” a heterogeneous
collective whose present absence and future arrival are simultaneously evoked by every
14
artwork? What inheres in the relationship between the collective dissonance of senses
and the dissonant collective named a “We”?
Testimonial Dissonances against the World Picture
Such plurally sensuous mediation of historical memory in art must be seen as a
contestation of the dominant form of vision that has organized the Asia Pacific since
1945 as a part of the “world picture.” Drawing upon Heidegger famous essay, “the Age
of the World Picture,” I argue that the twentieth-century Asia Pacific is part and parcel of
Heideggerian pictorial world that is “already posited . . . as the whole of producible
objects” (“What are Poets?” 108). It is the time-space in which “[t]he earth and its
atmosphere become raw material” for productionist metaphysics which Heidegger calls
the logic of “imperium” (Ibid, 109). Therefore, when Heidegger asserts that “[t]he
fundamental event of the modern era is the conquest of the world as picture” (“World
Picture,” 134), it involves both state imperialisms’ reduction of foreign and domestic
territories into a biopolitical reserve of “raw materials” and the global proliferation of
“imperium” itself—a way of managing the others by “overlooking from above”—as a
normative governing concept (Parmenides).
What is perhaps more devastating in Heidegger’s diagnosis is that the world
does not figure like a picture but it is already a picture at least since the inception of
modernity: “[w]orld picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the
world but the world conceived and grasped as picture” (“World Picture,” 129). Rey
Chow adopts this Heideggerian tenet that the same productionist logic not only represents
but constitutes the Asia Pacific as a set of places made available for multiple
15
imperialisms’ economic, military, and academic apparatuses (31). In the case of
American imperial construction of the Asia Pacific as its own region of dominance, a
fundamentally collaborative relationship between its military advance and commercial
expansion manifests in the rhetoric that posits the Asia Pacific as the “American Lake”
whose variants frequently appear in the remarks made by well-known political figures
such as John Hay and Douglass McArthur (cf, John Carlos Rowe, Bruce Cumings). Of
course, similarly biopolitical positing of the imperial subject as “that-which-stands-
before” the earth and its inhabitants as “raw material” equally applies to the Japanese
imperial logic of “East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” whose exploitative enterprise was
hardly disguised by the euphemistic misnomer.
9

Furthermore, as shown by more recent practitioners of East Asian studies, the
Cold War formation of East Asian area studies would have been impossible without the
funding and legitimation given by CIA and OSS (Office of Strategic Services), and
various donor foundations that oftentimes served as these government agencies’ proxies
(Cumings 263). As Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian note, the foundational logic
of East Asian Studies during the Cold War was twofold: study of America’s “enemies” in
communist countries such as China, North Korea, and North Vietnam, and selective
studies of economic successes of pro-American regimes set up in Japan, South Korea,
and Taiwan (5-6). Such bifurcated structure of Cold War East Asian studies conforms to
the US government deployment of “containment” and “integration” policies in Asia
whereby the US military’s strategic presence in the Asia Pacific led to its wars with
communist regimes in China, North Korea, and North Vietnam, resulted in the massive
16
suppressions of local egalitarian, postcolonial struggles in places such as South Korea
and Okinawa, and exemplified the patron-client relationships between the US and its pro-
American “liberal” allies in East Asia (Klein 24-26).
Literary and cinematic works on the Asia Pacific since 1945 contest such
military, economic, and academic pictorialization of the region and carry out plurally
sensuous remembrances of egalitarian, anti-imperial struggles that took place in the
Korean Peninsula, Okinawa, Vietnam, Taiwan, for example. But, as Frantz Fanon
repeatedly warns in the chapter “On National Culture” in the Wretched of the Earth
against the colonized intellectuals’ tendency to create a “national work of art” (226) that
bases itself on simplified representations of “customs” frozen in the past (224), these anti-
colonial struggles never aim to create a static tradition or culture in which participants’
identities are determined in advance. Rather, as Algerians’ struggles against French
colonialism exemplified for Fanon, anti-colonial struggles occur as ongoing exploration
of their own forms (233). This is why anti-colonial artworks for Fanon can never be a
“representative” of already existing people but rather a formal instantiation of “that
fluctuating movement which [people] are just giving shape to” (227). If Fanon insists
that artworks must therefore approach the “zone of occult instability” (227) and “use the
past with the intention of opening the future, as an invitation to action and a basis for
hope” (232), his attention to the formal opening of the new and unknown future
resembles, perhaps surprisingly, Adorno’s formulation of artworks as formal alteration of
past hopes into an ongoing demand for a heterogeneous “We” of the future. If, for
Adorno, art’s remembrance of past hopes occurs across plural arts and senses, Fanon
17
likewise argues that the anti-colonial struggles people are enacting necessarily require
multi-sensuous witnessing of their “echoes” “internal rhythms” “rhythmic images” (207,
225, 227). This, once again, brings us back to the question that remains unanswered in
Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: why do we need multiple senses in an artwork that
remembers the past as the future of “a We”? What is the relationship between collective
dissonance in such work and the dissonant collective of people it predicts and demands?
If Heidegger suggests that the world (as) picture is nonetheless supplemented by
its own “invisible shadow” or “the concealed emitting of light” (135, 154), Akira Mizuta
Lippit, in his analyses of post-1945 Japanese films, suggests that the chiasmus of (dark)
light and (bright) shadow already implies a supplementary experience of aurality. As
suggested by the Japanese term for the event of the bombing, pikadon (flash-boom), such
complex imbrication of vision and sound constitutes the heart of the atomic experience.
Therefore, as Lippit discovers in a number of Japanese films made after 1945, vision
oftentimes concedes its own blindness to the auratic flash of atomic traces left upon the
surfaces of the cities and human bodies and asks that its finite witnessing be taken up and
continued by another sense: hearing. Therefore, in these films, testimonial to the atomic
experience is almost always “acousmatic,” occurring at the limit whereby visual
breakdown is contiguous with acoustic experience of disembodied voices with no names
or identities (cf. 115-118, 135-136).
If artworks testify against the pictorialization of the Asia Pacific through its
deployment of dissonant sensualities, how do they invoke the emergence of a
heterogeneous “we” that has yet to come? I will here draw upon Jean-Luc Nancy’s
18
thinking of “being singular plural” as it enables us to think about the link between
artwork and community, an artwork’s plurally sensuous instantiation of the world and its
sharing among plurally singular recipients in the work. Devoid of any “determined
syntax,” Nancy’s conceptualization of “being singular plural” points to the inherent
imbrication of the singular (that is) plural and the plural singularities, or a co-emergence
of “[b]eing singularly plural and plurally singular” (28). If Nancy inherits the
Heideggerian argument that “the world is destroying itself is not a hypothesis” (the
Creation of the World, 35), an artwork is an interface whereby a different world
[“monde”] manifests its uniqueness and strangeness across multiple senses of the artist,
artwork, and its recipient: “we do not gain access to the origin [of the world]: access is
refused by the origin’s concealing itself in its multiplicity” (Being Singular Plural, 10).
Simultaneously manifesting and concealing its own unique and new appearance in art, a
world constitutes me as a finite being whose multiple senses cannot adequately depict the
world’s image which they nonetheless touch.
Each sensing touches on the rest of sensing as that which it cannot sense. Sight
does not see sound and does not hear it, even though it is also in itself, or right at
itself, that it touches on this nonseeing and is touched by it . . . (17, emphasis in
the original)

Multiple senses in me touch the world, however inadequately, and relay each sense’s
finitude to others “right at” their mutually shared lines of contiguity. If an artwork thus
incompletes me as a sensuous being, my finite existence recognizes its own singularity
only within “the necessary successivity” of multiple singularities that exist not only as
“one” but also as “one by one”: “[t]he singular is primarily each one and, therefore, also
with and among all the others” (32). The singular appearance and concealment of a
19
world through plural senses must be shared by multiple singularities: “[the withdrawal of
singularity] never takes place in an exemplary way, neither through an effacement nor
through an exhibition, but it can be shared by all works” or all beings (“Literary
Communism,” 79). Here, then, we find an ongoing “partnership” (Being Singular Plural
30) in which each artwork and each of us share the enigma of history, acousmatic traces
of the past, and wounds of administered society, which our senses barely see, hear, or
touch.
Chapter Outline
Chapter One beings by offering a reading of American poet Charles Olson’s early prose
and poetic works in which the poet seeks to relay to others his hypothesis that the
twentieth-century Asia Pacific is at once the end of “the west” as a civilization and the
wellspring of its postmortem hopes. In his idiosyncratic and apocalyptic prose work Call
Me Ishmael (1947), Olson confronts the then-hegemonic interpretation of Melville’s
Moby Dick that celebrates the narrative figure of Ishmael as an exemplification of
American democracy’s victory over its totalitarian enemies and sees captain Ahab’s self-
destructive search for the legendary whale of the Pacific as an uncanny prediction of the
certain endpoint of American imperial expansionism a century later: “[t]he Pacific is the
end of the UNKNOWN which Homer’s and Dante’s Ulysses opened men’s eyes to.
END of individual responsible only to himself. Ahab is full stop” (119). Such reading
can also be seen as a critique of more orthodox materialist reading of Melville’s novel
offered by critics such as CLR James who focuses upon the novel’s representation of a
potentially subaltern collective of “mariners, renegades, and castaways” that resists the
20
Cold War capitalist orders. While James seems to argue for an active production of a
subaltern community of international castaways, Olson seems to counter such
productionism in his claim: “[y]ou can approach BIG America and spread yourself like a
pancake, sing her stretch as Whitman did, be puffed up as we are over PRODUCTION.
It’s easy. THE AMERICAN WAY. Soft. Turns out paper cups, lies flat on the brush.
N.G.” (69).
The latter half of Chapter One examines his works such as “Projective Verse” and
“the Kingfishers” that were published immediately after Call Me Ishmael and presents
them as part of the poet’s attempt to discover a new transpacific figure that adequately
embodies his vision of non-productionist and egalitarian community of beings who
recreate a new type of knowledge as they encounter and engage with mysterious
particularities of objects partially destroyed and disfigured historically in the Pacific.
While Olson variously names such figure as “the Beast” and “postmodern man” in his
more theoretical writings such as “Resistance” and “the Human Universe,” he discovers
their approximations in the kingfishers who flew away from the ruined architecture of
Angkor-Vat in Cambodia and the Chinese Maoist peasant soldiers as the both represent
for Olson a possibility to reconstitute knowledge from the very refuse and ruins of history
of post-1945 Asia Pacific. Such reading of Olson is then coupled with an analysis of
Okinawan poet Kiyota Masanobu (1938~ ) whose “poetics of objets” has sought an
alignment of variously subjectivated and subordinated lives in the US-occupied Okinawa
(1945-1972) whose spiritual and political desires must be put into a relational articulation
without being submitted into the compensatory scheme that forms the complicitous
21
network of the US, Japan, and the elites within Okinawa. Haunting and exceeding such
“objectified” bodies that survive the social condition of the occupied islands, Kiyota’s
“objets” potentially appear as the singular images of their desires that cannot be fulfilled
within the discursive regimes of the empire.
Chapter Two constellates two different artworks that relay the wounds of the
Vietnam War across divisions of arts and of senses. Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex
Sutra” (1966) and Trinh Minh-Ha’s film Sur Name Viet Given Name Nam (1989)
respectively critique American mass media’s reductive representations of the Vietnam
war as a national spectacle to be glorified or worked through but also reconceptualizes
the very space of mediation as it enables them to mechanically reproduce Vietnamese
voices and bodies from which historical memories as “phony” auras flash up and
disappear.
Bypassing a typically contestatory strategy whereby a critique of mass media
leads to a vindication of verisimilitude in artworks, Ginsberg’s taped recording of mass-
mediated voices on the radio that constructs an alternative configuration in which the
mass-mediated lagitimations of the war interrupt themselves and Trinh’s use of non-
professional Vietnamese women in America who are asked to act as Vietnamese women
in Vietnam respectively offer manufactured spaces that interrupt the linear progress of the
war and enact alternative materializations of its history as visual images.
Chapter Three examines the oeuvre of multimedia artist, filmmaker, and writer
Theresa Hakkyung Cha and argues that Asian Americanist appropriation of Cha’s poetic
text Dictee (1982) as a “Korean American immigrant woman’s” critique (Shelly Sunn
22
Wong) of the US national narrative largely misses the artist’s larger concern to
disseminate the memories of colonized Korea to multiple singularities regardless of their
putative social categories. If many Asian Americanists’ readings of Dictee identify the
narrative figure named “diseuse” to be a “Korean American immigrant woman,” my
close reading shows that she is always already multiple and thereby remains unnamable.
In fact, “diseuse” of Dictee does center upon and yet cannot be exclusively equated to
various women colonized within and/or displaced from Korea during Japanese colonial
and American neo-colonial rules. They also include various female figures from Greece,
America, France, and elsewhere. No longer figuring exclusively as a Korean American
immigrant woman, the narrative voice of Dictee is already exposed to the narratives of
multiple diasporas and colonialisms scattered across the globe. Without interpellating us
into a preformulated identity or positionality, multiple women’s images and voices in
Dictee occupy our bodies, thereby deforming our previous manners of identification and
allegiance and soliciting us to become what Cha names “audience distant relative” of
multiple colonial histories.
For Cha, cinema serves as an indispensable intermediary space where the dead
from the past and the inhabitants of the present not only encounter one another but at
times overlap. Evoking a fundamental undecidability of the word “séance/seance” as at
once a summoning of the dead and cinematic viewing session, Cha’s various literary,
filmic, and performance works function as ritual spaces that summon the dead. However,
since Cha studied in 1976 with several well-known French psychoanalytic film theorists
such as Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour, and Thierry Kuntzel, the chapter also analyzes
23
her particular reworking of French semio-psychoanaltyic film theories that tend to
critique the cinematic apparatus and its production of passive and docile spectators
sutured to the ideological screen. This entails an analysis of Cha’s theoretically and
artistically critical commentaries upon this body of film theories that are collected in
Apparatus, the collection of film theoretical essays she published in 1980. In works such
as "Commentaire"—a sole artwork collected in Apparatus—various screen-like objects
serve as receptacles of the memories of the dead and the transmitters of these memories
to their future audiences. In addition, the chapter looks at Cha’s longer film Exilee
(1980) whose material was first shot during her visit to South Korea via Tokyo in 1977.
Chapter Four examines how aesthetic transmission of colonial memories
discussed in the preceding chapters actually prepares a ground for a heterogeneous
community that shares material. Focusing on two books by two diasporic Korean poets
in Japan and the US that respectively recount the South Korean government’s
suppression of egalitarian struggles of the 1970s and 80s engaged by students, workers,
and other citizens, this chapter argues that the significance of these poets’ works extends
beyond the sphere of anti-hegemonic struggle over cultural meaning. Instead, these
works demand that we take up the stunted hopes of these movements to institute a
community in which fundamental resources such as food, medicine, and words are freely
distributed.
Kim Shijong’s Japanese-language collection of poems, Kwangju Fragments
(1983), was published three years after the Korean military forces brutally suppressed its
own citizens’ Kwangju People’s Democratic Uprising in 1980 with the military support
24
provided by the US government. The poems collected in the book constantly bear
witness to the very impossibility of witness-bearing. In many of its poems, memories of
the movement the poet wishes to recuperate appear as the figures of the wind and the
faces of the activist’s perishing in the state prison. But if the wind is a metaphor of its
own disappearance and the faces only enunciate their muteness, Kim’s poems argue that
the activist’s face nevertheless “bear colors” and the city of Kwangju—literally meaning
“the province of light”—remains a storehouse of light seen only in its clandestine
darkness. Arguing that “Kwangju is its own renewal,” Kim suggests that Kwangju’s
memories displace themselves from image and voice to colors and light, and ask to be
shared by those in Japan and beyond who now need to reenact the latent hopes of May,
1980.
Myung-Mi Kim’s collection Commons (2003) written mostly in English and
partially in Korean also thematizes the work of sharing that spans across and calls into
question the bounded borders of social groups, nation-states, and languages. Initially
foregrounding the poet’s primary concern with Korea’s postcolonial history, Commons
ultimately advances its claim that memories of displacement, war, and politically induced
famine from multiple locations migrate to other spaces and wait for their moments of
translation. But such translations of memories in Kim’s work only occur as
disarticulations of singularly plural places or singularly plural sensual experiences. Thus,
for example, Commons juxtaposes testimonial fragments gathered from various locations
in the world including Kwangju of 1980 and Sarajevo under siege in 1992 without
establishing the terms with which comparison or interpretation of the two events can be
25
made. A “partnership” of touch, vision, and hearing Kim invokes remains dissonant and
disarticulated. Commons, as the title suggests, names these multiple commons that relate
to one another without resolving their differences.

26
Introduction Endnotes

1
The names of the East Asian authors in this dissertation given with their last names first,
i.e., Kiyota Masanobu or Kim Shijong.

2
The concept of “ensemble of senses” that testifies to the invisible or inaudible cultural
memories is taken from Fred Moten’s book In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black
Radical Tradition.

3
David Lloyd captures the circular ways in which the example institutes its own claim to
verisimilitude: “aesthetics gives the example to a pedagogy with which it can scarcely
dispense, requiring that pedagogy as the means to constitute the very space which
grounds the verisimilitude of its examples” (49, emphasis mine).

4
As Francoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih argue, this hierarchical model of
transnationalism presupposes “that [transnationally mobile] minorities necessarily and
continuously engage with and against majority cultures in a vertical relationship of
opposition or assimilation” (7).

5
Clifford in fact admits that his thinking of “routes” tends to downplay the importance of
both cultural elements and people that are unable to or refuse to travel: “Once traveling is
foregrounded as a cultural practice, then dwelling, too, needs to be reconceived—no
longer simply the ground from which traveling departs and to which it returns. I’ve not
gone far enough yet in reconceptualizing the varieties, different histories, cultures,
constraints, and practices of dwelling in the transnational contexts” (44).
In contrast to Clifford’s general tendency to celebrate physical mobility, Ackbar Abbas
suggests an alternative way of thinking about becoming that only occurs when the
subjects are trapped in a place from which they cannot escape: postcoloniality “means
finding ways of operating under a set of difficult conditions that threatens to appropriate
us as subjects, an appropriation that can work just as well by way of acceptance as it can
by rejection. Dealing with such conditions may involve, for example, thinking about
emigration in a certain way, emigration not in the diasporic sense of finding another
space, of relocating, with all the pathos of departure, but in the sense of remaking a given
space that for whatever reason once cannot leave, of dis-locating—emigration, that is to
say, before the exit visas have been issued” (10).

6
For example, Lisa Yoneyama examines In the Name of the Emperor (dirs. Christine
Choy and Nancy Tong),a documentary made by two Asian American directors that
recounts Japanese atrocity in Nangjin and American repression of its historical details
and argues that the film can potentially call for an emergence of a “postnational”
audience across those in China, Korea, Japan, Asian America, and the mainstream

27

America because the memories of Japanese atrocity are addressed to the subjects who are
not yet gathered into a site of contact (339-340). Furthermore, a similarly multilinear and
happenstance dissemination fo narratives and memories is implicit in Lionnet’s and
Shih’s invocation of “minor-minor networks that circumvent the major altogether” and
create literacies in “nonstandard languages, tonalities, and rhythms”(8).

7
Maurice Blanchot captures the similar relation from the addressee’s perspective and
argues that the aleatory nature of address constitutes its addressee as at once singular and
non-unique respondent, who is simultaneously replaceable by other addressees and yet
irreplaceable in relation to the addresser: “I am he whom anyone at all can replace, the
nonindispensable by definition, but one for whom nonetheless there is no dispensation:
he must answer to and for what he is not. His is a borrowed, happenstance singularity…”
(18).

8
Duttman also eloquently summarized how reason, for Adorno, must protect itself
through a practice of mimetic affinity with the child, the animal, and the eccentric:
“[R]eason, for the sake of its own concept and in order to resist its own reification and
not to condemn itself to impotence before reality, must push itself forward to the extreme
point at which it appropriates mimetic behavior familiar from childhood, accepting
eccentric traits, reconquering for itself through a clownish and foolish element its
resemblance to animality. The greatest seriousness, the dread whose unbearability
dictates eccentricity, a deviating behavior, become mad play and the most intense joy”
(183). I do think that the formulation of madness as what protects the reason of reason
Duttmann finds in Adorno resonates with Foucault’s assertion that “madness is precisely
the absence of the work of art” offered at the end of Madness and Civilization (287).

9
In this regard, it is not a mere coincidence that Heidegger frequently turns to the cases
of both atomic physics and US atomic bombing of Japan’s two cities to illustrate his
theorization of the world as picture. For example, atomic technology in Heidegger’s
essays appear as “the death-dealing machine” (“Poets” 114), “the attack . . .on living
matter” “the gigantic” (“World Picture,” 135) and an example of rigorous research that
conquers the object sphere it posits for itself (124).

28
Chapter 1

Politics of Objects: Charles Olson’s “Objectism” and Kiyota Masanobu’s
Poetics of “Objets” in America’s “Asia-Pacific”
The Asia Pacific’s “Bright Shadows”
Literary works in the twentieth-century Asia Pacific have contested both Japanese and
American imperial formations of the region as their enframed objects not only
thematically but through their formalist construal of images that unlimit and exceed such
pictorial regime that taxonomizes and evaluates beings as useful and usable “subjects.”
Within the context of this study, while America’s material and discursive construction of
the Asia Pacific as its objectified “picture” proceeded through and enabled the events
such as John Hay’s adoption of “Open Door Policy” toward the Chinese market (1899),
the Philippine-American War (1899-1902), the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and
Nagasaki (1945), the Korean War (1950-armistice in 1953), and the Vietnam War (1955-
1975), its more pernicious effect is felt in the schematized division of heterogeneous
beings into national, ethnic, and other discursively essentialized “subjects” that do not
contest but rather conform to the imperial terms of representing bodies and groups. If
ostensibly oppositional forms of nationalist literature confirm rather than question the
specular economy of hierarchized subjects in the colonial/imperial world, critics and
writers alike need to eschew the terms of subjectivation and subjection which are,
according to Judith Butler, “produced through the workings of power . . . [and] made
clear in [their] psychic effect” (6).

29
Critiquing precisely such imperialist framing that does not merely describe but is
constitutive of the region, recent studies in both transnational American studies and
critical East Asian studies examine their own disciplines’ complicitous implication in
America’s pictorial configuration of the Asia Pacific by drawing upon Martin
Heidegger’s notion of “enframing” or “gestell.” For instance, William Spanos’s
America’ s Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire invokes Heidegger’s Parmenides and argues
that the US expansionism in and across the Pacific constitutes geopolitical formation “at
the service not simply of [epistemic] certainty but of the imperium,” an objectifying gaze
“from the above” that not only represents but places beings as the resources for its
predetermined telos (53).
Rob Wilson empirically contextualizes Spanos’s critique of imperial metaphysics
by recentering Hawai’i as one locus within pictorial process informed by the complicit
interests of capital and warfare: “[t]hrough the production of Hawai'i into its crucial
spatial (and multicultural) link between Asia and Oceania ("Asia-Pacific," as it would
come to be called), the Pacific was transformed from a nexus of competing European
outpost and Asian ports into the extraterritorial space of what continental ideologues
mused over as their ‘vast American lake.’ . . . The US Pacific Lake, as it were, was not
empty or disenchanted: postwar nuclearization of the Pacific Ocean (a prerogative of
global power the United States shares with France) has only made extraterritorial
dominion over this site of hula skirts and bikinis (and the Bikini atolls) more seemingly
complete” (64-65). Similarly, Yunte Huang holds that “the long history of the
colonization of the Pacific” advanced the process “in which material possession and

30
discursive abstraction reinforce each other” (4). America’s construction of the Pacific,
argues Huang, conforms to the systematic production of what Henri Lefebvre might call
“abstract space” that, “[i]n its Euclidean geometric, optical, or phallic movement,”
emerges as “a product of violence of war” and “serves these forces which make a tabula
rasa of whatever stands in their way, of whatever threatens them” (5).
Within in East Asian Studies, Harry Harootunian and Masao Miyoshi point out
that the discipline has been founded to "meet the necessity of gathering and providing
information about the enemy" in the Cold War order (2, 8) while Bruce Cuming
excavates the records pertinent to the field’s foundational links with organizations such as
the Ford Foundation and CIA during the Cold War era (265).
1
Given impetus by these
critiques, Rey Chow’s The Age of the World Target: Self-referentiality in War, Theory, and
Comparative Work reintroduces Heidegger’s notion of “the age of the world picture” in
critiquing the ways in which “the United States has been conducting war on the basis of a
certain kind of knowledge production, and producing knowledge on the basis of war” in
both liberal capitalist and communist areas of East Asia (36). As Chow continues, the
post-1945 construction of “East Asian studies” in the US universities constitutes an
integral part of such state-funded gestell that systematically transformed the
philologically oriented “Far Eastern” cultural and literary studies into the “area studies”
of the “targeted” field whose significance to the US is decidedly geopolitical and
economic (39).
2

However, despite Chow’s effort via Heidegger’s work to reconfigure the Asia
Pacific and East Asia no longer as a totalizable area but as a disaggregate series of

31
“fragments that bear clues . . . to a history of ideological coercions and exclusions,” her
work tends to bypass Heidegger’s attention to the barely visible “shadows” that haunt and
exceed any areal space that is placed and pictured as an object of conquest (85).
Designating these beings as “bright shadow[s]” that enact “concealed emitting of light,”
Heidegger explores the ways in which their scattered scintillations in the targeted area
potentially discloses “a space withdrawn from representation” (154).
3
Poised and
concealed across the border of the visible and the invisible, these objects cast their dark
lights upon the world, constituting an alternative space in which bodies or things can no
longer be taxonomized or evaluated according to hierarchized notions of the subjects or
the social groups. As such, these entities no longer conform to the “schema-world” in
which nationalisms or comparative national literatures complicitously “co-figurate” one
another (Sakai 32).
4

This chapter explores such “bright shadows” in the post-1945 Asia Pacific by
examining their various figurations and metamorphoses in the works of two poets who
were active in the 1950s and the 1960s in the US and the US-occupied Okinawa: Charles
Olson (1910-1970) and Masanobu Kiyota (1938- ). Olson’s early poems and essays
such as Call Me Ishmael, “Projective Verse,” and “the Kingfishers” depict the Pacific as
an enframed space that is nonetheless inhabited and reshaped by what Olson calls “the
objects” that survive their reduction as tools and resources for America’s military
expansionism. Concurring with Olson’s “objectism” in the US, Kiyota devises his
“poetics of objects” and writes poems in which variously subjugated peasants, workers,
and women in the US-occupied Okinawa (1945-1972) reemerge as the singular images

32
that resist their categorization and deployment as subjects. Olson’s “objects” and
Kiyota’s “objets” articulate one another as the shifting forms of bodies that survive the
post-1945 Pacific and, through such survivals, open an amorphous spatiality that calls
into question the instrumentalist designation of the Asia-Pacific as America’s areal
picture.
The Birth of “Pacific Man” in Charles Olson’s Call me Ishmael
At once a treatise on Melville’s Moby-Dick and a “directive to his own work” as a young
poet (Blaser 206), Olson’s Call Me Ishmael(1948) examines the novel’s treatment of the
destroyed or destructible things, including the human bodies, in the nineteenth century
Pacific and its inscription of their persistent energies that live on after their
destructions. Call Me Ishmael thus postulates Melville’s epic as a prognosis of American
expansionism’s self-destructive end and the alternate forms of life that emerge from it in
the Pacific. Tacitly questioning his mentor F.O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance:
Art and Expressions in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941) which, despite its
attention to Melville’s inclusion in the novel of “[t]he latent economic factor” and the
Shakespearean “dramatic form” that resists narrative resolution, espouses “Melville’s
hopes for American democracy” that may arise between Ishmael and the “mariners,
renegades, and castaways” (444, 443), Olson declares in his book that “Melville was no
naive democrat” and begins it with the chapter “Part I is FACT” that empirically
contextualizes Moby Dick within America’s expansionist movement in the Asia Pacific
and its production of surplus value from the bodies that reside therein.
5

33
From the outset, Call Me Ishmael points to whaling as the key industry
responsible for enframing the Asia Pacific for spatial control and resource extraction. Its
first chapter examines the ways in which the industry subjected the human bodies to
extreme condition of labor and survival, as exemplified by the story of cannibalism
onboard the Essex in 1819, and, therefore, “descends to the bottom physical nature of
things where the human being becomes meat before it returns to the dance of the atoms”
(Nichols 31). Based on his historical research as a graduate student at Harvard, Olson
substantiates his argument that the whaling industry was originally established to address
“a shortage of fats and oils” in the continental US, necessitating the recruitment of
American Indian whalers and others as “a skilled part of the industry down to its end, a
miserably paid tool” (17). In contrast to Matthiessen’s liberal nationalism that obscures
Melville’s interrogation of America’s economic expansionism in the Pacific, Olson sees
in the novel a possibility to critically deframe the Pacific as it could be reinhabited and
reshaped by the destroyed or destructible beings that survive such exploitative process.
From such politico-economic perspective, the whaling ship reemerges for Olson
as both the agent and the object of America’s imperial targeting of the Asia Pacific.
Describing the whaleship’s doubly oppressive relation to both nature and labor as “the
precision instrument” and the “sweatshop” respectively, Olson argues,
So if you want to know why Melville nailed us in Moby-Dick, consider whaling.
Consider whaling as FRONTIER, and INDUSTRY. A product wanted, men got
it: big business. The Pacific as sweatshop. Man, led, against the biggest damndest
creature nature uncorks. The whaleship as factory, the whaleboat the precision
instrument. (23)

34
Olson’s characterization of such oceanic frontier that serves as an exploitative “factory”
and proto-militarist “precision instrument” critically revises Frederick Jackson Turner’s
“frontier” thesis whereby the frontier is valorized initially for its promotion of the non-
elite settlers’ free-spirited “inquisitiveness” and later on for its potential to institute an
agrarian republic by way of public education and laws (49, 55, Slotkin 34). Directly
questioning such romantic notion of the frontier that obfuscates the history of territorial
and economic violence, Melville insists that the oceanic frontier in Moby-Dick extends
the America’s continental frontier as an operational center of commercial expansionism.
Published in the immediate wake of the WWII, Call me Ishmael argues that the
maintenance of the Pacific as America’s last frontier required its militarization: “the
Yankees had discovered that the Sperm whale had the finest oil and brought the biggest
price. They went after it. And it led them into all the oceans. And gave whaling its
leading role in making the Pacific the American lake the navy now, after a lapse of 100
years, has been about the business of certifying” (19).
In this continuum of commercial expansionism and militarized domination, Olson
foregrounds Ahab’s critical difference from a series of North American homo
economicus whose jobs are to “square the circle” and proliferate the frontiers across the
Americas. The difference, as Olson construes, between Ahab and such economically
motivated explorers lies in the former’s intense hatred of the very system of exploration
and expansion whose only imperative is incessant reproduction of surplus.
6

Melville felt the movement as American. He understood that America completes
her West only on the coast of Asia . . . . The Pacific is the end of the UNKNOWN
which Homer’s and Dante’s Ulysses opened men’s eyes to. END of individual
responsible only to himself. Ahab is full stop. (119)

35

Despite his superficial resemblance to colonizing figures in the Americas, e.g.,
Columbus, La Salle, and the members of the Donner Party, Ahab appears as one to have
marked a “full stop” both to the system of capital and to his own life that has been
maintained by it thus far.
However, insofar as Ahab’s self-interruptive punctuation of capital remains a case
of individual caesura, Call Me Ishmael moves on to locate a more collective form of
resistance against capital and military among the inhabitants of the Pacific. Among such
figures that inhabit the Pacific, Olson first valorizes Melville himself as one who is
“long-eyed enough to understand the Pacific as part of our geography” and resembles “a
migrant backtrailing to Asia” (12, 14). Further, Olson argues that Melville’s
“backtrailing to Asia” has allowed him to discover “millions of mixed shades and
shadows” that survive their destructions in the Pacific and begin to mutate as “lives and
souls” upon its ocean floor. Olson’s assertion that “[w]ith the Pacific opens the NEW
HISTORY” (117) alludes to the ongoing dispersal of such mutative bodies that
repopulate the area by “dreaming still . . . tossing like slumberers in their beds” as “the
ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness” (116).
Olson’s persistent interest in such bodies that metamorphose contrasts sharply
with the attempts made by some American studies scholars of both the Cold War era and
the recent “New Americanist” period to underscore Moby-Dick’s usefulness in educing
its readers to mimetically identify with the normative or counterhegemonic culture’s
exemplary representatives. For instance, in light of Olson’s pursuit of metamorphosing
bodies and their potential for mutual articulation, Donald E. Pease’s seemingly anti-

36
hegemonic recentering of C.L.R James’s Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The
Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1953) seems to have merely
transferred the site of narrative truth from Ishmael (as in Matthiessen of 1941) to the non-
white laborers onboard the Pequod within the persistent framework of aesthetic education
that demands that its students mimic and identify with the pre-established figures of the
exemplars. As Pease himself writes, James’s reading of Melville serves as “a possible
model of American studies as, like Ellis Island [where James was once detained], a site
where becoming American would become indistinguishable from becoming ‘mariners,
renegades and castaways” (xxx).
Critically contrasting with both Matthiessen’s and Pease’s efforts to reeducate
American subjects, Olson embraces the “shades” and “shadows” in the Pacific as the
“objects” that survive their reification and practice their morphogenesis that resists and
exceeds the existing terms that classify national or ethnic subjects.
7
As such, Olson’s
figuration of mutative objects in Call Me Ishmael resembles Judith Butler’s notion of
“material praxis” which she rediscovers in Marx’s critique of Feuerbach whereby Marx
resituates the “matter” or “object” as its own temporal transformation in the present
social space. As Butler argues,
If materialism were to take account of praxis as that which constitutes the very
matter of objects, and praxis is understood as socially transformative activity, then
such activity is understood as constitutive of materiality itself. The activity
proper to praxis, however, requires the transformation of some object from a
former state to a latter state, usually understood as its transformation from a
natural to a social state, but also understood as its transformation of an alienated
social state to a non-alienated social state. In either case, according to this new
kind of materialism that Marx proposes, the object is not only transformed, but in
some significant sense, the object is transformative activity itself and, further, its
materiality is established through this temporal movement from a prior to a latter

37
state. In other words, the object materializes to the extent that it is a site of
temporal transformation. (250)

The object that appears in Butler’s text as “a site of [its] temporal transformation” is, to
use Levi Bryant’s formulation, a “‘being’ of differences” that constantly renews itself and
its relations with other affecting and affectable objects. If the objects as the affective
beings differently differentiate themselves, other objects, and their social milieus, they
reserve the ability to disrupt their marginalized status as the masculine reason’s
“countervailing materiality” and begin to resignify themselves in and as their morphings
of the selves and the others. As Butler holds, such objects “matter” both sensuously and
linguistically and “come from many quarters” across the social world, disabling us to
privilege a single group as the representative of the mainstream or counterhegemonic
culture (52).
Similarly, Olson’s Pacific emerges only as a consequence of relational encounter
among the numerous living and non-living “objects” that affect one another in the midst
of their destruction or exploitation. At times struggling to give more concrete forms to
the utopian potential exhibited by such “shadows,” “shades,” and “wonderous depths,”
Olson sees in Melville a prefiguration of “Pacific Man,” an agent of regeneration who
“[a]fter Pacific flood . . . took his dead to be all the fathers and sons of man” (116).
Arguing that “[t]he Pacific taught him how to repeat great RITES [as those practiced by
Osiris and Noah], of spring” (116), Melville as “Pacific Man” is seen as resembling a
series of well-known figures in the Western classics that have survived their potential
extinctions by morphing into different forms that are oftentimes non-human: Glaucus in
Ovid’s Metamorphosis who transformed into a fish-like being, Venus who was born from

38
the mutilated genital of Kronos in the Mediterranean, Osiris as a victim of patricidal
assassination who later became “Lord of the underworld,” and the prophet Proteus known
for a series of mutative changes into “a fire, then a flood, and last a wild sea beast” (113,
116, 119). Olson’s “Pacific Man” similarly survives the pictorialization of the Pacific by
restlessly moving about and rematerializing himself into shapes whose contours or colors
cannot be determined in advance.
And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling prairies and Potters’
Fields of all four continents the waves should rise and fall; for here, millions of
mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that
we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming still; tossing like slumberers in
their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness. (116)

“Homeless in his land, his society, his self” (14), the “Pacific Man” contests his fixed
status as resource and instrument by “dreaming still,” “tossing like slumberers,” and
retaining its “restlessness.” Unable to provide further specifications of Pacific man’s
morphogenetic practices, Olson’s task in his subsequent works such as “Projective
Verse” and “the Kingfishers” is twofold: to examine more concrete instances of survival
and metamorphosis in the Pacific and to provide poetic instances in which plural bodies
practice their mutations across and against the framed world.
“Projective Verse”: History as its Interruption
Olson’s formulation of “objectism” in an essay “Projective Verse” (1950) extends the
poet’s incomplete effort to define “Pacific Man” at the end of Call Me Ishmael.
Although “Projective Verse” as Olson’s manifesto on poetics lacks references to actual
places or events, his notion of “COMPOSITION BY FIELD” proposes a method with
which the poet can typographically spatialize the objects and articulate their mutually

39
affective relations. To such end, “Projective Verse” reexplores the mobile “shadow[s]”
that haunt the Pacific in Call Me Ishmael and renames their agility as “the kinetics of the
thing” that constantly differentiates itself (16-17). While Olson’s use of the term
“kinetics” helps him theorize the magnetic “pull” he imagines Melville might have felt
“to the origin of things” (Ishmael, 15), the word “thing” in the phrase has to be read also
in conjunction with a similar reference in the essay “The Resistance” (1953) so as to
clarify Olson’s notion of “the thing” and “the object” as something that is at once
constituted as resource and is imbued with a capacity for its re-origination : “[m]an came
here by an intolerable way. When man is reduced to so much fat for soap,
superphosphate for soil, fillings and shoes for sale, he has, to begin again” (emphasis
mine, 174).
Olson’s later text “Proprioception” (1962) underscores his indebtedness to Alfred
North Whitehead’s philosophy that examines mutual transformation of the sentient
subject and the sensible object in their contingent encounter.
8
Influenced by Whitehead’s
notion of “actual entities” which, as “drops of experience, complex and interdependent,”
“ingress” or differentiate the sensible “data” of other actual entities, Olson insists upon
the necessity to engage in a similar differential of the objects and their heretofore
imperceptible qualities. To do so, a human body, according to Olson, needs to enact its
“kinesthesia” by bracketing its “inner mechanism” that administers one’s habits of
“eating, sleeping, urinating” and by “wash[ing] the ego out” (181). Taken out of one’s
routinized perception, a human could reemerge within an ensemble of disparate objects
which Olson calls “the ‘body’ of us as object” (181-182). Postulating the human body as

40
such expositional object within the larger world consisting of animate and non-living
things, Olson likens the human body to a quasi-cinematic space that is vulnerably
exposed to the unknown elements from the outside: a human body resembles a
“cavity/cave: probably the ‘Unconscious’” that experiences “the universe flowing-in,
inside” (181, 183).
9

As one specific object among many that are mutually and differently affective, the
poet begins to co-construct an “OPEN FIELD” in which the “objects” of the world at
once relate to and affect one another. The poet’s task, then, is to produce a form of
writing that at once differentiates the perceptibility of other objects and relays such
sensible “data” to other affecting and affectable entities including his readers. What
arises in such transaction is a series of singular objects that differentiate and transmit
other objects’ sensible affects:
First, some simplicities that a man learns, if he works in OPEN, or what can also
be called COMPOSITION BY FIELD, as opposed to inherited line, stanza, over-
all form, what is the “old” base of the non-projective.
(1) the kinetic of the thing. A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got
it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way
over to, the reader. Okay. Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high
energy-construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge. So: how is the poet to
accomplish same energy, how is he, what is the process by which a poet gets in, at
all points energy at least the equivalent of the energy which propelled him in the
first place, yet an energy which is peculiar to verse alone and which will be,
obviously, also different from the energy which the reader, because he is a third
term, will take away? (16-17)

While the “same energy” traverses the extratextual object, the poem, and its reader, its
“kinetics” is changed by and changes its recipients. By providing a juncture between any
two entities that remain “peculiar” and “equivalent” to one another, Olson’s “OPEN

41
FIELD” designates an amorphous space that arises from an articulation of these scattered
singularities.
Olson thus confers prime importance to the poetic form that inscribes the matter’s
processual formation by foregrounding its typographical movement and syllabic
syncopation. Situated between the two types of object outside the text, i.e., the thing in
the world and the reader, a poetic form dramatizes the former’s reorigination in the
present and the latter’s further differentiation of it.
(2) is the principle, the law which presides conspicuously over such composition,
and, when obeyed, is the reason why a projective poem can come into being. It is
this: FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT. . . .
Now (3) the process of the thing, how the principle can be made so to shape the
energies that the form is accomplished. (16-17)

If poetic form responds to the object’s demand that its “principle” be “made” and its
“energies” be “shape[d],” it retains the trace of the object’s preponderance to the poetic
subject. Here, the poet is passively called upon to receive, mimic, and differentiate the
object’s metamorphoses. Thus, as the thing’s kinetic energy “propell[s]” the poet to
create its formal equivalent, both the poet and the reader are requested by the thing itself
to “obey” its principle of constant change.
10
This obeisance to the demand that the
thing’s “ principle” be (re)made into its “form” leads to a production of opens where
human bodies accede to the “secrets objects share,” i.e., the capacity to morph into
different forms in the midst of socio-political duress (247).
11

But such “secrets” also question an institutionalized form of historical knowledge
as they register themselves percussively as “bang, against tenses” at “at every given
moment of composition” (21). By underscoring the object’s acoustic disruption of both

42
chronological “tenses” and “grammar . . . as we have inherited it,” Olson seems to rework
Whitehead's notion of “the entity” and locates its kinetic energy in the occult haunting of
the past in the present (Whitehead II.X.I 208).
12
In short, in contrast to Whitehead's
notion of "prehension" that many commentators argue is attuned to the “immediate past"
(cf. Shaviro 29), Olson's "object” seems to arrive from multiple temporalities that cannot
be anticipated in advance. Departing from Whitehead’s notion of “inheritance” that
derives the thing’s character from “the presiding occasion” and helps modify its
“subsequent occasions through the rest of the body," Olson aims to inherit multiple pasts
which, in his formulation, “spring up like unknown, unnamed vegetables in the patch”
(244).
Positing the past as the transcendental being that nonetheless recurs in and
militates against the canonized doxa in the present, objectism as a mode of historiography
comes to resemble Jacques Derrida’s notion of “hauntology” that theorizes the matter’s
constitutively apparitional appearance and passing in the phenomenological present:
“What surpasses the senses still passes before us in the silhouette of the sensuous body
that it nevertheless lacks or that remains inaccessible to us . . . Transcendence, the
movement of super-, the step beyond . . . , is made sensuous in that very excess”
(151). Like Derrida’s attention to the spectral event that is characterized by its passing in
phenomenal world, Olson’s “percussive bang” reverberates as the past that haunts the
present. Reworking Whitehead’s attention to the immediate past that “presides” the
present and approaching Derrida’s notion of “inheritance” that witnesses the shock with

43
which the past recurs “anew” and “as the new” (49), Olson’s “object” tends to appear
“fresh for both sound and percussive use” and disrupt the present episteme (244).
A Transpacific Articulation in “The Kingfishers”
Olson’s long poem "The Kingfishers" (1950) foregrounds the Asia Pacific as an open
field of historical objects—both human and non-human—that have survived America’s
militarist and racist determinations of their values in the world. In the poem, two
“objects” in Asia are presented as instances of what Olson calls the “will to change,” the
thematic and formal indices of survival and metamorphosis of bodies under social duress:
the kingfishers that were exported from ancient Cambodia and Mao Zedong as the
theorist of resistance in colonized China. The poem thus begins by a reflexive meditation
on the possible method with which the poet can liberate the birds from the transpacific
circuit of exchange and begin to describe their colors outside such economy.
1.
What does not change / is the will to change

He woke, fully clothed, in his bed. He
remembered only one thing, the birds, how
when he came in, he had gone around the rooms
and got them back in their cage, the green one first,
she with the bad leg, and then the blue,
the one they had hoped was a male

Otherwise? Yes, Fernand, who had talked
lispingly of Albers and Angkor Vat.
He had left the party without a word.
How he got up, got into his coat,
I do not know. When I saw him, he was
at the door, but it did not matter,
he was already sliding along the wall of the night, losing himself
in some crack of the ruins. That it should have
been he who said, “The kingfishers!
who cares

44
for their feathers
now?” (167)

If Fernand’s unsuccessful call for the party attendees to “care about the [kingfishers’]
feathers” in the US conveniently authorizes the poet’s far superior ability to describe the
kingfishers, the very poet cannot provide such depiction of their colors. Instead, he is left
with their vague impression that comes to pass from his waking consciousness.
The poem thus proceeds to enfigure Mao Zedong and his words as the
metamorphosing objects that extend the injunction to “know thyself” that many argue is
inscribed upon the mysterious stone at Delphi (Maude 58). Like the Greek stone that
paradoxically publicizes its inscrutability, the poem encrypts and shelters Mao’s words in
a French translation as a form of foreign secrets and yet openly displays such form itself.
I thought of the E on the stone, and of what Mao said
la lumiere"
but the kingfisher
de l'aurore"
but the kingfisher flew west
est devant nous!
he got the color of his breast
from the heat of the setting sun! (168)

Mao’s words in French describe the kind of social and personal change in the
decolonizing world which the kingfishers cannot enact. Thus, Mao’s invitation for his
peasants to organize an insurgency as “la lumiere . . . de l’aurore (the light of the dawn)”
extends the kingfishers’ attempts to escape “the heat of the setting sun” that scorches
their feathers in Asia or the US. Although Robert von Hallberg claims that “[t]he
particular beliefs and objectives that motivated Mao and his supporters do not enter the

45
poem, or Olson’s thinking” (37), the passage here foregrounds Mao and his words as the
“objects” whose appearances need to be actualized again and anew in the poem.
13

As the two “objective” indices of “the will to change” themselves and their
milieus, the kingfishers and Mao present strikingly similar typographical movements and
syllabic gestures that interrupt and exceed the narrative order. These lines’ rightward
movement on the page dramatizes the objects’ desires to move spatially while the same
lines become increasingly shorter and percussive so as to instantiate the speed and agility
of such movements.
It nests at the end of a tunnel bored by itself in a bank. There,
six or eight white and translucent eggs are laid, on fishbones
not on bare clay, on bones thrown up in pellets by the birds.
On these rejectamenta
(as they accumulate they form a cup-shaped
structure) the young are born.
And, as they are fed and grow, this
nest of excrement and decayed fish becomes
a dripping, fetid mass
Mao concluded:
nous devons
nous lever
et agir! (168)

By discovering the regenerative capacity in their own “rejectamenta” and ”excrement,”
the kingfishers turn these seemingly worthless matters into objects that nurture the
newborn and transform the earth’s shape. Correspondingly, Mao’s words travel to and
transform the rural peasants and others into the agents of insurgency.
14
In addition to
such narrative indices of the “will[s] to change,” the poem prosodically reinstantiates the
birds’ and the peasants’ active interruption of the present order by underscoring their

46
short, explosive syllables, e.g., the kingfishers’ “dripping, fetid mass” and Mao’s call for
the peasants to “lever” and to “agir.”
The poem, however, critically unmoors Mao’s dictum of change from its putative
anchorage in rural China, a space that is often presumed as the fixed basis upon which
certain “subjects” achieve revolutionary change. Showing an implicit skepticism toward
Mao’s tendency to subjectivate the rural peasantry as “the fundamental revolutionary
force and power base” (Robert Young 183) and to interpellate them as the agents of
social change that Mao wants to see implemented in colonized China, Olson
deterritorializes the Chinese tactician’s words and reinserts them into a Whiteheadean
universe in which any entities can mutually encounter, “prehend,” and transformed one
another. Olson’s Maoism thus partially questions Mao’s tendency to subjectivate certain
bodies and force them to institute his prefixed idea of change.
15

Deterritorializing the plural “will[s] to change” across and against such spatially
bounded protocols that constitute subjects, the objects in “the Kingfishers” produce a
shifting space in which they initiate “a discrete or continuous sequence of measurable/
events distributed in time.” Therefore, they irrupt in the poem as the serial in the
sequence of a long sentence while publicizing their successive (re)originations. The
poem here formalizes its own “message”:
is the birth of air, is
the birth of water, is
a state between
the origin and
the end, between
birth and the beginning of
another fetid nest

47
is change, presents
no more than itself . . .

This very thing you are (171, my emphasis)

The poem designates the readers as the “thing[s]” and urges them to critique the racist
taxonomy that essentializes the bodes in the both coasts of the Pacific through their
patient “look” that questions the normative visuality of race and attunes itself to the types
of light and brightness that exceed the binary scheme of “blackness” and “whiteness.”
Like a “desubjectified” body which, in Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation, “destroy[s]
the instinctive forces” and “replace[s] them with transmitted forces” of the outside,
Olson’s reader as “the thing” becomes a passage for such “light” that otherwise remains
invisible within the current scheme of racialized colors (Deleuze and Guattari 172).
The light is in the east. Yes. And we must rise, act. Yet
in the west, despite the apparent darkness (the whiteness
which covers all), if you look, if you can bear, if you can,
long enough

as long as it was necessary for him, my guide
to look into the yellow of that longest-lasting rose

so, you must, and, in that whiteness, into that face,
with what candor, look

and, considering the dryness of the place
the long absence of an adequate race (172)

As the racist cartography “which covers all” under the cultural screen of whiteness that
blinds our vision, the poem seeks a concealed light among the devalorized entities such
as “the yellow of that long-lasting rose.” The poem then asks its readers to witness the
passage of incandescent “light” and “candor” and to become its peculiar “equivalent.”
Critically exceeding the terms that govern “whiteness,” “yellowness,” and other types of

48
racialized hues, these bodies that look are now recruited in the poem as potential
constituents of “an adequate race” that may replace the “races” that govern the Pacific
today. But if such “race” cannot be aggregated as a totality and remains missing today,
the poem tentatively concludes with its thematic and formal call to institute equality
among the devalorized objects such as “maggots” and “stones” in the Asia Pacific: “shall
you uncover honey / where maggots are? [/] I hunt among stones”. (173).
Kiyota Masanobu: A Poetics of “Objet” in Okinawa under the US occupation
The kind of transpacific objectivism Olson calls for in “The Kingfishers” needs to be
linked with other literary works in the Pacific that formally rematerialize the objects that
are seen as dispensable. Writing contemporaneously in the US-occupied Okinawa of the
1950s and the 1960s without much influence from New American Poetry, the poet Kiyota
Masanobu (1938~ ) has sought to transfigure variously subjugated bodies in the island as
the “objets [obuje]” that relate to one another and potentially constitute their “invisible
commune.” In the US-occupied Okinawa that is inhabited by Okinawans, non-
Okinawans, and the US soldiers, Kiyota’s notion of “objets” conceptualizes their desires
for an “exodus” from the regime that discursively subordinates and materially subjugates
them within the structure of military occupation.
From the outset, Kiyota’s poetics critiques the student writers of the previous
generation as their didactic critiques of the US military occupation and land confiscation
posited the landholding peasants as the exemplary agents of the anti-American struggle.
While their poems and essays published in the journal Ryudau Bungaku (the University of
the Ryukyus’ Literature) discursively formulated Okinawa as a unified ethnic culture,

49
Kiyota critiques such self-racializing tactic as it not only confirms the racialized
hierarchy set in place among the US, Japan, and Okinawa but risks excluding those who
do not conform to the idealized notion of the male landholders, e.g., the landless farmers,
female laborers, and non-Okinawan workers recruited from Taiwan, the Amami Islands,
and elsewhere.
Kiyota questions these writers’ self-orientalizing portrayals of the peasants as they
confirm American or Japanese stereotypes of “Okinawans” and buttress their allegedly
superior position as the representatives of such stereotyped populous. As Michael
Molasky points out, although the poem “The Colored Race” (1956) by Akira Arakawa,
the movement’s leading figure, insists upon a potential solidarity between the Okinawan
farmers and the African American soldiers in the island, Arakawa’s homogenization of
Okinawans as the purified race compromises his “vision of a coalition among the racially
oppressed” (100). Moreover, Arakawa’s earlier poem “An Orphan’s Song” presents
Okinawa’s landscape as a timeless reservoir of ethnic culture and remains a case of what
Fanon calls “a nationalist work of art that shuts him up in a stereotyped reproduction of
detail” (224). The strict correspondence the poem sets up between such stereotyped
culture and the aspects of the island’s nature only promotes Arakawa’s position as one
who can represent and is a representative of “the natural origin of [national] culture” in
Okinawa’s burgeoning postwar public space (Readings 70).

50
. . . Once the sky of this island was deep
so was the sea of this island.
But Yes!
Not only were the sky and the sea deep
so was the green of the mountains, so was the heart of the people.

And now,
where has the beautiful language of this island
gone?
The rising of the sea tide, an explosion that begins with it
The flow of morning mist, a gun smoke that begins with it.

Representing the colonized culture only by recourse to the debased terms within
imperialist binary, the poem ultimately underlines the poet’s status as the representative
of the “ethnic” culture who is powerful enough to command his “populous” not to deviate
from such essentialized notions of who they are: “Women/ Stop being hypocrites./
Children,/ stop being blind./ Men,/ stop being an authority. . . . We must harmonize our
song with the people’s message, which surges forth/ and covers the entire land.” (Cited in
Molasky, 232-233, translation modified)
16

Poetics of “Objets”
Against such ethnic nationalism, Kiyota insists upon the necessity to “liberate the
village” against the colonial scheme that only recognizes or compensates the
marginalized groups and individuals. Thus, the poems and the essays by Kiyota
invariably shed a light upon the landless, the poor, and the women whose thoughts and
desires remain invisible to the culturalist intellectuals and the landholding elites.

51
Resembling Fanon’s paradoxical and fluid notion of “national culture” that is devoid of
any ahistorical essence or substance as it constitutes its “fluctuating movement which
[people] are just giving shape to” (227), Kiyota’s poetics aims to give images to the
disparate array of people who strive toward “an invisible commune” that emerges in its
“descent” (33).
Insofar as these bodies are physically “starved” and politically “invisible” in the
margins of both the village and the city, Kiyota’s writings imagine and image them as the
potential constituents of an invisible “commune” or “village” that traverses and spreads
across the spaces that are already represented within the structure of the occupation.
Writing on the unorthodox Marxist poet Kurota Kio, Kiyota examines what he calls “the
depth of sharing” that may arise from such mutually incommensurate, marginalized
bodies that remain unrepresented in postwar Okinawa (34, 36). Their “hunger” and
“starvation” not only signify their material poverty but also operate as the transcendental
ground that constantly informs and reforms their desires to live against and without
institutionalized hierarchy that links the metropole and the colony.
In the process in which the landless farmers—the farmers who cannot be
farmers—persistently deny their lingering desires for the invisible land and the
kind of life that they could not own but instead continued to have lost and been
deprived of, “those who starve” wander on the streets and form a chain of those
whose lives slipped out of the social system. After their lives have been
thoroughly exposed to those who live comfortably within the system, we could
produce thoughts and poems that go beyond being a farmer . . . . When [the
peasants] are alienated from the institutionalized struggle and are deprived of their
visibility within society, their lived experience of hunger forces them to face their
possible deaths in their quotidian lives. Hunger, then, ceases being a merely
physical experience of being hungry and impregnates itself with a rigorous
questioning and critique of the reality as such. (29)

52
As the unrepresentable residue left out by the politics of recognition, such “hunger”
reverberates among and helps relate the poor peasants, workers, and others and links
them into a “commune” that cannot be recognized as an aggregate social group by the
state(s). In a more aesthetic term, Kiyota argues that the multiplicity of such “starving”
bodies must disclose the “resource for sympathetic relations that possibly emerges even
prior to our attainment of shared sensible perceptions” (34).
While subordinated to and often inevitably employed in the structure of the
military occupation as its “objects,” the bodies in Kiyota’s poems reemerge as “objets
(obuje)” and resignify their own sentient and sensuous singularities. As the French term
“objet” in the Japanese vocabulary usually designates art object placed in a museum or
gallery, Kiyota’s resituation of the alienated “object” as an aesthetic “objet” is rather
obvious here. Therefore, it becomes crucial for Kiyota’s poetics to observe and depict
how “objects” could matter sensuously and semantically as their own “objets” within the
space that is occupied by the imperial state. In contrast to Olson’s “objectism” that
emphasizes the objects’ formal and acoustic metamorphoses, Kiyota’s poetics of “objets”
tends to singularize the socially destitute bodies as their own uniquely strange visual
images.
The problem won’t be solved by proposing a [political] prescription. Nor will it
be ameliorated through the normative form of perception that seduces us to let go
of our attempts to think logically. If these methods risk overlooking the very
status of the object in society and, by doing so, leave unexamined the current state
of our alienation, I propose instead to deepen precisely such state of alienation so
that an alternative form of alienation emerges within the self and overlaps with
the first form of alienation. . . . Only the logic that allows us to own ourselves as
“the things” that proliferate upon and across variously demarcated divisions in the
systematized society is capable of interrupting the very alienation. Instead of
fearing objectification, it is more productive to willingly become an object first

53
and then to explore what necessarily exceeds such objectification in the space
where the notion of human subject is already bankrupt as a condition of human
existence.

The reality is not the only thing that changes. We ourselves are changing and will
change. By achieving our metamorphosis into objets, we will be able to query
into a more fundamental condition of human existence. (267)

Declaring that the politics that merely rewards or punishes preexisting “subjects” is
“bankrupt,” Kiyota recognizes the bodies’ existence as “the things” and embraces their
alienated status in Okinawa and elsewhere as the condition that enables them to become
their own imagist “objets.” Kiyota’s essay on the Okinawan abstract painter Adaniya
Masayoshi further clarifies the ways in which “objects” undergo their rebirths as “objets”
primarily as visual images that are are imbued at once with their “material resistance in
the world and their willingness to give their resistance a form” (21).
Kiyota’s poem “Poetic Fragments of a Man Called Crayfish” (1963) provides
instances of such bodies that survive and resist the military occupation and reemit their
materially palpable “hunger” through their becomings-image. Written five years after the
end of “the All-Island Struggle” where the ethno-nationalist coalition only succeeded in
achieving an annual payment from the US for the confiscated land, the poem begins by
depicting a ruined landscape that analogically references the political space that has been
left vacant by the agrarian nationalist struggle.
17
By seeking within such ruined space a
potential to renew one’s perceptive relation to the world, the poet enunciates his own
“freedom” in the poem’s epigraph: “I stand and am blown by the wind that passes in the
ruin. On such day, I utter to them the word ‘freedom’” (228). If the “wind” blows into
and demands to be felt in the space that is now devoid of hegemonic political viewpoints,

54
the poem begins its critique of habituated perception that locks people up within the
imperial matrix of subjectivities.
Having killed a tender-hearted man
and the beggar’s habit in me,
I ride the mobility of naked revolution from town to village.
From village to town, I nail a chant repeatedly
into the hollowed space of the emptied breasts:
the army of the farmers’ alliance rise now,
of those who have been ravished by the habituated perception of the Asian
peasants.
By doing so, I span the epicenters of the revolution
that thins itself out. (228)

Having critiqued both “the beggars’’ habit” and “the habituated perceptions” held by the
self-alleged revolutionaries, the poem depicts the mobile bodies that rise up from various
“epicenters” of the failed struggle that now inevitably “thins itself.” In lieu of the
agrarian nationalists who have ultimately desired to be compensated or recognized by the
US and/or Japan, the poem discovers the lurking and burgeoning presence of much more
resolutely egalitarian struggle that arises without its territorially bounded space,
representative subjects, and institutional foundation.
The “crayfish” is one such “objet” that attests to the human body’s objectification
in the occupied landscape and visualizes its political hunger for the potential opening of
an articulatory space.
Having heard the words of
a young revolutionary who digs the festers in his thoughts that cut you apart,
the man of crayfish spews his froth and tightens his claws.
Enraptured by the rainbow that hangs over it,
he howls in a frothy whisper that does not issue its words. (230)

The crayfish’s hard shell protects its desire for an egalitarian “commune” and disperses it
into non-discursive visible matters such as “froth” and “rainbow.” As “the man of

55
crayfish,” it transports these silent images backward and laterally to the other bodies that
similarly desire to escape from the regimes of subjectification in Okinawa.
The crayfish thus eschews a “horizontal” form of camaraderie that sutures those
who presume to share a “habituated” perception and embraces its lateral/backward
movement as a contingent opportunity to meet and relate to strangers.

Not for the sake of a revolutionary army that institutes itself horizontally
Not for the sake of lonely embraces with which people mutually hold each other
horizontally
You who crawl and tread upon this round earth
do so because you want to be met by the vertical arrivals of thoughts
which penetrate and scrape the earth’s core.
What you saw, however, was a broken harp.
On the street where an autumnal wind passes,
Unable to absorb the reverse flow of dusk with its flood-like quickness,
you must travel
along the coasts of constant vagrancy and departure. (232)

Having forgone a “horizontal” exchange of dogmatic sensibilities, the crayfish treads
upon “this round earth” and is met by “the vertical arrivals” of thoughts that “penetrate,”
“scrape,” and arrive into the islands for the first time. However, if such thoughts
immediately efface themselves like “an autumnal wind” or an ephemeral “dusk,” the poet
must obtain a “broken harp” in order to remember such “thoughts” that still remain
problematic and enigmatic to his perception. Here, the roundness of the earth’s surface
serves as the rigorously geometrical condition of possibility whereby his music that
translates such thoughts could be heard among multiple strangers who reside in the
islands. Ultimately, the crayfish holds its singular music in its solitary body and stands
upon “a coastline with no interior,” awaiting to contact other bodies that are similarly cast

56
ashore on their respective coasts that extend from their solitary bodies and do not enclose
or delimit any preexisting political community.
A “Commune” of Objets
The crayfish’s lateral distribution of political hunger as an image and music also informs
Kiyota’s partially sympathetic critique of Okinawa’s mainstream activists who opted in
the 1960s for the island’s “reversion” to Japan in order to gain basic human rights
guaranteed by the latter’s constitution. Acknowledging their desire to escape from the
oppressive condition of the occupation, Kiyota seeks to reorient such desire into its lateral
alignment with other individuals’ and groups’ wishes to similarly escape the American or
Japanese state authorities.
In the essay “Homecoming and Exodus” (1968) published in the heyday of the
“reversion” movement, Kiyota repeatedly insists upon the absence of the so-called
“mother country” for various inhabitants of Okinawa and insists upon a potential linkage
among multiple bodies that wish to enact flights from the complicitous network that is set
between the US, Japan, and some Okinawan elites. To illustrate the possibility of such
articulatory form, Kiyota recounts a story from his childhood in Kume Island in which a
Japanese AWOL and a retired Kume Islander soldier meet one another. Although both
men have “escaped” from the same military apparatus, the Japanese soldier’s desire to be
as remote as possible from his division and the aged Kume Islander soldier’s desire to
seek his revenge against the Imperial Army led to the latter’s attempted murder of the
former. As suggested in the essay’s titular reference to the two men’s respective
movements away from the state’s military, i.e., “homecoming” and “exodus,” Kiyota

57
seeks in their frontal antagonism a potential to relate them as “objets” that are imbued
with the desires to be free of state authorities that have variously subjectivated them.
One’s “exodus” and the other’s “homecoming” away from the Japanese imperial army
could thus “sublate” the logic that continuously equates liberation with belonging to a
“mother country.” To do so, Kiyota argues that their bodies must meet one another at the
base of a “V-shaped” relation and translate their antagonisms into a concerted
“prosecution” of the nation-state as such (11, 17).
Transposing this narrative from 1945 onto the social condition of the island prior
to its 1972 “reversion,” Kiyota insists that a similar articulation may hold among the
Okinawan workers of the US military bases who initiate their anti-war strike, the
American sergeant who refuses his deployment in Vietnam, and the student activists in
Tokyo who have opposed the1960 renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty that concedes
to the US a quasi-permanent entitlement to the part of Okinawa’s land for military use.
Kiyota’s “commune” or “village” links these different groups of people insofar as he
believes that their “primordial emotions” encourage them to avoid hierarchical relations
and adopt modes of co-existence with their neighbors. However, if they need to collide
against each other as they remain subjectivated as Okinawan workers, American soldiers,
and Japanese students, Kiyota insists that the “true solidarity exists in a place where
poetry and thoughts grow,” disclosing their “affective desires” to live convivially that are,
however, increasingly difficult to find sustainable forms in the colonized space (22).
Objec(t)s in and against the World Picture

58
Extending Olson’s “COMPOSITIONAL FIELD” of “objects” into Kiyota’s “invisible
commune” of “objets,” the Asia-Pacific as America’s pictorial “target” critically
illuminates the mutative and affective lives that resist being known or classified
according to the imperialism’s enlightening logos. Instead, these bodies present their
current objecthood as the condition that enables their becomings as the aesthetically
perceptible objects that are singularly unique. Percussively, imagistically, and formally
disrupting the linear development and spatial expansion of imperialism(s) in the
twentieth-century Asia Pacific, Olson’s “objects” and Kiyota’s “objets” constitute an
incessantly changing shape of the space that is, according to Heidegger, “withdrawn from
representation” and thus no longer inhabited by representable subjects. Critically
exceeding the nation-states or their national literatures, Olson’s and Kiyota’s poetics
coexist and co-implicate one another as the two resonant practices that produce an
emergent field of obje(c)ts that enacts its opening against and across the Asia Pacific as
America’s areal target

59
Chapter 1 Endnotes

1
Moreover, according to Harootunian and Miyoshi, the field’s more recent commitment
to "preserving the nation-state as the privileged unit of teaching and study" made it a
recipient of donations from the foreign investments keen upon promoting "balanced" and,
therefore, "uncritical" images of the nation-states in the US public (2, 8, 5).

2
Corresponding to and reinforcing such discursive shift in the pedagogical space,
Christine Klein demonstrates that America’s “middle-brow” cinematic and literary
representations of the region in the 1950s and the 1960s reinforced “global imaginary of
containment” of communist Asia and “global imaginary of inclusion” (32-37) of its
liberal, capitalist counterpart. As Klein notes, the film The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
epitomizes the use of sexualized metaphor in depicting the threat of communism to the
US domestic sphere as if it is a contagious disease. On the other hand, the integrationist
examples from the popular culture include magazines such as the Saturday Review and
films such as The King and I in which Americans retain their political and material
superiority and deploy such superiority pedagogically in order to inculcate the
“unenlightened” Asians into values relates to “democracy” (37, 77, 12-13).

3
As Heidegger notes, “In truth, however, the shadow is a manifest, though impenetrable,
testimony to the concealed emitting of light. In keeping with this concept of shadow, we
experience the incalculable as that which, withdrawn from representation, is nevertheless
manifest in whatever is, pointing to Being, which remains concealed” (154)

4
Heidegger’s discussion of occluded light as modernity’s critical excess finds resonance
in Akira Mizuta Lippit’s notion of “avisuality”: “This order of invisibility is never given
to sight; it resides in the other senses as invisible. It is, in a phenomenological sense,
absolutely outside vision. Absolute invisibility establishes a form of secrecy preserved in
the other senses. A visibility that takes place elsewhere, outside, but still, in some manner,
visible, even as nonvisible” (32).

5
On Matthiessen’s rather meticulous readings of Melville’s interest in the whaling
industry and its exploitative economy and Moby-Dick’s anti-narrative form and style, see
his American Renaissance (esp. viii, 396-402, 423-431).

6
Casareno argues that Ahab’s suicidal desire to interiorize the whale is reflective of his
desire to become one with the potential commodity whose exchange value already seen
as declining in the mid-eighteenth century. Ahab’s impossible desire to consume and
become the whale thus corresponds to his desire to decommodify himself in the midst of
the transpacific space opened by a commercial imperialism (101).

60

7
As Olson’s “pacific man” chooses mutation as a last resort that enables them to resist in
the Asia-pacific, a potential for a coming community of those who similarly become
“pacific” in Olson’s scheme cannot be foreclosed to particular identitarian formations in
advance. Thus, Olson’s post-imperial peopling of the pacific evinces surprising openness
in its constitution in comparison to some of his contemporary critics whose readings of
Moby-Dick recover pre-constituted agents that critique or defend America’s multicultural
imperial project. On one hand, Olson’s definition of “pacific man” as one who constantly
mutates in and after imperial catastrophe distinguishes itself sharply from his mentor F.O.
Matthiessen’s soon-to-be canonical valorization of Ishmael as a prefiguration of the US
nation-state’s exceptional tendency to achieve racially and culturally tolerant
democracy. Arguing that Ishmael’s tireless quest for humane relations with the
subordinated non-white workers onboard the whaleship symbolizes America’s post-1945
“democratic dignity” in contrast from its totalitarian counterpart Soviet Union,
Matthiessen writes, “[b]y this full-voiced affirmation of democratic dignity, even of
divine equality, he reveals also with what assurance he felt that a great theme could be
created from the common stuff of American life” (445). Positing itself against such
nationalist induction of the novel, on the other hand, C.L.R James’s Mariners,
Renegades, and Castaways (1953) sees Moby-Dick as an incomplete attempt for the
nineteenth-century author to represent the voices of the non-white workers that offer an
indictment of the US imperialist national culture. Arguing that “Melville gave [these
workers onboard Pequd] dignity, but failed to see through their real power,” James wants
to recruit them as the privileged agents whose production of critical knowledge against
the US imperialism remains stunted in the novel itself.
Donald Pease, in his “Introduction” to the reissued edition of James’s book, in
effect recruits the latter as the “model” for the anti-imperialist canon of his New
Americanist paradigm, a reading strategy that is tantamount to viewing “mariners,
renegades, castaways” as the “model” citizens of the US. James’s work, argues Pease,
offers “a possible model of American Studies as, like Ellis Island, a site where becoming
American would become indistinguishable from becoming ‘mariners, renegades and
castaways” (xxx, emphasis added).

8
Therefore, Olsonian objectism and its interest in transferring and transforming the
object's sensuous potentialities into a poetic form clearly reflects Whitehead's
theorization of "prehension" that marks the evental becomings of both that which
perceives and that which is perceived and felt:

That every prehension consists of three factors: (2) the "subject" which is
prehending, namely, the actual entity in which that prehension is a concrete
element; (b) the "datum" which is prehended; (c) the "subjective form" which is
how that subject prehends that datum. (23)

61

Such transaction of the sensed specificity from the "datum" to the "subject" and its
perceptive "form" seems to have a directly influenced Olson's triangulation of the kinetic
"thing," the sentient poet, and the poetic form in "Projective Verse." Moreover,
Whitehead's formulation of the eternal object's actualization or "concrescence" happens
through a particular mode of objectification in which both the perceived and the perceiver
change or become again and again (23, esp. (viii)).

9
This is why Nathan Brown critiques previous readers of Olson such as Byrd and Altieri
for whom objectism remains important for its consolidation of democratic ethics among
human and non-human lives. Cautioning against such tendency to valorize the organicist
“logic of the living” in pursuit of “biological autonomy” (Don Byrd) or the poet’s
participation in “what all beings share by being alive” (Charles Altieri), Brown argues
that Olson’s objectism remains at odds with “the wholistic systematicity and continuous
self-production of the organism” usually valorized by Olson’s vitalist readers (4).

10
Thus, despite the oft-made criticisms of Olson’s sexist favoring of male poets as the
exemplary recipients of such “energies,” the basic tenets of “objectism” itself allow all
beings, regardless of their variously sexed or (non)organic status, to engage in poetic
inscription that aesthetically responds to the flashing irruption of inorganic energies in
space (Brown 8, Davidson 203).

11
Olson’s interest in the human body’s predominantly passive exposure to the things and
the subsequent experience of becoming is discernible in a much earlier journal entry:
“[L]ife is the matter, and all you can do with it is, together, to make certain things out of
it with one another. I am a landscape, and not a man. What you have so far had are the
seasons, as a landscape does. It changes, is acted on, does not itself act” (emphasis mine,
“Enniscorthy” cited in Nichols 34).

12
Robin Blaser comments upon the importance Whitehead’s notion of “the vectorial,
fluency of the world” in Olson’s oeuvre: “This is important to Olson because origin,
beginning, and renewal are finally the true subjects of his poems, and such regard
transforms the finitude of modern humanism with its despair and terrorisms. He was to
search for active form, rather than the referential kind which he reads as entrapment in
present cultural conditions. A dead duck, if I may so express myself” (207).

13
For instance, we know from Ralph Maude’s research of his personal friendship with
the Asia specialists such as Robert Payne and Owen Lattimore who, on separate
occasions, met or interviewed Mao and were his sympathetic associates (41). In one of
the letters to Robert Creeley collected in Mayan Letters, Olson proposes a speculative
theory that triangulates the historical Malaysians whom he insists have migrated to the
Americas, the present-day Mayans who descended from such an Asian people and once
carved the “glyphs” as the “field of force” that housed “ multiple . . . expressions,” and

62

the Maoist peasants’ struggle in rural China against both Japanese colonialists and the
US-backed Kuomintang party (KMT): “culture is confidence, & surely, Mao Makes
Mexico certain . . . this whole Peninsula . . . is a muzzle rammed for firing” (98, 113,
79). If both the Chinese peasants and the Mayan villagers are two separate instances of
potentially revolutionary change, Olson somewhat mysteriously reiterates the same hope
in one of the earliest worksheets for “the Kingfishers” as the section V of the poem has a
heading: “the going on—change again: the Long March” (Maude 31). See also Maude’s
reference to what Olson calls “a tremendous pick-up from history other than that which
has been usable (123).

14
Olson’s composition also retains what Eduardo Cadava sees as the “geological strata”
that Emerson writes about referentially and writes with formally. As Cadava argues in his
analysis of Emerson’s natural and social landscape of the New World, he writes:
“Emerson’s passage, with its innumerable layers and strata, comes to us in the form of the
very geological strata of which he is writing. Like the earth that bears the traces of the
entirety of its history, Emerson’s language inscribes, within its very movement, the traces
of all the texts that have informed his own” (151).

15
As Mao defines in the well-known “On Practice: On the Relation between Knowledge
and Practice, between Knowing and Doing” (1937), one’s attainment of knowledge that
potentially changes him or her is inseparable from the person’s active engagement with
and transformation of the very object of knowledge. This is why, in a well-known
example Mao provides in the same essay, the taste of the pear needs to be known and
changed at once.

16
Partially acknowledging these poets’ allegedly politicized writings as “precious” (202),
Kiyota nonetheless denounces their construction of the “mass” as docile and monolithic
since it replicates “the definition of the mass which the very authority allocates in order
to effectively curtail and usurp their power” (208). Insofar as these writers tend to
stereotype “the mass” (206) and their consciousness ironically comes to resemble that of
the “managers” of the workers (209), Kiyota thinks that such politics amounts to a
politics of “resignation” and discourages the peasants to “strive for a commune that
descends downward.” At best, such culturalist politics of representation could help
organize their “upward structuration through direct appeal and petition which, however,
miserably absorbs them into the dominant system” (223).

17
Atsushi Toriyama argues that the agrarian struggle that gained momentum in 1955
against the US military’s land appropriation at locations such as Isahama and Ie Island
partially provided the platform on which local bureaucrats and ordinary citizens
expressed their mixed desires to seek economic compensation from Japan and to critique
the latter’s allowance of the US military presence in Okinawa (88-90). Mayuri Tanji also
notes the “all-island” struggle’s eventual collapse since the increasing number of the

63

landed farmers opted to “co-operate with the US military and extract maximum profit
(rent)” for the land they own (76).

64
Chapter 2

“Mediauras” of America’s Vietnam War: Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita
Vortex Sutra” and Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s Sur Name Viet Given Name Nam
America’s Vietnam War and the Commodity Culture
The outbreak of America’s Vietnam War historically overlapped with the post-Fordist
invention of “flexible accumulation” that sought to address the crisis of overaccumulation
in the developed countries by generating surplus across an increasingly contracted time-
space between the sites of finance, production, and consumption (Harvey 183). Situated
within such restructuraion of global economy, American, Vietnamese, and Vietnamese
American bodies have arguably appeared in the US public culture prior to and after 1975
as commodities, i.e., the bodies that engage in their own varied "flexible accumulations"
of profit that accrues by way of discursive recognition and monetary compensation.
Therefore, in the post-1975 space of consumption, the mainstream American’s
remasculinized body and Vietnamese American “ethnic” body co-figure one another as
the commodities that complicitously relegitimate America’s rehabilitated moral status
internationally. That is, if the former appears as one who withstands his war trauma
through an increasingly narcissist attachment to and management of his wounded bodies
in the rapidly globalizing economy, the latter is constantly asked to couch its protest
against the war through orientalist tropes that discursively exacerbate their alleged
proximity to the “premodern” world that must be enlightened and protected by the
former. Therefore, for instance, while America’s remasculinized “heroes” such as Rambo
avowedly despise the state bureaucracy and opt to self-manage his war against America’s

65
erstwhile enemies, the publicly “ethnic” subjects such as the author Le Ly Hayslip need
to sell themselves as ones whose lives and bodies incarnate Vietnam’s violated landscape
or nature (Nguyen 108-109).
1
Therefore, despite the seemingly disparate discourses in
which Rambo and Hayslip seem to circulate, they gain recognizability and viability in
American public culture only through the “entrepreneurial” reproduction of their traumas
within the hierarchized binary dividing technology and nature, masculinity and
femininity, the mainstream and the ethnic.
Informed by such problematic, this chapter explores American, Vietnamese
American, and Vietnamese bodies’ possible disarticulation of their commodified status in
the US during and after the Vietnam War through their “auratic” resistances that flash
within the very process of commodification. Resembling a certain “phonic materiality”
Fred Moten discovers in African American literary and music works that “scream[s]” and
contests the body’s enslavement in the market and discloses an “ensemblic publicity that
is activated in and as sound” against “the meanings that comprise dominant culture and
knowledge” (6, 291), the commodity forms this chapter examines materially interrupt the
very process of their commodification during and after the Vietnam War by inscribing or
performing their singularities that, however, only (dis)appear like auratic flashes. Allen
Ginsberg’s poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra” (1966) and Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s film Sur Name
Viet, Given Name (1989) can be paired as two such cases from during and after the
Vietnam War that interrupt the constitutive economic logic that informs the war’s
execution until 1975 and its post-war spectacularization in the US culture. As this
chapter demonstrates, Ginsberg and Trinh differently attend to the commodities’ own

66
decommodifying impulses through various citations of their linguistic and theatrical
excess, pointing to the traversal of auratic materiality that is originarily dispropriative
and, hence, belongs to no proprietor.
The “Hyper (In)Visible” War in the US Consumerist Culture
As Rick Berg and John Carlos Rowe, the editors of The Vietnam War and American
Culture (1992), point out, America’s military defeat in Vietnam nonetheless yields its
“war-surplus” as the mass media have begun to represent and redistribute the war as the
nation-wide spectacle that can be consumed across its divided political spectrum (3). As
Berg argues, the mass-mediated dispersal of the war as a spectacle enabled the
legitimation of two mutually linked forms of domesticity: the nation-state and the nuclear
family: “[t]he family had what appeared to be an intimate acquaintance with Vietnam,
even though the correspondent’s reportage (which would change during the course of the
war) mediated it all” (118-119).
The media’s post-1975 spectacularization of the Vietnam War resumed through
the popular cultural efforts to stage what Jodi Kim refers to as the war’s “masculinist
hypervisible” reappearances (195). According to Susan Jeffords, the remasculinized
heroes that appear in popular works such as the Rambo series, Miami Vice, and Born on
the Fouth of July help recathect the mainstream American public to the rehabilitative
narrative of the nation-state whereby the US begins to police its domestic space and the
outside world once again (xi-xii). Thus, Rambo’s privatized war against the communist
“enemies” corresponds to other male veterans’ more domestic career paths as they begin
to serve as the police officers who survey and arrest the domestic enemies in Miami Vice

67
or Magnum, P.I., or literally become the representative of the nation state in Born on the
Fourth of July (9-10). Consequently, the war memories that do not conform to such
gendered narrative of the nation have been effectively quarantined from the consolidated
border of the dominant American culture, leading critics such as Berg to argue that the
remains of the Vietnam War “stay [as] a problem, or to be more precise the remains of
Vietnam are problematic” (117).
The war memories are further spectacularized and domesticated as the national
property through a case of decidedly more “high cultural” representation that offers a
negative substantiation of the war within the strictly nationalist scheme of imagination.
Corresponding with and augmenting the “hypervisible” process of remasculinizing the
nation, the impulse to monumentalize the war in its “hyperinvisibility” for its national
audience permeates Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Veterans Memorial constructed in the
Washington Mall in 1982.
2
If the wall’s black granite surface allegorizes the war’s
transcendence of discursivity and its etched names of the dead veterans paradoxically
figurate the unfigurability of their deaths, Lin’s Memorial hypostatizes and homogenizes
the war’s invisibility for a range of American audiences who may otherwise harbor
competing claims and views of the war and the government that executed it. To borrow
Kant’s definition of a dialectical notion of the sublime, the Memorial, therefore, allows
its spectators to feel their own “limits and inadequacy” in perceiving the veterans’ deaths
and hypostatizes such inability as the shared resource that reunites America as an
imagined nation.
3
If both “hypervisible” and “hyperinvisible” figurations of the war in
the US culture thus present the war as the consumerist spectacles for the nation, how do

68
writers and artists engage in an alternative mnemonics whereby aural and visual
refigurations of the war disclose the constitutive inappropriability and infinite iterability
of its memories? Moreover, what are the ways in which such works visually and
materially dramatize the non-commodifiable nature of the memories they recite?
Suspending Commodity in “Wichita Vortex Sutra”
Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra” collected in Fall of America (1966)
deploys the iterative technique the poet calls “Auto Poesy” in stockpiling the commodity
depictions of the Vietnam War and other corporate discourses that participate in and
profit from the war. First recorded into his voice recorder and later transcribed and edited
as a poem during his transamerican journey that crisscrosses Canada, California, and the
East Coast, the poem “zigzag[s]” among the commodity descriptions of the Midwestern
US and presents to its readers an architectural composite of these commodified words
that potentially critique and contest their own commodification and dispensation (369).
Such reevaluation of Ginsberg’s interest in mechanically reproducible language in
the commodity culture remains necessary since the critical discussions surrounding his
works and especially “Wichita Vortext Sutra” have repetitiously confirmed the rather
stereotypical characterization of Ginsberg as the enunciator and proprietor of fully
embodied and, hence, authentic “voice” that contests and refuses the logic of mass-
reproduction of language. For example, Marjorie Perloff in her Radical Artifice: Writing
Poetry in the Age of Media uses Ginsberg’s own commentary to argue that he, like other
poets of the 1950s and the 1960s, believes in “[t]he fidelity of verse form to the actual arc
of feeling” and in the potential of his embodied “voice” and “breath” to directly and

69
naturally reflect his mind without artifices (135, 34). Following such assessment,
Michael Davidson explains that “Wichita Vortex Sutra” that records Ginsberg’s
verbalization of the commodity languages exemplifies the larger trend among the poets of
the 1950s to embrace some recording and telephonic devices only as a means to recover
their authentic speeches within the Cold War culture characterized by mass consumption
and state surveillance. As Davidson writes, “[b]ut far from rejecting the tape recorder as
an agent of reification, they embraced it as an accomplice in the recovery of more
authentic speech” (103).
Timothy Yu also praises Ginsberg’s ostensible finesse for detailed descriptions of
specific social contexts that inform and implicate the poet’s own life. Thus, favoring his
“Howl” (1955) that more deftly narrates the poet’s association with the “coterie” of
writers and artists over “Wichita Vortex Sutra” which, to Yu at least, remains “the mirror
image of political institutions and must retain its allegiance to the language spoken by
[them],” Yu laments that the latter poem has lost the “Beat particularity” and its language
now seems largely indistinguishable from the one used by “the existing structures of
power” (36). As Yu continues, the poem’s self-defeatist abstention of descriptive
language leaves Ginsberg “stranded within a media landscape he cannot hope to control”
(36).
4

However, is it possible to discover in “Wichita Vortext Stutra” a more
dialectically critical relation with the commodities it cites? How might we reread the
poem without praising it as an (ideologically suspect) attempt to recover the poet’s
authentic “voice” or merely remaining wary of its ostensibly self-defeatist replication of

70
the dominant discourse? If, as the critics such as Davidson and Yu are already aware,
Charles Bernstein has remarked that Ginsberg, “as his work shows, knows better” about
the “non-absorptive” and anti-narrative materiality of language but “has made an
ideological commitment to such simplicity” (38-39), it is important to move away from
the kind of essentialist binarism that Davidson and Yu reinvoke between the authentic
“voice” and the reproducible “commodity” or the “coterie” of writers and the “discourse”
of the power. Instead, we could witness in the poem a sustained critique which does not
issue from the poet’s own body or consciousness but is enacted by the commodities
themselves.
From the outset, “Wichita Vortext Sutra” shows less interest than many have
presumed in the poet’s own “voice” as the non-commodifiable object that must be
regained against all odds. Instead, it repetitiously thematizes the current unavailability of
utopic space in which we do not appear as commodities to one another. This focus upon
the commodities themselves extends Ginsberg’s previous problematization of the logic of
mass production that has informed his poems’ narrative contents in the 1950s. If, for
example, Ginsberg narrates his ambivalent attachment to “Time Magazine” and imagines
a Whitmanesque sexual rendezvous only among the mass produced vegetables in
“America” (1956) and “A Supermarket in California” (1955) respectively, his work in the
mid-1960s not only narrates his compromised happiness in this commodity culture but
also labors to perform an interruptive break within the logic of commodiifcation.
5

Cognizant of the ways in which his “voice” or “breath” also circulates as commodifiable
in both mass and high cultures, the poems such as “Wichita Vortex Sutra” attend to and

71
refract the commodities’ prismatic materiality that reappear in his poems as the
commodity’s immanent other. As the title of the collection indicates, Ginsberg’s Fall of
America foresees the potential “fall” of the American nation-state and its economy that
profits by dispensing its mass-produced commoditites and commodified human bodies in
the US and South East Asia. Therefore, Ginsberg’s “auto-poetic” assemblage of
commodities that aims to disable America’s war economy begins to bear resemblance to
Walter Benjamin’s notion of “dialectical image” in his unfinished Arcade Project that
points to the self-interruptive caesuras in commodities that undergo their “decline” in the
market. Benjamin’s programmatic effort to “develop to the highest degree the art of
citing without quotation marks” (N1, 10) and Ginsberg’s “auto poetic” sutra composed of
commodity forms point to the possibility to interrupt the flow of capital and commodities
in the social space devoid of its utopic outside.
We can briefly sum up here that Benjamin devises his “literary montage” of
commodities in the early twentieth century Paris as a series of “dialectical images” that
illuminate the commodities’ constitutive tendency to defer their consumers’ desire for a
classless society while they themselves are subjected to the imminent loss of their value
in the market. As Max Pensky summarizes, Benjamin’s historical materialist idea and
practice of “dialectical image” seek to illuminate the commodity’s own “dialectical
explosive” by pointing to its barely perceptible singularity that cannot be purchased in the
economy. Designating such potentially unique and irreplaceable presence of the
commodified thing as “the perceptibility of history,” Benjamin argues that a materialist
historian needs to accumulate instances in which the commodity’s dialectical

72
perceptibility flashes and reorganize these occasions such that their “heightened
graphicness” emerges in a certain montage (Pensky 188, 185).
Benjamin notion of the “perceptibility of history” that inheres in the commodities
extends his earlier theorization in Origin of the German Tragic Drama of the “origin” of
history that paradoxically “originates” through an “imperfect and incomplete” mosaic of
the new images that come to pass in the present: “ [o]rigin [Ursprung], although an
entirely historical category, has, nevertheless, nothing to do with genesis [Enststehung].
The term origin is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into
being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and
disappearance” (emphasis mine, 45). Thus, an alternative “perceptibility” of history that
lies within the commodity requires the very commodity’s (re)origination, becoming, and
disappearance as something uniquely different from itself. Furthermore, insofar as such
idea of “origin [ursprung]” inherits Goethe’s attention to the “Ur-phenomenon” or that
which lies in nature and remains without its expression, Benjamin’s task as a historical
materialist in modern day Paris or elsewhere is to collect commodities and their hitherto
expressionless specificities that cannot be adequately represented in the commodity
culture (Arcades 12). By resembling the eighteenth century allegory maker who “pile[s]
up fragments ceaselessly” so as to rematerialize “the dialectic which is inherent in
origin,” the historical materialist constructs his “long roll of thunder” in which “the
indesctructibility of the highest life in all things,” including commodities, flashes and
reverberates. Benjamin’s somewhat idiosyncratic natural history of capitalist modernity

73
is thus dedicated to the ways in which “singularity and repetition [are] conditioned by one
another” (46).
Ginsberg’s “sutra” produces a similarly citational text which consists of the
American commodities of the mid-1960s and visualizes their decommodifying impulses
into a montage which the poet calls the “vortex.” To situate Ginsberg’s shift toward such
iterative poetics, we might briefly examine his Indian Journal (1970), originally written
between 1962 and 1963, where the poet expresses his growing dissatisfaction with a
conventional narrative poetics and begins to explore an alternative methodology with
which the poet might visualize the objects’ alternative perceptibility. Thus, along with
his “organized experiments” in “mantra,” “Zen meditation,” and “drugs” all of which
operate more or less as the “switchboard[s] making new combinations” of perception at a
“non-verbal-nonceptual level” (52, 93), Ginsberg continues to search for a method that
enables him to align words as material forms that are irreducible to their narrative
significance.
Poetry XX Century like all arts and sciences is devolving into examination-
experiment on the very material of which it’s made. They say “an examination
of language itself” to express this turnabout from photographic objectivity to
subjective-abstract composition of words a la Burroughs. . . .

Now poetry instead of relying for effect on dreaminess of image or sharpness of
visual phanopoeia—instead of conjuring a vision or telling a truth, stops.
Because all visions & all truths are no longer considerable as objective & eternal
facts, but as plastic projections of the maker & his language. So nobody can
seriously go on passionately concerned with effects, the vehicle of the visions,
the conceiver of the truth, which is: words. Language, the prime material itself.

So the next step is, how do you write poetry about poetry (not as objective
abstract subject matter a la Robert Duncan or Pound)—but making use of a
radical method eliminating subject matter altogether. By means of what kind of
arrangements of words. (38-39)

74

Troubled by his inability to practice such “examination-experiment of the very material”
that determines our perception of “reality,” Ginsberg’s text repeatedly seeks to decenter
the poem from the writing subject so that it could reopen perceptive “potentialities
unrestricted by human presupposition” (38). However, the poet could only enlist other
writers’ experimental manners of approaching the “potentialities” of the “outside”
universe: Stein’s “[b]reak up of syntax,” Ashbery’s “[a]rrangement of intuitive key
words,” Burrounghs’ “[r]andom juxtaposition,” and “[a]rrangement of [s]ounds” in both
Artaud and tantric mantras. The passage ends with a recognition of Ginsberg’s
methodological impasse: “I really don’t know what I’m doing now. Begin a new page”
(39).
However, Ginsberg is already aware that an improvisational “arrangement of
words” could enact stoppage of narrative order in both contemporary poetry and the
dominant society: “[n]ow poetry instead of relying for effect on dreaminess of image or
sharpness of visual phanopoeia—instead of conjuring a vision or telling a truth, stops”
(39). If poetry “stops” itself as a consumable form of narrative, it also attests to the larger
possibility to punctuate and interrupt the flow of commodities-at-large in the consumerist
economy.
“Wichita Vortex Sutra” improvises such avowedly impersonal “sutra” so that its
montaged commodities offer graphic instances in which their values as commodities
vitiate on the pages of the poem.
6
Using the voice recorder to montage the “fugitive
things” that pass him by in Kansas, Ginsberg practices a poetics that is “less intense than

75
inner poetizing” while focusing his attention to the perceptibility of such commodities
themselves (Improvised Poetics, 17).
Turn Right Next Corner
The Biggest Little Town in Kansas
Macpherson
Red sun setting flat plains west streaked
with gauzy veils, chimney mist spread
around christmas-tree-bulbed refineries . . . (394)

At the outset, the poem equivocates the putative boundary between commodity and
nature and highlights their mutually imbricated status as the reproducible goods. In
addition, historical knowledge also seems a priori commodified as it too can only be
disseminated within the commodity culture:

76
Prehistoric excavation, Apache Uprising
in the drive-in theater
Shelling Bombing Range mapped in the distance,
Crime Prevention Show, sponsor Wrigley’s Spearmint
Dinosaur Sinclair advertisement, glowing green—
South 9
th
Street lined with poplar and elm branch
spread over evening’s tiny headlights—
Salina Highschool’s brick darkens Gothic
over a night-lit door— (396)

In Kansas, historical knowledge sediments as the debris in the larger history of
commodification as the prehistoric excavation site has now become a tourist venue and
B-films such as Apach Rising (1965) distribute suspect information and ideologies about
the past among its consumers.
Accordingly, “Wichita Vortex Sutra” culls its first reference to Vietnam from the
conservative politician’s remark given during a commercial radio program. Presenting
the poet’s desire to critically “face the nation” as a citation of the title of the popular
political talk show Face the Nation that has been widely broadcast on TV and radio since
1954, the poem begins to unfold itself like a graphic scroll in which commodities become
a reverse ventriloquist for the poet who also desires to critique the war economy.
Face the Nation
Thru Hickman's rolling earth hills
icy winter
gray sky bare trees lining the road
South to Wichita
you're in the Pepsi Generation Signum enroute
Aiken Republican on the radio
Northvietnamese troops now infiltrated but over 25,000
South Vietnamese armed men
our Enemy--
Not Hanoi our enemy
Not China our enemy
The Viet Cong! (398)

77
Indiscriminately enumerating “Aiken Republican” “Pepsi” and “Signum” as what
Ginsberg calls the “pop signs” of the mass consumerist society, the poem’s
indiscrimination between politics and consumption confirms Samuel Weber’s
observation of mass-media’s eventual obliteration of “the difference between the two
categories, actor and politician, to the point of allowing the one to become the other”
(101). In order to survive in the market, “Aiken” and “Pepsi” relate to one another in
their mutually competitive relation as the bearers of profitable novelty, e.g., the news
about the “Viet Cong” or the exciting prospect of joining the “Pepsi Generation.”
However, if these commodities remain valueless unless they are mutually
articulated through the equivalential representation provided by currency in the market
(Marx 139-140), “Aiken,” “Pepsi,” and “Signum” remain vulnerably exposed to the
whimsical tides of consumers’ shifting moods and tastes and, therefore, gradually appear
to us as what Benjamin calls the “rags” and “refuse” that may be discarded anytime
within late capitalist societies. Resembling Benjamin who argues that a materialist
historian “needn’t say anything” but “[me]erely show” such commodities that are
abandoned and rendered inoperative in the market, Ginsberg also refrains from
denouncing the politicians’ imperialist viewpoints and scavenges the American
phantasmagorias of the mid-1960s in order to reposition them as the material entities that
refuse to be bought or sold.
Bomb China’s 200,000,000
cried Stennis from Mississippi
I guess it was 3 weeks ago
Holmes Alexander in Albuquerque Journal
Provincial newsman
said I guess we better begin to do that Now,

78
his typewriter clacking in his aged office
on a side street under Sandia Mountain?
Half the world away from China
Johnson got some bad advice Republican Aiken sang
to the Newsmen over the radio
The General guessed they’d stop infiltrating the South
if they bombed the North—
So I guess they bombed! (398)

Resembling a barricade erected during the Paris Commune which consisted partially of
the commodities that once lined up the city’s boulevard, both the politicians’ demeanors
and their words are stockpiled one by one as if they were the ex-commodities whose
values as the bearers of largely incoherent news about the war in South East Asia have
long vanished.
Such architectonic Ginsberg constructs out of trashed commodities extends his
previous interest in sutric and mantric language that syllabically interrupts the discursive
temporality and replaces it with the bodies that are moved by its sonic reverberation and
intensity. Recalling an anti-Vietnam War rally in 1965 where his sutra momentarily
rendered both hegemonic and counterhegemonic discourses meaningless, Ginsberg
remarks: “So I started chanting the Prajnaparamita Sutra, which was not an argument,
simply a tone of voice from the abdomen. . . . It brought the whole scene down from the
argument to some kind of common tone—because they were desperate too” (Deliberate
Prose, 16). By distributing his “monosyllabic deep-voiced monochordal chant” among
those who attended the rally, including the members of the pro-war Hells’ Angels, the
chant’s vibrant materiality “settled everybody’s breath there in a neutral territory where
there was neither attack nor defense (16-17). Published a year later, “Wichita Vortex
Sutra” similarly disperses and institutes what Ginsberg calls a “common tone” among the

79
commodities and allows them to mutually relate in their desperation and misery within
the structure that exchanges and expends them. Resembling a series of “om, om, zoom,
zoom” that comprises his activist sutra, the poem extracts non-discursive materiality from
commodity language and provides the minimalist summation of its non-commodifiable
intensity and iterability: “language language.”
Smuggling his words from “the black mantras” of the state and the market, as it
were, Ginsberg wants these words to “contradict, counteract, and ultimately overwhelm
their force field of language” (35). Being aware of the full unity between “the name of
the god” and “the god itself” in mantric inscription of names such as “Krishna”, Ginsberg
avows that “Wichita Vortex Sutra” needs to present “a series of syllables that would be
identical with a historical event” and “wanted the historical event to be the end of the
war” (35). If Ginsberg confidently insists that “Krishna is the sound of Krishna,” the
commodity depictions must reverberate their audible refusals to participate in the war and
the war economy of the US.
Continued from page one area
after the Marines killed 256 Vietcong captured 31
ten day operation Harvest Moon last December
Language language
U.S. Military Spokesmen
Language language
Cong death toll
has soared to 100 in First Air Cavalry
Division's Sector of
Language language
Operation White Wing near Bong Son
Some of the
Language language
Communist
Language language soldiers
charged so desperately

80
they were struck with sex or seven bullets before they fell
Language language M 60 Machine Guns . . . (408-409)

The repetitious invocation of “language language” underscores the non-commodifiable
materiality that intermittently irrupts from the commodities and interrupts the linear
narratives of “Operation Harvest Moon” and “Operation White Wing.” Acoustically
crystallizing the commodity’s material excess against itself, “language language”
inscribes and distributes what Benjamin calls “indestructibility of the highest life in all
things” and Ginsberg refers to as “the god itself” across the American commodities in the
mid-1960s. Such graphic instance in which commodities seem to barricade themselves
against the war economy inspires the poet’s statement: “I here declare the end of the
War” (407).
However, Ginsberg’s seemingly authoritative “declaration” remains eclipsed by
the commodities own coagulation into their own critical force field in and as the poem.
Despite the poet’s attempt to appropriate the commodities’ clandestine resistance against
commodification, his “auto-poetic” methodology attests and countersigns his passive
exposure to the commodities’ material force. The passive construction in the following
passage verifies such preponderance of the commodities as the objects vis-a-vis the
poetic subject: “nameless Mystery—/ published to my own senses,/ blissfully received by
my own form . . . ” (407).
Recalling such sensuous and nameless “Mystery” of the commodities in Wichita
and its vicinity, the poem begins to approach the figures of the “Viet Cong” dead: “three
five zero zero” killed in North Vietnam, “256 Vietcong captured,” “”Cong death toll/ has
soared to 100 in . . . Operation White Wing,” (398, 402, 408). If the hawkish

81
politicians’ vilifying remarks about “the Viet Cong” are effectively redirected to the
dialectical interruption of their commodifiability, Ginsberg hopes to open a space in
which the lives considered to be dispensable in both the US and Vietnam relate to one
another as the bearers of the uncommodifiable and common “secret”: “. . . prophecy of
the secret/ heart the same/ in Waterville as Saigon one human form” (404). Although
with a limited degree of success perhaps, “Wichita” thus searches for a potential linkage
between its iterative attempt to interrupt the war economy in the US and its opening of
new sensibility for bodies that inhabit Vietnam or Vietnamese America.
Repetition in Recreation: Trinh T. Minh-Ha's Surname Viet Given Name Nam
Ginsberg’ figuration of the commodities’ “dialectical” refusal to participate in America’s
war economy during the Vietnam War ends with a critique of the war’s dispensation of
human lives in “Waterville as [in] Saigon.” Yet, the poem’s invocation of these bodies
as “one human form” potentially reintroduces a rubric of sentimental humanism and fails
to account for the Vietnamese and Vietnamese American bodies’ invariably
“phantasmagoric” appearances as the commodified “ethnics” or “natives” in the US
media landscape.
Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s film Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) aims to interrupt
such tendency in the post-1975 US to commodify Vietnamese and Vietnamese American
subjects and emblematize their ostensible proximity to the premodern lifeworld and
pristine nature within the larger effort in culture to comparatively highlight America’s
renewed prowess in the globalizing economy. Interrogating the constitutively racist
tenets of such consumptive “multiculturalism” that subjects “the ethnics” to the prospect

82
of “worldly compensation, advancement, and validation” that are tightly controlled and
occasionally distributed by the center (Chow 46), Trinh’s film disables this logic by
soliciting its three Vietnamese American non-professional actors to provide fictitious
repetitions of the testimonies given by three Vietnamese women whose geographical
origins, occupational backgrounds, and personal concerns radically differ from those of
the actors. As these women awkwardly rematerialize the testimonies they do not fully
comprehend or cannot sympathize with, their acts disrupt the doubly racist assumption
that, arguably because of their putative similarity to the “natives” in the “non-west,” the
“ethnics” in the US should verisimilarly substantiate the suffering that has already taken
place out there in Vietnam. Instead, the women’s performances in the film create strange
bodies that resist and exceed the hierarchical binary that classifies people as “the
mainstream,” “the ethnics,” or “the natives” and appear as their own singularizations that
produce and are produced by a series of cinematic fabulations in Sur Name.
Trinh’s film thus affirms witness-bearing as an experience and act whose
possibility is predicated upon the witness’s ineradicable possibility to speak in fiction.
However, the past critics have selectively valorized the film as a rigorous critique of
ethnographic and other forms of constructed knowledge and, therefore, have not paid
sufficient attention to its embrace of historical truth that is grounded in the possibility of
fiction. For example, Marsha Meskimmon praises the film’s “reenacted” testimonials
insofar as they self-consciously disclose their constructedness and contrast with the film’s
second section where the same women seem to express their own thoughts and wishes
(58). Peter Feng similarly valorizes Trinh’s alleged interrogation of received knowledge

83
in ethnography yet critiques the film’s second section that seems to be “framed, shot, and
edited by the terms that conform to Trinh’s aesthetic criteria” (200). Despite their
ultimately divergent assessments of the film, Meskimmon’s and Feng’s characterization
of the film as a critique of institutionalized knowledge only reconfirms their own
adherence to positivist realism that potentially entraps the “ethnic” subjects within the
criteria that forbid them to recreate or remediate their appearances.
In fact, Trinh’s interest does not lie primarily in such seemingly moralist
positivism that could at best transfer some limited degree of filmic authority from the
filmmaker to the filmed women and does not, as a result, transform the ways in which
“ethnic” or “third world” subjects are produced as an effect of colonialism’s discursive
structure. What Trinh is interested, instead, is a form of historiography that militates
against the officially sanctioned historicist chronologies in both Vietnam and the US and
continuously recreates its “truth” through novel forms of theatrical utterances and
gestures: “[b]y choosing the most direct and spontaneous form of voicing and
documenting, I find myself closer to fiction” (78). For Trinh, historical truth requires
such filmic construction of fiction since it needs to be told outside and against the
currently canonical narratives that reduce the cases of unjust events into a progressive
series of cause and effect.
If, as Trinh argues, “[t]here is no real desire to make people believe that what
they have on screen happened (or did not happen) in Vietnam” and, instead, “I rather deal
with the notion of translation itself, and not claim any authentic retrieval” (170), her
cinematic historiography of Vietnam during and after the war locates the past in its

84
constitutive drift from one witness to another and its unforeseeable reappearance at a
contingent time-space. Such theorization of history as its own rearrival in Trinh’s film
can be better understood in light of Jacques Derrida’s theorization of writing’s
constitutive iterability and inappropriability in “Signature Event Context.” Commenting
upon the ways in which “the différance as writing could no longer (be) an (ontological)
modification of presence,” Derrida discusses the text’s or the mark’s constitutive deferral
and differentiation of its significance as it retains its readability and iterability even in the
absence of the originally postulated addresser or the addressee. In reference to such
linguistic materiality that is inappropriable by its “producer” or “receiver,” Derrida holds
that its “essential drift” or “breaking force (force de rapture) is not an accidental
predicate but the very structure of the written text" (7-9). As Sur Name presents the
constitutive iterability and inappropriability of historical memory that comes to pass
within or between its witnesses, it is insufficient merely argue that the film “illuminates
the cultural circuits along which these stories have traveled, and the marks that these
displacements have inscribed on the original texts” (Mimura 76). Instead of initially
hypostatizing the historical memory in Vietnam and only thereafter examining its various
translations in the sites of diaspora, the memory the film reinvokes here is always already
citational and differentiable in its “origin.” By repeating and recreating such originary
iterable and differentiable “memory,” can “the natives” be dislocated from their current
status as the object of paternalist sympathy within the metropole and “the ethnics” be
removed from the essentialized interstice between the “natives” and the “colonizers”
within the colonial scheme of human taxonomy.

85
The actors’ ongoing iteration and fabrication of the historical marks they do not
fully understand or identify with in Sur Name invites a comparison with Robert Bresson’s
notion of “human models.” According to Bresson, his models’ automatized acting style
helps bracket their “interior” emotions and open their theatrical bodies to “enigma
peculiar to each living creature” which, however, comes from the characters they act as
and their words they are told to recite (4, 33). If Bresson’s “cinematograph” inscribes a
“new way . . . of feeling” upon the bodies of his “models” that receive and manufacture
the experiences of others (28, 58-59), Trinh’s actors’ are similarly exposed to the
testimonies that move them emotionally and baffle or surprise them cognitively. Unable
to fully identify with the social contexts of the women they act as and yet constantly
sympathetic to their experiences of duress imposed mainly by the post-1975 socialist
regime in Vietnam, each actor in Sur Name needs to witness and perform historical
memories which, however, lack a preauthorized set of conventions or rules to verify their
verisimilitude. Engulfed by the radical uncertainty as to how to perform such pasts, the
actors as witnesses need to attest to their encounter with the enigma of someone’s
experience that is singularly new and unique to them and has no historical precedence.
By instantiating a material excess of such event, each acting woman in Sur Name
becomes its singular witness who is, by definition, different from who she was prior to
her witnessing of and performing the event.
7

What we witness in Sur Name, therefore, is a group of theatrical bodies each of
whom is different from both her current subjectivity in the US or that of the witnessed
woman in Vietnam.
8
For instance, although a North Vietnamese woman Thu Van’s

86
critique of the socialist regime’s construction of womanhood as mothers and wives
happens upon the Vietnamese American Khien Lai’s body that attests to and performs it,
the very performance that materializes Thu Van’s life seems not only impersonal but at
time inhuman.
9
Re-embodying Thu Van’s loneliness in post-1975 Vietnam, Khien’s
body begins to visualize a series of events that affected not only Thu Van but also the
objects and the landscape that surrounded her. Therefore, if Thu Van insists in the film’s
script that her bicycle is the “only witness” of her isolation, Khien’s gesture and utterance
re-witness such “loneliness” by constructing a compositional body that seems to resemble
both Thu Van and her bicycle and yet does not amount to either of them. Speaking as
Thu Van and moving like her bicycle while retaining Khien’s own accents in English,
this body emerges upon the undecidable border of the human and the machine and incites
a question among the audiences who witnesses her: who/what is she? As this acting body
that Khien incarnates in the film argues,
Yes, we have to live for love. It is an emotion that escapes men’s control, that
happens inside the body, a very personal intimacy. . . . I end up loving my
bicycle! . . . I have a sincere affection for it because it helps me when I am tired.
. . . It keeps me company in my morning solitude, it takes me home in my
distress in the evening. It is the only witness of my movements . . . . (62,
emphases mine)

All first person possessive pronouns “my” in the passage at once mark the presence of the
singular person and operate as the absolutely iterable marks that do not belong to any
particular proprietor. “My bicycle,” “my morning solitude,” “my distress” and “my
movements” appear as the singular objects whose historical presence in North
Vietnamese structurally demands their renewals in the cinematic world that Sur Name
brings into being.

87
Commenting upon an “eerie continuity” that seems to traverse Khien’s
performance as Thu Van in the film’s first section and as herself in the second segment,
Anne Rutherford observes the ways in which Khien’s sincerely earnest performance as
Thu Van produces this fictive body that does not belong to or resemble anyone: “it’s not
as if at some point you realize that it’s reenactment but you are constantly being pulled
back and forward in terms of how to interpret it. So it’s not like you actually get to one
point where it becomes seen as a fabrication but you are thrown around all the way
through, back and forward between ideas of fabrication and maybe some sort of desire
for naturalism” (240). Sur Name operates as such naturalist documentary of
historiographical fabulations and performances that cannot proceed without at least some
possibility of fiction, an ineradicable possibility that the marks can be iterated, fabricated,
and disfigured in the constant drift to the addressees-to-come. Since such marks can be
reiterated and cannot be appropriated by anyone, the actors’ performances in the film
gradually contest the essentialized divide between “the original” and “the copy” or the
“native,” the “ethnic” and the “mainstream.”
10

The “Ethnics” in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
In its second section, Sur Name documents the same non-professional actors’ unwittingly
critical citations of categories that subjectify them as the gendered ethnics in the US
society. If the women in the film are seen as quietly drinking a cup of tea in the morning,
idly sitting next to a fish pond with her son, performing Tai Chi at a park, or wearing ao
dai while guest-lecturing before a predominantly white group of secondary school
students, their seemingly impeccable iterations of the ethnicized middleclass Vietnamese

88
American subject become the paradoxical indices of their inability to occupy such
assimilative position within the US economy. Their theatrical feignings of the
stereotypes critique the multiculturalist tendency to distribute reward and privilege to two
types of “ethnic” subjects that continue to perform well in the mainstream economy:
model minority and protestant ethnic. Sur Name, especially in its second half, can be
viewed in its active contestation of the specular economy that traps “model minority”
within a gamut of assimilative traits such as “self-reliance,” “self-sacrifice,” and “quiet
restraint” and the “protestant ethnic” intellectuals through an injunction to accumulate
their “symbolic rather than economic capital” by foregrounding “racial identity as a
mode of resistance to capitalist exploitation” within the pedagogical structure of the
university and other spaces of cultural production (Nguyen 148, 5). Having to negotiate
the mainstream demand that solicits them to “play as, to act like, to exist in the manner of
something,” both model minority and protestant ethnic circulate today as the
“commodities” and “phantasmagorias” whose appeals as fetish objects only mask their
violent traces of racialization and commodification (Chow 100, Benjamin 7).
Therefore, the Vietnamese American actors’ feigned performances as
“middleclass Asian American female professionals” shed a light upon the very difficulty
they face in attaining such positions in the US economy and help redirect their "play" and
"act" toward a different kind of protest against a systematic and differential conferral of
exchange values to “minority” workers in the imperial metropoles.
11
. As Trinh admits
in an interview, the women’s “imaginative flight from their working-class daily realities”
during the film’s shooting process resulted in such “fabric of excess” in their

89
performance as middle-class Asian American “ethnics.” Although such iterative
performances do not work well with the film’s audiences who may adhere to “the legacy
of dressing down in public occasions [that] belongs in all probability to middle-class
women who wish to ally with the cause of the working class” (195), their attempts to
perform as the phantasmagoric “ethnics” emit their auras which stage, according to
Benjamin’s famous formulation, a “unique appearance of a distance, however close it
may be” (243).
Following Samuel Weber’s rigorous rereading of Benjamin’s idea of “aura,” we
are led to surmise that aura as such does not simply vanish in the age of mechanical
reproduction but rather proliferates itself as such vanishings in and as the technically
reproducible media that circulate in capitalist space. Aura is, then, “the singular leave-
taking of the singular” that happens in and as such media, a certain critical excess of the
reproducible commodity that emerges as its own “phony spell” (“The Works of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 231). The actors in Sur Name similarly reproduce
their “phony” singularities that flash during their performances as the “model minority”
Asian American subjects. What they perform in their appearances as the assimilative
middleclass bodies, then, is “a singularity that is no longer unique, no longer the other of
reproduction and repetition but their most intimate effect” (Weber 104, emphases in the
original).
Ginsberg’s “dialectical” commodities and Trinh’s actors’ “phony” singularities
present two modes of protest the commodified objects and bodies themselves enact at the
intersection of capital, military, and race in the US. The commodities in Ginsberg's poem

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and Trinh's film thus anticipate a sociality where they relate to one another as the
alienated objects in the market and as their inspirited and auratic “doubles,” the
singularities that only appear in their audio- visual disappearances. The essential
impropriety and inappropriability of such sonic and visual materiality organizes the
passage of sounds and visions across the racially and economically divided space of the
post-1975 America and Asia as their (dis)appearances in poetry, cinema, and other arts
attest to the commodities’ potential transformation into their own barricades, sutras, or
phonic fabrics.

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Chapter 2 Endnotes

1
See Naoki Sakai’s deft analysis of Rambo’s rigorous reshaping of his own body and his
tendency to display his naked body presumably toward the male audiences of the films he
appears in as a way to cathect the mainstream American males to ideological demands
put forth by neoliberalizing society to control one’s bodily desires and to narcissistically
love one’s ability to control (73). Thus, America’s post-1975 bodies remasculinize
themselves in order to interiorize the requirements set forth by what Deleuze would call a
“society of control.”

2
Marita Sturken points out the memorial’s presentation of the war and its production of
58,196 dead through a chronological form even if that sense of chronology is somewhat
attenuated as it starts at the very mid-point of the memorial. Sturken also discusses the
memorial’s obvious exclusion of the Vietnamese casualties and the occlusion of the war
protesters from the discourse surrounding the Memorial (61-62).

3
As Kant further explains the imagination’s dialectical retrieval of the supersensuous
“Idea” precisely by way of imagination’s distance from it, “[t]he feeling of the Sublime is
therefore a feeling of pain, arising from the want of accordance between the aesthetical
estimation of magnitude formed by the Imagination and the estimation of the same
formed by Reason. There is thus a pleasure thus excited, arising from the correspondence
with rational Ideas of this very judgment of the inadequacy of our greatest faculty of
Sense . . . “ (72).

4
Such assessment is largely derivative of Bob Perelman’s argument that the poem’s
citation of media language can only “gall back on irony” (117). Remaining at once
sympathetic to and partially critical of Ginsberg’s foray into the poetics of citation,
Perelman holds that the poet’s “desire to change the world by language has become
trapped in the realm of language” (118).

5
See some well-known lines such as I’m obsessed by Time Magazine./ I read it every
week.” and “I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel
absurd” (146, 136) in “America” and “A Supermarket in California” respectively.

6
As Benjamin notes by quoting Adorno in The Arcade Project, “With the vitiation of
their use value, the alienated things are hollowed out and, as ciphers, they draw in
meanings” (N 5, 2).

7
My argument here owes itself to Eyal Peretz’s discussion of the singular witness/actor
of the disaster. As Pererz argues, “the actor, I propose, is a witness to the role that
transformed her or him into an actor through its assumption and transmission; and the act

92

of becoming an actor signifies that the relation of the witness to the disastrous excess
which has to be transmitted but cannot be known is that of performance” (12).

8
See Trinh’s comment upon the process-based revision of the film’s “script”:

Very often, I have encountered viewers who ask, But how do you script the film?
The only thing I started out with in Surname Viet was the few interviews I had
selected and translated; but most of the choices in the film are dictated by what
happened during the process of materializing it—the casting of the parts, the
rehearsal, the shooting and so on. The script only came about with the film, not
before it . . . . (174)

9
Such incomplete nature of the cinema image that in turn requires the spectator to further
explore and extend the image’s phenomenological richness resonates with Andre Bazin’s
thesis on “phenomenological realism” that presents appearance as an event of “unique
discovery, an almost documentary revelation that retains its full force of vividness and
detail” (87).

10
The other actors in the film also rematerialize the Vietnamese women’s testimonies as
both unique and strange in the present. Tran Thi Hien’s acts as Ly, a domestic worker
who experienced post-1975 poverty in the central region. Tran’s seemingly mechanical
vocalization of Ly’s testimonial nonetheless produces syllables in English that reproduce
the audibility of the latter’s biography not through narrative signification but its
interruption into silences. That is, numerous pauses Tran’s speech creates at once
prevent her from emotionally identifying with Ly and solicit her to materialize that which
remain beyond the grasps of her comprehension (50-51). Similarly, Ngo Kim Nhuy who
acts as Kim, a woman in the south whose husband was arrested by the post-1975 state,
voices her protest against the arrest through her automatized speech that seems devoid of
naturally intoned utterances. However, as she verbalizes the following sentence without
a hint of sympathetic overtone, Kim’s “pain” that is thematized in her scripted utterance
is transformed into the pain to iterate, extend, and transform such pain that, strictly
speaking belongs to no one: “ . . . I prefer to forget that moment when I saw my husband
in his prison clothes, looking devastated and desperate. It is a painful memory” (59).
Originally decontextualizing drift of the testimonial flashes as a dispropriative materiality
that cannot be localized in Vietnam, the US, or elsewhere and continues to transform its
addressees including the ones who seem to publicize it as “mine” in Vietnam.

11
Chow’s deft analysis of Zhang Yimou’s Films directly puts to work such critical
insight. Analyzing seemingly orientalist images that could subjugate Chinese female
characters in Zhang’s early films, Chow observes that these images do not cover up more
authentic images but operate as “gestural force” of ideology on the surface that
potentially enacts its own destruction. “[M]eaning is displaced onto the level of surface

93

exchange. Such a displacement has the effect of emptying “meaning” from its
conventional space—the core, the depth, or the inside waiting to be seen and
articulated—and reconstructing it in a new locus—the locus of the surface, which not
only shines but glosses; which looks, stares, and speaks “ (150).

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Chapter 3

The Postcolony’s “Phantomnation”: Cinematic Specters and Choral
Antiphonies in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee
From Alchemist to Diseuse
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s mail art piece Audience Distant Relative (1977) materializes
her nascent concern with the artwork’s ability to institute aleatory relations among the
work, the artist, and the audience and to disarticulate their putative sense of who they are
in the world.
1
Predating her more well-known works such as Dictee and Exilee (both
made in 1980) which embrace written inscriptions and postal addresses they engage in,
the work performs a contingent reticulation of the artist, the artwork, and its recipient
who remain disjointed across an incalculable distance. Placed within the multiple
envelopes, the work’s text addresses the audience as its “distant relatives” and solicits
each of them to become a co-recipient of the letter’s enigmatic materiality.
I address you
As I would a distant relative
As if a distant relative
Seen only heard only through someone else's description. (3)

By showing a condensed overlap of meaning between a “relative” who is distant and a
“distance” that is relativized by the letter’s missive movement, Cha’s “address” questions
normative notions of both “relative” and “distance” and enacts a poiesis of relation
between two heretofore estranged entities whose sensuous faculties only partially and
incompletely perceive one another. Here, the work’s limited capacity to “see only” and
“hear only” the unknown audience’s presence corresponds with the audience’s own
similarly incomplete synesthesia that does not quite fully capture the perceptible object of

95
their desire.
2
As the passage below indicates, despite the kind of intimacy usually
associated with the second person pronoun “you,” the audience’s relation to the work is
torn between her vision of the inscriptions and her hearing of their potential sounds.
this is a letter read aloud.
upon opening it
you hear the sender’s voice as your eyes move over the
words. You, the receiver, seeing the sender's image
speak over the
voice. (5)

Cha’s early work from 1977 illuminates multiple senses of material and embraces its
aesthetic transmission as an act that transforms both the transmitted matter and the
audience’s sentient body. In her MFA thesis titled "Path," Cha further defines the artist’s
task as one of producing “an alchemical path” upon which the material in the world and
the audience that receives it can be altered.
Alchemical elements used by Alchemists could be most commonplace: water,
air, fire, earth, etc. They simply exist, as space, as time exists, almost
unnoticeably. [...] He enters a covenant with these elements, with the intention
not of imposing upon these materials, not so much to transform and shape them
according to his will, but during the unfolding of this pact, these elements will be
the ones to transform his soul. [...] The artist's path is close to that of the
alchemist in that his/her path is that of a medium. His/her vision belongs to an
altering, of material, and of perception. (1)

At once linking and changing the "elements," the artist, and her audiences, the work itself
operates as an amorphous receptacle in which “phantom things and people” “appear and
move about” (Fass cited in “Path,” 3).
Remaining attentive to such alchemical process that informs Cha’s literary,
cinematic, and other visual and performance works, this chapter explores her phantomatic
materialism that transforms both the history and its historiographer in her later works

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such as Dcitee, Exilee, and Apparatus. If some Asian Americanist readings highlight
Dictee mostly and occasionally analyze Cha’s other works as if they constitute the
mimetic replicas of the artist’s putative social positions within the US society and
deploys these texts as a pedagogically useful tableau that represents the transnational
Asian American or Korean American subject that resists against the US imperialism, this
chapter questions such sociological positivism which ultimately dismisses Cha’s works
material forms that articulate singular memories and their equally singular recipients.
Instead, the chapter seeks in Cha’s figurations of colonial memories a potential
emergence of “distant relatives,” an ensemble of singular and irreplaceable beings that
differentiate and are differentiated by the memories that arrive into the present. Three
questions thus arise from the intersection of aesthetics and politics that is discernible in
Cha’s works themselves. First, how do Cha’s later works such as Dictee, Exilee, and
Apparatus embrace history’s “phantomatic” recurrence whose spectrally palpable forms
enact “an altering, of material, and of perception”? Second, given Cha’s work as an
emerging filmmaker and film theorist in the San Francisco Bay Area, France, and later in
New York between the mid-1970s and 1982, to what extent do these later works offer
explicitly cinematic figurations of historical memory? Finally, how do such cinematic
figures rearticulate memories that pertain to Korea’s colonial history while addressing
them to their “distant relative[s]” who may emerge acrss and against the regimes that may
constitute and separate “Koreans,” “Korean Americans,” and others?
Containing Diseuses: Asian American Studies and Dictee

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The wide reception of Dictee outside of a small circle of artists and critics with whom
Cha was associated began with the publication of Writing Self, Writing Nation (1994), a
collection of critical essays on Dictee written by Elaine Kim, Lisa Lowe, Laura Hyun-yi
Kang, and Shelly Sunn Wong.
3
From the outset, Writing Self, Writing Nation aims to
intervene into the two critical contexts that either dismiss or depoliticize the politico-
historical concerns of Dictee. On one hand, their readings attempt to critically overcome
Asian American studies’ previous focus on the identity logic that suppresses internal
differences and debilitates potential solidarity and negotiations with other marginalized
social groups in the US (Lowe 50, Wong 105-106). As Lowe argues, Dictee’s
interruptive narrative and multilingual female subject may encourage the constituents of
Asian America to “engage with rather than suppress heterogeneities of gender, class,
sexuality, race and nation” while remaining “able to maintain and extend the forms of
unity which make common struggle possible . . .” (62-64). On the other hand, at the
same time, these scholars critique so-called “postmodern” critics whose readings of
Dictee might postulate difference as abstract, decontextualized entities that lack any
social grounding. Thus, Shelly Sunn Wong warns that both mainstream feminists’
celebration of a “feminine voice” and poststructural detection of “alterity” in Dictee erase
its grounding in colonial history (135) while Elaine Kim’s editorial “Preface” declares the
book’s aim as one of “interven[ing] in the published conversations about Dictee . . .
among a number of contemporary critics who largely ignored or sidelined Korea and
Korean America” (ix).

98
Laudable as their efforts may be in foregrounding the centrality of Korea’s
colonial history and the ensuing experience of migration and disapora in Dictee, the
critics’ assumption that such history can be best told from the perspective of its “native”
offspring who is either of Korean or Korean diasporic origin at once invites the problem
of the native’s commodification in the mainstream culture and its utilitarianist
exemplification as the resource of political “truth” in the pedagogical culture while
replicating a historicist belief that history, however fragmentary and incomplete, can be
told again as it was. More specifically, these critics’ hypostatization of the “native”
subject as the proprietor of the prefixed historical truth willfully ignores the presence of
multiple speaking women (“diseuse”) who narrate plural histories of oppression and
banishment including ones that occurred in Korea. By doing so, they presume that Dictee
is narrated by a single speaker whose social positions somehow reflect the categories
often used to describe Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, i.e., “Korean American immigrant
woman.”
4

In "Unnaming the Same: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee," Shelly Sunn Wong
argues that Dictee critiques the notion of national history and its privileging of "identity
over difference" since such notions are what "the Korean American immigrant woman
writer, marked by differences of race, nationality and gender, can ill afford at the cost of
almost certain erasure" (105). Thus, according to Wong, the text’s partially skeptical
usage of lyric poetry as an expression of the autonomous individuality and of epic poetry
as a representation of the dominant political community is reflective of the predicament
undergone by “the multiple subjectivities of the Korean American immigrant woman

99
writer" in her attempt to produce the lyric subject that is nonetheless situated within the
non-dominant collectivity (118). Wong thus assumes that, in Dictee, the single speaking
woman parodically cites dominant religious and colonial discourses as they “prescribe
and proscribe all possibilities of speech for the Korean American immigrant woman"
(121).
5
Elaine Kim’s essay also presumes the presence of the single Korean American
narrator of Ditee and posits her incomplete capture within various ideologies as a
metonymic instance of Korea’s incomplete status as the nation since “it can be said that
every Korean in the world is poised on the in-between, and that the Korean American
identity of the narrator of Dictee is located on both sides of the border [of divided
Koreas] (11). By assuming Dictee’s fragmentary form and parodic citations to be
reflective of the pre-textual predicaments undergone by the “Korean American immigrant
women,” Wong’s and Kim’s pedagogical tactics prohibit those placed outside the
discursive border of a specific minoritarian formation to critically respond to Dictee’s
narrative and disable the equally important task to interrogate and interrupt instituted
categories of subjection such as “Korean,” “American,” “Korean American,”
“immigrant,” and “woman” in a given society.
Lisa Lowe’s essay more cautiously nominates the speaking woman in Dictee as
the “subject” that resorts to “discontinuity, fragmentation, and episodic unfluency” only
in order to enact its shifting refusals of multiple national apparatuses such as the US,
Japan, France, and even Korea. However, Lowe, like the other critics in Writing Self,
Writing Nation, assumes that Dictee’s form works as its theme precisely because it is a

100
verisimilar record of the multiple interpellations and the resultant opportunities for
resistance that have already taken place in postcolonial Korea:
Firstly, Dictee is more specific about multiple hailings, particularly about the
conflicts and noncorrespondences between hailing apparatuses; while they may
intersect and coexist, or be linked through the use of similar modes and logics,
these apparatuses are often at odds with one another: in 1945, for example, the
Japanese colonialist occupation of Korea was contested by the U.S. imperial
interests in the area; in the 1960s and 1970s, the Catholic Church offered support
to Korean student and worker protests against the authoritarian regimes of the
Republic of Korea (Hanson, chap. III). Secondly, Cha's text suggests that, within
this multiplicity, one site of interpellation may provide the means or instruments
with which to disrupt another apparatus, as in the student's use of English to
supplant the rules of French dictation, or in the Korean American female
narrator's critical stance with regard to the militaristic uniformity of South Korean
nationalism.

In this sense, Dictee makes explicit that every social formation includes a
multiplicity of social contradictions—of race, national origin, ethnicity, gender, or
class—arising from heterogeneous origins and conditions, with certain
contradictions taking priority over others at particular historical moments. . . .
These contradictions are uneven and nonequivalent, with a particular
contradiction surfacing in relation to other contradictions in response to the
material conditions of a given historical moment. (56-57)

In valorizing Dictee’s refusal of its “correspondence, mimesis, and equivalence” with the
dominant apparatuses, Cha’s text is reductively seen in its correspondence, mimesis, and
equivalence to the political events that are already narrated in the historicist chronology
of modern Korea. Lowe’s seemingly materialist interest in “conditions of a given
historical moment” thus tends to dismiss the material experience that can be solicited by a
reading of Dictee’s form, images, and narrative all of which refuse to be subordinated to
such extra-texual indices of politics. Ultimately, then, Dictee is embraced by Lowe as a
vehicular text that narrates an idea of a materialist politics in Asian American studies that
now privileges the “transnational” cultural workers. If such interpellative tendency

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marks the Asian Americanist critics’ usage of Dictee, it not only seems coercive to the
students who read the text in Asian American studies curriculum but also further risks
commodification of the “minority” text within the dominant culture that has been
financially sponsoring and symbolically legitimating minoritarian aesthetic cultures.
Such canonizing tactics, moreover, commit an erroneous reading of Dictee
precisely because Cha’s text inscribes plural emergences of numerous “diseuse” who
move about and change their shapes across historical and geographical divides. While
their unnamable multiplicity and constant metamorphoses will become important in the
chapter’s later discussion, it suffices at this point to enlist some nameable cases of the
diseuse’s plurality: Sappho whose verse is quoted before the beginning of the text
(unnumbered page), an immigrant female student who “had come from afar” (1), Yu
Guan Soon as the female revolutionary heroine of Korea’s decolonizing struggle (25-31),
the “mother” who teaches in Manchuria under Japanese occupation, the actress whose
image is projected on the screen (94-98), “Sister Therese” (101), Maria Falconetti who
acts as Joan D’Arc in Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (119), a mysterious
“Laura Claxton” and the “crazy” woman (142-143), two women sitting in an empty
theatre (149), and a girl and an older woman who meet and exchange their gifts beside an
old well (167).
Moreover, since, as Trinh T Minh-ha notes, the “diseuse” could also refer to
heretical female fortune tellers (49), their bodies that receive and reincarnate the spirits of
the dead remain socially marginalized precisely for their engagements in the occult acts
of “seance”. As such, Dictee suggests the disuse’s continuous marginalization by

102
alluding to a semantic contiguity between the French word "diseuse" and similarly
sounding English term "disuse":
Dead words. Dead tongue. From disuse. Buried in time's memory.
Unemployed. Unspoken. History. Past. Let the one who is diseuse, one who is
mother who waits nine days and nine nights be found. Restore memory. Let the
one who is diseuse, one who is daughter restore spring with her each appearance
from beneath the earth. The ink spills before it runs dry before it stops writing at
all. (133)
6

While "diseuse," as an utterer of "buried" history, remains in "disuse" or “[u]nemployd”
in the dominant society, her restoration of the “[u]nspoken” history simultaneously
allows her to “restore” herself and to “spring” forth anew into the current reality.
Moreover, despite the use of the singular noun “diseuse” here, its appearance as “mother”
and “daughter” suggests her constant transformations while the expression “her each
appearance” indicates the serial or successive appearances of such plural singularities
(emphasis mine).
Critically distancing oneself from the Asian Americanists’ attempts to stabilize
the diseuse’s sociological positions, it is thus necessary to highlight these women’s
numerical multiplicity, social marginality, and passively and actively malleable selfhood.
Given their constitutive tendency to change their appearances, one may begin to think of
Dictee’s fundamental incommensurability with the notions of mainstream or minoritarian
canonicity in general. If, as Viet Thanh Nguyen points out, these women not only
"refuse to be hailed by dominant ideology [but also] refuse to be hailed by resistant
ideology" (157), their manners of “springing” up like “ink” or “water” across time and
space suggest a potential for a non-identitarian formation that consists of the bodies that
transform and are transformed by historical memories they resubstantiate.

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Cinematic Structure of Dictee
The diseuse’s open exposure to the past history corresponds with the text’s overall
affirmation of cinema and its capacity to recall, reform, and transmit memories across
both temporal/spatial divide and audio/visual (dis)junctures of one’s senses. Such
attention to the cinematic figurability of historical phantoms is already anticipated in the
text’s narrative as the women begin to collectively produced materials or labor around the
objects that function as film screens: sheets of paper and kerchiefs and labor around the
wells and the window (130, 160-170, 179).
What of the partition. Fine grain sanded velvet wood and between the frames the
pale sheet of paper. Dipped by hand over and over from the immobile water
seemingly stagnant. By the swaying motion of two hands by two enter it back and
forth the layers of film at the motion of a hundred strokes. (131)

As a mise-en-abyme of cinema in cinema, Dictee here projects an image of the two
women’s “swaying motion” in producing a framed sheet of paper that, in turn, emits its
“pale” color in the stagnant yet transparent water.
In Dictee, cinema solicits in the viewer a certain mode of patient waiting that
cannot be met by an initially posited object of her desire. At once demanding and
betraying one’s act of waiting, cinema introduces an image that constantly surprises the
viewer and retains its potential to constitute an ensemble of such viewers who are struck
by the image’s unpredictable intrusion into the cinematic present.
One expects her to be beautiful. . . . One seems to be able to see her. One
imagines her, already. Already before the title. She is not seen right away. Her
image, yet anonymously suspends in one’s mind. . . . We would wait. Wait to
see, We would have to wait to see, Wait and see. If. For a second time. For
another time. For the other overlapping time. Too fast. Slow our pace. Please.
Slower, much slower. For me to follow. Doucement. Lentement. Softly and
slowly. For a second time. For another time. Two times. Together. Twofold.

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Again. And again. Separately, together. Different place. Same times. Same
day. Same Year. Delays, by hours. By night and day. At the same time. to the
time. twice. At the same hour. Same time. All the same time. At the time. On
time. Always. The time. (98-99)

In a movie theater, such spectral appearances of images intensify the spectator’s desires
that cannot be fulfilled within the structure of knowledge and recognition. Instead, the
very quickness of the movement the woman’s image makes on the screen eludes the
viewer’s vision and is constitutive of the latter’s desire to see her again.
She enters the screen from the left, before the titles fading in and fading out. The
white subtitles on the black background continue across the bottom of the screen.
The titles and names in black appear from the upper hand corner, each letter
moving downwards on to the whiteness of the screen. She is drawn to the white,
then the black. In the whiteness the shadows move across, dark shapes and dark
light” (94).

Such (dis)appearances inspires the spectator’s desire to get nearer to the image,
potentially inviting her to dismiss the narrative progress of the film she currently watches.
As Dictee makes clear elsewhere, the spectator expects for a “closer view more and more
face to face until nothing else sees only this view singular” (79).
Hauntological Apparatus in Cha’s Apparatus
Dictee’s construal of the female cinematic spectator who is exposed to and changed by
the image’s unexpected revival resonates with Cha’s delineation of a similarly affective
form of cinema viewership in Apparatus, a collection of film theoretical texts she edited
and published in 1980. However, if the book titularly indicates its affinity with the
French “Apparatus” or “psycho-semiotic” film theorists such as Christian Metz, Jean-
Louis Baudry, and Thierry Kuntzel whose works critique the institutionalized form of
film production and viewership that sutures the spectator to bourgeois culture of

105
consumption, Asian Americanist critics such as Laura Kang and Sue J. Kim have read
Apparatus accordingly as a text that provides useful evidence of Dictee’s similarly
formalist suspicion and refusal of dominant ideologies. As Laura Kang gives a brief
characterization of what she thinks is Cha’s politics of hermeneutical suspicion in
Apparatus: “I see Cha as reaching out to an audience that is aware of the specific point
from which we view all others and how our perceptions and ways of knowing are limited,
molded, and enabled by the place where we stand” (94). On the other hand, Sue J. Kim
warns against such formalist procedures in Apparatus and Dictee as they seem dismissive
of the importance of social contexts: “ [Cha’s artwork] ‘Commentaire’ replicates the
issues plaguing the anthology [Apparatus]: a focus on form/process; the turning-away
from/ rejection of content; the lack of historical context; only oblique suggestions of or
references to the outside world; the subject-viewer assumed to be passively asleep
(except, presumably, the implied sophisticated reader). (161)
However, it is important to note that Cha’s general suspicion toward ideological
apparatuses arises as part of her larger interest in cinema’s capacity to receive and
express singular images that remain irreducible to discursive forms of explanation and
evaluation.
7
Therefore, while Apparatus aims to introduce to its mainly American
audience the key theoretical texts such as Metz’s “The Fiction Film and Its Spectator: A
Metapsychological Study” (1976) and Baudry’s “Ideological Effects of the Basic
Cinematographic Apparatus” (1974), Cha’s editorial attention, considered in light of the
idiosyncratic array of literary texts and her own artwork collected therein, seems to attune
itself to the more clandestine moments in these theoretical texts where their authors

106
cannot ultimately disavow the figural presence of cinematic images that do not contribute
metaphorically or figuratively to the narrative contents of films.
8

At the outset, these texts seem to rehearse the by-now familiar understandings of
film apparatus whereby it is said to produce and suture the subject to the narrations given
by capital and/or the state. By rhetorically asking, “Does the technical nature of optical
instruments, directly attached to scientific practice, serve to conceal not only their use in
ideological products but also the ideological effects which they may provoke
themselves?” (25), Baudry critiques cinema’s production of docile subject in bourgeois
culture not only through its promulgation of ideological contents in a linear narrative that
negates different perspectives but also through its formal suturing of the viewing
positions of the viewer and the camera (32). Metz’s essay in Apparatus more specifically
argues that techniques such as “superimposition” and “lap-dissolve” effect “a sort of
equivalence between two distinct objects,” soliciting the viewer’s uncritical belief in the
illusory equivalence of the things and thus “consol[ing] us with common impossibilities”
while “the machinery of fiction [remains] self-effacing” (392-393).
9

Cha’s Apparatus tacitly refracts such body of French “pshycho-semiotic” film
theories by inaugurating the book with Roland Barthes’ short essay “Upon Leaving the
Movie Theater” (1979). In the text, Barthes partially acknowledges the contributions
made by Metz and Baudry as they facilitate our “awakening from hypnosis
(imaginary/ideological)” and yet seeks to vindicate an alternative form of hypnotic
fascination with cinema images that exceed narrative structures that speak for and suture
us to ideologies. As Barthes argues,

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But here is another way of going to the cinema (other than going armed with the
discourse of counter-ideology); it is by letting myself be twice fascinated by the
image and by its surroundings, as if I had two bodies at once: a narcissistic body
which is looking, lost in gazing into the nearby mirror, and a perverse body, ready
to fetishize not the image, but precisely that which exceeds it; the sound’s grain,
the theater, the obscure mass of other bodies, the rays of light, the entrance, the
exit: in short, in order to distance myself, to “take off,” I complicate a
“relationship” with a “situation.” What I make use of to take my distance with
respect to the image is what, in final analysis, fascinates: I am hypnotized by a
distance, this distance is not an intellectual one. It is, so to speak, an amorous
distance: could there be, even in the cinema (and taking the word in its
etymological profile), the possibility of deriving pleasure from discretion?
(Apparatus, 4)

In Barthes’s essay, cinematic images are seen as that which ultimately refuse to operate
as culturally decodable signifiers and, instead, assert their irreducible materiality through
“the sound’s grain” and “rays of light.” By further complicating Baudry’s and Metz’s
critique of cinematic apparatus by pointing to what Victor Burgin calls the very
apparatus’s “biphasic structure,” Barthes intends to seek in the viewing body’s
“narcissistic” absorption of the film’s seemingly ideological contents a potential for the
same body’s “perverse” jouissance as it is exposed to and overwhelmed by audio-visual
materials on and around the screen. As Burgin notes, Barthes’ viewer experiences
cinematic images in a manner reminiscent of a distracted pedestrian who suddenly
encounters numerous photograms that flash upon the threshold of his or her wakeful
consciousness. Replacing the critic’s intellectual wakefulness with the viewing body’s
“alert torpidity,” Barthes theorizes the kind of viewer who is surprised by the images that
can only come to pass before him or her (23). Barthes’s text thus valorizes a movie
theater as a type fo materialist cavern in which an audience, as an involuntary fetishist,

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witnesses the image’s singularity that resists and exceeds the ideological spaces it often
circulates in.
If we assume that Cha as the editor of Apparatus has quite deliberately chosen
Barthes’s text as the inaugurative text of the book, one of Metz's texts collected in it also
implicitly attests to the cinematic image’s biphasic structure. As Metz himself writes, a
film’s discursive effectivity is constantly at odds with its own figural excess that cannot
be explained narratively.
It is true that the image can organize itself—and that it does so most often, in the
cinema as elsewhere, when caught up in the constrains of communication and the
pressures of culture—in figures as "bound," as secondary as those of language
(and which classical semiology, with its linguistic inspiration, is in a good
position to grasp). But it is also true, as Jean Francois Lyotard has rightly
insisted, that the image resists being swallowed up whole in these logical
assemblages and that something within it has the tendency to escape.
(Apparatus, 391)
10

As the passage demonstrates, Metz cannot ultimately contain the cinematic image within
"the constraints of communication and the process of culture" and, somewhat hesitantly
concedes to Lyotard's definition of the cinematic image as the non-linguistic “figure” that
escapes and exceeds its discursive registration in mass-culture. In “The dream-work does
not think,” Lyotard reexamines Freud's assertion that "[t]he dream-work does not think"
and points to the persistence of oneiric "desire" that appears only in its disguise, i.e., a
particular "form" of the dream text and that form's nearly imperceptible "distortion" of
narrative sequence (25). As a "violence perpetrated on linguistic space," such visual
forms work as what Lyotard calls "the figural," an imagist object that resides in and
distorts the discourse, circulates within and "jams" its communicative signification
(30).
1112

109
Apparatus links Barthes's fetishist love of the singular image and Metz’s more
attenuated awareness of such image’s figural persistence to a series of literary parables
by Plato, Diderot, Apollinaire, and Henry James all of which project several ghostly
figures within caves or cavernous spaces. Initially, the excerpts from Plato and Diderot
in Apparatus seem to concur with the semio-psychoanalytic assessment of cinema’s
ideological function: Plato’s argument in the famous parable of the cave that the
“prisoners would recognize as reality nothing but the shadows of those artificial objects”
(23) and Diderot’s characterization of the same “philosopher’s cave” as being surrounded
by “illusion makers” (39). This stance, however, changes as Apparatus moves on to cite
Apollinaire’s text whereby a young man in the Tyrolean cave witnesses its dwellers who
wear certain “head bands” that “[render] visible and tangible . . . the portion of time
brought back to life” (371) and a section of Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner” in which
its protagonist encounters a figure that is “[r]igid and conscious, spectral yet human” and
resembles “some black-visored sentinel guarding a treasure” (412). Later in the text,
Apparatus offers a part of Balzac’s text that describes a daguerreotype, the earliest
method of photography, as a means to collect the “traces” of “past events” which, in turn,
retain their spectral potential for their reappearances as the “coming ones.” Balzac’s text
in Apparatus further notes the daguerreotype’s function as a modern form of
“soothsayer” who discovers new significance in the past’s material traces: “so ideas, real
and potential creations, imprint themselves upon what we must call the atmosphere of the
spiritual world, produce effects upon it, remain there spectrally, —it is necessary to coin
words to express these unknown phenomena . . . .” (65).

110
Cinematic Arrivants in “Commentaire” and Exilee
Weaving together these theoretical and creative texts that either implicitly or explicitly
affirm cinematic images’ capacity to reincarnate and reinvent history, Cha’s Apparatus
increasingly moves away from its initially apparent engagement in ideological critique
and approaches a space structured by what Jacques Derrida calls the spectral logic, a
certain manner in which the “supersensuous sensuous” flashes and exceeds the routinized
manners of perception in the phenomenological world. Speaking of the barely
perceptible being that arrives in and yet escapes from the phenomenological perception
that tends to ontologize substances, Derrida argues for a different manner of attestation
and perception within the transcendentally empirical rubrics of “hauntology” where an
“element is itself neither living nor dead, present nor absent: it spectralizes” (51).
Constitutively recursive and resistive of the regimes of predictability, the spectral comes
to and affects the present while immediately disappearing from the phenomenal reality
that temporarily houses it. Haunting the present as its “revenants” (47, 11), the spectral
constitutively “comes back and presents itself again, anew, as the new” and exceeds what
Derrida calls the “horizon of the wait” (49).
If specters elude the viewers’ phenomenological perception and, because of such
elusion, demand to be sensed at the limit of one’s habituated imagination that classifies
and evaluates the sensible beings, Derrida’s hauntology further explains the spectral
visuality by way of the commodity’s exchange value that cannot be felt or located in the
commodity as substantial essence but stages its barely sensible passings in and from the
sensuous material it nonetheless haunts (154, 150-151). Similarly, in regards to both the

111
acts of historiography and witnessing, inheritance of the past also involves one’s
encounter with such “sensuously super-sensible” element that has no prior substantial
basis and instead “begins [itself] by coming back” (11). Therefore, instead of merely
receiving a preconstituted past, the inheritors of the specter are forced to offer its new
forms in which they become sensible again and anew. As Derrida clarifies, as a being of
sensuous excess and shock, the specter precedes and is, at least, partially constitutive of
those who come together as a certain disaggregate “we,” an inoperative collectivity of
those who attest to the past’s arrival: “That we are heirs does not mean that we have or
we receive this or that, some inheritance that enriches us one day with this or that, but
that the being of what we are is first of all inheritance, whether we like it or know it or
not” (54).
If Apparatus is itself already a cinematic book that contains moments of missed
encounters and belated rendezvous with the imagist ghosts, Cha’s own artwork
“Commentaire” collected therein is yet another arrivant that offers its ghostly history in
which an image only comes to pass within and from visible phenomena. As the work’s
two overly exposed photographs of the film screens—one shot at a drive-in theater and
the other in the interior of a conventional theater—flicker and blind the spectators’ vision,
“Commentaire” transmits to its reader-viewers a question of “how to (commentaire)” see
the invisible, a brightness that blinds my vision and darkens my world.
Advancing such interest in the spectral images, Cha’s longer film work Exilee
(1980) postulates cinematic image as that which is constitutively exiled without its
ontological origin or destination and visualizes its unexpected flash in front of the

112
similarly exiled filmmaker who finds herself at an unspecified location arrived at in the
midst of her travel. As a series of frames show the work’s title in its ongoing
metamorphosis, both the image and its maker are shown to be constantly mutative in and
across plural languages: “EXIL/ EXILE/ ILE/ É/ ÉE” (33). The exilic image and
filmmaker thus (re)appear and disappear in both space and language as something new:
“the exilic,” “an island,” and the “feminine.” Later in the film, Cha’s own narratorial
voice intrudes into the diegesis and recites a few metonymic figures of the spectral that
remain both atopical and mutative, e.g., “light wind shadow” that have always already
“started” their drift and are “on the way” (33-35). Naming such space initially as “room”
and immediately pluralizing it as “rooms,” Cha’s voice insists upon the ghost’s
contingent drift and arrival that could occur and recur in any space whatsoever:
some door some night some window lit some train some
city some nation some peoples
Re Named
u tt e r ly by chance by luck by hazard otherwise
any door any night any window lit any train any city
any nation any peoples some name any name to a
given name (55).

We can now surmise that Dictee’s plural movie theaters operate as such “rooms” that
welcome the imagist specters that appear and disappear in front of the female
spectator(s).
Memory
It is an empty theatre. The immediate familiarity upon entering the theatre, of
that which has passed in shadow and darkness. It is between séances. The light
from the street reflects on the screen briefly while the door opens and closes at a
deliberate speed. The steps are carefully measured when darkness resumes,
moving closer to the screen to the width of the screen, the depth. . . . Her hands
are folded on her lap with her other belongings. She hovers in a silent
suspension of the simulated night as a flame that gives itself stillness and equally

113
to wind as it rises. Her eyes open to distance as if to linger inside that which has
passed in shadow and darkness.

She follows no progression in particular of the narrative but submits only to the
timelessness created in her body. (Ancient. Refusing banishment. Refusing to
die, the already faded image. Its decay and dismemberment rendering more
provocative the absence.) She remains for the effect induced in her, fulfilled in
the losing of herself repeatedly to memory and simultaneously its opposition, the
arrestation of memory in oblivion. (regardless. Over and over. Again. For the
time. For the time being.) (149-150)

Explicitly linking film viewing (“seance”) with a ritualistic resuscitation of the dead
(“séance”), the woman in the movie theater encounters a thing (or a body) whose
atmospheric passing has always already begun before the beginning of the film.
13
Upon
entering the theatre, it is already there as “that which has passed in shadow and
darkness.” If “[s]he remains for the effect induced in her,” we become increasingly
unsure of the demarcation between the female arrivant who remains momentarily in the
theater and the female spectator who harbors the effect induced by the arrivant’s image.
Instead of delineating a preformed personhood, such “she” names a time-space where the
past’s arrival in and as the sensuous event in the present simultaneously gives rise to the
spectator’s becoming-witness in the same temporal space.
14

A “Phantomnation”: the Decolonizing Ensemble in Dictee
Extending Cha’s discovery in Apparatus of ghosts that come to pass in literary and film
theoretical texts and her subsequent attention to their essential drifts and ongoing
metamorphoses in Exilee, Dictee now begins to resemble a textual haunt that hosts
ghostly figures that remain singular and mutative, and, therefore, resist what Derrida calls
the "welcoming powers" of appropriative subjects such as the state, nation, culture,
family, and the self. Therefore, as some of these ghosts in Dictee narrate the events

114
pertinent to colonial and postcolonial Korea, they potentially open a space in which
historiographical practice creates memories that cannot be canonized or made a property
of national or identitarian space.
In the book’s last two chapters “Terpsichore Choral Dance” and “Polymnia
Sacred Poetry,” Dictee describes ways in which the spectral revenants’ multi-sensuous
traces mutate, haunt, and begin to rejuvenate the earth and its inhabitants. In
“Terpsichore,” an anonymous voice speaks to a partially disfigured plant and restores its
ability to flower again: “You remain dismembered with the belief that magnolia blooms
white even on seemingly dead branches and you wait” (155). Subsequently, an
atmospheric material arrives in the space and emits its silent darkness that nurtures the
dandelion’s capacity to create and disseminate its seeds.
You wait when you think it is conceiving you wait it to seed you think you can
see through the dark earth the beginning of a root, the air entering with the water
being poured dark earth harbouring dark taken for granted the silence and the dark
the conception seedling. Chaste you wait you are supposed to you are to wait for
silence to break you wait for the implanting of some dark silence same constant as
a field distant and close at the same time all around sound far and near at the same
time you shiver some place in between one of the dandelion seedling vague air
shivering just before the entire flower to burst and scatter without designated
time, even before its own realization of the act, no premonition not preparation.
All of a sudden. All of a sudden without warning. No holding back, no retreat,
no second thought forward. Backward. There and not there. Remass and
disperse. Convene and scatter . . . . Inside the atmosphere. No access is given to
sight. Invisible and hueless. (156)

If the dandelion “burst[s] and scatter[s]” its “sound far and near at the same time,” a
Dictee’s cinematic and hauntological logic institutes a passage between vision and sound,
a point at which the old “dark earth” transforms itself into a new world that suddenly
vibrates itself acoustically.

115
Such recursion of the past not only constitutes a new world but also transforms its
cinematic spectator. In “Polymnia,” a girl encounters an elder and drinks the water or,
more precisely, the water and its sonorously vibrating “echoes” given by the latter.
Subsequently, the girl’s presence in the narrative becomes increasingly indistinguishable
from that of the elder woman.
15

Approaching the well, the sound becomes audible. The wooden bucket hitting the
sides echoes inside the well before it falls into the water. Earth is hollow.
Beneath . . . . She dipped the bowl into the bucket and filled it to the brim. She
handed it to the child to drink. She drinks quickly from the liquid. Earth is cooler
as it descends beneath. She looked up at the woman. Her eyes became clearer.
(167-168)

If Dcitee seems generally affirmative of the ways in which young girls show their
mimetic affinity to nature, history, and the elderly, the very mimesis ends up
reconstructing and reinvigorating its subject and object. While the text unquestionably
demonstrates its loving attention to the modern history of Korea that is characterized by
an intermittent series of colonial and dictatorial violence, its hauntological structure
enacts a simultaneous transformation of history that is remembered and historiographer
who remembers it. Therefore, Dictee’s critical mimesis of Korea’s colonial memories
does not operate within the space that is already claimed by anticolonial nationalist
movement which, as Partha Chatarjee explains, constantly resorts to a self-orientalizing
representation of its political autonomy and cultural uniqueness and invariably reconfirms
the lasting power of colonial hierarchy within the internationally schematized world.
Through its seeming reversal of orientalist epistemology whereby “the ‘object’ in
nationalist thought is still the Oriental,” “nationalist thought accepts and adopts the same
essentialist conception based on the distinction between ‘the East’ and ‘the West,’ the

116
same typology created by a transcendent studying subject, and hence the same
‘objectifying’ procedures of knowledge constructed in the post-Enlightenment age of
Western Science” (Ibid.).
16

In contrast to such nationalist appropriation of colonial memories that contributes
to the colonial division of essentialized nationalities and stereotypes, a critical collective
that remembers Japanese colonial and American imperial violence arises only within the
circuit in which both history and historiographer undergo their becomings. The diseuse
in Dictee wait for the unexpected arrivals of secretive images of history in cinema,
literature, and other sensuous mediations and affirm their materially sensuous forces that
solicit them to become their witnesses without subscribing to the authority of any nation-
state. Dictee designates such spacing of singular memories and singular witnesses of
Korea’s colonial history as “phantomnation,” a space where one views, hears, and is
changed by the imagist arrivants of the past.
17

If Dictee postulates that such “phantomnation” is primarily opened by women
who appear in the text, it recognizes the ways in which some Korean women’s crucial
contribution to Korea’s independence movement remains ostracized, devalorized, and
partially effaced in it. For example, in “Clio History,” Yoon Guan Soon’s figure is
valorized in the independence movement only as an additive "contribution" to its
predominantly male-led proceedings. Cha’s text thus acknowledges the marginalized
status of Yoon in the movement that treats her as a docile receptacle of men’s ideas. Her
“figural” presence is thus trapped in the stereotypically sexist narrative that uses her as a

117
figuration of “feminine” materiality that is said to lack ideas, thoughts, and logos that are
produced by the movement’s male leaders.
18

. . . Guan Soon forms a resistant group with fellow students and actively begins
her revolutionary work. There is already a nationally organized movement, who
do not accept her seriousness, her place as a young woman, and they attempt to
dissuade her. She is not discouraged and demonstrates to them her conviction and
dedication in the cause. She is appointed messenger and she travels on foot to 40
towns, organizing the nation's mass demonstration to be held on March 1,
1919. (30)

Despite her reduced status as the men’s "appointed messenger," Yoon’s words materially
and semantically “matter” as they inspire the residents of the forty towns to participate in
the March 1
st
movement that sought independence from Japanese colonization. If Yoon’s
secretive words thus help “secrete” this potentially revolutionary ensemble (Deleuze and
Guattari 287), her very words are presented as not only silenced but effaced in the pages
of Dictee.
In “Calliope Epic History,” the mother's words emitted "[i]n the dark, in secret" in
Japanese-controlled Manchuria (45) begin to exert rematerializing effects upon both
herself and her audience. Constitutively self-veiled in secrecy, mother’s words continue
to change their syllables and sounds and expect their discrete rebirths in and as the
audience’s responses.
You write you speak voices hidden masked you plant words to the moon you send
word through the wind. Through the passing of seasons. By sky and by water the
words are given birth given discretion. From one mouth to another, from one
reading to the next the words are realized in their full meaning. The wind. The
dawn or dusk the clay earth and traveling birds south bound birds are mouth
pieces wear the ghost veil for the seed of message. (48)

118
In their transmissive drift to the audiences whose locations or attributes cannot be known
in advance, the mother’s words open a space in which historical secrets, their utterers,
and the audiences are mutually affected.
Cha’s “phantomnation” thus opens itself within such “correspondence” helps
constitutes a choral ensemble of “antiphonous” voices that repeat and renew the past at
the nexus of sight and sound or image and music (47). Used only once in Dictee to
describe a telephone conversation between two women who do not know one another,
“phantomnation” names an alliance of strangers and the “antiphonal” responses they
provide to one another: "She begins the search the words of equivalence to that of her
feeling. Or the absence of it. Synonym, simile, metaphor, byword, byname, ghostword,
phantomnation" (140). Yoon’s and the mother’s words that enact their quasi-cinematic
movements and mutations wait for their choral and “antiphonal” responses as their own
rematerializations: “You know to wait. . . . For the Antiphonal song. Antiphonal
hymn. The choral answer. In the ebb and tide of echo" (47).
A Choral Ensemble
Dictee thus demands that its readers also respond antiphonally to the diseuse’s names
which singularly figurate the women’s desires to relate to others without imperial
domination or nationalist subordination. Dictee thus provides a minimal registration of
such women’s singularities that nonetheless retain their potentially musical iterability that
could be recited by anyone: “she.” Refusing to endorse the specular yet asymmetric
economy in which imperial nationalism and its anticolonial counterpart continuously
authorize one another, the text solicits the reader to act as these women’s “Melpomene”

119
who, like the Greek muse, sings her antiphonal response to an uncountable multiplicity of
colonized or displaced women in the past. As the text indicates, the collective ensemble
of such choral voices begins not only to resist but also to interrupt national formations of
any kind.
Suffice Melpomene. Nation against nation multiplied nations against nations
against themselves. Own. Repels her rejects her expels her from her own. Her
own it, is, of , through, all others, hers. Her own who is offspring and mother,
Demeter and Sibyl . . . . Suffice Melpomene, arrest the screen en-trance flickering
hue from behind cast shadow silhouette from back not visible. Like
ice. Metal. Glass. Mirror. Receives none admits none.
Arrest the machine that purports to employ democracy but rather causes
the successive refraction of her none other than her own. Suffice Melpomene, to
exorcize from this mouth the name the words the memory of severance through
this act by this very act to utter one, Her once, Her to utter at once, She without
the separate act of uttering. (88-89)

When the diseuse’s figures can only (dis)appear in the cinematic space, the spectators
come to rescue each of their singular presence as “Her, or “She” by pronouncing it. At
such intersection of cinema and music, the emergent choral ensemble of its
viewers/singers offer their plurally singular responses to the women and critique and
interrupt “the machine that purports to employ democracy but rather causes the
successive refraction of her none other than her own.” Resembling the cinematic figures
that interrupt their figurative operations within narrative cinema, the diseuse reappear
here as a series of percussive, sonic, and musical figures that reoccupy and punctuate the
postcolonial nation-state that usurps their desire for articulated equality and singularity
into its pursuit of co-figurative nationalisms in the colonially schematized world. As the
diseuse appear on the cinematic side of this “correspondence,” the task to utter “Her” and
“She” is bestowed on the readers of Dictee who, through their experiences of reading its

120
text, become the singers of such anti-colonial “antiphony” in a choral ensemble that at
once links and separates the postcolony’s “distant relatives.”
As Theresa Hak Kyung Cha once aspired to become an "alchemist" who “enters
a covenant with [her] materials” and to act as their “relayer” to the future audiences,
Dictee receives and countersigns the virtual dis/appearance of memory in an infinite
mise-en-abyme of literature, cinema, and music, and depicts a collective of singular
bodies that remember and rematerialize the past across and against the nation-states and
other identitarian formations. Both the past and its recipients recur in Dictee, making
possible an alliance of the singular bodies that, while remaining strangers to one another,
recall multiple colonialisms as their cinematic and musical revenants which they continue
to reinvent.

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Chapter 3 Endnotes

1
Many of Cha’s art works can be viewed at University of California Berkeley Art
Museum’s Website.
(http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/resources/art_collection/index.html)

2
See, for example, Cha’s works from 1977 such as Re Dis Appearing, Chronology, and
Father/Mother.

3
For such early references and reprints of Cha’s work, see, for example, the issues of
How(ever), Vol. 5, No.1 (1988).

4
Other critics in Writing Self, Writing Nation similarly evince a desire to specify Cha’s
social positions which Dictee as a whole and diseuse in particular should faithfully
reflect. For instance, Elaine Kim, while admitting that her argument is a highly
subjective one (23), argues that the theme of Dictee is a particular Korean nationalism
critically revised from Cha’s position of “Korean American” feminist. Echoing the views
taken by Wong and Kim, Laura Hyun-yi Kang similarly holds that Dictee's menacing of
disciplinary structures such as religious confession and language education reflects Cha's
own position "[a]s as Korean immigrant woman for whom English is not a first language"
(87) and chooses to appreciate its aesthetics of non-correspondence from Kang’s own
position as "a Korean/American, immigrant, multi-lingual, feminist writer/scholar" (97).
Lisa Lowe allows much more ambiguity in her elaboration of diseuse. That is, she does
not treat diseuse as representing a narrowly Asian American or Korean American
position and simply calls it "the subject" who can be variously located in the midst of
French Catholicism, Japanese colonial rule, Korean American immigration, and South
Korean democracy movement (35-36). However, Lowe's text also instrumentalizes
Dictee by labeling it as "a cultural object which catalyzes [...] an engagement" between
politics of difference and politics of identity within Asian America and the US (62-64).

5
On one hand, Wong’s text offers a quite sensitive reading of various forms of
“interruption” in the text that include: the use of Hangul letters in Dictee questions the
identity of the English book (107), redefinition of “home” not as a place of permanent
return within a nation-state but a site of constant struggles and questioning (109-110), re-
presentation of the past that calls into question a chronological history and demands the
fundamental transformation of the present (111).
At the same time, Wong’s assumption that Dictee’s narrator is a Korean
American immigrant female person who more or less reflects the biographical details of
Cha is excessive (see 105, 115, 118, 120, 121, 123, 124, 130). Such repetitive hailings of
Cha’s sociologically determinable identity may in fact evince the critic’s desire to anchor

122

both Cha and Dictee within the disciplinary space of Asian American studies and, as
such, does not tell us much about what the text itself conveys as a work of art.
Wong herself admits that her own reading intentionally contains Dictee within Asian
American studies and its narrowly defined political agenda: “[g]rounding literary analysis
in the recognition of historically specific cultural perspectives and interpretive
frameworks (both Asian American and mainstream) enables the critic of Asian American
literature to assess the potential value of a work not only in terms of formal or thematic
features but also in terms of its social function at a particular historical juncture” (104).

6
Other English words that could be associated with “diseuse” and “disuse” would be
“disease” and “dis-ease” (see Mizota cited in Elaine Kim 29). Other words in Dictee that
question the boundary between English and French include “de naturalized” (20), “Sang”
(65), “re veils” (124).

7
Cha studied with French film theorists such as Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour, and
Thierry Kuntzel in France during the summer of 1976 and collected the essays by Metz,
Kuntzel, and Jean-Louis Baudry in her collection Apparatus (1980).

8
As Gilles Deleuze explains Francis Bacon’s technique that isolates “the Figure” from its
figurative deployment in narrative, “[i]solation is thus the simplest means, necessary
though not sufficient, to break with representation, to disrupt narration, to escape
illustration, to liberate the Figure, to stick to the fact” (6).

9
The term “believe” is repeatedly used in the essay pejoratively as the ideological result
of narrative films.

10
As Metz argues in Film Language, “The cinema is not a language system, because it
contradicts three important characteristics of the linguistic fact: a language is a system of
signs used for intercommunication. Three elements to the definition. Now, like all the
arts, and because it is itself an art, the cinema is one-way communication. As we have
already seen, it is only partly a system. Finally, it uses only very few true signs. Some
film images, which, through long previous use in speech, have been solidified so that
they acquire stable and conventional meanings, become kinds of signs. But really vital
films avoid them and are still understood” (75).

11
Deleuze in his Cinema II points out that the seeming equivalence of the image and the
discourse continues to inform Metz's own supposition (34-35).

12
Barthes himself has undergone a well-known methodological shift from the kind of
semio-psychoanalytical approach to one that revalues history in terms of the minute
details in a photography (“punctum”) that must be lovingly attended to and analyzed. On
such shift in Barthes’ career that becomes especially manifest in his last book, Camera

123

Lucida, see Jean-Michel Rabate’s “Introduction” to the book Writing the Image After
Roland Barthes (esp. 2-8).

13
As Lawrence Rinder notes, in comparison to the theories of Baudry and Metz, Cha’s
work was informed by “a fundamentally different notion of the psychic apparatus [and]
of the cinematic apparatus to which it had been analogized” (27). While the French
theorists maintain a one-way model of communication between the sender and the
receiver of the filmed images, Cha has developed an alternative notion of “sendereceiver”
where the two subjects are related to each other through postal communication. Despite
the usefulness of this observation, Rinder unfortunately sets up a rather orientalist binary
between the French theorists’ fixation upon the bounded individualities of both the
filmmaker and the viewer and Cha’s desire to form a “collective consciousness” between
the artist and her audience (28-29).
As early as in 1980, Judith Barry, in her analysis of Cha's performance piece
Reveille Dans la Brume, pointed out Cha's artistic interest in not only of interrupting but
also making an intimate contact with the cinema screen. According to Barry, Cha's
approach to the screen resembles Kristeva's notion of "semiotic chora," a pre-language
domain that offers alternative resources for specifically feminine speech (451).

14
If Cha's performance and visual works such as "A Ble Wail" and "Commentaire,"
through their use of a cheesecloth curtain and the page frames resembling a cinema
screen, offer a simulated dream in which past memories can be grafted and translated.

15
As Derrida notes, the spectral does not assume that we do not “have” or “receive” this
or that ontologically preconstituted being but that “the being of what we are is first of all
inheritance, whether we like it or know it or nor” (54).

16
As Partha Chatterjee argues, anticolonial nationalist constation of autonomous culture
and sovereign polity precisely repeat the post-Enlightenment “thematic” that legitimates
its knowledge production based upon essentialist and objectifying supposition of
elements that are brought into (hierarchical) relations:

By applying this distinction to our material, we will find that problematic in
nationalist thought is exactly the reverse of that of Orientalism. That is to say, the
“object” in nationalist thought is still the Oriental. Only he is not passive, non-
participating. He is seen to possess a “subjectivity” which he can himself
“make.” In other words, while his relationship to himself and to others have been
“posed, understood, and defined” by others, i.e., by an objective scientific
consciousness, by Knowledge, by Reason, those relationships are not acted by
others. His subjectivity, he thinks, is active, autonomous and sovereign.

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At the level of the thematic, on the other hand, nationalist thought accepts and
adopts the same essentialist conception based on the distinction between “the
East” and “the West,” the same typology created by a transcendent studying
subject, and hence the same “objectifying” procedures of knowledge constructed
in the post-Enlightement age of Western Science.

There is, consequently, an inherent contradiction in nationalist thinking, because
it reasons within a framework of knowledge whose representational structure
corresponds to the very structure of power nationalist thought seeks to repudiate. .
… [I]t is this contradictoriness which signifies, in the domain of thought, the
theoretical insolubility of the national question in a colonial country, or for that
matter, of the extended problem of social transformation in a post-colonial
country, within a strictly nationalist framework (38-39).

17
For instance, Elaine Kim, while seeing Dictee as a “contradictory text,” affirms what
she sees in the work as the anti-colonial nationalism that is critically reconfigured from
the position of a Korean American woman. In contrast, Naoki Sakai, while locating in
the text a similar contradiction or ambivalence, praises the aleatory, immigrant sociality
which does not add up to any form of social totality. For Sakai, what he sees as the
instances of Korean nationalism in Dictee can at best be a strategically enacted political
choice that has various theoretically regressive consequences (38-39).
Lisa Lowe also provides a sophisticated reading of the daughter’s relationship to the
figure of “Korea” in "Calliope Epic Poetry" in which the latter sees her mother as neither
a metaphorical equivalent for her lost homeland nor a sign of the indisputable origin but
as a metonymic signifier that can only allude to the presence of her Korean home as
always "partial, disembodied, and missing" (49). According to Lowe, while the text
thematizes various reunions of elements and people that are forcibly divided, such
encounters are always displaced by "departure, distance and return" that prohibit the total
identification between two subjects distanced and different from each other (62).

18
Such problematic traces Judith Butler’s well-known exploration into the historical
process of gendered categorization and construction of “matter” and “idea” in
metaphysics: “The body posited as prior to the sign, is always posited or signified as
prior. This signification produces as an effect of its own procedure the very body that it
nevertheless and simultaneously claims to discover as that which precedes its own
action.” (30)

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Chapter 4

A Poiesis of Dissensus Communis: Kim Shijon'g Kwangju Fragments and
Myung Mi Kim’s Commons
I will not forget.
Even if the world forgets,
It cannot make me forget this. (Kim Shijong)

To change the position of enunciation and the relations within it

Peregrine and Earth (Myung Mi Kim)

The Asia Pacific and the Age of Neoliberalism
How does poetry inscribe and extend a sharing of things that materially provided for and
aesthetically transformed multiple bodies’ lives and appearances within and against the
US-backed dictatorial regime in East Asia? If such activist instance of “communal”
articulation that illuminated its participants in each of their singularity and equality has
been brutally suppressed militarily, in what ways can poems offer such community’s
extension, its afterlife, or its renewed hope in their materialist poiesis of the bodies that
receive and differentiate the memories of this communal form that arose against a
complicit network of nation-states in the Asia Pacific? If, as Jean-Luc Nancy argues,
“we . . . accede to a dawning of sense, we do so poetically” even though a poetic offering
of such access to what is “elevated” and “moving” necessarily defers itself infinitely and,
therefore, places the process of communization of singular bodies in its infinite
incompletion, how can we say that poetry engages in its infinite extension and
continuation of activist “community” of plural singularities that arose against the states in

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East Asia and the Asia Pacific that have begun to play an increasing role in privatizing
the economy and producing what we may call proto-neoliberal forms of hierarchy,
rationality, and poverty? In short, how can we locate an aesthetico-political chiasm
between an activist distribution of sensible things across social space and a poetic
division of the memory of this activism, soliciting a sharing of senses and things that
originally took place in and as the activist articulation of singular bodies?
In attempting to provide provisional answers to this series of questions that
concern the intersection of activist opening of community and its poetic extension in East
Asia and the Asia Pacific, this chapter offers a reading of Kim Shijong’s Kwangju
Fragments (1983) and Myung Mi Kim’s Commons (2003) as two instances of such
poiesis that differentiates and extends the anti-state materialist community that emerged
during the Kwangju People’s Democratic Uprising in May, 1980 in the southern
provincial city of Kwangju in South Korea.
So-called neoliberal privatization of economy across the third and the first worlds,
as David Harvey and others argue, paradoxically required the states as the agents that
have suppressed political dissent and social movements in order to implement policies
that privatized various commonly held assets and promulgated a definition of human
individual that is increasingly indistinguishable from the biopolitical lives exposed to the
whims of the market economic (41). If the authoritarian states are needed to implement
neoliberal values and policies that privatize assets and promulgate a similarly privatized
idea of the human subject that increasingly seems like a “bare life” exposed to what
Deleuze calls “the society of control,” the state relies upon both cultural legitimations and

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military operations, the twin process that is “backed by the traditional upper classes” and
leads to “the fierce repression of all solidarities created within the labour and urban social
movements” as happened in Chile and Argentina in the early 1970s (Harvey 108).
Benefiting from both the financial support from the US and its signing of the
normalization treaty with Japan in 1965 in exchange for massive economic aid, Park
Chung Hee's government that ruled South Korea from 1961 to 1979 actively surveyed
and brutally suppressed labor and student movements in an effort to stimulate export-
oriented development of capital over anything else. As such, Park's regime exemplified a
post-colonial state’s in preparing an economic shift which we today know as neoliberal
counter-revolution. Like many other formerly colonized societies, those who lived in
South Korea in the late 1970s and the early 1980s have experienced how colonial forms
of domination that previously oppressed them slowly and seamlessly give way to new
forms of economic and cultural hierarchy. If the workers, students, and other citizens
mounted a series of active resistances against such proto-neoliberal policies, they were
continuously suppressed by Park's government and its intelligence that were politically
approved and financially supported by the US. Further, Park, himself a former officer of
Japan's imperial army, actively borrowed the symbols of Japanese imperial nationalism to
legitimize his dictatorial governance and, at one point, designated his style of governance
"Yushin," taken from the Japanese term "Ishin" that is usually used to signify the Meiji
Restoration (Meiji Ishin). With such institutional support and cultural appropriation of
symbols from the US and Japan each of which occupied Korea and suppressed its people,
Park’s ostensibly post-colonial state illustrates a harrowing continuum of colonization

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and globalization. Resembling the situation of Hong Kong which, according to Ackbar
Abbas, is constituted by imperialism as "the colonial city" and now is "primed to perform
well as [one of] global cities" (3), the lives of those who lived in South Korea in the
1980s were precariously poised upon the transition from colonial to neoliberal forms of
dominance and management.
The Kwangju People's Democratic Uprising punctured such continuum of
domination in South Korea by having instituted a short-lived egalitarian, civic
government in the southern city of Kwangju in May, 1980. However, its destruction by
the country’s military force with a backing from the US military continues to pose
questions to those who live the present: what is a community in and against the imperial
network of the nation-states? who inhabit such space of community? If the democratized
Korean government engages in its celebratory representation of the event as a major step
toward its recovery of formal democracy where some Korean filmmakers’ moralist
refusal to visually represent it risks its dialectical substantiation as the sublime object in
the nation’s commemorative project, it is necessary instead to attend to a singular
example of a visit to Kwangju in which one who visits the site of the struggle encounters
its material traces that manifest as the paradoxical “origin” of democracy in its repetition.
In an essay on Korean film, Peppermint Candy, Naoki Sakai recounts his visit to
Kwangju in 1997, a historical moment in which the city has already begun to host a series
of events that commemorate the 1980 uprising as part of the nation’s spectacularized
narrative toward its recovery of formal democracy. According to Sakai, however, even
these state-funded events and institutions (such as the Kwangju Biennial, May 18th

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National Cemetery, and May 18th Commemoration Park) continue to receive local
visitors who offer prayers to the dead, make offerings such as flowers and the activists’
portraits, and therefore proliferate different meanings of the event. As Sakai notes, these
material offerings the visitors make and the pains inscribed on their bodies constitute the
"excess of history" that cannot be easily recuperated by the nation-state's attempt to make
Kwangju a property of the nation. Instead, as Sakai is reminded here, the origin of
“democracy” only appears paradoxically in its repetition that leaves and appears as its
ineradicable “traces.”
For someone like me who is no longer able to find it important to seek the origin
of the term democracy in the United States or Britain, visiting Kwangju meant a
visit to one of the wellsprings of democracy as both an ideal and practice in the
world today. Since democracy is not a property of a nation, ethnicity, race,
tradition, or civilization but that which disseminates itself toward others--as
corresponding to the idea of democracy as a universality--its origins should lie in
its traces and in the very people who were moved by the ideal of democracy.

. . . [At the May 18
th
Memorial Park,] I recognized the traces of the engagements
of Kwangju citizens in the photographs of the barricades and the occupied
provincial building which they set fire to. While looking at the broad and
somewhat vacuous landscape of this government-funded park, I thought about
both [the so-called] “Kwangju Incident” that became a harmless part of or an
episode in the national memory and what I would call an “excess of history” that
deviates from such national process of commemoration. (178-9)

As Sakai recognizes here, the photographs of the citizen activists in the occupied
buildings and behind the barricades in May, 1980, do not exemplify any prefigured idea
of democracy that does not inhere in the acts of resistance. Rather, their occupation of
the state-sanctioned space and coordinated sharing of food, medicine, clothing, and
weapons across social boundaries happened as an ongoing exploration of the idea of both
community and equality that can only be witnessed and felt in and as its process. If

130
Korean social scientist Jung-woon Choi’s designation of the uprising as “an absolute
community” may seem shocking to those of us who are trained to question both the
notions of the absolute or the communal, his term points to an absolutely self-referential
manner in which those who participates in this “community” explored, tested, and put
into practice the meanings of such communal “being-with” against all forms of privilege
and authority that subordinate their lives: “The community that emerged during the
uprising, which I discuss in this chapter, was a social reality affirming itself for its own
sake, grounded in a love inexplicably linked to life. This community therefore pushes
Tonnies’s notion of the community [as Gemeinschaft] to its furthest limits” (9).
1

If such egalitarian sharing remains a task in need of repetition in the neoliberal
space that traverses the US and East Asia, the poems that explore such potential
significances of the Kwangju uprising must repeat the gestures with which its participants
enacted a sharing of material and distribution of appearance thematically, imagistically,
and formally. The “community” that experimentally explored its alignment of bodies as
both equal and singular against the state’s distribution of identity and privilege requires
its extension in poetry.
Poetic Articulating of the Popular Struggles
In Kim Shijong’s Kwangju Fragments, published in 1983, material traces of the Kwangju
Uprising in the wake of the government massacre of its participants extend and reiterate
themselves in the space that traverses the Korean peninsula and the ethnic Korean
communities and the mainstream society in Japan. However, we first need to examine
how Kim’s articulation in poetry of such communal space is inflected by his personal

131
experiences in Kwangju in 1945 and in Cheju in 1948. Once an elite student under the
Japanese colonial pedagogical apparatus, Kim’s post-1945 encounter with the rural
peasants near Kwangju served as a catalytic event that prompted him to join the
communist struggle, whose increasing popularity was apparent in the growing number of
so-called “People’s Committees” established throughout South Korea (Mun 37). More
specifically, it was his participation in a youth study group on local history and
subsequent travel across the Cholla Province that allowed him to directly come into
contact with the peasants’ lives and to reexamine the cultural, educational, and political
impacts of Japanese colonialism that informed his sensibility.
Led by Mr. Choi [Kim’s teacher], we visited the villages that were scattered on
the foothill of Mt. Mudung, not too far from our school. My experience during
these days forced me to reexamine myself who had been striving to be an elite
subject of the [Japanese] empire. What surprised me first in those days in early
November with its clear air was the peasants’ houses with their poorly thatched
roofs that stood on the earth like scabs on a skin. I couldn't call them houses,
when compared to the houses in Cheju with their tightly thatched silver grass
roofs and walls. . . .

There were children with protruding bellies who were plagued by flees. The
cooking pot was fixed on the hearth, and flies flew there even in November [after
the harvesting season]. Mr. Choi taught us about multiple apparatuses of
exploitation placed by Japan upon the peasants and the social reasons behind the
erosion of agricultural villages. He also talked to us about the talented poets and
novelists who either died early or succumbed to devastating madness during the
colonial era. (Kim and Kim 35-36)

Since the publication of his first collection Horizon (Chiheisen) in 1955, the poems Kim
writes in Japanese as a resident-Korean poet has critiqued such apparatuses of material
domination not only thematically but by formally and imagistically describing an
unfolding of a community that occurs despite and because of a fundamental
incommensurability between one and one’s neighbors or the environment. Such practice

132
in aesthetics constitutes what the poet calls his “revenge” upon the structure of feeling
imposed by modern Japan’s literary nationalism that promulgated the sense of uncritical
unity between the body and the nation’s natural environment especially through its
systematic promotion of stereotypical seasonal words in numerous lyric poems and
children’s songs. If a lingering sense of antagonism permeates Kim’s depiction of
relations between humans or between them and nature, his “revenge” serves the twin
purpose of disarticulating the poet’s own previous cathexis to Japan’s pedagogical
structure in the colony and of critically depicting the lives of Koreans in both the
peninsula and in Japan without replicating the ideological adherence to the notion of
homogeneity or commensurability.
Such reinvention of Japanese-language poetry in terms of prosody and imagery is
necessary for Kim’s decolonizing poetics precisely because his poems critique not only
the Japanese imperial structure of sentiment but also a series of authoritarian regimes that
gained power in both South and North Koreas. Therefore, the poet, in several of his
essays, variously implicates South Korea’s pro-US leaders such as Park Chunghee and
Chun Doohwan—the former a graduate of imperial Japan’s military academy and the
latter also an elite military officer—and some Korean activists he has encountered in
Japan who, despite their radically opposing political viewpoints, share a similarly
sentimental notion of sociality that imagines cohesion of the human subjects without
friction or antagonism. Kim’s poems constantly examine the ways in which socio-
political domination effects itself by controlling and managing human bodies’ appearance

133
to the others in space and, consequently, how such skewed distribution of our appearance
as unequal is justified and naturalized.
To do so, Kim refrains from using a typical term for domination in Japanese
shihai (servitude and distribution) and instead opts for a rarely used word sahai
(difference and distribution) that more adequately illuminates the ways in which
systematic domination by a colonial authority deploys both physically repressive violence
and aesthetic distribution of privilege and appearance whose effects sediment over time
in colonial and postcolonial societies (60). Thus, an alteration of the ways in which
certain people and objects are seen or sensed in a hierarchical structure becomes a crucial
task for Kim’s poetic critique of colonial domination that exerts one of its most
pernicious effects in the structure of aesthetic education and literary pedagogy. If sahai,
in Kim’s formulation, effects an aesthetic politics that governs the ways in which people
and things are seen and sensed in social space, his poems must reorganize material and
historical phenomena so that they could reappear differently across the multiple sensuous
registers in a manner that challenges the current aesthetic regimes.
2

Kim’s poems thus open a clandestine temporality in which historical events
potentially recur as something yet to be understood. If the uprising in Korea’s popular
memory is often referred to somewhat enigmatically by re-citing its date May 18
th
as a
mere number 5.18, the poet’s linkage of the Kwangju Uprising and the April 3 Uprising
of Cheju Island in 1948 as yet another popular resistance that has been long repressed
from the popular memory of the mainstream Korean society consolidates a hitherto
unexplored affinity between two enigmas: 5.18 and 4.3.
3
Therefore, instead of using a

134
chronologically causal narrative to link these two events, his articulation of the two
events ends with his recognition that a certain barely perceptible “aching” recurs against
his will and needs to be given its material forms in his poems:
Words are powerless when facing the facts that overwhelm them. […] If
memories resembled a thin string, then we could still drag and wind it according
to our will. But when I try to recall those memories [of the April 3 Massacre],
they suddenly arise in the form of a mass and refuse words altogether. […]
While not directly linked to the May 18, my sense of indebtedness to the April 3,
as its direct participant and witness, and the resulting trauma allowed me to
complete Kwangju Fragments. I could not have written this book that records the
Kwangju citizens’ uprising without my relationship with the April 3. The book’s
main purpose is not primarily to condemn the oppressive violence committed by
the authority but rather to attend to the aching at the bottom of my consciousness
that nonetheless desires to face this incident. (Kim and Kim 180-181)

Without a prefigured subject who offers a moral critique of the US-backed South Korean
dictatorships and, through such critique, predetermines the community’s constituents and
purposes, the poet’s “aching” that rises up to his consciousness poses again a question of
how to share material and reconfigure appearances of those who participate in such
sharing. If Kim’s poems continue to refigure “the aching” mass that lacks its words, they
redistribute the questions about such egalitarian social ensemble that were tentatively and
experimentally answered in Cheju in 1948 and in Kwangju in 1980. Such recognition of
the imbrication between the poet’s initially passive exposure to the memories of the
uprisings and his subsequent discovery of the desire to extend and continue the uprising’s
avowed and unavowed aims informs the very preface of Kwangju Fragments.
I will not forget,
Even if the world forgets,
it cannot make me forget this. (218)

135
Without any comprehensible meaning of the uprising set in place, the poet declares his
will to “not forget,” thus positing the book as a work of critical remembrance that
protects the significance of the uprising from the nation-states as South Korea, the US,
and Japan that were complicitously involved in its suppression. The uprising, for Kim, is
neither visible nor invisible in its fixed, substantiated form within the officiated archive
of the nation-state. Such double refusal of the event’s prefixed visibility and invisibility
preserves a chance that its potential images may arrive at multiple bodies and challenge
them to recreate its secret significance. Kim’s poems explore the very possibility for
figuration as a kind of aesthetic task that is at once required and cannot be completed as
one’s own work or oeuvre. The uprising repeatedly appears and takes upon various
figurations in Kim’s book and presents its image that cannot be appropriated by one’s
faculty of visual imagination.
4

Infinitely Finite Figurations of Kwangju
In the poem titled “The Wind” [“Kaze”], a gradual withdrawal of the memories of the
resistance manifests itself visually and refuses to recede into the transcendent space
reserved for the unrepresentable. Instead, they continuously arrive as the cold spring
wind that blinds the mouse’s eyes and, therefore, initially presents itself only acoustically.
Moreover, the wind’s arrival issues a protest against possible celebration of newly
burgeoning lives in the spring and introduces a barely acknowledged presence of that
which lies in the midst of such season without its own recognizable image and voice.
Passing by the round eyes of a wild mouse,
the wind crosses the riverbed.
Beside the trembling sounds by the water,
and the wind that sways the yellow petals,

136
the early spring bends itself by the Yongsan river.
Lower than the shrunk height of the past,
the wind shuts itself, only to return its bending shade.
. . .
That is where the voices that blow from somewhere twitch at the tip of the leaves
and faintly sing all day long.
When words are no longer words,
we should not inquire their whereabouts. (220-221)

In the spring season animated by the signs of new lives such as “the wild mouse,”
“yellow petals,” and green “leaves,” the wind’s passage through the southern plains of
Cholla Province instantiates the ephemeral nature of the very interruption that disappears
in and as the wind. If the cold wind at least presents its “trembling sounds” that become
somewhat visible through the leaves that “twitch,” its lack of image or words prohibits
the poet to consign the history of the uprising into oblivion. Bypassing the realms of the
national culture and discourse in which they become impregnated with utilitarian
meanings, Kim’s poems explore a significance of such “wind” through his poiesis of
audio-visual senses.
5

If the past as such, therefore, is to come into the present as its potential images,
several poems that initially seem to eulogize the deaths of the uprising’s participants now
postulate their very passings as the events that need to be reimagined and reformalized at
the nexus of sound and vision. In the poem “Distant Thunder,” the poet describes the
moment in which he did not “hear” but “saw the sound” of the distant thunder that “ fell
while crashing the whitened, empty sky” (50). When the rain drops form a “white
entanglement” that frames his window and clouds his vision, the poet needs to listen to
such rain drops’ “endless murmurings.” Therefore, such partially invisible and voiceless
“thunder” frames the limit of the poet’s vision: “the memory pales and lurks at the core of

137
the dark” (50) and the “corpses of the cry fall as dust in the emptiness of one’s perception”
(58). Sheltered in and from the field of vision, these memories that exceed and evaporate
from visuality present their spillage into the acoustic field where they need to be heard.
As it becomes clear in the poem, such bestowal of an image to what is now only
acoustically palpable constitutes his act of love toward both people and things. As the
uprising recurs as “the distant thunder” which the poet cannot see, he nonetheless sees its
invisible white “flash” and sets out to give a “figure” to the event whose “shape” is lost
due to its official commemoration and spectacularization.
It’s not that I saw
the distant thunder that ripples with its dull sound.
Pierced by the white of the flash that is released,
my own white heart heard it. (52)

This is why
it dries.
Known when the thing’s shape (katachi, 形) is lost,
It is a figure (zo, 象) of the first love. (53)

If the “loss” referred to in the passage occurs due to the commemorative efforts in both
national and consumerist cultures of South Korea especially after the country has gained
its formal democracy and economic competitiveness within the globalizing world, it also
becomes the transcendental condition of the poet’s desire to refigurate its missing “shape”
into its singular “figure.” The “shape” that needs to be made as its “figure” foregrounds
the way in which the uprising’s memory recurs singularly and continuously in the present.
Division of Light: Kwangju and Its Renewal
Such sheltering and dispersal of the material traces of the past is extended in the poem
“Words That Are Sealed—For Pak Kwanhyun” which labor to meditate upon the very

138
nature of the uprising and its constitution of a short-lived egalitarian community. If the
the specific causes that have led to the uprising continue to elude many concerned social
scientists to this day, the poem specifically focuses upon one student dissident’s suicidal
erasure of his body in the confined space of the state prison and explores a particular
visuality of his “words” that need to be not only distributed but re-differentiated by
whoever comes to receive them and hope to enact the potential extension of the uprising
beyond its putative defeat.
6
Reversing the preponderance of the audible over the visible
in “Distant Thunder,” Pak’s sealed words are seen as the bearer of colors that at once
challenge and unlimit the poet’s faculty of imagination as they demand to be figured in a
way the poet was not able to do previously. Here, the poet is led to imagine and make an
image of the colors that emanate from the edges of the student’s tightly shut lips.

Sometimes words
seal themselves and bear colors
as expression refuses its communication.
A demand of refusal has no words.
Only the dark silence differentiates and distributes [sahai suru]
while oppositions compete with one another.
Words are already distanced from the phenomena
that are being taken away
Meanings exfoliate from words
that hold them in their entirety. (252)

In the poem, the well-known student activist Pak Kwanhyun’s forty-day hunger strike in
the prison that eventually took his life indexes his refusal to enter the discursive space
governed by the pro-US state that would brand him and others as “communist traitors.”
At the same time, his persistent maintenance of silence also makes it extremely difficult
for the sympathetic activists to reify his words as a part of an anti-imperialist variant of

139
pro-unification nationalism in South Korea. Refusing to be vilified or canonized, Pak’s
body becomes a transmitter of non-discursive materiality that must be felt as a “demand
of refusal” [“kyozetsu no yokyu”]. By inverting a more common phrase in Japanese, “a
refusal of demand” [“yokyu no kyozetsu,”] into its uncanny inverse, Pak’s body in the
state prison emits its refusal whose lack of specific objects or referents almost makes it a
transcendental refusal of the state power. However, the very transcendental desire also
demands its differentiation and modification precisely because his silent words come to
our world empirically and sensuously as their “colors.”
By issuing its colors, Pak’s desire to incarnate his refusal of the state signifies
itself sensuously. Poised upon his lips that tremble in the undecidable border between his
body and its exterior, Pak’s demand materializes in its constant spillage into the others’
sentient bodies that he may or may not know. Such distribution of appearance tends to
critically exceed the kind of equitable transfer of visibility in the social space that Jacques
Ranciere calls “the distribution of the sensible” as it illuminates a more radical
potentiality and necessity to distribute that which is currently insensible, soliciting us to
explore new manners in which people could appear to one another. As colors and lights,
Pak’s resolute silence in the state prison spills itself elsewhere and begins to reilluminate
itself and its recipients. Dispropriative of Pak’s alleged proprietorship of his own desire
to refuse, the colors upon his lips are to be seen, felt, and refracted by others in turn. The
uprising, then, retains its power to reconfigure a current form of “sahai,” an instituted
distribution of predetermined differences and identities that are made to appear as both
fixed and legitimate.

140
The man who turned his living body into a will has died,
having lived his only demand
which his flesh alone can expiate.
For the man who has his death alone to be taken,
Death worthy of dying has proven his life in its entirety.
Suppression does not mean tranquility.
Brutality cannot disfigure memories.
Kwangju is a demand,
is a refusal,
and is a renewal.
What power could crush the significance
of the composites that have come together as one?
As it interrupts,
what becomes exposed is yet another surface of interruption.
. . . The night’s depth
forms a black curtain
that witnessed the man’s death
and its mortification in his last breath.
I quietly open the window
and press my lips softly onto the night.
When the whole nation lies in the dark,
the prison is a box from which light spills forth. (252-254)

If Pak’s death “prove[s]” his “will” to live against the state power and transmits its colors
and lights, the poem actively links such “lights” Pak’s body emits in the prison to the
larger significance of the uprising that occurred in the city named Kwangju, signifying
“the Province of Light” in its Chinese iteration. If the demand Pak and others physically
instantiated by occupying and barricading the provincial government building
substantiates the larger significance of the uprising in Kwangju as a certain distribution of
lights, the poet thinks that the light may have already arrived in the nocturnal darkness of
Osaka where he resides in and writes his poem. If such light has indeed traveled to
Osaka, the poet can receive it by “kissing” the city’s night air in which it still remains
concealed. Such act fractures and invaginates the poet’s body on the surface of his lips.

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Prohibiting his body to enclose itself into a totality, the poet’s kissing orifice becomes
both a receptacle and passage for the reilluminative light of the uprising.
Archive Fevers and “Beauty”
How could we explain such mediated erotics where the poet’s kissing of Pak’s light is
construed as constitutive of an egalitarian community in its renewal? Here, Jacques
Derrida’s notion of an “archive fever” helps describe the way in which a historical
archive burns itself into erasure and only leaves certain visual impressions that
parasitically attach themselves to the limit of one’s aesthetical imagination and manifest
their transcendentally empirical excess that vibrates at such limit (Archive Fever, 8). As
Derrida observes in his reading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a historical
archive’s architectonics resembles that of human consciousness which protects itself from
“the most intense and durable forms of memory.” In such archive that is “entrusted to the
outside,” memory appears in its own “mute” destruction and effacement from both
consciousness and phenomena: “It is at work, but since it always operates in silence, it
never leaves any archives of its own” (10). However, such concealment of concealment
that seems to seal up an archive nevertheless encounters an “exceptional” moment in
which it its erotically “impressed” and exposed to the traces of (dis)appearing memory.
Such impressions seem to occur upon the archive’s outer “skin”, which, as Freud writes
in his quasi-anatomical analysis of human consciousness, exists as a filmic surface that
“gives up the structure of living matter [and] becomes to an extent inorganic" (68).
[T]he anarchy drive eludes perception, to be sure, save exception: that is, Freud
says, except if it disguises itself, except if it tints itself, makes itself up or paints
itself in some erotic color. This impression of erogenous color draws a mask right
on the skin. In other words, the archiviolithic drive is never present in person,

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neither in itself nor in its effects. It leaves no monument, it bequeaths no
document of its own. As inheritance, it leaves only its erotic simulacrum, its
pseudonym in painting, its sexual idols, its masks of seduction: lovely
impressions. These impressions are perhaps the very origin of what is so
obscurely called the beauty of the beautiful. (11)

An archive, then, is reconceptualized as its own burning impression right on the skin of a
delimited form such as consciousness or institution. As such, a series of impressions
burn and flash right upon the outer limit of an ostensibly delimited totality. As Derrida
argues, if such burning and flashing instances of self-effacement provide their “erotic
colors” and provide the condition of possibility for our experience of “beauty,” we could
place such colors within the larger analytics of aesthetic experience and judgment in
Kant’s Third Critique and begin to rethink Pak’s “colors” that disappear in silence as a
form of erotic impressions that delimit the poet’s and others’ imaginations.
In Critique of Judgment, Kant persistently excludes what he describes as “merely
sensuous” appeal of colors and sounds from his analytics of “purely” formal judgment of
beauty that is covertly and parenthetically instrumentalized by Kant himself “(perhaps in
conjunction with the Understanding)” as a means through which we attain cognition (27).
However, as Derrida’s reading points out, while Kant argues that the human imagination
initially engages in its “free play” (spiel) with “purely” formal elements such as the
patterned lines and regularized rhythm in order to satisfy one’s own form-making ability
(imagination, einbildung) while disregarding the material distinctness of the object,
Einbildung’s narcissistic figuration of its own power to figurate nonetheless happens “on
the occasion” where it is already pressed against and exposed to what Kant calls “the
attraction of sensory matter” (Derrida 64, see also Nancy 215). At once enabling and

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exceeding the subject’s imagination in which it nonetheless remains devalorized as “mere”
decoration or “parergon,” an instance of the “merely decorative” matters such as the
“mixed colors” and “irregular rhythms” constitute the limit at which the artist encounters
materiality that his imagination cannot appropriate (Derrida 90).
Derrida focuses upon such sensuous “appendage” that does not contribute to the
work’s production of its finished form and speculates upon the ways in which it
simultaneously gives rise to the production of artwork and renders such production
constitutively incomplete at its own limit. Engaging in an “erotic” (re)constitution of the
inappropriable, such parergonal colors and sounds exhibit a certain beauty that appears in
and as its continuous self-erasure and self-veiling. Such erasure and veiling serve as the
transcendental condition of possibility for historical memory to appear in its empirical
renewal in the world. Constitutively lacking a teleological end, such lack-of-end
nonetheless manifests its non-negative materiality in an artwork as its colorful traces and
traits that incomplete the work at its edge, frame, and border and, hence, constitutively
disables our attempt to call it a closed totality, a work (oeuvre).
The without of the pure cut is without lack, without lack of anything. And yet in
my experience of the accomplished tulip, of the plenitude of its system, my
knowledge is lacking in something and this is necessary for me to find this totality
beautiful. This something is not some thing, it is not a thing, still less part of the
thing, a fragment of the tulip, a bit [bout] of the system. . . . The mere absence of
the goal would not give it to me, nor would its presence. But the trace of its
absence (of nothing), inasmuch as it forms its trait in the totality in the guise of
the sans, of the without-end, the trace of the sans which does not give itself to any
perception and yet whose invisibility marks a full totality to which it does not
belong and which has nothing to do with it as totality, the trace of the sans is the
origin of beauty. (90)

144
In an accidental encounter with the singular object and its sensuous excess, my
imagination cannot produce an entirely self-constitutive picture of itself insofar as the
barely perceptible colors and sounds of the object inhabit its edge. “[T]he parergonal
equivocity of the color comes to intensify the parergonal equivocity of the frame” that
escapes and questions my ownership or production of it (77). The work’s frame is
constitutively and amorphously exposed to such heterogeneous colors and sounds that at
once resist my appropriation and yet constitute my pleasure of reimagining them in an
experience that I cannot fully enjoy. At a nexus of aesthetics and ethics, such pleasure
without enjoyment constitutes and intensifies my desire to engage in an ongoing task to
recreate and renew the memories of others. As Jean-Luc Nancy sums up the same
process, it presents the incessant movement of “unlimitation” of the work’s and the
body’s form that otherwise completes and presents its work of representation as an
enclosed totality: “the unlimited begins on the external border of the limit and it does
nothing but begin, never to finish” (223).
In Kwangju Fragments, Pak’s colors remain an inappropriable material for the
individual subject or the nation-state. As such, the poet’s kissing of the night air in Osaka
countersigns Pak’s silent colors and rematerializes their erotic excess in and as the new
image, i.e., his own constitutively divided body. Exposed to such “parergonal” colors as
a certain origin of “beauty,” the poet’s oral orifice tears apart his previous narration of the
self and incompletes his body along the cut pressed upon it by the traces and the trait of
Pak’s colors. The Kwangju Uprising that unfolded in “the province of light” now

145
constitutes such orifice, a space where an image of history disarticulates, questions, and
unlimits the delimited subjectivity or self-consciousness of its historiographer.
The uprising’s “compositional” articulation of heterogeneous bodies does not
begin and end in a bordered space and instead happens as a movement of colors and
lights across multiple mouths that resignify and reform(ulate) the actual distribution of
both practical and sensuous things among the struggle’s participants in Kwangju, 1980.
Thus, if Korean artist Hong Songdam, who participated in the uprising, unhesitantly
affirms “the beauty” of those who defended the nascent community, Hong’s rather naïve
postulation of the “beautiful” points to its “origin” which, as an inappropriable appendage
to his imaginative faculty, calls to be extended, refigurated, and infinitely passed on to
the future recipients (216-219). In the poem’s ethics of eros, the distribution of senses
and its transformation of their recipients are inseparable.
The poem “Distance” [“Kyori”] emphasizes such fleeting appearance of Kwangju
in the midst of Osaka where the poet now resides. While Osaka is presented in its scarred
or decaying landscape characterized by the "rust that eats into the electricity wire" and
"the water moss that shines in the dented wall," "the distance" in the poem becomes the
material condition that allows for the spirit and practice of the May resistance to find its
reinstantiation.
A cleaving keeps me away from all places.
O, my heart that always looks afar,
as if standing powerlessly also means to be linked to some place,
distance is a concern [kanshin, or interest] that never shortens itself and would
take me anywhere. (276)

146
Prohibiting us to know whether what "never shortens itself" is the unbridgeable distance
between the poet and Kwangju or the poet's undiminishing interest in Kwangju, the last
line insists upon this inseparability of distance and touch, or separation and “interest.” If
history as a figure can be renewed in such distance where its erotic materiality traverses
and divides our bodies, the poem’s division of singularities implies its doubly genitive
consequences: division of material among singularizes and division of singularities from
one another. Such sharing and separation take place in East Asia that continuously
appears as a militarily targeted spatial construct.
Muttering that it’s nevertheless important to be concerned,
distance wriggles its silver scale toward the smoky horizon
that lies even farther than the ocean
and set the clouds on the run.
To the USS Midway idly searching its enemy fleet,
it turns this cleaving distance
into a distance that pushes itself further
and puts flames upon three stars-and-stripes that then bleed into vermillion.
I look at this distance intently.
And the distance in turn reduces me,
passing through as a dotted scape on the paved bridge. (277)

The movement of the US aircraft carrier within the “smoky horizon” illustrates the state
of East Asia where "the nationalism of Japan [and other Asian states such as South Korea
and the Philippines] and the US hegemony in the region need not be seen as oppositional.
Rather, East Asian nationalisms constitute a part of the US hegemony as the latter's
maintenance relies upon the continuation of the former" (Sakai 204). The poem
illuminates a processual opening of space in which Kwangju memories share themselves
out within the larger geopolitical space where the US hegemony functions in concert with
the nationalisms of South Korea and Japan.

147
Kim’s Kwangju Fragments approaches the space of the people who not only
survive on the liminal edges of Korea, Japan, and elsewhere but also initiate an incessant
and incompletable opening of an alternative community whose disparate subjects contest,
withdraw from, and practice a form of composition that challenges the state apparatuses.
In culturally abject and economically subjugated places such as Kwangju in South Korea
and Osaka in Japan, the people enact a gathering of narratives, sharing of food, and
distribution of desires that retain the potential to annul the legal orders of both nation-
states. As Giorgio Agamben asserts, this is a politically ambiguous zone of “the
people”—a “fragmentary multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies” that “cannot be
included in the whole of which it is a part” (1). Kim’s poems also attest to the survival
and renewal of such space after it has been culturally erased or militarily destroyed.
Material appearances of memory disseminate themselves as light, color, and wind and
solicit us to become the contingent inheritors of the popular across the formerly imperial
metropoles and former colonies.
Articulating the Singular Resistances: Myung-Mi Kim’s Commons
Myung Mi Kim’s collection of poems Commons (2003) also proposes a poetic form with
which singular experiences of war and military destruction on one hand and of popular
resistances and survivals on the other retain their potentials for repetition and
differentiation as sound and color. Kim’s poem thus relocates the social struggle from its
sociologically grounded empirical history to its possibility for repetition in unexpected
spaces. If such move allows the poet to prevent both commodification and
exemplification of the political tragedies that occurred in Korea under the Japanese

148
colonization and the US imperialist dominance, Kim’s increasing attenuation and
obfuscation of local particularity is supplemented by her awareness that the very locality
continues to serve as a reserve that temporarily frames iterable and distributable sensuous
experiences.
Kim’s first collection Under Flag (1989) exhibits a tendency to spatially
substantiate the geographical distance between the US and the Korean peninsula as the
fixed substance across which a disaporic subject has lost her possibility to master Korean
language. Therefore, such melancholy that is perhaps evident in Under Flag risks
postulating the diasporic as one who has been linguistically impoverished in comparison
to the national subject who stays put in Korea and boasts a fuller access to the language.
7

Must it ring so true
So we must sing it

To span even yawning distance
And would we be near then

What would the sea be, if we were near it

Voice
It catches its underside and drags it back
What sound do we make, “n”, “h”, “g”,
Speak and it is sound in time (13)

Critically reflecting upon such potentially essentializing tendency to substantiate the past
in East Asia and its loss in the US, Kim begins to pursue an alternative poetics that does
not essentialize or sanctify the past but rather seeks its renewal and transformation in the
present. Thus, while maintaining a focus upon the history of colonizations in Korea, in
her subsequent collections such as The Bounty and Dura, historical event is not treated as
a thing or substance in the fixed place but instead retains its undiminishing potentiality

149
for its recurrence that produces new forms of spatiality. In Commons,
reconceptualization of history as such a “virtual” call for its resignification assists the
poet’s effort to see and sense “the world” anew. If the poet critically points out in
“Lamenta” section at the beginning of the book that “[t]he fundamental tenet of all
military geography is that every feature of the visible world possesses actual or potential
military significance” (32), testimony of and against such militarist pictorialization that
produces “the world” recalls history not as an object of knowledge but as its
manifestation that is at once sensuous and “partial.”
The transition from the stability and absoluteness of the world’s contents
To their dissolution into motions and relations.

P: Of what use are the senses to us—tell me that
E: To indicate, to make known, to testify in part (13)

In a manner that closely resembles Kim Shijong’s necessarily incomplete presentation of
Pak Kwanghyun’s silent colors that allows for an erotically seductive encounter between
the dead and the poet, Myung Mi Kim’s relocation of language from the domains of
referential knowledge to that of sensuous attestation repostulates historiography as a
passive-active production of perceptible enigmas that, in this case, span across color and
temperature:
War is there and travel
The same is my sister, brothers, and mother
The father is thrush, white at birth and at dusk
Father is burying ground cool to the touch

This is some color but what color is it (39)

If the first two lines indicate that both the unspecified military force and the family
affected by its presence similarly travel across space, the latter’s experience of survival

150
and exodus only manifests as a poetic image whose sensuous equivocity (“color” and
“touch”) corresponds with its epistemological uncertainty as the status of the father. That
is, if the father, already separated visually from the rest of the family in the second line,
seems to be at peril physically in the poem, the poem remains unaware of his status or
location. The enigmatic presentation of his color (“what color is it”) corresponds to his
undecidable status between life and death that are figured by both “birth” and “dusk” in
the present. Furthermore, his colorful ambiguity corresponds with his enigmatic presence
in terms of temperature. The passage does not resolve the question of the father’s status
as a live person who buries the dead or the body that is buried as the dead, making it
impossible for the reader to decide whether the very coolness derives from the “ground”
into which he now buries the others or from the father himself who has lost his
temperature and now feels “cool to touch.” History here resists its placement within the
domain of knowledge and ephemerally and repeatedly flashes like the thrush’s colorful
feathers or the rise and fall of someone’s temperature. The readers’ experience of non-
knowledge inspires an act of testifying history in its constitutively infinite incompletion
and extension across senses. The poet, the poem, and its readers bear a question about
the past as one that primarily concerns its sensuous enigma: “what color is it?”
Erotics of the Earth: the Birds in Commons
Kim’s attention to various local experiences of colonization and expropriation and the
struggles and resistances that ensue immediately leads to the very experiences’ non-
localizable dispersion of their sensible virtuality that enigmatically recurs in and
dislocates the present. In fact, if, according to the explanatory notes which the poet is

151
asked to provide in the book’s last section “Pollen Fossil Record,” “potential sounds in
Korean, or, for that matter, any number of languages” operate as “roaming fragments
[that] fall into the writing” (109), Commons is tasked to instantiate multiple moments of
sensuously enigmatic recurrence of history from plural locations. Contesting the ways in
which such experiences are taxonomized and canonized by the existing nation-states, the
poet argues that non-substantiable possibility to renew these experiences challenges the
archives of the nation-states and refigures the plural events in history as the constellated
singularities: “sayings . disturbances/ A nation to be humanized/ Visited by a humble
pounding/ The meaning of becoming related” (101).
8

To be sure, such “communal” form in Commons does not offer a mere jointure
between preconstructed subjectivities or groups. Instead, it presents a moment of being
“communal” that happens among and across multiple bodies in their persistent efforts to
survive. Thus, if Kim Shijong redefines the significance of the Kwangju Uprising in its
multi-sensuous recursion and repetition of community that continues to articulate
strangers, Commons locates community in a traversal of the desire to survive in the midst
of economic and military dominations across plural “local” struggles. Such postulation
of “community” as an effect of traversing desire manifests in the juxtaposition of three
incomplete instances of military “sieges” and those who survive them: an unlocatable
experience of warfare that took place somewhere, the uprising in Kwangju, and the
citizens under siege in Sarajevo.
“peacekeeping troops”
“tanks beneath the windows”
The inside of someone else’s dwelling visible—a table and some chairs.

152
You start to count one, two, three, four . . .until the explosion is near your
neighborhood.
You can guess the position of mortar by this counting and try to find a safe
place.

If the windows are gone, weak plastic is taped up but the strong wind comes and
we stay awake

In this South Cholla Province where all vehicles had been confiscated, we
resorted to walking, the method of travel of the Yi dynasty. We reverted back
300 years.
Kwangju, 1980.

It’s the same to be in the house, at the shelter or anywhere. There is no safe
place.
When we have no electricity, we are sitting in the dark and we know what life
looked like before Christ.
Sarajevo, 1992. (43)

The communal subject “we” in the above paragraphs or stanzas does not aggregate the
groups of people that endure or resist violence in the three separate locations. Instead, a
persistent desire to survive and live on extends itself from one place to another,
dislocating its anchorage within one fixed locality and allowing it to manifest its
extension of almost impersonal affect that is discernible in the strikingly similar yet
slightly different manners of their survival: “the strong wind comes and we stay awake,”
“we resorted to walking, the method of travel of the Yi dynasty,” and “we are sitting in
the dark and we know what life looked life before Christ.”
If Kim’s poem engages in a spatial dispersal of such desire in and against
militarized and economic dominations, its most localizable instantiation happens in the
bodies of numerous birds that populate the pages of Commons and present themselves as
the local indices of non-localizable voices and colors they temporarily embody and

153
continuously transmit.
9
Presenting their minute bodies in their constitutive movement,
the birds in Commons appear as the figurations of incomplete and, hence, infinite
possibility to leave colors and sounds at multiple locales on the earth. Such figures in the
poem include “a blackbird . . . in a pittance of sky” that points to the presence of those
that are of “foreign origin” and “forgotten sources” (4), “the blue jay” that “exacts” and
thus transports the wealth of “the half-broken sunflower” (20), “the robin” that is found
dying in the war zone (27), and “[p]eregrine” whose body, like a parenthesis on the page,
frames and carries the possibility to enunciate two italicized syllables “(f l)”to the
locations over the earth it flies to (60).
The birds thus figurate reservation, renewal, and dispersal of singular sounds and
colors to plural singularities and enact an ongoing opening up and formation of what
could be retrospectively seen as a communal space. In fact, the birds are figurations of
the very possibility to distribute things that materially provide for viable lives and
aesthetically expose one’s imaginative faculty to other bodies and things in the world. As
such, the birds’ continuous travels in the world potentially transfigure “the globe” as the
representational plane of domination and extraction into what the book calls “Earth” that
extends and expands as it disperses the beings of the sensible to and across plural bodies
in the world.
Hold this up

Amid listening board and gourd

Were to pipe and fittings

Free from function

154
To change the position of enunciation and the relations within it

Peregrine and Earth (99)

Commons therefore links the desires of disparate and different people who persistently
survive in multiple sites of domination and figurate their singularities, mobility, and
renewability as the audio-visual materiality temporarily enframed and contingetly
released by the birds. If such dissemination of sounds and colors leads to potential
liberation of these people from “function” and provide them with different positions for
and relations of enunciation, such liberatory potential lies in the non-functional nature of
the birds’ colors and sounds whose attractive appeal exceeds their putative purpose to
facilitate sexual reproduction by captivating their mates.
Kim’s Commons thus endeavors to offer an instantiation of the ways in which
multiple struggles and resistances against colonizations and expropriations in both
colonial and neoliberal eras extend and differentiate this singular desire to live and live
on across the “earth”. As Elizabeth Grosz points out, the birds, in such instances, create
their songs whose tones, keys, melody, pitch, and rhythm exert “the mesmerizing and
appealing power . . . not only for members of the same species and opposite sex but also
for other species, including mankind” as they affirm “the excessiveness of the body and
the natural order, their capacity to bring out in each other what surprises, what is of no
use but nevertheless attracts and appeals.” As Grosz continues, such vibratory sensation
inherent in birdsongs autonomizes itself and detaches itself from its putative owner. As
such, it points “to the capacity of both matter and life to exchange with each other, to
enter into becomings that transform each” (37, 7).

155
For both Grosz and Kim, “Earth” then designates a potential dispersal of the
human and non-human bodies that engage in their incomplete figurations of this desire
that manifests across vision and hearing and passes to others the ongoing task of its
differential configuration of non-functional erotics which they cannot complete. Such
happenstance dispersal of mutually affective bodies into a new spatial form certainly
resembles Deleuze and Guattari’s reconceptualization of “the earth” that “deterrotirializes
itself, in a way that provides the nomad with a territory” whereby the nomad signifies a
body of becoming that is often placed without much mobility in various challenging and
destitute environments (381). “Earth,” as Myung Mi Kim develops it in Commons,
designates such amorphous opening of spatiality that proceeds through and as an
infinitely incomplete division of sounds and colors and singularization of their recipients’
sentient bodies.
Kim Shijong’s Kwangju Fragments and Myung Mi Kim’s Commons repeat,
extend, and differentiate the activist propositions of “community” in which sharing of
material among and across incommensurate or antagonistic bodies and groups exerts a
transformative effect upon the manners in which such bodies or groups appear to one
another in space. In both Kwangju Fragments and Commons, the composite of bodies
that engage in their ethico-aesthetic sharings and recreations of colors, lights, and sounds
thus constitute an “earth,” an opening field of singularities that unfolds itself in and as
such bodies’ active contestation of hierarchizing and subordinating categories of national
or ethnic identities. By resituating the Kwangju Uprising and other popular resistances as
a series of incomplete and incompletable attempts to practice an “absolute community”

156
that cannot be absolutized as an enclosed totality or completable narrative, the poetics of
Kim Shijong and Myung Mi Kim retain the power to continuously open an “earth” over
and against the imperial and neoliberal construction of the “globe” that is imagined as the
plane given to extraction and exploitation and occupied by the complicitously co-
figurative nation-states.

157
Chapter 4 Endnotes

1
For an overview of the egalitarian manner in which the citizens’ government in
Kwangju distributed food, medicine, and other supplies and organized their minimally
armed police force, see, for example, an interview in a Japanese journal Zenya with the
Korean artist Hong Song-dam, who was one of the central participants in the uprising
(Hong in Zenya, 2005 Spring).

2
Kim could not return to South Korea until very recently as he still maintains his Chosen
national identification and refuses to hold a passport issued by either North or South
Korea. His involvement in the 4.3 Cheju Incident obviously doubled the legal difficulty
for his temporary homecoming.
Thus, Kim's residence in Japan forces him to “let the time pass by even though
this is the time when I should really be who I am” (“In the time that fades” [“Aseru toki
no nakade”] 240). While his previous book Ikaino Poems houses multiple fragmentary
memories of exiled Koreans who currently inhabit Osaka, the very people whom
Kwangju Fragments intends to “listen” to and remember are absent. Finding himself in
an aporia marked by a sense of obligation to come into contact with the massacred
participants of the resistance, Kim registers his powerlessness over what is perhaps an
inevitable consignment of the uprising into partial oblivion: “A year has almost passed
[since the Uprising]. It has not passed. Rather, this is a year that I perhaps let slip away”
(420).

3
Thus, if Korean people usually assign specific numbers to denote the dates of the
significant political events in the country's colonial and postcolonial history: 3.1 (“sam
il”) for the Independence Movement against Japan in 1919, 4.3 (“sa sam”) for the
suppressed civic uprising of Cheju Island in 1948, 4.19 (“sa il gu”) for the civic
“revolution” of 1960 that ousted the pro-American, conservative Rhee Sung-Man regime,
and 5.18 (“o il pal”) for the Kwangju Citizens’ Uprising of 1980, these numbers that are
themselves devoid of any references to specific locations and characteristics of the events
allow us to refer to them as events whose significance has yet to be comprehended. Such
numbering practices thus potentially alter our experiential and empirical exposure to
history as an act that is productive (?) of the event’s possible significance without relying
upon preconceived narratives. To quote Jean-Luc Nancy's remark on On Kawara's
similar reiteration of the years rendered as mere numbers, "[h]istory in this sense,
however, is neither the grandiose or confused movement of the destiny of peoples nor the
monumental lumping together of culture and barbarity nor the adventure of events, but
the simultaneous presence of each one of its millions of stories [histoires], present,
presentified history" (Multiple Arts, 193). The numbers such as 3.1, 4.3, 4.19., and 5.18
co-appear like mutual relatives on the calendar while keeping the terms of their
relatedness open-ended and undetermined

158

4
South Korean films such as Petals and Peppermint Candy exemplify such tendency to
represent Kwangju as unrepresentable and posit the very unrepresentability as a property
and guarantor of the anticolonial nationalism’s ethical legitimacy in relation to a series of
the dictatorial regimes. This more or less corresponds with Jean-Francois Lyotard's
formulation of the critical avant-garde that arises in its encounter with that which exceeds
the faculty of imagination and its ability to provide a representation corresponding to the
former (203). It is apparent that, in South Korean context, some radical artists have
secured their avant-garde positionality precisely by foregrounding their failure or refusal
to properly represent such excess in Kwangju and unwittingly appropriating the very
failure as a moment verifying their ethical exemplarity in the nation. While Kim
certainly expresses his deep sympathy for the student and labor movements that promote
Kwangju citizens to such an exemplary status, his poems refuse precisely this ethically
motivated appropriative scheme within which the dead dissidents appear as examples of
the heroic anticolonial nationalist subject.

5
For a discussion of "sense" as both semantic and sensuous appearance and exposure of
the world, see, for example, Jean-Luc Nancy's Being Singular Plural (esp. p. 1-5) and "A
Finite Thinking" (3-6).

6
Social scientific researches could cite multiple reasons and heterogeneous groups that
were involved in the event and yet remain unable to explain why such multi-causal
coming together led to the interruption of the state authority and distribution of material.

7
In her interview with Lynn Keller published in 2008, the poet warns about the notion of
“fragment” as that which risks foregrounding the notion of totality from which it is now
missing. “I often work on the floor spreading out ‘parts’ of a manuscript—walking in
and among fragments—although ‘fragment’ is a problematic word. . . . For me the
fragment is something already imbued with its own integrity—historical, material,
acoustic, and so one” (340).

8
Because Commons persistently attends to sites of labor across the Pacific and the globe
and encounter speeches and texts that desire for mutual articulation, the community this
book espouses and imagines among laboring bodies of the world perhaps resembles the
concept of multitude powerfully put forth by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. In their
formulation of this concept, Hardt and Negri attend to the sites of labor across the first
and third worlds in the age of globalized capital and argue that both material and,
increasingly, immaterial labor not only help sustain transnational flow of power and
capital but also produce so-called “common,” loosely defined as “general intellect […], a
collective, social intelligence created by accumulated knowledge, technique, know-how”
(364). If such “common” in its simultaneous mobilization of knowledge and affect
brings into being an “international cycle of struggles” against slavery, neo-liberal

159

economic policies such as NAFTA, oppressions of women and minorities, and
exploitation of workers and especially migrant workers (211-219), we can perhaps see a
large overlap in which both Hardt’s and Negri’s “common” and Kim’s similarly named
“commons” strive to produce a new public that does not denigrate but rather embrace the
central importance of the laboring and speaking bodies of the poor, the migrants, and the
refugees.

8
Despite such degree of overlap and resonance between the two projects—and I argue
that this overlap is very important and should not be dismissed too easily—Commons can
be read as a nuanced and sympathetic critique of a implicitly totalizing and
transcendental vision of global community articulated by Hardt and Negri precisely
because the vision of community in Kim’s poems is articulated and disarticulated in the
same moment.

9
Lynn Keller, in a published interview with the poet, comments on the marked presence
of the hummingbird in Kim’s previous collection Dura (350).

160
Conclusion
Modalities of ghostly materialization
This dissertation has underscored some literary and filmic works' critical eschewal of
identity-based opposition to colonialism and racism which invariably tends to retain or
reinforce the effects of colonially enacted hierarchy. As the preceding chapters have
attempted to demonstrate, these works engage in an aesthetic materialism which releases
the subjectivated bodies into an opening field of desubjectivation. I have attempted to
show that such emergent space may arise as the works' audiences read, see, or hear the
mnemonic revenants that critically haunt America’s Asia Pacific, a space that has been
construed historically as a pictorial target of imperial conquest and management.
It is thus useful here to briefly reexamine the ways in which essentialist
hypostatization of heretofore undervalued identity risks authorizing the very discursive
space that accounts for centrality and dominance of its dominant counterpart. Wendy
Brown aptly summarizes identity politics' inevitable dependence upon and confirmation
of the dominant structure of recognition:
Indeed, if the ostensibly oppositional character of identity politics also render
them something of the “illegitimate offspring” of liberal, capitalist, disciplinary
discourses, their absent fathers are not, as Donna Haraway suggests,
“inessential” but are installed in the very structure of desire fueling identity-
based political claims: the psyche of the bastard child is hardly independent of
its family origin (62).
1

Placed within this quasi-familial structure that arbitrates the hierarchized intersubjects
and traverses the metropole and the colonies, the subordinated group often chooses self-
exoticization and other means of restorationist cultural politics in order to gain visibility

161
or appearance. Subscription to such preexsitng scheme of orientalist knowledge also
implies one's desire for the status of subjecthood that can only be achieved in the midst of
subjectivation within and subjugation to that scheme. Postulating such subjecthood to be
a lack to be filled, restorationist cultural tactic is often driven by an affective stance
toward the imperial center that necessarily involves envy and violence. As Rey Chow
explicates, these emotions respectively signify “the one of wanting to have what the other
has; the other , of destroying the other so that one can be in his place” and are situated
firmly within the patriarchal structure whereby political desires are articulable only
mimetically vis-à-vis those of the dominant subjects (32). Predictably, the individual's or
the group's claim to such uniformity and homogeneity necessarily leads to exclusion,
ostracization, and abjection of those who do not conform to the imagined ideas of the
exemplary “subject.”
Within feminist theory, Judith Butler has critiqued certain traditional feminists'
similarly essentialist construal of the feminine body as the prediscursive substance. As
Butler argues by way of Aristotle’s and Foucault’s inquiries into the process of
“materialization,” the body as such never exists as a prediscurisve substance in its inertia;
its emergence is inseparable from its constant materialization within but also against the
discursive domain of intelligibility. Butler argues this by paraphrasing Foucault’s
characterization of the body or the matter as both a product and conduit of power:
[T]he body—indeed, materiality itself—is produced by and in direct relation to
the investment of power. The materiality of the prison, Foucault writes, is
established to the extent that (dans la mésure ou) it is a vector and instrument of
power. Hence, the prison is materialized to the extent that it is invested with
power.
2
To be grammatically accurate, there is no prison prior to its
materialization . . . . Here the body—of the prisoner and of the prison—is not an

162
independent materiality, a static surface or site, which a subsequent investment
comes to mark, signify upon, or pervade; the body is that for which
materialization and investiture are coextensive” (91).

Following Aristotle's and Foucault's conceptualizations of “matter” as that which
processually materializes within social space, Butler urges that we “ask what constrains
the domain of what is materializable, and whether there are modalities of materialization”
in order to interrogate continuous reinscription of the existing schemes of subjectivation
(Bodies that matter, 35).
If Butler's call for “a critical desubjectivation” involves the body as a temporary
receptacle of “the unconscious of power itself” and "its traumatic and productive
iterability" that recursively indexes ungrievable losses and loves (130), the present study
has somewhat similarly underscored constitutively unpredictable recurrences of historical
memory that “desubjectivate” its witnesses, recipients, and scribes. If, according to
Butler, the melancholic ego operates as an instituted form that renders “certain kinds of
losses ungrievable” and yet “cannot obliterate the social occasion of this production”
(185, 198), I have attended to the ways in which historical memories recur in the present
by transmitting their heretofore insensible materiality and soliciting us to produce novel
forms of their rematerialization. We could argue that the body's performative iteration of
such socially ungrievable losses at once transforms the appearance of the very memories
and the constitution of the performing body. The literary and filmic works I have
examined above engage in such distribution of memories as the heretofore insensible or
the barely perceptible.

163
Such (in)sensible memories and the sentient bodies mutually solicit their
becomings and critically modify currently available “modalities of materialization” that
produce, categorize, and hierarchize the subjects. As Jean-Luc Nancy explains, the
subject’s self-image typically arises in its imaginative faculty’s narcissist pictorialization
of its power to represent itself: “the imagination that schematizes without concept would
schematize itself of itself in aesthetic judgment” (217). Despite such narcissistic
structure, the subject's self-schema is only postulated “on the occasion of its object” and
cannot ultimately disavow the “object,” an exteriority that is contiguous to and, hence,
touches the delimiting frame of the subject's Einbildung.
A certain type of “Asian American cultural critique” tends to promulgate such
narcissist delimiting of its aesthetic imagination and engages in a circulatory
representation of its own exceptional ability to represent history. If Butler defines the ego
as an instituted interiority that emerges by its turn away from the ungrievable and Nancy
resituates Kantian imagination as imagining itself "on the occasion of" but not in its
exposure to the “object,” Lisa Lowe's cultural politics tends to institute Asian American
subject precisely through its turn away from its “objects” in Asia. More specifically, the
subject here is defined by its exceptional capacity for “re-member[ing]” the fragmented
histories in Asia while “Asia” itself is imagined as reservoir of originally fecund and
coherent historical memories that are now irretrievably lost.
This [Asian Americanist] dialectic not only addresses the dominant culture and
the political state it represents but also reaches back into the reservoir of memory
out of which the distinct forms and practices of Asian American culture itself
emerge. The “past” that is grasped as memory is, however, not a naturalized,
factual past, for the relation to that past is always broken by war, occupation, and

164
displacement. Asian American culture “re-members” the past in and through the
fragmentation, loss, and dispersal that constitutes that past. (29)

What Lowe elsewhere terms the “distinct”“ status of “Asian American culture” as
“countersites to US national memory and national culture” arises from such
homogenization of “Asia” as a spatial emblem of victimhood and from her deployment of
such imagined figure as an “occasion” constitutive of Asian American subject's aesthetic
of the self. In a Kantian vein, we could argue that “Asian American” subject schematizes
itself on the occasion of its “Asian” object.
3
Instead of such monolithic emblematization
of “Asia” that allows one to turn away from the ongoing work of critical remembrance
and experimental renewal of memory, how could one attend to, for example, the complex
histories of complicity with imperial formations in the Asia Pacific? More importantly,
how would we depart from such binarist co-figuration of “Asia” as the site of memory in
its negative and, hence, irretrievable essence and “Asian America” as its constitutively
imperfect yet best available representative in the US? What if such memories only recur
as different to multiple bodies who may or may not reside in so-called Asia, the Asia
Pacific, or Asian America?
Unlimitation of the subjects on “the earth’s surface”
If we wish to refuse such turn away from the recursive materiality and perceptibility of
historical memory that paradoxically necessitates its rematerialization, it is helpful to
recall Nancy’s reading of Kantian imagination as it sheds light upon what “touches” and,
hence, “unlimits” the imagination's self-enclosure. Such unexpected “touch” of history
as revenant marks a potential transition whereby “the subject” that serves as the
proprietor of its self-image becomes “the singularity” whose uniqueness and strangeness

165
are always already exposed to other entities of the (in)sensible that arrive at and touch it.
An elaboration of such shift from the subject to the singularity remains useful although
the shift itself should not and cannot be construed as one of temporal continuation or
progression. Instead, the “conversion,” as Nancy describes it, should be one that is
interruptive and caesural of current discursive field.
The subjectivity of feeling and of the judgment of taste are converted here into
the singularity of a feeling and a judgment that remain, to be sure, singular, but
where the singular as such is first of all exposed to the unlimited totality of an
“outside” rather than related to its proper intimacy. Or in other words, it is the
intimacy of the ‘to feel’ and the ‘to feel oneself’ that produces itself here,
paradoxically, as exposition to what is beyond the self, passage to the
(in)sensible or (un)feeling limit of the self (A Finite Thinking, 236).

History as revenant unlimits the “(un)feeling limits of the self” and allows such self to
“feel oneself” as being touched by “the unlimited totality of an ‘outside.’” Instead of
anchoring the subjects in discursive field, bodies indicate their expositional points and
metamorphosing silhouettes that are traversed by history as dispropriative event even as
they remain situated in the space materialized by power and knowledge.
One text that perhaps surprisingly conjugates historical revenants and
rematerializing bodies is Kant’s Toward Perpetual Peace. In the book’s last chapter
entitled “Third Definitive Article of a Perpetual Peace,” Kant valorizes the earth's
spherical shape as the geometrical condition of possibility for both one’s exposition to an
arrivant and subsequent reflective judgment of that encounter. Since the sphere’s areal
finitude paradoxically allows for an endless and, hence, infinite number of encounters
upon its surface, the earth seems to geometrically demand its residents to at once

166
“tolerate one another’s company” and to host and to be taken hostage by that which
continue to arrive into the present (106).
[A]ll men are entitled to present themselves in the society of others by virtue of
their right to communal possession of the earth’s surface. Since the earth is a
globe, they cannot disperse over an infinite area, but must necessarily tolerate
one another's company. And no-one originally has any greater right than anyone
else to occupy any particular portion of the earth's surface such as oceans and
deserts, but even then, the ship or the camel (the ship of the desert) make it
possible for them to approach their fellows over these ownerless tracts, and to
utilise as a means of social intercourse that right to the earth's surface which the
human race shares in common. (106)

Since what Kant calls “the right to communal possession of the earth’s surface” can only
be felt empirically among humans in an actual event of arrival and encounter at “any
particular portion of the earth” (106), the attempted adjudication of the universal axiom
("the right to communal possession") and its empirically local instantiation (“any
particular portion”) requires a reflective judgment of the very experience that is felt as
singular, unique, and, hence, irreplaceable. As Kant discusses in Critique of Judgment,
what is potentially axiomatic in experience must be deciphered and formalized from an
experience itself without recourse to existing laws that govern perception: “the reflective
Judgment, which is obliged to ascend from the particular in nature to the universal,
requires on that account a principle that it cannot borrow from experience. . .[T]he
reflective Judgment can only give as a law from and to itself. It cannot derive it from
outside” (12).
The earth thus emerges as a space that processually distributes bodies and
memories that cannot be imagined or imaged as properties of the subjects. Rather, it
inscribes a potential for successive unlimitations and interruptions of the scheme of

167
subjectivation and helps redefine historiography as a continuous reflection and
reconstruction of the inappropriable. As Rene Sherer further speculates in his reading of
Kant's text, it is possible that the originary communal and potentially communist
structure of the earth (as “no-one originally” [ursprünglich] monopolizes any spot of its
surface) disperses memories of such sharing and sharedness in their flash-like
(re)appearances and, therefore, paradoxically refigure the memories of “origin” as the
recursive instances of its “becoming and disappearance.” Scherer thus argues that Kant’s
supposition of the earth’s geometrically “originary” communism requires its structurally
repetitive validations in the generations to come, i.e., Benjaminian “origin” of history that
only manifests through its recursive becomings, disappearances, and dispersions: an
“origin [ursprung]” paradoxically “emerges from the process of becoming and
disappearance” (Scherer 72, Benjamin 45).
The literary and filmic works examined in this dissertation attempt such
repetitious and sensuous differentiations of histories that have taken place on the given
spots on the earth. By doing so, they reconfirm the originary dispropriative nature of
“experience” whose iterability and singularity enable its dispersion and renewal within
and against discursive field. For instance, both Kiyota Masanobu’s “The Man Called
Crayfish” and a section of Myung Mi Kim’s Commons invoke the earth as a limited space
for an infinite process of desubjectivations of the subjects and singular renewals of
historical memories.
Not for the sake of a revolutionary army that institutes itself horizontally
Not for the sake of lonely embraces with which people mutually hold each other
horizontally
You who crawl and tread upon this round earth

168
do so because you want to be met by the vertical arrivals of thoughts
which penetrate and scrape the earth’s core.
What you saw, however, was a broken harp.
On the street where an autumnal wind passes,
Unable to absorb the reverse flow of dusk with its flood-like quickness,
you must travel
along the coasts of constant vagrancy and departure. (Kiyota 232)

Hold this up
Amid listening board and gourd
Were to pipe and fittings
Free from function
To change the position of enunciation and the relations within it
Peregrine and Earth (Kim 99)

The “vertical thoughts” in Kiyota’s poem and the peregrine’s colors and cries in Kim’s
text touch the reading subjects and begin to reconfigure them as the singular witnesses of
such “thoughts,” “colors,” or “cries.” This dissertation has been an attempt to comment
upon and clarify the process of such serial encounters between historical ghosts and their
recipients who undergo their becomings-witness. Their continuous figurations of “the
earth” as an emerging space traversed by the recursive traces of history provide some
instances of resistance to American, Japanese, and other states' imperial cartography and
management of the Asia Pacific. Such instances that are barely sensible could potentially
desubjectivate multiple subjects while remaining inappropriable by any of them.

169
Conclusion Endnotes

1
As Brown continues, such deployment of identity politics sustains and strengthens the
larger field of domination as the subjugated groups come to find their “investment” in
their “resentiment” to be their (perhaps only) legitimate political strategy in that field of
inequality. Overall, political desire to restructure the current space of injustice is thus
transformed into an economic field in which “identities” as such figure instrumentally for
these groups to claim redistribution and recognition from the center. Brown argues:

[I]n its attempt to displace its suffering, identity structured by resentiment at the
same time becomes invested in its own subjection. This investment lies not only
in its discovery of a site of blame for its hurt will, not only in its acquisition of
recognition through its history of subjection (a recognition predicated on injury,
now righteously revalued), but also redistribute the injuries of marginalization
and subordination in a liberal discursive order that alternately denies the very
possibility of these things and blames those who experience them for their own
condition. Identity politics structured by resentiment reverse without subverting
this blaming structure: they do not subject to critique the sovereign subject of
accountability that liberal individualism presupposes, not the economy of
inclusion and exclusion that liberal universalism establishes. Thus, politicized
identity that presents itself as a self-affirmation now appears as the opposite, as
predicated on and requiring its sustained rejection by a “hostile external world”
(70)

2
This “subjection” or assujetissement is not only a subordination but a securing and
maintaining, a putting into place of a subject, a subjectivation. . . . The materiality of the
prison, Foucault writes, is established to the extent that (dans la mésure ou) it is a vector
and instrument of power. Hence, the prison is materialized to the extent that it is invested
with power. To be grammatically accurate, there is no prison prior to its materialization .
. . . (91)

3
It is thus remarkable that Myung Mi Kim departs from this ultimately essentialist
espousal of the fragment in her following formulation:

A [Kim]. Yes. I often work on the floor spreading out “parts” of a manuscript—
walking in and among fragments—although “fragment” is a problematic word.

Q [Keller]. Because it suggests a missing whole.

A. Yes. For me the fragment is something already imbued with its own
integrity—historical, material, acoustic, and so on. This coincides with my sense

170

of the mobility and plasticity of language, bits of language coming together in
ways that cannot be estimated, guessed at. But I would also suggest that this
doesn’t yield an infinite rehearsal preventing one from speaking of “the
poem”—rather, that it releases a kind of totality that is not closed. (340)

A poem, according to Kim’s formulation here, could be thought of as a temporary frame
that singularizes historical experience without subsuming it as a part of national or
linguistic totality that is imagined as foreclosed.

171
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Asset Metadata

Creator Inoue, Mayumo (author)

Core Title Senses of history: colonial memories, works of art, and heterogeneous community in America's Asia-Pacific since 1945

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publication Date 04/20/2014

Defense Date 09/28/2011

Publisher Los Angeles, California (original), University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag aesthetic theory,Asian American literature,OAI-PMH Harvest,postcolonial studies,the Transpacific

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee chair), Kamuf, Peggy (committee member), Lloyd, David C. (committee member), Nguyen, Viet Thanh (committee member)

Creator Email m.inoue@hit-u.ac.jp,mayumoin@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-7679

Unique identifier UC1113556

Identifier usctheses-c3-7679 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-InoueMayum-622.pdf

Dmrecord 7679

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Inoue, Mayumo

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA