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[Norma Field] The Accidental and Fated Revival of Kobayashi Takiji’s Cannery Ship

February 20, 2009

Norma Field The Korean translation of this article was published in The Quarterly Changbi (Spring 2009). Norma Field is a Professor in Japanese Studies in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. © Norma Field 2009 / Korean Translation ⓒ Changbi 2009 ——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————- Commercial Appetite and Human Need: The Accidental and Fated Revival of Kobayashi Takiji’s Cannery Ship Readers of Changbi are likely to be acquainted with the news that Japan’s best-known proletarian novel, Kani Kōsen (The Cannery Ship) by Kobayashi Takiji (1903-1933), enjoyed an utterly unanticipated revival in the course of 2008. They are likely to know as well that the revival of the novel is attributed to the deepening impoverishment of the ranks of the irregularly employed, now widely said to account for one-third of the work force. The majority of the latter earn less than two million yen per year. It is their increasingly insistent presence that has given such terms as “income-gap society” (kakusa shakai), “working poor” (waakingu pua), and more recently, “lost generation” (rosu jene) widespread familiarity. That said, it remains difficult to formulate a statement along the lines of “Because of a momentous socioeconomic shift, therefore the revival of a novel published in 1929.”　Why not a contemporary novel for grasping contemporary conditions? How can a novel from eight decades ago even be readable today, especially by those young readers whose circumstances it is said to elucidate? And finally, what meaning should we find in the “boom” beyond amazement that it actually happened? These questions entail each other. They can only be answered provisionally, not only because the process is ongoing, but also because any meaning we might ascribe to it is itself an expression of our understanding of the present and of our obligations to the future, in other words, of our consciousness. In order to make even rudimentary sense of the “boom,” however, it is first necessary to take account of its implausibility. Why the “boom” was improbable Let me speak briefly from personal experience. For approximately five years, I have been studying what is called Japanese proletarian literature with a focus on Kobayashi Takiji. I have stayed at length in Otaru, the port city in Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, where this writer grew up. Even there, where most people had at least heard his name, if I told people that I was studying Kobayashi Takiji, I was greeted with surprise. The surprise was often benign, but it could turn skeptical, and especially with intellectuals, aggressively so. Why are you bothering with someone like him now, was the accusation I read in people’s faces even, or especially when they didn’t voice it. In Japan, it is generally acknowledged that “the season of politics” was over by the early 1970s, after both the popular struggle against the renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty in 1960 had been crushed and the student struggle of 1968-70, which was an explosive protest against the bureaucratized, competitive, consumption-centered society that had followed upon the “income-doubling” plan announced in 1960, ended in a widespread sense of defeat. What did this mean for the legacy of a writer like Kobayashi Takiji? At the time of his death, at age 29, by torture at the hands of the Special Higher Police, he was a member of the then illegal Japan Communist Party. Leftist intellectuals from the 60s and 70s movements, who might be thought to feel some affinity for him, were alienated by the fact of his membership in a party that had sought to control them. For others, saturated in postmodernist ideology, a body of works produced in a class-based revolutionary movement was simply laughable. But surely there was more to the hostility of middle-aged leftists than party affiliation or intellectual camp. Takiji’s name awakened an all but forgotten reconciliation with a retreat from politics. It registered as a dull, irritating reproach. For the young, he was simply an unknown entity or at most, a name attached to a title in a list of modern Japanese writers. The “boom” was manufactured and real To be sure, during the five years preceding the boom, several developments laid the ground for expanding interest in Takiji beyond the tiny circles of devotees. A Takiji Library（http://www.takiji-library.jp/index.html) was established through the remarkable initiative of Sano Chikara, a hugely successful businessman and graduate of Takiji’s alma mater, Otaru University of Commerce. The Library became a centralized source of information; it also sponsored the publication of ten books including a manga version of The Cannery Ship to attract a young readership to, and together with the University, co-sponsored a series of international symposia. A documentary film, “Strike the Hour, Takiji” (http://home.b09.itscom.net/takiji/) was released in 2005; screenings became occasions for new Takiji gatherings. The film’s foregrounding of Takiji’s opposition to imperialist war served to link it to the national movement to preserve Article 9 (the no-war clause) of the Constitution. These initiatives were significant achievements in themselves and led to a new Internet presence as well. It is striking, however, that the antiwar angle failed to spark a broad interest in Kobayashi Takiji. What was required for that to happen was not only a widespread acknowledgement of economic crisis, but the much more difficult recognition—for a society habituated to regarding itself as homogeneously middle-class—that the solutions being adopted were creating dramatic disparities. The bursting of the bubble economy in the early 1990s led to an onslaught of structural readjustment. Suicide rates took a leap beginning in 1998. (The figure of 30,000 per year has not changed in ten years and places Japan second only to Russia in the G8.) Signs of economic “recovery” came around 2003 and were heralded in the media without acknowledgment of the cost, which was growing income disparity. Prime Minister Koizumi himself provided distractions from such recognition by playing up his eccentricity as evidence of independence and by engaging in a hyper display of patriotism in visits to Yasukuni Shrine, obscuring the real damage he was doing to the majority of Japanese citizens. Concurrently, a blame-the-victim approach was prepared through government responses to the three young hostages in Iraq (2004), captured in the expression jiko sekinin, “personal responsibility.” Perhaps the first sign of recognition that the economy, if indeed it was recovering, was doing so in a way that benefited the few and injured the many came in the selection of the phrase “income-gap society” as one of the ten keys expressions of the year 2006. The alarming numbers of the irregularly employed and the concentration of unemployment among the young made it apparent that the emphasis on “free” in the expression “freeters” (furiitaa) was no longer appropriate. If increasing numbers of the young were to be found in dispatch and other forms of irregular employment, it was no longer because they preferred to be unshackled to a regular job, but because they had no choice. The precariouslysituated young (yielding the term “purekariaato,” said to derive from an Italian grafitto combining “precario” and “proletariato”) found their champion in the erstwhile rightist punk-rock-band-singer-turned-labor-activist-and-writer Amamiya Karin. Amamiya, a conspicuous media figure in her “gosu rori” (Gothic Lolita) fashion. It is one of her book titles that has provided a slogan for the anti-poverty movement: “ikisasero,” or “make us live,” a neologism insofar as it is a demand and not a plea to “let us live.” Amamiya was to play a key role in the Cannery Ship revival. Here, a brief chronology of the boom might be useful. Two newspaper articles served as major catalysts. First, a conversation between Amamiya and established novelist Takahashi Genichirō in the nationally circulated daily Mainichi (January 9, 2008) in which Amamiya observed that reading Cannery Ship, she was struck by how the conditions depicted mirrored the current desperate situation of young workers. (Why was Amamiya reading this work? She was preparing for a discussion on literature and labor to be published on the pages of Minshu Bungaku (Democratic Literature), a formally independent journal with close ties to the Japan Communist Party. Amamiya, in her early 30s, seems to effortlessly cross the boundaries between old and new left and new new left, liberal, socialist, and communist publications.) Amamiya’s comment was quoted widely and found its way into the second influential article, in the major liberal daily Asahi on February 16. In the course of the article, senior editorial writer Yuri Sachiko referred to an essay contest on Cannery Ship in which she had been a judge. Cosponsored by the Takiji Library and Otaru University for Commerce, the contest targeted (a) young readers (age limit of twenty-five) but also (b) made room for older and unconventional readers (such as homeless readers, through internet café submission) and offered substantial prize money for responses to Cannery Ship, or more precisely, the manga version published in 2006 by the Library. (In fact, the winning entrants went on to read the novella, as evident from the collection of submissions, which in turn sold well: Watashitachi wa ikani kani kōsen o yonda ka, or How We Read the Cannery Ship). The Asahi article prompted a bookstore worker in charge of stocking paperbacks to read the novel. Stunned by how it spoke to her own experience of three years as a “freeter,” she ordered 150 copies from Shinchosha, the publishers of a paperback edition, who were frankly bewildered to receive such an order for a long-forgotten title. Once received, the copies were stacked with a handwritten pop-up sign suggesting that the conditions of the “working poor” might constitute a veritable “cannery ship.” “Working poor” was already familiar as a phrase, and here it was effectively paired with the unfamiliar, but concretely suggestive “cannery ship.” Middle-aged male readers, the first to notice, began to yield to young people in their twenties. Then, on May 2, during the slow-news period of “Golden Week,” the top circulation conservative daily Yomiuri made the boom—which did not yet exist–its topic article of the evening edition. Soon, television stations began vying with one another to take up the improbable hot topic of the day, their cameras going to bookstores, and filming essay contest winners. By the end of May, Shinchosha had reprinted 200,000 copies. By December 2008, it is estimated that 600,000 copies of this edition alone had made their way to bookstores. Other publishers followed suit; one (Shūkan Kinyōbi) produced a new hard-cover edition with an introduction by Amamiya in which she meticulously analyzed the parallels between labor conditions as depicted in the novel and those of the present-day. There are now four manga versions on the market. A documentary on Takiji’s life by Hokkaido Broadcasting Corporation won the Agency for Cultural Affairs Grand Prize, edging out major productions by the National Broadcasting Corporation (NHK). Not only are more titles forthcoming in 2009, but a stage production and a feature film scheduled as well. All of this would surely have been welcome to Takiji, an eager filmgoer, ardent yet critical fan of Charlie Chaplin, interested in all genres that would bring the movement to more people. What can we make of this concatenation of events? It seems to be a miraculous meeting of pure contingency and absolute necessity, of commercial appetite and human need. Without the long investment in Takiji and his works (collecting, editing, reprinting, issuing newsletters, observing his death anniversary) on the part of a few groups, many associated with the Japan Communist Party, the resources would not have been available for this historic moment. Takiji could have lived on like this for another decade, until the aging keepers of the flame died out. To be sure, there were individuals newly interested in him thanks to the activities of the Takiji Library, but they did not constitute a group; if they knew each other, it was through the Internet. For Takiji to survive beyond dusty library shelves, something utterly different needed to happen. That is, somehow, there had to be a meeting between his 1929 fiction and the political-social order of the present, a meeting that could only take place in the hearts and minds of those compelled to live under the strictures of the latter. Two liberal newspaper articles, an initial book order of 150 copies, then a conservative newspaper article turned the trickle of interest into a flood. Finding a story that sells is of course a central preoccupation of the media, with the hoped-for outcome being a cascade of sales. The aura of newsworthiness prompted publishers to reprint more copies, bookstores to provide more space, provoking further media attention, then more copies reprinted. And in this largely commercial process, something began to happen. Kitamura Takashi, in a report at the 2008 Kobayashi Takiji Memorial Symposium at Oxford in October (collected papers published by Kinokuniya Shoten as Takiji no shiten kara mita shintai chiiki kyōiku [Body, Region and Education from Takiji's Viewpoint] in February, 2009) observes a shift in the nature of the reporting, which began with the familiar observation of similarities but then evolved to registering and reproducing the novella’s claim that banding together in resistance can lead to social transformation. In other words, journalists following the story began to recognize themselves in it and to express their own desires in print and on the airwaves. Not That We Are Exploited, but Why and How, and What We Must Do The phrase “kani kōsen” ended up among the top ten key expressions of 2008. The phrase, in other words, had become a metaphor that enabled many people to grasp their condition. It drew together terms such as “working poor,” “lost generation,” and “income-gap society” into a coherent whole in its image of inescapable exploitation: a factory ship, subject neither to international maritime law nor factory regulation because of its hybrid nature, operating in frigid waters near the Soviet Union, with workers of diverse origin who were driven to compete for marginal advantages in literally deadly conditions of labor. In fact, it was this condition—that workers were confined on board ship and faced with a visible enemy in the form of slave overseer-like bosses—that led some to question the applicability of the novella to present-day conditions, wherein temporary workers are scattered and the exploitation often abstract and impersonal. Takiji makes clear in the work, however, (1) that it is a slow, difficult process for the hierarchically separated, motley group of workers to reach the understanding that only through solidarity do they have any chance of survival and (2) that their real enemy is not the brutal overseer before them, but the structure comprised of bankers in Tokyo, the imperial military, and global capital. (In fact, the workers’ first uprising fails because they expect the imperial navy to defend them, loyal imperial subjects, against their unjust bosses. Having learned their lesson, they must rise up “again…and again.”) About his next major work Fuzai jinushi (The Absentee Landlord, 1929), Takiji wrote his editor that his purpose was not to show tenant farmers that they were wretched, which they knew all too well, but why and how they were maintained in that condition, and that the way forward was struggle through solidarity not only among themselves but with urban workers as well. After decades of depoliticized emphasis on consumer pleasures, accompanied by atomization masquerading as individualism and fostered by educational and workplace competition—decades in which the word “labor” was all but forgotten despite the rising phenomenon of death-from-overwork (karōshi)—it should, in fact, not surprise us that there was no contemporary literary work that could provide such an intuitively compelling image of both exploitation and resistance. Indeed, now that we have been thrust in a worldwide depression, the image of the “cannery ship” is more comprehensive than ever, coinciding with that image of “spaceship earth” from a time when astronauts still provided us heady excitement and hope. The aspect of the “cannery ship” image that continues to be under-recognized is that of the military. Acutely attuned to the imbrications of the class system, colonialism and imperialism, Takiji argued for the need to join the class struggle with anti-imperialist struggle. In his penultimate work of fiction, Tōseikatsusha (The Life of a Party Member), published after his murder in 1933, the protagonist, together with comrades, is organizing in a factory that has suddenly been ordered to produce gas masks for use on the continent. The goal is to persuade regular and temporary workers to stand together for their rights and to oppose the use of their labor for an imperialist war. Since permanent workers were inclined to safeguard their privileges from encroachment by cheaper temp labor, and temp workers were grateful for a war that was providing at least short-term wage labor, we can imagine how daunting this organizing task was. Daunting, but correct in terms of principle and analysis. If Japanese activists today, often securely middle-class, well educated, and middle-aged and older, who are dedicated to problems of historical consciousness, the former military comfort women or Article 9,have not seemed engaged by the antipoverty movement of the young, then the latter have not taken up the antiwar cause. Given the limitations of time and resources, this is altogether understandable. But in order to catch up with the consciousness of Takiji and his comrades of the late 1920s and early 30s, in order, therefore, to be adequate to the demands of the present, it is necessary to join the antipoverty and antiwar struggles. That entails overcoming the sectarian residues from the 1960s and 70s as well as generational divides. Two new journals give a hint of the discussions and actions that are underway: POSSE (http://www.npoposse.jp/magazine/index.html), run by an NPO membership in their early twenties and dedicated to labor issues, and Losgene, which bills itself as a “Pan-left Journal” (http://losgene.org/). The New Bearers of Solidarity and Struggle The Cannery Ship boom issued from and feeds a hunger for collectivity and activism amid the loneliness and cynicism produced by neo-liberal callousness. Communist Party membership has been increasing at the rate of 1000 per month over the past year and has attracted mainstream media attention. New kinds of unions are springing up around the country, welcoming single members, providing legal advice and support, demonstrating that collective bargaining is possible even for dispatch workers. From December 31st to January 5th, twenty some organizations, including these unions as well as mainstream labor confederations, came together as part of the Anti-poverty Campaign (http://www.k5.dion.ne.jp/~hinky/) to establish a “Greet-the-New-Year-Dispatch-Workers’ Village” for workers who had been summarily terminated and rendered homeless just as administrative offices closed for the new year holidays. Tents went up in the heart of Tokyo in Hibiya Park, under the nose of the Labor Ministry; food and legal advice were provided, and most importantly, the New Year was greeted in the company of others and before the eyes of the nation. No doubt Takiji would have rejoiced in these developments, too. Committed as he was to the cause of poor women—often depicting their skills as organizers in his fiction–he might have been especially intrigued by the case of Iwagami Ai, who was unlawfully fired by a shop specializing in the BABY line of Lolita fashions. (http://blog.goo.ne.jp/koube-roudou/d/20090112 ) Clad in her long black Gothic Lolita dress, surrounded by customers in pink and white ruffled dresses, Iwagami speaks at May Day rallies and labor-rights’ study groups. She has won broad support from the new unions and is taking her case to court: “Workers have the right to stand in unity, to engage in collective bargaining, and to take collective action.” Why Literature? In Cannery Ship as well as in other works, Takiji makes frequent reference to the colonies and to the “semi-colonial” brutality of the police. He understood the periphery to represent both backwardness and possibility. Looking to the Scandinavian writers who raised key issues in modern literature, he acknowledged a similar aspiration for himself, an “absentee writer,” absent, that is, from the center in Tokyo, situated as he was in the semi-colonial periphery of Hokkaido. But he expected truly great “absentee writers” to emerge from the colonies, from Korea and Taiwan. No doubt, again, that he would have been gratified to see a new Korean translation of Cannery Ship appear in 2008. But he would also have been thrilled with the rediscovery of an earlier translation and the journey of the translator (李貴源, Yi Kwiwon) and publisher (李相炅, Yi Sanggyŏng)to speak at his birthplace in Akita Prefecture in February of 2008. Yi Kwiwon recounted how, as he translated the works of Marx or Lenin from Japanese translations in the course of underground activities in Pusan, he began to yearn for works of literature. Encountering Takiji’s works for the first time, and feeling a strong affinity for the portrayal of state violence (in “March 15, 1928″) and underground struggle (“The Life of a Party Member”) as well as the narrative of the Cannery Ship, he translated the three, and his friend published them under the title of The Cannery Ship as soon as the Chun Doo-hwan regime came to an end. Why did Yi Kwiwon feel the need for works of literature? Why, for that matter, did Takiji and his comrades feel the need to produce literature during their busy, danger-ridden pursuit of social transformation? And how important is the fact of its being a work of literature to the revival of the Cannery Ship? We know that the title has provided an invaluable metaphor enabling people to grasp their current condition, but what about the work as a whole? It remains to be seen if, and how, in these strange and familiar times, the experience of novelistic ways of seeing, feeling, and thinking will serve people seeking to redefine their world: from a collection of atomized consumers to a collectivity of citizens who, by forging solidarity around the necessity of work, have once gain begun to dream of a society dedicated to the flourishing of all.
[Roberto Schwarz] A Brazilian Breakthrough

November 24, 2008

A Brazilian Breakthrough By Roberto Schwarz Roberto Schwarz is professor of literary theory, University of Campinas, São Paulo. Professor Schwartz’s materialist interpretation of cultural history has produced many works of critical theory, spanning 25 years. His books include Um Mestre Na Periferia do Capitalismo: Machado de Assis (1990) and Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture (1992). * The Korean translation of this article was published in the Quarterly Changbi (Winter 2008). © New Left Review 2005
[Mike Davis] Living on the Ice Shelf: Humanity’s Meltdown

October 15, 2008

Living on the Ice Shelf: Humanity’s Meltdown Mike Davis Mike Davis (born 1946) is an American social commentator, urban theorist, historian, and political activist. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in his native Southern California. He is the author of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire (Haymarket Books, 2008) and Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso, 2007). He is currently working on a book about cities, poverty, and global change. * The Korean translation of this article was published in the Quarterly Changbi (Autumn 2008). © Mike Davis 2008 ——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
[Paik Nak-chung] A Singular Modernity, Plural Postmodernisms, and a Do…

August 1, 2008

Paik Nak-chung Editor, the Quarterly Changbi . Professor Emeritus of English Literature, Seoul National University The following presentation was made at the Holberg Prize Symposium in Bergen, Norway, 25 November 2008, in honor of the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize recipient, Fredric R. Jameson. The text records the talk as it was given, assigning to footnotes those remarks in the prepared text omitted from the oral presentation. The filmed talk is to be made available at http://holbergprisen.no/fredric-r-jameson/holbergprisens-symposium-2008.html. © Paik Nak-chung 2008 ——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————- It is a great honor to be speaking at this Symposium honoring Fredric Jameson. I have written out what I have to say, because I wanted to be sure of saying it within the allotted time. I confess to you that after hearing Professor Jameson and other speakers this morning I feel a great temptation to add impromptu remarks, but I promise I’ll exercise heroic self-restraint, even omitting some lines in the prepared text. There are three terms in my title: a singular modernity, plural postmodernisms, and a double project. I shall take them up by turns in that order, and I begin with a strong endorsement of Fredric Jameson’s idea of ‘a singular modernity’. Behind the easy resort to such distinction is the assumption that the true aim of the June Struggle was to build ‘people’s democracy’ or socialism—or at least social democracy—in South Korea. From such a vantage point, the June 29th Declaration (by government candidate Roh Tae-woo acceding to many of the protesters’ overt demands) was nothing more than a deceptive move to prevent the full success of the popular struggle, and such interpretation turns the past twenty years into a period of thwarted hopes where the people won the shell but lost the core of democracy. In my view, this is a very one-sided interpretation of Korea’s reality. Going beyond such one-sidedness is an important task for us as we commemorate the 20th anniversary of the June Struggle. The notion of multiple modernities does have its merits. For one thing, it challenges the once-dominant ideology of ‘modernization’ as a universal and essentially uniform historical process; and for another, it explodes the monolithic view of modernity entertained by those who attempt to stand apart from the modern world and reject it in toto. While neither of these positions functions today as credible intellectual doctrines, they remain potent enough as ideological forces, especially the unquestioning valorization of modernity. Notions of multiple or ‘alternative’ modernities, according to Jameson, represent precisely such ideological maneuvers that block fundamental questions regarding modernity. “Whatever you dislike about the latter [the hegemonic Anglo-Saxon model of modernity],” he writes in A Singular Modernity, “including the subaltern position it leaves you in, can be effaced by the reassuring and ‘cultural’ notion that you can fashion your own modernity differently, so that there can be a Latin-American kind, or an Indian kind or an African kind, and so forth. … But this is to overlook the other fundamental meaning of modernity which is that of a worldwide capitalism itself. The standardization projected by capitalist globalization in this third or late stage of the system casts considerable doubt on all these pious hopes for cultural variety in a future world colonized by a universal market order.”[1] Although I have a very limited knowledge of the topic, I have noticed that capitalism itself rarely receives serious analysis in discourses of multiple or alternative modernities (including at the 2006 Holberg Symposium with Shmuel Eisenstadt[2] ); and while modernity as a contested ground is emphasized, its contradictions are hardly mentioned. These omissions prove all the more glaring in the light of this year’s global economic crisis. Of course, so long as the system lasts, different nations, cultures and regions will cope with it in different ways, but the existence of capitalist modernity as a common problem appears more convincing than ever. Jameson calls the ‘cultural logic’ of this third and presumably last stage of capitalism[3] by the name of ‘postmodernism’. He also uses the word ‘postmodernity’, mostly for the current stage of capitalism but at times also for its cultural logic. This leaves us with many things to ponder and sort out. But here let me make a short digression on Jameson’s presence in South Korea’s literary and intellectual scene. Marxism and Form was the first of six Jameson books to be published in Korean.[4] I will not conceal my pride in the fact that it was translated by two of my pupils and issued by a publishing house I am closely associated with, Changbi Publishers. At the time of its publication (1984) South Korea was still under military dictatorship, and using the original title was out of the question, so that the Korean edition opted for the more innocuous-sounding ‘Unfolding of Dialectical Literary Theories’. Yet both in those days, when open Marxist discourse was severely suppressed, and after democratization in June 1987, when the enlarged freedom saw (among other things) a resurgence of dogmatic Marxism-Leninism, this book rendered invaluable service to South Korea’s intellectual life. Here was Jameson the great transcoder, not only working on a set of diverse codes but transcoding for an audience habituated to non-dialectical thought. Rising to that challenge gave the book its cutting edge (as Jameson himself remarked in the book’s preface), ensured its relevance to a national situation as different as South Korea’s and, in my view, gives it an enduring power even today, for “to think dialectically, to acquire the rudiments of a dialectical culture and the essential critical weapons which it provides”[5] remains as urgent and as largely neglected a task as when knowledge of dialectical theories was far scantier. The monumental Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism is also frequently cited among us, but I would say its impact has been less profound or pointed than his earlier work (up to, say, The Political Unconscious), not only because there is no Korean edition yet, (one is forthcoming), but for other reasons too. The relative weakness in Korea of non-literary critical discourse (on architecture, film, video art, etc.) would be one of those reasons, but more crucially, there is the difficulty of discriminating Jameson’s postmodernism from aesthetic and philosophic doctrines of the more fashionable kind (whose fashion, incidentally, has by now waned in Korea), a difficulty owing considerably to the fact that the cultural objects Jameson discusses are often the same ones that the latter theorists celebrate. Indeed, it has been difficult in our situation to distinguish even the ‘modernist’ and ‘postmodernist’ features, many of which would reach our shores simultaneously and with the effect largely, though not exclusively, of colonial or neocolonial domination. This brings me to the second term of my title, ‘plural postmodernisms’. There is no need to survey the full range of uses of the term.[6] The crucial discrimination seems to me the one I already referred to: between Jameson’s notion and what I have called postmodernisms of the more fashionable kind, which often prove to be variants of what Jameson calls ‘late modernism’. His own postmodernism, in contrast, is based on an economic analysis (relying on Mandel) of contemporary reality as the third and last stage of capitalism, and bespeaks a political will to overcome capitalist modernity as such. All the same, the term ‘postmodernity’ is ambiguous. It could mean the sum of all the genuinely ‘postmodernist’ features, but in that case, just as ‘modernity’ is not coterminous with ‘modernism’, one should guard against conflating ‘postmodernity’ with ‘postmodernism’. If, on the other hand, ‘postmodernity’ refers to a historical period (the current one), it may risk the danger of blurring, in Jameson’s words quoted above, “the other fundamental meaning of modernity which is that of a worldwide capitalism itself.” Mandel’s late capitalism, as Jameson reminds us, is a stage of purer capitalism than the previous stages, but then the term ‘full modernity’ might better fit this final maturation of capitalist modernity. Jameson’s choice of the term despite such difficulties seems to reflect his eagerness to foreground the radical break between this purer capitalism and the less pure ones of the past, and his aim of questioning modernity as such from a radical vantage point. If this be the case, rather than arguing over the terminology, we should concentrate on looking for a persuasive criterion to discriminate between what is genuinely postmodern and what is speciously so, whether in politics or culture. I have already stated that such discrimination is extremely difficult in Korea’s peripheral or semi-peripheral condition. Not only various kinds of postmodernism, but modernism and postmodernism?indeed the whole triad of Jameson’s realism, modernism and postmodernism?have tended to be mingled in an overpowering influx from the hegemonic West. This accounts for the appeal that many Korean intellectuals have found in Lukacs’s somewhat different notion of ‘realism’ as the doctrine best suited to the task of a genuine overcoming of capitalist modernity, vs. ‘modernism’ as the doctrine amounting to a virtual (though not always self-conscious) surrender to capitalism. Lukacs’s “ideology of modernism”[7] actually has much in common with what Jameson designates by that name. But whereas Jameson confines it to ‘late modernism’[8], Lukacs not only attributes it (often with glaring injustice) to Jameson’s ‘high modernists’ but also would have it cover (with considerable justice, in my view) some of his ‘realists’?those whom Lukacs calls naturalists. We can have little doubt that, had he known the term and the figures, he would have so characterized many of Jameson’s postmodernists as well! Specific critical discriminations aside, Lukacs’s scheme remains attractive because it speaks to the historical task that I have elsewhere defined as “the double project of simultaneously adapting to and overcoming modernity.”[9] This double project is in fact a unified endeavor with double aspects, an inevitable option in the face of the singular modernity of worldwide capitalism. For even the work of adaptation will require for its success a coherent long-term strategy for its overcoming, while no meaningful work of overcoming can be expected from empty (and at worst pernicious) talk of abolishing modernity without learning to live through it. In Korea’s case, the project reflects the realities of a nation forcibly incorporated into the capitalist world-system in the late nineteenth century, ravaged by colonial rule during the first half of the twentieth, then plagued by prolonged national division and attendant ills (including an internecine war and decades of dictatorship on both sides). Given such experience of modernity, simple emulation would be both impracticable and unpalatable, while a measure of modernization has been necessary even for the sake of overcoming this ruinous modernity. As a matter of fact, the principal task for the population of the Korean peninsula today?that of overcoming what I have called its ‘division system’[10] ?entails at once a more effective adaptation to the modern world-system and a decisive step in the worldwide endeavor to transform it. I would now submit that the double project is not a parochial agenda confined to the periphery or semi-periphery, but a planetary one applicable to the metropolis as well. If most people in the core areas do not feel that way, the reason may lie, on one hand, in the false consciousness that adaptation is no problem to the ‘advanced nations’, and, on the other hand, in the absence of powerful social movements for overcoming modernity. But what will be the upshot? Either capitalist modernity will drag on till “the common ruin of contending classes” (The Communist Manifesto), or the double project should take on a planetary scale with a substantial input from those national and local situations where such a project enjoys a vigorous life. In closing I should like to return to the cultural field, and suggest how Perry Anderson’s thesis in his seminal essay on “Modernity and Revolution” of a “triangulated” field of force for the flourishing of modernist art, a thesis Jameson strongly endorses,[11] may be expanded?though at some cost to the original notion’s precision?to fit other moments of artistic achievement and, indeed, a globalized double project. For instance, regarding Anderson’s first coordinate, “the codification of a highly formalized academicism in the visual and other arts, which itself was institutionalized within official regimes of state and society still massively pervaded, often dominated, by aristocratic or landowning classes… in… pre-First World War Europe,”[12] we may revise it to cover the nearly ubiquitous phenomena of ‘the persistence of the old regime’ and outmoded cultural forms in societies where capitalism has made considerable headway. The second coordinate, “the still incipient, hence essentially novel, emergence within these societies of the key technologies or inventions of the second industrial revolution,” may also be rewritten to include fruits of both the first industrial revolution and more recent technological revolutions. As for the third coordinate, “the imaginative proximity of social revolution” (idem.), something similar may be discerned easily enough in societies other than those of the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Europe. So revised and enlarged, they are precisely the coordinates that provided the condition for the flowering of the great realist novels of Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, and (with a necessary time-lag) Dostoevsky and Tolstoy?or indeed the poetry of Blake and Wordsworth, or the German works of Goethe, Schiller and Holderlin?all of them representing struggles to cope with modernity yet rich with impulses for its overcoming. And if, as Anderson points out, in the advanced capitalist world “[i]t was the Second World War … which destroyed all three of the historical coordinates,”[13] in numerous parts of the globe the same post-War period saw those coordinates coming to obtain, often for the first time in history. South Korea’s double project, too, owes its life to that worldwide phenomenon. It is my hope that a truly planetary solidarity for overcoming the singular modernity may be built through dialogue and collaboration between Jameson’s project of ‘postmodernity’ and the double projects being pursued in diverse national and local situations. This is how my prepared text ended. But with Fred’s permission, I would like to rephrase the last portion to read, “…dialogue and collaboration between Jameson’s project of ‘postmodernity’ and other double projects in diverse national and local situations.” Thank you. ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————- 1] Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (Verso 2002), 12-13. [2] See http://www.holbergprisen.no/HP_prisen/en_hp_2006_symposium.html. [3] For his understanding of this stage Jameson draws on Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (NLB 1975). [4] See the bibliography in Jameson on Jameson, Duke University Press 2007, 241-46. [5] Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton University Press 1971) xi. [6] The first two chapters of Perry Anderson’s The Origins of Postmodernity (Verso 1998) provide a sufficiently rich and incisive summary. [7] Cf. Georg Lukacs, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (Merlin Press 1963), ch. 1 ‘The Ideology of Modernism’. (The original for ‘modernism’, however, is Avangardemsmus.) [8] A Semngular Modernemty, Part II ‘Modernism as Ideology’. [9] Paik Nak-chung, “Coloniality in Korea and a South Korean Project for Overcoming Modernity,” emnterventemons: emnternatemonal journal of postcolonemal studemes vol. 2 no. 1, 2000, 79. [10] Paik, op. cit., 76-78. [11] A Semngular Modernemty, 134-35. [12] Perry Anderson, A Zone of Engagement (Verso 1992), 34. [13] Ibid., 37.
[Paik Nak-chung] Toward a New Encounter

November 15, 2007

Paik Nak-chung Editor, the Quarterly Changbi . Professor Emeritus of English Literature, Seoul National University This address was delivered at the opening session of the 2007 Jeonju Asia-Africa Literature Festival (AALF) at Jeonbuk National University, Jeonju, Korea, on November 9, 2007. © Paik Nak-chung 2007 —————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— Yesterday I gave a welcoming speech as chair of the AALF Organizing Committee. Today I am going to offer you some personal thoughts according to the decision by my younger Committee colleagues, who, without consulting the chairman, invited me to deliver this speech. I am nevertheless honored and delighted by the invitation. Asia and Africa are vast and diverse places, each comprising a world on its own. Even the concept of a continent with the name ‘Asia’ or ‘Africa’ did not emerge until Europeans gave those names. Numerous civilizations merely have come and gone, many of them with histories much more ancient than Europe. Asia and Africa, however, share the common experience of being marginalized by the Europeans as the Other, and of having had most areas fall victim to European colonialism. Among those that escaped direct rule by Western nations, China suffered from various colonialist invasions and partial occupations, and Korea was colonized by a surrogate imperial power. Even Japan, which achieved early success in imitating the West, has not been free of cultural and intellectual colonialization and, in my opinion, still shows symptoms of its aftereffects. Africa and Asia also share the feature that the preponderant majority of their population is suffering from poverty, disease, dictatorship and exploitation. Among them, Iraq suffers direct occupation by the hegemonic superpower, while Palestine would offer an instance of surrogate occupation. As for Korea, although I do not believe foreign powers are solely responsible for the continuing national division on the Korean peninsula, the division initially engineered mainly by the United States continues to fetter the people of both Koreas. In short, the rich legacy of African and Asian civilizations has been either defaced or insufficiently recognized because of such a state of affairs, and the creative energies of Asian and African writers have been either oppressed or, when productive and fruitful, have been marginalized on the world stage. Even our mutual contacts are usually dependent on the languages and publishing markets of the hegemonic nations. Endeavors were not lacking in the past to build direct networks of dialogues and solidarity, overcoming dependency and marginality. A good example is the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference and its activities in the middle and late decades of the past century. There were also attempts to include Latin American writers in a wider solidarity. Some of you in the audience have personal experiences of working in these movements. Although they advocated ‘non-alignment’, African and Asian writers’ movements in the past century were actually on closer terms with the socialist bloc, and in any case operated within the framework of the Cold War regime. Therefore, the end of the East-West Cold War and the collapse of the socialist bloc led to the weakening and virtual demise of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference. The Korean peninsula failed to make significant contributions to that movement. Politically, North Korea was an important member of the ‘Non-Aligned Movement’, and even hosted the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference in Pyongyang, but their literary contributions, I believe, were rather limited. South Korea, on the other hand, did have a vigorous presence of writers espousing what we then called ‘the Third-World perspective’, but because of its heavy dependence on the United States could hardly claim a respectable share in the Non-Aligned Movement or the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference. When we Korean writers look back on this regrettable past, we are all the happier that we can host this Asia-Africa Literature Festival in Jeonju. This has been possible because in the ensuing years South Korea has successfully struggled for democracy and economic development, and continued to reduce its dependence on the United States. At the same time, the world today needs a new type of solidarity in order to resist the ever-spreading sway of global capital after the end of the East-West confrontation. Now more than ever we need to realize that ‘the Third-World perspective’ should serve not to divide the globe into three parts but to see the problems of a single globe from the point of view of ordinary people rather than that of the vested interests of either the ‘First World’ or the ‘Second’. It is time that we organized our creative energies and collective wisdom accordingly. This festival, too, is a part of that project. In a sense, it seems appropriate for a country like South Korea to play a special role in this endeavor, a country neither too rich nor helplessly poor, placed somewhere between the so-called First World and the Third World, a country that, moreover, has entered the process of reconciliation, cooperation and gradual reintegration of the socialist North and the capitalist South. In any event, it is beyond all doubts a great blessing for us Korean writers. The encounter with fellow Asian and African writers will also be a valuable occasion for us to rethink and sort out our own literary agendas. In the days when we were fighting military dictatorship and had to struggle for the very space for reunification movements, the idea of ‘national literature’ served Korean writers of resistance as a rallying point their political and literary endeavors. ‘National literature’ in this context is a very specific notion based on the unique reality of divided Korea. Refusing to be the literature of only one half of the divided nation, it aspired to be the literature of the entire Korean nation-in other words, a literature of the people, representing the desires and needs of the preponderant majority of the population across the peninsula. However, ‘national Literature’ no longer serves as a productive slogan in today’s Korea. Since the Democracy Struggles of June 1987, South Korea has continued its process of democratization, accompanied by a further deepening of capitalism, and as a result, it now shows signs of rapidly turning into a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society. However, I cannot agree with some of those in Korea’s literary world who dismiss as outmoded nationalism even the vision for a reunified Korea contained in the discourse of national literature, especially since that vision proposed not a simple end to the partition of the land but the building of a more humane society than that under the current division system and thus contributing to the endeavors toward a new civilization for humankind. Such a wholesale abandonment of the project of ‘national literature’ with its emphasis on writers’ sense of responsibility for the realities of national division, can only make ourselves more easily subject to the neo-liberal trends that all the more effectively carries out the essentially anti-artistic and anti-poetic logic of capitalism by tolerating or even encouraging a certain degree of individual and collective differences. I believe the Asian and African writers in attendance today will not find it difficult to empathize with the problems faced by Korean writers, even though you belong to societies very different from Korea. For you must have worked to give voice to the sufferings of your own people, and often espoused urgent national agendas, but you must also have felt the need for international solidarity and the importance of high artistic standards. We do have to move beyond simple-minded militancy and nationalism, but we should not surrender ourselves, in the name of ‘global standards’ and intellectual sophistication, to neoliberal global domination that threatens the life of literature itself. The Third World, I repeat, cannot be confined to specific regions of the globe. The Third World is there in the so-called First World and in the erstwhile Second World as well; while within the nations designated as the Third World, we find First-World elements, and even attempts to enlarge their privileges by touting the cause of the ‘Third World’. That art and literature that enable us to see this complex world with clear eyes and a balanced mind will truly deserve the name of art. In order to achieve such genuine art and literature, we shall have to pay much more attention to the experiences of continents and nations alienated from the center of the world-system, even though the concept of the Third World is not a cartographical one. And we have to build a network of dialogue and communication of those writers who tend to be neglected in the world literary market precisely because they respect the experiences of Asia and Africa, so that these writers can come together to recognize their mutual good will and can strengthen their passion for true art and literature. Needless to say, each of us will need above all to devote ourselves more wholeheartedly than ever to his or her daily creative work. I hope this 2007 Asia-Africa Literature Festival in Jeonju will be a point of departure for many more creative encounters. Thank you very much.
[Hwang Jeong-mi] Time to Qualify, Not Quantify, Motherhood

September 13, 2007

Time to Qualify, Not Quantify, Motherhood Hwang Jeong-mi Researcher of Korean Women’s Development Institute This article was published in The Changbi Weekly Commentary (2007.5.29) and translated by Korea Foundation later (see the webzine of Korea Foundation, KOREA FOCUS [http://www.koreafocus.or.kr/]). © Hwang Jeong-mi 2007
[John Lanchester] Warmer, Warmer

September 3, 2007

Warmer, Warmer John Lancester John Lanchester is an English novelist and contributing editor of the London Review of Books. He is a regular contributor to several newspapers and magazines, including Granta, the New Yorker and The Observer. His first novel, the highly acclaimed The Debt to Pleasure (1996) won the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Betty Trask Prize, the Hawthornden Prize. HIs most recent work is a book of memoir, Family Romance (2007). * The Korean translation of this article was published in the Quarterly Changbi (Autumn 2007). © John Lanchester 2007
[Paik Nak-chung] Twenty Years After June 1987: Where Are We Now, and W…

June 7, 2007

Paik Nak-chung Editor, the Quarterly Changbi . Professor Emeritus of English Literature, Seoul National University This is the English version of the keynote speech at the International Symposium ‘Democracy and Peace-Building in Korea and the Choice of 2007’, Los Angeles, California, USA, May 12, 2007, co-sponsored by the Korea Democracy Foundation, Center for Korean Studies at UCLA, and the Korean Council for Reconciliation and Cooperation in the US. Footnotes have been added subsequently. © Paik Nak-chung 2007 ———————————————————————————————————————————————————————– I. The June Struggle for Democracy and the Regime of 1987 The nationwide uprising of June 1987 put an end to the tyrannical rule of Chun Du-hwan’s regime and opened a new chapter in South Korea’s contemporary history. True, it has had its background in the April 19th Student Revolution of 1960, the Pusan-Masan Uprising of 1979 and the May Democratic Struggle of Kwangju 1980. But it represents a categorically new achievement in having initiated a democratization process that has continued for the past twenty years without experiencing reversals such as the military takeovers of May 16, 1961 and May 17, 1980. At the same time, there is a prevalent sense of crisis in Korea today that the so-called ’87 regime that was formed after June 1987 has now reached its limit and is in need of a new breakthrough. While searching for an answer, some analysts offer a diagnosis that although formal and procedural democracy was achieved through the June Struggle, substantive democracy in the economic and social fields has remained inadequate or has even suffered a retreat. This view grasps only part of the truth and we must beware of such a facile dichotomy. Political democracy itself, even after its foundation was laid by the establishment of a democratic constitution and the direct presidential election in 1987, still had to be fought for and arduously extended at each step through the regimes of Roh Tae-woo, Kim Young-sam, Kim Dae-jung and Roh Mu-hyun. Nor can we yet assure ourselves of its ‘irreversible achievement’, even though the possibility of reversal through a military coup has more or less been eliminated. Furthermore, just as the July-August Great Labor Struggles of 1987 led both to improvements in workers’ welfare and an advance in procedural democracy, the distinction between the ‘form’ and ‘substance’ of democracy is at best facile. Behind the easy resort to such distinction is the assumption that the true aim of the June Struggle was to build ‘people’s democracy’ or socialism—or at least social democracy—in South Korea. From such a vantage point, the June 29th Declaration (by government candidate Roh Tae-woo acceding to many of the protesters’ overt demands) was nothing more than a deceptive move to prevent the full success of the popular struggle, and such interpretation turns the past twenty years into a period of thwarted hopes where the people won the shell but lost the core of democracy. In my view, this is a very one-sided interpretation of Korea’s reality. Going beyond such one-sidedness is an important task for us as we commemorate the 20th anniversary of the June Struggle. At any rate, there exists a broad consensus that the ‘regime of 1987’ (if we call by that name the general political, economic, and social order created by the June Struggle and its immediate aftermath) constitutes an order much superior to what preceded it, but that it was from the beginning an unstable structure based on a number of make-shift compromises, and has by now almost reached the end of its tether. True, some would go further and assert that it was already replaced by the ‘regime of 1997’ at the time of the financial crisis and the IMF bailout. Others contend that the ’87 regime has been finally destroyed in 2007 by the government’s arbitrary decision to conclude a Free Trade Agreement with the United States; while still others, of the ‘New Right’, call for the launching of a ‘regime of 2007’ in a different sense, namely, one that puts an end to the ‘pro-North Korean leftist regimes’ (i.e., those of Kim Dae-Jung and Roh Moo-hyun) through this year’s presidential election. All in all, one rarely hears a voice claiming the health of the ’87 regime and its warrant for continued existence. II. Looking Beyond the ’87 Regime The vision of overcoming the ’87 regime depends largely on what we consider to be the larger system of which the ’87 regime is a subclass, and within what more comprehensive scheme of periodization we place the post-1987 period. For instance, the argument (including the above mentioned notion of ‘the 1997 regime’) that the progress in political democracy since 1987 actually amounts to the failure of substantive democracy, accompanied as it was with the ascendancy of neoliberalism, represents a point of view that seeks to understand the South Korean society of the last twenty years mainly in terms of the ‘neoliberal phase’ (beginning in the early 1980s) of the modern world-system. It is an undeniable fact that South Korea exists as a part of the capitalist world-system, and that the global trend of neoliberalism has exercised a great influence on the post-1987 history. However, in order to determine the precise extent and manner of that influence, and the best possible response that South Korean society may adopt toward it, we need not only a more exact understanding of neoliberalism, but a closer analysis of the concrete ways in which it affects Korean society. I am no expert in either of the two topics, but I will try to lay down my basic understanding of the concept of neoliberalism. In my view, it is an attempt to return to an even older form of liberalism than the ‘old’ liberalism itself, namely, to liberalism in its early days before it managed through a laborious route to combine itself with values of democracy and the welfare state. Capitalism in its crisis of accumulation in the late twentieth century has decided to subvert those values and replace them with the resuscitated doctrine of unrestricted free market.[1] One may well doubt whether this ‘new’ liberalism may even qualify as ‘liberalism’, since it has lost even the progressive aspects of early capitalism, such as the removal of feudal fetters and the promotion of healthy individualism, attempting instead to solidify the inequalities created by contemporary capitalism. Even so, the effects of neoliberalism differ according to the time and place. In South Korea’s case, the decisive turning point for its ascendancy was the financial crisis of 1997, but the consequences also included the implementation of certain reforms either liberal or democratic in nature that Korean society urgently required. Ending the arbitrary dominance over the financial institutions by the government was one of them, and the financial crisis also helped the peaceful transition of political power to the opposition in 1998, facilitating the political reforms in the initial days of the Kim Daejung government. Of course, one may offer the counterargument that all such reforms only contributed to the expansion of liberal politics and the establishment of capitalist institutions, but in that case one must produce a fuller critique of liberalism or capitalism per se, together with persuasive short-, middle- and long-term projects for countering it, rather than using ‘neoliberalism’ as a blanket term to include everything one opposes. Global perspective is not the only requirement necessary to illuminate the concrete nature of the ’87 regime. The peninsular or all-Korean perspective must come into play as well, given the fact that Korea still is a divided country. At a symposium commemorating the 10th anniversary of the June Struggle, I proposed that “instead of seeing the June Democratic Uprising only within the context of South Korea’s history, we should comprehend and evaluate it as an occurrence within the peninsula-wide division system.” (‘The Historical Significance of the June Struggle and the Meaning of its Tenth Anniversary’, The Shaking Division System, Seoul: Changbi Publishers, 1998, p. 212) Although the country was first partitioned in 1945 and separate regimes established in 1948, it was only after the Korean War ended in a stalemate in 1953 that the division came to take on a certain systemic character.[2] This division system subsequently survived such challenges as the April Revolution of 1960 and the Kwangju Uprising of 1980, and was not terminated by the June Struggle of 1987, either. When seen from this perspective, the ’87 regime comprises a subclass of what we may call the 1953 regime. But the division system entered a period of instability when one of its pillars, the military dictatorship in the South, was overturned. It lost another, a crucial one at the global level, when the East-West Cold War came to an end. Then in June 2000, with the North-South summit meeting in Pyongyang and the June 15 Joint Declaration issued there, the prospect of overcoming the ’53 regime finally came into view. As this brief survey shows, applying the peninsular perspective on the ’87 regime is not a ‘division-centered reductionism’ that emphasizes only the inter-Korean relations at the expense of changes within South Korea or the global geopolitical order. The very term ‘1987 regime’ is an appellation that foregrounds events internal to the South, and implies such major domestic agendas as continuation of the democratizing process, the search for a new developmental model, and either the accommodation or the rejection of neoliberalism. But the peninsular perspective does insist on not losing sight of the fact that responses even to these domestic agendas operate within the force field of the division system and that domestic progress in democracy has owed much of its success to factors like reunification movements at the civilian level, which never stopped even under the ’53 regime, and to attempts at the government level to mitigate the North-South confrontation such as the Roh Tae-woo regime’s ‘Northern policy’ (itself an achievement of the ’87 regime). Consequently, the recognition in the division system theory of the decisive significance of the year 2000 represents a different stance from that of ‘national liberation’ or nationalistic privileging of reunification above all other goals. The ‘Age of June 15’ that takes the year 2000 as its starting point does have a special meaning in providing a periodization scheme that the two Koreas have seldom been able to share since the partition in 1945, and especially since 1953 (the year of the Armistice), but the degree of its realization in terms of the concrete social reality on either side remains rather limited. Not that it has been working at the symbolic and ideological level only, for its impact on everyday life, too, has been considerable. Yet, speaking of the South, ‘the Age of June 15’ has not terminated the ’53 regime and indeed, cannot even be said to have ended the ’87 regime. The IMF crisis of 1997 was much more powerful so far as direct impact on South Korean people’s daily lives is concerned. To find in it the inauguration of the ’97 regime, however, amounts to an overestimation of the progressive character of the ’87 regime. In other words, such a view minimizes the many inherent limitations of this regime as a subclass of the ’53 regime, and overlooks the fact that the 1997 financial crisis was no more than a dramatic exposure of South Korean society’s pursuit, in some ways more reckless than anything before 1987, of the dream of ‘joining the advanced nations’ and ‘absorbing North Korea’. At the same time, it is still another oversimplification to assume that the positive dynamics of the ’87 regime were totally exhausted in the IMF crisis. Again, more adequate appraisals demand the peninsular perspective, which provides a much more complex yet in its own way a coherent picture of the interconnections between 1987, 1997 and 2000. In this picture, 1987 marks a decisive turning point in the democratization of South Korea and inaugurates the ‘period of oscillation’ of the division system, but neither the constitution nor the major political parties nor even most of the social movements of the ’87 regime set out with ‘the overcoming of the division system’ as a clearly conceived agenda. The consequent accumulation of unresolved problems led to the economic crisis of 1997 and in combination with the crisis in the North including the food crisis, came to seriously challenge the division system. The ensuing June 15 Joint Declaration would then represent at once the direct effect of the peninsula-wide crisis and the product of the resilience and dynamism of the Korean people seeking a new opening in mutual reconciliation, cooperation and gradual reintegration, rather than in persisting with the status quo or resorting to an increased dependence on foreign powers. I have argued that the year 2000 marks the turning point from the division system’s period of ‘oscillation’ to ‘disintegration’ (`Unification Korean-Style, Present Progressive Tense, Changbi Publishers 2006, p. 6), but periodizations that take as their respective unit of analysis the whole Korean peninsula and only one half of it need not be in full agreement. Thus, the view that the ’87 regime in the South has persisted beyond 2000 does not necessarily contradict the notion of ‘the period of disintegration of the division system’ that begins in the year 2000. However, for such disintegration to run its course and lead to a better system, the overcoming of the decrepit ’87 regime in the South is a prerequisite. The 20th anniversary of the June Struggle, when the international conjuncture seems more favorable than ever for the establishment of a framework for peace in the Korean peninsula, and the terminal symptoms of the ’87 regime are becoming daily more apparent, would be the moment for taking a decisive step toward a new age. III. South Korea’s Choice in 2007 2007 also happens to be the year of the presidential election in the South—another reason for its potential as a decisive watershed. Voices in the conservative camps of South Korea, too, find in this year’s presidential election a crossroads for the entire peninsula, rather than just an opportunity for retrieving political power in the South. The goal is to put an end to the period of drifting since 1987, particularly the rule of ‘pro-North leftist’ forces over the last ten years and to launch a regime of ‘becoming advanced’. In my view however, the electoral victory of the conservative opposition will hardly result in overcoming the ’87 regime. Despite the belligerent pronouncements by speakers of the ‘New Right’ and hardliners within the opposition party, I do not believe that even if returned to office, they can overturn the results of the democratization process since 1987 or abrogate the June 15 Joint Declaration. On the other hand, with the prolonging of the ‘bad stalemate’ of the ’87 regime, this regime’s terminal symptoms may become aggravated. This is not a partisan argument to oppose in principle the coming to power of a particular political party. It merely conveys the judgment that any party that seizes power under the hegemony of elements that find little to criticize in the ’53 regime—not even in the ’53 regime before 1987—and consider the period of democratic reform governments as nothing but ‘ten lost years’ can only add to the woes of the waning ’87 regime. Indeed, things will not prove any better even if a ‘grand conservative coalition’ of some sort is formed under a government that once proudly flaunted its reformist and democratic credentials but is now attempting to force a speedy conclusion of the Korea-US FTA with conservative blessings. ‘Radical (or transformative) centrism’ is the term I have used to characterize what today’s Korean society needs. (Unification Korean-Style, Present Progressive Tense, pp. 30-31, 58-60) Its explicit use dates from a relatively recent past, but actually it was already apparent with the opening of a new stage after the June Struggle that neither of the two main currents of the radical movement, namely, ‘national liberation’ and ‘people’s revolution’, nor moderate reformism lacking any visions of social transformation, could meet the demands of the time. [3]In the period of tyrannical rule by the government of a divided nation, mere advocacy of the principle of peaceful and autonomous reunification or of an egalitarian society, or the immediate struggle for basic civil rights could serve to shake the division system. However, with the end of military dictatorship and the newly opened space for more substantive endeavors, the need arose for a centrist line that could incorporate the various agendas of various forces with a view to a clearly conceived goal of transforming the division system. Close to twenty years later, Korea now finds itself in an even more urgent need of a line focused on radical transformation in this sense and broadly centrist in practice. Since the ’87 regime essentially comprises a part of the ’53 regime and many of its problems derive from the vertical repressiveness (vis-à-vis its people) and lateral weakness (vis-à-vis foreign powers) of the division system itself, any project of overcoming the ‘87 regime that lacks a broader design of transforming the division system can hardly succeed. This is true not only of the conservative logic that finds little problem with the ’53 regime, but also of the ‘anti-neoliberal’ position that underestimates the determinative influence of the division system, and of the line of ‘reunification through national self-reliance opposing American obstruction’, which does foreground the fact of national division but remains too little aware of its systemic character. As a matter of fact, forces of progressive reform had managed to form a fairly broad coalition in the movement criticizing the Korea-US FTA negotiations. Along with forces opposing the FTA from the start for reasons of ‘national autonomy’ or ‘social equality’, people critical of the conduct and certain particulars of the negotiations joined in the efforts to stop an overhasty agreement. The result, as is well known, was a failure: the deal was announced in early April in time to meet the deadline set by America’s Trade Promotion Act. The biggest cause for that failure must be the determined drive on the part of President Roh Moo-hyun and his ‘participatory government,’ while one contributing factor may be found in the temporary setback suffered by popular movements when North Korea carried out a nuclear test in October 2006. We must also admit, however, that the movement itself, unable to go beyond a largely tactical alliance of various camps with different implicit agendas, showed a limit in its ability to persuade a preponderant majority of the population. With the successful conclusion of the negotiations, even that tactical alliance has suffered considerable damage. Some of the once moderate critics have moved to a more militant position rejecting outright the results of the negotiation, but many others have resigned themselves to the eventual ratification of the FTA and are adopting the line that, having succeeded in removing some of the worst provisions, we ought now try to make the best of the situation and prepare for the aftermath. On another side, those who have opposed in principle all free trade agreements, or at least any FTA with the United States, are enraged by the deal yet also welcome the new political terrain where a clear line seems to be drawn between two camps, for and against the Korea-US FTA. The point, however, is whether such a configuration augurs well for overcoming the ’87 regime. The strengthening of the more radical progressive camp(s) in such an alignment will not be without its positive meanings. But there is an acute risk that an easy electoral victory for the conservative opposition, plus the existence of radical sects satisfied with mere quantitative expansion, may prolong and further embitter the downward slide of the ’87 regime in its final days. Precisely at this moment when room for unprincipled ‘middle of the road reformists’ has shrunk due to the conclusion of the FTA negotiations, we should bring about a regrouping of forces for progressive reform with ‘radical centrism’ as their main tenet—without of course, necessarily holding on to the term as an electoral slogan. It is not certain whether these forces, plagued by the divisive influence of the so-called KORUS FTA, can achieve such unity. But just as a broad alliance was formed to oppose a rash deal, a similar alliance is both possible and necessary to prevent a quick ratification and the many undemocratic practices foreseeable in the process; and it need not be ruled out that, on the strength of a thorough and responsible scrutiny of the contents of the deal and their implications, the movement may come to agree on a course of action that will obtain wide popular support. Only, this time it must manage to go beyond mere tactical alliance and be able to persuade the public with a clear insight into the nature of the ’87 regime and with effective projects for overcoming the division system. IV. ‘Reunification Korean-style’ and the Role of ‘the Third Party’ ‘Radical centrism’ can become a realistic alternative because of the unique character of the reality of the Korean peninsula. Korea is peculiar enough in remaining divided to this day, but it constitutes a truly unprecedented case in that the process of its reintegration differs from any previous case of national unification. Briefly put, not only is a Vietnamese-style reunification through military conquest out of the question in Korea, but even a peaceful reunification, unlike that of Germany or of Yemen, can only proceed gradually, stage by stage. And it so happens that such a reunification process has already been agreed to between the top leaders of North and South Korea in the June 15 Joint Declaration. Such an agreement has a far-reaching effect not confined to the relations between the two governments. Initiatives by ordinary citizens are bound to be limited in a speedy, one-shot unification, whether violent or peaceful. In contrast, a gradual, step-by-step process opens up space for civic participation. And where, as in South Korea, civil society possesses both the will and the ability to utilize this space, citizens’ say in determining the timing and the specific contents of a given intermediate stage must continue to increase, and eventually it will not be possible to prevent the sphere of civic participation extending to the entire peninsula. From such viewpoint, I have argued that South Korea’s civil society—taking it in a broad sense to include the private business sector as well—ought to function as a ‘third party’ besides the two governments. As yet, this ‘third party’ remains far too weak to act as an equal partner, nor does our civil society display sufficient self-consciousness or self-esteem as ‘the third party’. But the expansion of civic participation will be inevitable as the DPRK-US relations improve and inter-Korean exchanges proceed in full swing. Here I shall consider two contingencies in which the role of ‘the third party’ may prove decisive. One may come about in the course of resolving the issue of North Korea’s nuclear programs. As I prepare this text at the end of April, no solution has yet been found to the problem of North Korean accounts at BDA (Banco Delta Asia in Macao), and the initial steps specified by the February 13th Agreement have not been followed through. Yet the more general view still is that the Six-Party Talks will be able, even if after repeated delays, to go through the second stage of ‘disablement’, while considerable skepticism prevails regarding the possibility of reaching the final stage of ‘dismantlement’ of all nuclear programs. Of course, we need not give up hopes of completing at some time the third stage as well, since North Korean authorities have strongly asserted that “the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula is an injunction to posterity by the late President Kim Il Sung” and also because the United States will not agree to provide adequate compensation for any settlement short of ‘dismantlement’. The problem will arise however, in the event of a tacit collusion occurring between America’s preference for withholding compensation and maintaining an appropriately controlled ‘low-intensity nuclear crisis’ and the North Korean calculation that there exists no surer means of regime security than possessing nuclear weapons. This of course is sheer conjecture, but if or when such a situation comes into existence, one can hardly expect the South Korean government to display sufficient will or capability to effect a breakthrough. It will be a case requiring interventions by a civil society that advocates denuclearization not only as the North Korean leader’s injunction to posterity but as a matter of utmost interest to the concrete lives of ordinary people in both Koreas. The special role of ‘the third party’ would also be essential when the nuclear problem is satisfactorily resolved, DPRK-US relations normalized, and inter-Korean exchanges greatly expanded. One need not resort to the logic of hard-line defenders of vested interests to grant the possibility that such contingency might imply a real threat to the North Korean regime. A divided country is by definition unstable, and given the current balance of forces on the peninsula, it is the North that will feel seriously threatened by the presence of the other side. Probabilities for the smooth process of reform and opening in the manner of China or Vietnam should be rated low under the division system. At the same time, the realities of the peninsula rule out the possibility of removing the instabilities of a division regime either by agreeing to a permanent division or through a speedy reunification. Precisely this state of affairs gave rise to the agreement in the June 15 Joint Declaration that the two Koreas would work for reunification but without haste, by going through an intermediate stage of ‘union of states’ or ‘a low-level federation’.[4] But such an agreement will hardly be carried out if left to the authorities themselves. Even a confederative structure that leaves two sovereign states in existence will not offer a sufficient guarantee for the self-preservation of the North Korean regime and it is moreover in the nature of governments everywhere, including both Koreas, to desire either reunification on their own terms or else the status quo, and not to relish the prospect of handing over even a small portion of their power to organs of the confederation. All the same, while carrying on the process of reconciliation, cooperation and reintegration to meet the real needs of the people on both sides, we need a minimum institutional device to manage the dangers of that process. Provided that the only possible answer lies in a union of states or a loose confederation, there is for the moment no one besides ‘the third party’ to actively study and promote this project, nor will it be possible, without large-scale participation by it, to prepare the ground for such a confederation through various inter-Korean contacts and networks in every field. Finally, in lieu of a conclusion, I will briefly discuss the role of Koreans abroad. As the space for civilian efforts for reunification and for direct contact between North and South Koreans has expanded under the ’87 regime, and particularly after June 2000, we have come to depend less on devoted activists in the diaspora in the struggle against dictatorship and for national reconciliation. Moreover, once the building of a confederation emerges as the central agenda, the Korean diaspora can hardly be expected to play a role equal to that of the residents of the peninsula, since the confederation will be a confederation of the two Korean states, not a tripartite union of North, South and the diaspora. As a Resident Korean activist in Japan has put it, “the overseas Koreans will be the subjects of reunification like any other Korean, but the leading role must belong to the North and the South.” But precisely such a situation opens up the way for broad and diverse popular participation overseas as much as in South Korea during the ‘Age of June 15’. Without having to gird themselves for superhuman self-sacrifice, ordinary people can contribute towards the reunification process the experiences, visions and influences on the scene unavailable to the population of the peninsula, while remaining true to their daily lives in their respective places of residence or citizenship. This will be particularly true of the Korean and Korean-American communities in the United States, by their very presence in the most powerful nation on earth and with the wealth of outstanding talent among them. Their contribution will not only enrich the content of Korean-style reunification, but the project of building a global network of Koreans will become all the more meaningful as a result. They will also contribute in no negligible measure to making the future human civilization a more just and diverse world. —————————————————————————————————————————————————————————- [1] See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press 2005). [2] The literature on this topic is quite scanty in Western languages. My essay, Habermas on National Unification in Germany and New Left Review 1/219, Sept./Oct. 1996, may serve as a convenient introduction in English. Readers of Japanese may consult the Japanese edition of my book The Shaking Division System: Peku Nakuchong (Paik Nak-chung), Chosen hanto toitsu ron – yuragu bundan taisei (Tokyo: Kurein, 2001). [3] See Paik Nak-chung, The Reunification Movement and Literature (1989), especially the section Perspectives on the Period after the June Uprising, pp. 202-7, in Kenneth M. Wells, ed., South Korea’s Minjung Movement: The Culture and Politics of Dissidence University of Hawaii Press 1995. [4] It is noteworthy that while Pyongyang clings to the term yonbang (the Korean word for its official English translation calls for a Koryo Democratic Confederal [rather than Federal] Republic.
[Paik Nak-chung] Special News, Dateline Korea: Unification Korean-Styl…

March 19, 2007

Paik Nak-chung Editor, Creation and Criticism Quarterly . Professor Emeritus of English Literature, Seoul National University This is the text of a special lecture delivered at the 2007 IFJ (International Federation of Journalists)-JAK (Journalist Association of Korea) Special Conference in Korea on ‘Peace and Reconciliation in the Korean Peninsula’, 12 March 2007, at Lotte Hotel in Seoul. © Paik Nak-chung 2007 ———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————- It is an honor to address this gathering of journalists from all over the world who have come to Korea to discuss and promote peace and reconciliation in the peninsula. ‘Special news’ in the title is meant to whet your professional appetites, but as seasoned journalists you must also be aware that the actual content does not always live up to sensational headlines. In any case, let me start with what is no longer news. With the February 13 agreements at the Six-Party talks in Beijing, the situation in and around the Korean peninsula has taken a distinctly favorable turn towards the twin goals of denuclearizing the peninsula and normalizing the relations between DPRK and the United States. It’s too early to predict the final outcome, but this time we have a very specific action plan, though a limited one, and both between the two Koreas and between DPRK and each of the directly concerned parties (notably the U.S., Japan, and the IAEA) serious contacts and negotiations have either already begun or are soon to take place. All in all, prospects for peace and reconciliation in the Korean peninsula look brighter than at any time in recent years. As I say, this is hardly news. What I offer as special news is that not simply ‘peace and reconciliation’ but reunification of the Korean peninsula is in progress, and has been in progress for the past several years. Even this isn’t exactly a breaking news, for a book I published last year (alas, in Korean only) was titled Unification Korean-Style, Present Progressive Tense. But is this ‘special news’ a true report? Isn’t it a wild exaggeration, or even an outright falsification, given the undeniable continuance of the Military Demarcation Line dividing the peninsula? My claim would all too obviously amount to sheer nonsense unless we were to perform a radical redefinition of the term ‘reunification’. And here I offer you another piece of news: such a redefinition, too, has been going on for some years now. Moreover, the success of that task is crucial not only for reunification but for peace in the Korean peninsula. Many foreigners, genuinely concerned for peace in Korea but naturally less preoccupied with reunification, tend to be puzzled by such conflation of the two issues. Why can’t Koreans be reasonable, they often ask, and try to co-exist in peace rather than always be harping on unification? Peaceful co-existence was exactly what the Germans in the decades of division worked for, with the result that they not only managed to preserve peace but even achieved reunification as an unexpected reward. Koreans should do the same, (so the argument goes,) and while they may or may not be rewarded with a similar surprise, they will in any case have peace, which represents both a more tangible and a more universal value than national unity. Nor is such a way of thinking limited to foreigners, needless to say. In contrast, if we take the case of pre-unification Vietnam, advocating ‘peace in division’ would have been but a thinly disguised apology for continued colonial dominance. Some Koreans place a great emphasis on this lesson and still consider ‘national liberation’ the fundamental task of the day. The actual situation, however, falls somewhere in-between. In other words, Korea’s reality fits neither the German nor the Vietnamese pattern. In the sense that the country’s division in 1945 was imposed without any legitimate cause, an act of further victimizing a nation previously victimized by the aggressor power (Japan), it resembled Vietnam’s more than Germany’s division, and also in representing an attempt by the hegemonic power (USA) to control a Third World people. But in contrast to Vietnam, the Korean War ended in a stalemate in 1953, and the structure of division since then has acquired a certain stability and power of self-reproduction-enough to justify, in my opinion, finding a ‘division system’ in force. Yet the fact that such stability was reached only through a bloody civil war (as well as an international one) makes for another crucial difference from Germany, where the division was sustained mainly by the East-West confrontation and thus could lead to a quick reunification when the Cold War ended. It naturally follows then that neither the German nor Vietnamese formula for unification would work in Korea. On the one hand, overzealous pursuit of reunification would pose a threat to peace, because the North will resist at all costs the German type of peaceful annexation, let alone military invasion. Indeed, simplistic discourse of national unity must delay reunification itself, since it will only strengthen the division system by fanning popular fear of what a sudden reunification might bring. On the other hand, pursuit of peaceful coexistence at the expense of national unity is also an illusory project and ultimately destabilizing to peace as well. This is so in principle because of the fundamental illegitimacy of the division system, which makes any project for its perpetuation lose legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of the population. But in more practical terms, we must note that the system has already been dangerously destabilized-The Shaking Division System (Seoul: Changbi Publishers, 1998) is another title of mine-due to 1) democratization of South Korea since 1987, which removed one of the main props of the division system by putting an end to military dictatorship; 2) the end of the East-West Cold War, which, though not as decisive a factor as in German division, nevertheless did away with another major prop; and 3) an increasing imbalance of power between the two Koreas, partly as a consequence of that geopolitical change, prompting the imperiled North to rely more and more on military force even to the extent of undertaking nuclear armament. If neither a Vietnamese nor a German type of solution will do, what other way is there? (I will just remark in passing that the somewhat different Yemenite type doesn’t apply, either.) Now the frequently forgotten fact, even among Koreans who ought to know better, is that a distinctly Korean way out of the dilemma was already agreed to and promulgated by the top leaders of the two Koreas in the year 2000, in the June 15 North-South Joint Declaration. Article 2 reads: “The North and the South, recognizing that the low-level federation proposed by the North and the commonwealth system proposed by the South for the reunification of the country have similarity, agreed to work together in the future for reunification in this direction.” For all the intentional (and in its way quite admirable) ambiguity of expression, the article clearly stipulates that Korea’s reunification will differ from all the preceding examples of Vietnam, Yemen and Germany in being a gradual, step-by-step affair, and that the initial stage will be some kind of a commonwealth or ‘union of states’ in which each side will retain most of the functions of a central government. Pyongyang prefers to call this a ‘low-level federation’, but there is every indication that its first priority is preservation of DPRK as an independent entity and, even after security guarantees by the U.S. and other powers, it will at best settle for a quite loose confederation, (which in fact is the word used in its official translation of the proposed Koryo Democratic Confederal Republic.) But there is another essential feature of this Korean-style reunification that the two political leaders may or may not have bargained for. When reunification is made into an extended, many-staged process, there inevitably opens up a space for civic participation, which the civilian sectors (including business corporations) of South Korea, at any rate, are ready to fill. If such participation does its work, it will even define to a large extent when and how the authorities on the two sides could or should proclaim a union or confederation. In other words, such a formal proclamation will amount in large part to a post-facto ratification of what people on the ground have worked out through political, economic, social, cultural contacts and exchanges. And let me assure you that since the June 15 Joint Declaration this process has never really stopped, not even in the darkest days of nuclear crisis. I will conclude by trying to answer two questions. First, even if a confederal structure comes into place, will such a union-probably much looser than the European Union in its current state-deserve to be called reunification? I say yes because we are operating in a completely different historical context, where, unlike the already unified nation-states of Europe moving toward a closer union, a forcibly divided nation with a long history of unified national life behind it will be taking an irreversible step toward recovery of its unity, and where the two sides will have devised for the first time a meaningful mechanism for managing a process far more explosive than anything in present-day Europe or the two Germanies of the past. But secondly, is reunification even in this peculiar sense feasible? An affirmative answer at least sounds less doubtful today than it did two or three months ago. Implications of a negative answer have also become much more dire since North Korea’s nuclear test. No doubt, it will take time to reach what I have called the twin goals of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula and normalization of DPRK-US relations, but for proponents of Korea’s ‘participatory reunification’ that is no great matter. For we can use the time to deepen people’s participation in the reunification process and thus help to build a more humane and democratic society in the Korean peninsula. □
[Bill McKibben] How Close to Catastrophe?

November 30, 2006

How Close to Catastrophe? Bill McKibben is an American environmentalist and writer who frequently writes about global warming, alternative energy, and the risks associated with human genetic engineering. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, Outside, and The New York Times. His first book, The End of Nature (1989) sounded one of the earliest alarms for a general audience about global warming. * The Korean translation of this article was published in the Quarterly Changbi (Winter 2006). © Bill McKibben 2006

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