NORTH KOREA, 'THEATER STATE'
The explosion in Kaesong, as reported on South Korean television.
Earlier this week, on Tuesday (16 June), at around 2.50 in the afternoon, I head a dull crumping thud in the distance. I didn’t think much of it because, as I live near the DMZ, such sounds are not uncommon. My day is often punctuated with gunfire from troops training in nearby Republic of Korea army barracks, and sometimes by larger ordinance going off. It was only that evening I realized I had heard the joint liaison office in Kaesong, which is only about ten miles from here, exploding, courtesy of North Korean incendiaries.
My heart sank. For the past eighteen months or so there have been high hopes for an easing of the tension between the two Koreas, and even that the DMZ would become the PZ – the Peace Zone. I was even encouraged by President Trump’s meeting at nearby Panmunjeom. Of course, I should have known better. Trump is a full of shit, and North Korea is a terminally failed state. The only hope is that neither of them will end up getting me and my family, and millions of other people, killed.
But the event of Tuesday afternoon got me thinking, and I realized it was time to say something in my blog about my neighbours. I have read several books about North Korea, and talked to many people about how to understand the situation. I won’t start here a history lesson. Instead I will discuss what I’ve come to consider the best way to comprehend North Korea, and also, as a result, to understand some key aspects of the global political reality.
Today, due to famines largely caused by state inefficiency, the North Korean male is on average between 1.2 to 3.1 inches shorter than the South Korean, this despite the fact that Koreans are all from exactly the same genetic pool.[i] It is hard to find a more exemplary case of ideological bias determining not only what we see and what we think, but even how we grow. Christopher Hitchens had this to say about North Koreans in general: “Unlike previous racist dictatorships, the North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwars, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult”. In North Korea old-style Confucianism blends with new-style Marxism, racism and militarism. As B. R. Myers argues in The Cleanest Race (2011), the North is neither a bastion of Stalinism nor simply a throw-back to Confucian-style patriarchy. Rather, it is a paranoid nationalist, ‘military-first’ state on the far right of the ideological spectrum, promoting an ideology whose seeds were sown during the period of Japanese colonialism in Korea. This is a conclusion also reached by another seasoned North Korea-watcher, Bruce Cumings, who stresses in addition how the brutality of the Japanese colonial era and the Korean War set the stage for the North’s paranoid national myths of persecution, suffering and endurance.
But something more needs to be said. Why do the people of North Korea put up with it all? The obvious answer is that they are brainwashed and terrorized into obedience. This is certainly true. But the Korean academics Byung-Ho Chung and Heonik Kwon offer another part of the puzzle. In North Korea: Beyond Charismatic Politics (2012) they apply the theory of the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz concerning what he terms the ’theater state’ to North Korea. Unlike other state formations which focus, for example, on the security or material well-being of its citizens, there is another model of the state that is instead directed toward the ordering forces of display, regard, and drama. As Byung-Ho Chung says in an interview:
The partisan state of North Korea, directed and designed by Kim Jong Il, takes on some of the characteristics of what Geertz calls the theater state. The charismatic power of North Korea was transmitted by heredity, for the first time in the communist countries, partly but evidently, due to its reliance on theatrics. Kim Jong Un, the third generation successor in charismatic power, reenacts his grandfather Kim Il Sung with a tunic suit, high-cut hairstyle, stride, facial expressions, and speech manner at the age of 34 (28 when he came to power). From the start, he appeared like a heroic actor in an epic revolutionary theater production and is continuously playing the role in the contemporary political drama. [ii]
There is plentiful evidence of how the North Korean state choreographs dramatic spectacle to include its citizens – the Arirang Games, for example, or the mass displays of military might, but also under Kim Jong Un, Western-style pop music concerts, ski resorts, and amusement parks. There are also smaller-scale dramas, such as those recorded in the various photo shoots of Kim Jong Un’s visits to army barrack, factories, and farms. A notable feature of these, what we might call chamber pieces, is the presence in the hands of all participants save Kim Jong Un of a notebook and pen or pencil. Within the bizarre semiotics of the North Korean state drama, this curious symbol functions as a sign of fealty and trust signaling that obedience is granted not through terror but through the recognition of superior knowledge and wisdom. What these performances do is not put food on the North Korean people’s tables but rather compels them to become actors in a grand national drama. As Chung says:
A few main actors usually get the spotlight. For a country like North Korea, where the political process is not revealed to the outside world, we are likely to assume that the leader or the few political elites move society in perfect order. However, in the theater state North Korea, most of the 25 million people actively participate in the drama as directors, actors, staff, and audience. They have considerable influence on the composition and construction of the drama.
In some senses, North Korea is a gasamtkunstwerk – a total work of art – in which the rehearsal and performance of an ideal (and to us, nonsensical) myth of the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea is takes place continuously for both domestic, and when necessary, international, audiences. A recent film for North Korean consumption shows how this ‘theater state’ is more than just a metaphor. It recounts Kim Jong Un’s ‘legendary miracle year of 2019’, and include his meetings with Trump. The film ends with rousing martial music as Kim and his top officials ride into the sunset on Mount Paektu, as the narrator incites viewers to follow the leader’s example and “advance, advance, advance.”
The discomforting thought, however, is that the people of North Korea while being compelled to participate in the state drama might actually be getting real fulfillment and meaning from playing their roles. There is plentiful evidence from outside North Korea and throughout history of how humans are mightily reassured when someone is telling them what to do. We are not hardwired to enjoy choices, which often make us anxious. ‘Man is condemned to be free’, says Jean-Paul Sartre.
I’m not sure what this means for the future. How does a ‘theater state’ end? In theory, the drama could go on forever. The narrative possibilities are endless, or at least, the permutations within the narratives acceptable to the North Korean state, are considerable. The extraordinary thing is how utterly impoverished and yet at the same time wholly engrossing the theatrical existence of the North Koreans seems to be. The dramas in which they are obliged to perform are risible from any point of view – except the one that counts for the people who wrote the play, direct it, and perform in it. And yet, perhaps this is why they are relatively easy to perform. When something is all just sound and fury, smoke and mirrors, putting on the show is all that counts.
Which lead me to Trump. Isn’t the United States increasingly also a ‘theater state’? Surely this is the only way to explain how Trump gets away with it. There are enough Americans ready to play the few leading roles, bit parts, and to be extras in crowd scene, in what is only, very marginally, a better play. Or perhaps it is even just a different play. The mythology of North Korea seems to outsiders to be obviously just that – a ridiculous mythology. We are more inside the myth Trump charismatically performs a lead within. It is the myth of America as the land of the free, the land who accepts ‘your tired, your poor, your huddled masses’, but which today seems just as far from actual lived reality as believing that Kim Il Sung is somehow miraculously still alive, or that Kim Jong Il’s birth was preceded by the appearance of a new star in the sky and a double rainbow. Maybe we think the drama that’s playing in North Korea sucks, but so does the one in the US of A.
References:
Byung-Ho Chung and Heonik Kwon North Korea: Beyond Charismatic Politics. Rowman & Littlefield, 2012
Bruce Cumming, North Korea: Another Country, New York: New Press, 2004
Christopher Hitchens,, ‘A Nation of Racist Dwarfs’, Slate, February 1st., 2001, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2010/02/a_nation_of_racist_dwarfs.html.
B. R Myers, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why it Matters (New York: Melville House, originally published 2000. Reprint Edition, 2011
Notes:
[i] Christopher Hitchens (2001) claims that the difference is six inches. The figure I cite is that presented by Professor Daniel Schwekendiek of Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, in 2012.
[ii] North Korea: Beyond Charismatic Politics, The Asia-Pacific Journal. Japan Focus. July 1, 2018. Volume 16 | Issue 13 | Number 1https://apjjf.org/2018/13/Chung.html