Boundaries, terrestrial and extra-terrestrial

A screen grab from the Guardian on-line (November 28th).  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/28/north-korea-claims-spy-satellite-has-photographed-white-house-and-pentagon

Recently, North Korea boasted that it had successfully launched a spy satellite into orbit. The Guardian newspaper on-line (November 28th) reports that it has ‘sent back “detailed” images of the White House, the Pentagon and US nuclear aircraft carriers that have been viewed by the regime leader, Kim Jong-un.’ The Guardian published the photograph at the top of today’s post. Hilarious, isn’t it? The T-shirts sported by the science wonks are priceless. I want one!  I imagine the piece of paper they’re holding shows Scarlett Johansson sunbathing beside her pool in her USD 3.88 million home in Los Feliz, recorded while the satellite was passing over Los Angeles.

It would be comic, except the news has now brought us one step closer to war. Again. Life near the DMZ has just gotten fractionally more insecure. Am I just imagining it, or are there more live fire-drills taking place? More troop movements? It may be a ruse. After all, they have already failed twice. But the suspicion is that Russia has recently provided much needed technological support, and in return, North Korea is providing Russia with thousands of artillery shells. What a diabolical marriage made in Hell!

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I was struck by the chance juxtaposition in the media of this advanced extra-terrestrial surveillance technology with what’s currently going on in Israel/Palestine: the contrast between two relationships to the world - between attaching oneself to a particular patch of soil and having panoptic access to the entire world.

In Israel/Palestine what we see playing out in terrible  detail via the media is a crisis brought on by a fundamental human orientation to land and territory. Strife and war between humans have historically always been about appropriation of land.  A sense of being at home in a particular place is axiomatic. The securing of a particular area of land through migration, colonization, and conquest leads to the setting up of social order and the organization of economic life of society.  Only by dwelling somewhere do we feel truly human. This also meant that because societies are historically grounded in the occupation of a particular area  of land, the construction of boundaries is absolutely necessary.  

So, what is happening in Israel/Palestine is an ancient struggle for the appropriation of land, one that in spite of all the huge changes that have occurred over the past one hundred years remains central to human meaningful existence. Two peoples claim the same land as their own.

And yet, at the same time, thanks to globalization, a thoroughgoing deterritorialization of human existence has occurred. In fact, this process began long before the period usually described as ‘modern’. The uniquely iintimate link between being human and dwelling on the land was destroyed over 500 years ago when the oceans were systematically opened up.  From this point onwards, human society ceased being land-based and lost its status as the connection to specific area of the Earth.  Humans were no longer earth-bound. With the development of maritime technology - improved ship construction,  the  invention of the compass,  the science of mapping -  Europeans spearheaded the subjection of the entire planet to appropriation and control which had begun millennia before. when humans first developed boats that could carry them across the oceans. The general assumption became that by the end of the twentieth century, globalization meant the struggle between humans for the appropriation of land was over.  Humanity had spread all over the entire globe, across land, sea, and space, and there was nowhere else to go.

The North Korean’s launching of a spy satellite is in line with the logic of modernity in this sense. It is part-and-parcel of the process through which humanity has detached itself from its terrestrial bonds and manufactured a god-like view which bestows upon it immense power. It is this technologically-assisted extension of human perception that dominates our experience of the world – at least those of us who live in the developed world, and those who seek to maintain their security in relation to this world – nations like North Korea, for example.  To ensure a secure boundary for appropriated land entails the production of technologies that will deter others from making a grab for it. In this sense, the spy satellite is a contemporary standard form of boundary establishment generated on a global rather than terrestrial scale.

Meanwhile, in Israel/Palestine boundaries of a more ancient kind were erected. Israel constructed a fence to pen in the Gaza Palestinians. But this fence proved catastrophically inadequate. This was not because of sophisticated technological subversion, however, but rather because of the violent invasion of land by humans.

In this sense, the conflict in Israel/Palestine brings together the pre-modern and modern, the post-terrestrial and the terrestrial. Israel’s folly has been to attempt to live like a globalized nation in a region that is still trapped in a feud over land, trapped in a way of dwelling on earth - of being human - that is ancient, and has been kept alive through the bungling of modern leaders.

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But however awful the conflict in Israel /Palestine is, in a weird sense it is actually reassuring on a certain level, in the sense that it is enacting a very familiar kind of struggle over the appropriation of land based on historical precedent, religious justification, and political compromises. With climate change, the conflict between the global and the local will become even more tense. It is transforming the land upon which people dwell, forcing many of them to migrate and causing perpetual conflicts over dwelling rights. We will be seeing lots more violent struggles over land use because of the pressures of climate change, but they won’t be rooted in evident history like the one in Israel/Palestine.

As Bruno Latour writes in Down to Earth. Politics in the New Climatic Regime, , in order to effectively confront climate change we need “to be able to succeed in carrying out two complementary movements that the ordeal of modernization has made contradictory: attaching oneself to a particular patch of soil on the one hand, having access to the global world on the other. Up to now…. such an operation has been considered impossible: between the two, it is said, one has to choose. It is this apparent contradiction that current history may be bringing to an end.’

NOTES

The Guardian article can be accessed at:  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/28/north-korea-claims-spy-satellite-has-photographed-white-house-and-pentagon

The Bruno Latour quote is from Down To Earth. Poltics in the New Climatic Regime (Polity, 2018), p.12 

Decay

The picture above was snapped recently while out walking the dog. What you see is a detail of a metal signboard that has been corroded by the weather and invaded by ivy tendrils. How long has the signboard undergone this attrition? Difficult to say, but probably not that long, and the only reason it’s still there is because it belongs to an abandoned property and so no one has gotten round to removing it.

One reason I took the photograph is because It’s unusual to find such time-worn surfaces here in South Korea. Everything looks new, that is, without a history. Why is this? This question is especially interesting to me because I find surfaces like this that carry the random textures of time very poignant and aesthetically pleasing. But Koreans, on the whole, don’t seem to have a sensibility attuned to enjoying such surfaces. Why?

Koreans seem to have a different sense of time, or of how quickly the ‘past’ becomes the ‘old’.  In this context, the word ‘old’ implies the moribund, redundant, diminished, and lacking in economic value. In short, there’s nothing appealing about being ‘old’. Is this why almost all Koreans dye their hair black as they age? As grey hair is a primary signifier of being ‘old’, it’s not something a society bent on the ‘’young’ and the ‘new’ wants to display. In fact, one could say that Koreans  strive very hard to erase any signs of age – both in themselves and their built environments.  The lifespan of  a new building  is deemed to be around thirty years. I will never forget the day ten years go when some young acquaintances of my wife said they lived in an ‘old’ apartment. When I asked when it was built, they said, in the 1980s! Koreans always buy new cars regularly. Vintage clothes and second-hand goods in general are not appealing. They don’t want something ‘used’ or, as the current euphemism has it, ‘pre-loved’ (ugh!)

One reason for the animus against the past is that for Koreans it is perceived as traumatic. The first half of the twentieth century was a disaster for their country. The Korea of the second half of the century experienced rapid economic progress, but while this economic development brought immense benefits, it also, in a sense, inadvertently consolidated what Japanese colonial rule had begun: the severing of modern Korea from its rich and unique past.

Where I come from, old weathered surfaces are common. We live surrounded by tangible traces of the past in our built environments, with stones and bricks which endure for centuries. Our ‘modernization front’, as the Swiss philosopher Bruno Latour describes it, advanced much more slowly than here in Korea. The Industrial Revolution was, by comparison, an ‘Industrial Evolution’. It  began tentatively in the mid-eighteenth century in England, and so the replacement of the ‘old’ by the ‘new’, the superseding of what was deemed obsolete and redundant, occurred over a much longer period of time and has been far less total. Korea’s economic ‘miracle’ only goes back three generations. It also occurred in what was virtually a tabula rasa – a ruined country decimated by colonial rule and war. After 1953 and the cessation of fighting, there literally wasn’t much ‘old’ Korea left standing.

The westernizing modernization that South Korea embarked upon is premised on the idea that history has a single and developmental direction heading from the past through the present to the future. Consequently, the people of the present must escape the pull of the past on the journey to the future. As Bruno Latour writes in a context that assumes a western reader but which when read here seems to speak directly to the South Korean situation:

What had to be abandoned in order to modernize was the Local…….It is a Local through contrast. An anti-Global. …Once these two poles have been identified, we can trace a pioneering frontier of modernization. This is the line drawn by the injunction to modernize, an injunction that prepared us for every sacrifice: for leaving our native province, abandoning our traditions, breaking with our habits, if we want to ‘get ahead,’ to participate in the general movement of development, and, finally, to profit from the world.

For a nation bent on modernization, the Local is equated with the ignorant, the antiquated, the redundant, the valueless. With failure. In this sense, we can perceive the worn surface pictured above as a sign of the Local that is abandoned because it carries the stain of an archaic past that must be erased as society moves forward into the better future.   And, in a rapidly modernizing country like South Korea, ‘the archaic past’ can be very recent history - just a few years ago.

But this doesn’t of course mean that modern-day Korea has no past. What it means, however, is that this past can only exist as pre-packaged and scrubbed clean heritage. ‘Old’ historical buidlings are often modern recreations, like Gyeonbokgung Palace in Seoul, which is a kind of ‘zombie’ palace, in that it has all been recently rebuilt and therefore seems lifeless – although people love to go there dressed up in rented pretend hanbok costumes and use it as a backdrop for their selfies. In my experince, historical buidlings in Korea mostly lack aura - by which I mean, a distinctive atmosphere or quality that seems to surround and is generared by them. But this might just be because I’m not Korean. Or, it might be because aura isn’t something that can be consciously produced or manufactured. In relation to built structures, it’s a kind of spatial resonance that is associated with the time-worn, the random, the unproductive, the neglected.

The contemporary Korean animus against the ‘old’ is rather surprising, however, insofar as South Korean society still also clings to the conventions of Confucian age-hierarchy, which means different forms of language are necessary when talking ‘up’ to older people and ‘down’ to younger. It’s normal for Koreans to say in English that someone is a ‘junior’ or a ‘senior’ in relation to them, which sounds odd to westerners.  One of the first questions a Korean will ask you is your year of birth; this is so they know if you’re a ‘senior’ or a ‘junior.’ They also venerate their ancestors. And yet…..

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How to have a living relationship with the past? One way is to consciously live with it’s traces. Without them, how can one exist in anything but a shallow present? This might have been sufficient when the future seemed to be a golden invitation. Today, it is not. So, we end up stranded in a present divested of both the appeal of the Local and the Global.

Bruno Latour’s discussion in the book from which I have quoted, unfolds within what he terms the ‘new climatic regime’, by which he means the crisis caused by humanly-engineered climate change. Latour argues that the old binary of the ‘attractors’ Local and Global which dominated the modern period (and determined South Korea’s modern identity) cannot permit us to confront the challenges of the Anthropocene. Instead, these poles need to be   linked to a third, which Latour calls the ‘Terrestrial.’ By this, he means the ‘attractor’ of Planet Earth itself.

It seems to me that living surrounded by time-textured and humanly-made surfaces is one important part of being Terrestrially-minded. These traces remind us of our finitude. Ultimately, they are memento mori. They show us that everything decays and passes away.

 NOTES

 My quotes come from: Bruno Latour, Down to Earth. Politics in the New Climatic Regime, translated by Catherine Porter (Polity  Press, 2018)