A Dubious Sense of Security
Who wins in the war on the virus?
This photograph was taken this morning from my home’s rooftop. The mountains in the distance are in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea – North Korea. Normally, the mountains are far more hazy, but thanks to heavy rain and Covid-19, I can see their craggy details more clearly than I ever have. Why thanks to Covid-19? Because the pandemic has lowered pollution levels; usually a large proportion of pollution drifts across the Yellow Sea from China to smother the peninsula.
Up north, beyond the DMZ which lies between me and those mountains, the leadership claims to have completely won the battle against the virus. Of course, we can treat this claim with skepticism. But let’s for the moment take it at face value, and put it in a broader context. This means that the most successful nation on earth at eradicating the threat of Covid-19 is also the most oppressive nation on earth.
In fact, if you think about it, the more authoritarian the nation is, the better it seems to have coped with the crisis (again, assuming the truth of the claims). This is because in these societies, the individual must routinely sacrifice what to Westerners seems like an unacceptable portion of their liberty in order to further what they are told is the common good. And which nations have fared worst in the battle against Covid-19? Those with a more individualistic culture, and especially those who have elected populist leaders, such as the United States, Brazil, and the United Kingdom, who make a point of espousing individualism at the expense of the collective.
What lessons can we learn from this striking contrast? One is that, at a deeper level of significance, this pandemic isn’t about the existential threat posed by a virus, but about how to achieve a sense of security, and about how to define ‘security’. What does ‘security’ mean, what value does it have for human beings, and how much are they willing to pay for it? After all, viruses are nothing new. They are an inherent part of human existence, and we literally live with them inside us, as well as outside. What Covid-19 has exposed is not so much our vulnerability to viruses or our dangerous unsettling of the ecosystem but the urgency of the perennial problem of existential and communal security. Or, more accurately, it has drawn attention to the urgency of the problem of how to achieve a credible sense of security, which isn’t the same thing as ‘security’ per se. Having the ‘sense’ that I am secure is a state of mind, and not necessarily a material condition or existential fact. But if I believe I am secure, then I will feel secure. There has been a lot of talk about ‘the normal’ and ‘the new normal’. What this means in this context is ‘the secure’ and the ‘new secure’.
Real, genuine, existential security can only be based on a shared unity of benevolent purpose, which has the effect of collectively shouldering awareness of the inevitability of insecurity, rather than trying to conceal it. This, alas, is totally unachievable within complex societies. But actually, one might call it generally utopian, in that it seems probable that humanity has never achieved such a refined level of social integration. But we are still capable of imagining it. In the meantime, a sense of security has become increasingly premised on another utopian dream: the irradiation of insecurity, or the perpetuity of security. Enter religion, with its offer of eternal life (read: eternal security). As I suggested in a previous post, this search for absolute security originates in childhood vulnerabilities, and fantasies of parental omnipotence. It makes us very susceptible to the rhetoric of infallibility, something that tricksters, con-artists, charismatic visionaries, and politicians, profit from. But in the context of my present argument, the key point is that the feeling of security is a state of mind, not a reality. Total security is a figment. A fantasy . But that doesn’t mean the notion of ‘security’ hasn’t got real, compelling, influence over human life. In fact, it’s what has driven us towards the endorsement of an increasing dehumanized society.
If we look at history, we can see that the sense of security is relative. Compared to today’s society, the level of rampant insecurity of a typical peasant in the Middle Ages might, objectively speaking, seem far far higher. But thanks to his religious faith, this peasant was actually likely to have had a sense of security that surpasses that of many people today. In other words, a sense of security is not linked like cause and effect, but is relative, and determined by specific priorities. The medieval peasant’s physical life is likely to have been ‘nasty, brutish, and short’, but his faith guaranteed him eternal life in heaven, and this guarantee, in turn, made his existential life feel more secure.
In this sense, security is determined by individual and societal visions of the future. A positive vision of the future will make the present feel more secure, while the absence of such affirmation, will make people more pessimistic. So a sense of personal and communal security is closely bound up with a society’s capacity to forge and maintain a credibly positive image of the future. This is precisely one of the things that the pandemic has brought to attention: the vulnerability of our image of the future. I will return to this problem in a future post, and return now to the lessons of the pandemic for our understanding of security.
The sources of our insecurity come and go, and very quickly become normalized and cease to evince fear, or an active sense of insecurity. The Atomic bomb massively increased feelings of insecurity within modern society, but within a generation it had become part of what is deemed ‘normal’ - that is credibly ‘secure’ - society. Sources of insecurity function like gestalts. They rise out of the undifferentiated ground of general impermanence to become foci of attention, then slip back into the ground. Or they suddenly land in our perceptual field and become foci of attention, but then, all going well, are more or less rapidly consigned to the unnoticed background. Indeed, we could say that a sense of security is dependent on consigning sources of fear to the background or periphery, where they will be unnoticed, but have not actually disappeared. Any ‘normal’ society is therefore characterized by a process in which sources of insecurity are ferried from focal attention to unnoticed background. But they do not disappear. Rather fear is transmuted into dread and anxiety.
A vital purpose of any national leadership is to supply a sense of security. Even a despotic one must at least guarantee security for its supporters and enforcers. But, as Marx emphasized, it is also usually politic to provide or sanction an ‘opium’ for the masses, just to be on the safe side. In the modern state, democratic or not, whoever is in control must make a good proportion of the people feel secure in the face of manifest insecurity. They do this by acting as guarantors of security through deflecting attention away from intractable sources of insecurity – nuclear war, pollution, climate change, random violence - and focusing attention instead on more tractable ones – terrorism, Covid-19. They know from studying history that insofar as security is the highest human priority, that the members of the society over which they rule will sacrifice a good deal of their freedom to possess a sense of security, and will thank their leaders with compliant support.
Any ruler is in the business of delivering states of mind not existential truths, and they need to conjure up the right ones. But in truth, the best any ruler can do is to transmute a dangerously destabilizing, fear-inducing, reality into a more socially manageable anxiety-inducing reality. All human life is, as Heidegger argued, lived in an atmosphere of anxiety, which is fear that has been dematerialized or de-focused. The security we are being offered is therefore not the absence of insecurity, but rather an acceptable level of insecurity. The job of a benevolent ruler is to guarantee this level remains more or less stable, while that of a malevolent ruler is to manipulate insecurity in order to maintain and profit from the increasing opportunities for social control and domination it will provide.
So one thing the pandemic is bringing to the fore is the price people are willing to pay for maintaining their illusory sense of personal and collective security. Quite a high price, so it seems. The pandemic is forcing nation states to re-calibrate the grounds upon which to establish for their citizens a credible sense of security. They are doing this in the time honoured manner : by extending their control over their citizens. And the reason their citizens are so willingly giving up their freedoms is because they have been conditioned to believe that the state controls security, whereas what is really happening to that the ruling elite is using the primordial need for security to extend its control over their lives.
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Another lesson to be learned from the pandemic is that the form of a nation’s leadership is important in determining how a society can act collectively, but also, that whatever the ideology being espoused, the common goal is always the panacea of security. But the pandemic has starkly revealed the extent to which collective action to achieve security, when organized within a rigid and oppressive hierarchical system, is much more successful when compared to a system in which collective action is decentralized, local, and driven more by individual initiatives. By ‘successful’, I mean in relation to its capacity to effectively cultivate the belief among members of its society that they are secure.
The more totalistic a state, the more efficient it is at guaranteeing a clearly defined sense of security. This is because the totalistic state has the monopoly on security, and defines what it is, who will be granted it, and what will happen to those who do not conform to the regulations imposed to ensure the consolidation of this fabrication called ‘security’. China and North Korea claim to have successfully protected their peoples from the virus through strictly policing them. A sense of security is granted and achieved through the measures initiated by the state to ensure the limiting of the spread of the virus. But it is success gained at the price of strict conformity imposed through physical and psychological threat. The techniques used to fight the virus are, however, merely extensions of the range of routine techniques used to maintain a sense of security in ‘normal’ times in China and North Korea. In other words, security from the virus has been achieved through a concomitant heightening of awareness of the level of state induced personal insecurity that will ensue if obedience isn’t forthcoming. The state offers a sense of security by effectively monopolizing and deploying the fear that the security it establishes is ostensibly intended to allay.
The state removes security in order to guarantee security. It monopolizes security and its absence. This individual and collective conformity is ensured through the establishment of a dual regime. First, through systematic state-controlled indoctrination - ‘brain-washing’ - and second, through state-controlled surveillance. State-controlled indoctrination, or socialization, ensures a high-level of conformity, which surveillance helps to police and enforce. So the totalistic state’s monopoly on security is built on its monopoly on violence. Lock-down or else!
Ultimately, the pandemic in China and North Korea has been ‘defeated’ through the willingness and ability of the leadership to use insecurity – on the one hand in the shape of fear of the virus, and on the other in the shape of the state apparatus of control and repression – so as to ensure the continuing establishment of an illusory sense of security. The major difference between China and North Korea is that China’s regime relies on strict state controlled indoctrination supported by forms of surveillance that are increasingly accomplished, and exponentially extended and more efficient, via digital media. North Korea still relies on the old ‘analogue’ methods – that is, almost hegemonic state controlled indoctrination via the pre-digital media (print, radio, tv, cultural entertainment), combined with the old surveillance techniques of the neighbour’s spying eyes and ears, backed up by the punitive threat of a boot in the face.
Both China and North Korea have discovered that the danger of a pandemic can lead profitably to an increase in the state’s power to control the lives of its citizens, and that its people will accept the further invasions of their lives if it there is the caveat that this is necessary in order to guarantee the feeling of being secure (although it has to be said that imagining where this extension of control has infiltrated North Korean society is difficult, as the state already has such a total monopoly on security).
The question then is , to what extent is North Korea exemplary? In other words, is this level of social control actually more acceptable and potentially exportable elsewhere than we imagined? George Orwell certainly thought it was.
Meanwhile, in the United States, Brazil, and the United Kingdom a different leadership model and supporting ideology exists at the apex of a more amorphous social structure. Here, it is said that the state’s obligation to achieve a sense of security for its citizens must be counterbalanced by the promotion of the idea that individual freedom is sacrosanct. This concession to individual freedom inevitably jeopardizes the ability of the state to achieve a monopoly on the sense of personal and collective security. The underlying assertion is that security must to a certain extent be sacrificed in order to protect personal freedom and ensure economic stability. This reflects the self-image of a culture within which the ideology of individualism requires that security be defined in relation to personal separateness and autonomy. Security for the individual trumps security for the group or collective.
We can see this cleavage in worldviews very clearly in relation to the farrago over face-masks. To wear or not to wear, and why? The face-mask has become a cipher for the difference between the collectivist and individualistic responses to the crisis. Those who protest that the wearing of a face-mask is an infringement of their personal freedom are essentially claiming that security is monadic, atomized, and is in opposition to every other individual’s security. By contrast, the collectivist mindset, which a one-party state like China and North Korea endorses and distorts, claims that the curtailing of personal liberty is necessary to achieve group level, rather than personal level, security.
But both are fundamentally deviations, in the sense that they both draw false conclusions from the same evidence. The individualistic solution, by assessing the problem from the false premise of a separate, localized, independent self, erroneously concludes that a sense of security is gained through emphasis on more bounded autonomy, more personal differences. The collectivistic solution, on the other hand, starts from the actually more reasonable premise that the boundaries of the self are fluid and extendable, that personal security is indivisibly connected to the security of the group of which the individual is an intrinsic part. But it transplants this insight onto the one party political system, in which the party becomes the embodiment of this extended self.
Both the individualistic and collectivistic models are superstructures built on the basic foundation of what the writer and activist Charles Eisenstein calls ontological ‘separation’, that is, on a way of being that is based on a fundamental distortion and dissimulation (1). The cognitive fluidity that allowed Homo sapiens to best other hominids, such as the Neanderthals, meant having a sense of independent and reflexive selfhood - of separateness. It allowed humans to act as if from outside the world it shares with animals, vegetables, and minerals, and as a result, placed them in what no doubt at first seemed like an enviably advantageous position which made possible the wholescale exploitation if the rest of nature, and also, when expedient, other human beings. This, as we now know, was a magical trick, and furthermore, one that is has turned out to be blatantly self-destructive in the long run.
The big difference between the collectivistic and individualistic models of human sociality is therefore that the former seeks to consolidate the assumption of ontological separation through collective means, the latter though individualistic means. Both are equally about domination of the Other. The collectivistic model has a very long history, one in which security comes through domination achieved by the hierarchical organization of society directed towards collective goals. The individualistic model has a much shorter history, which parallels the growth of Protestantism and capitalism, and where the underlying premise of separation becomes manifest and is exponentially exaggerated.
So collectivism is closer to what was probably the norm in per-agrarian hunter-gatherer societies, in that it seeks to use the primal interconnectedness that pervaded these communities, but now in the service of providing security for a particular, separate, community. The individualist model, on the other hand, while also bringing a sense of security to the community, does so by exaggerating people’s awareness of separation. To this extent, I think we can claim that individualism, while further away from an inherent sense of what Eisenstein calls ‘interbeing’, is nevertheless closer to re-connecting with such ‘interbeing’, because it makes manifest – makes explicit - what is still only latent, and therefore much further away from conscious awareness, within collectivist societies.
(1) Charles Eisenstein is a recent discovery for me, and I highly recommend his writing (and talks). This is his website: https://charleseisenstein.org/
I also draw in today’s blog on his much shared on-line essay ‘The Coronation”: https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-coronation/
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
Getting Acquainted with Nothing
Detail of the flag of the Republic of Korea, featuring the yin-yang symbol.
Nothing can sneak up on us when we least expect it, an uncomfortable fact that has certainly been amplified during the Covid-19 crisis as millions of people have been obliged to self-isolate. In fact, negative feelings of failure, envy and resentment, and experiences of loss, absence, sickness and death seem to shape our lives more than positive feelings and experiences. Despite our desire to hold onto ‘positive’ emotions and thoughts, we often find ourselves trapped in the company of the ‘negative.’
There is a battle raging inside all of us between the internal and external forces moving us forward and helping us grow, and those holding us back and defeating us. Intrinsic to our emotional and intellectual life are conscious or unconscious, willed or unwilled, encounters with ‘nothing’ – with pessimistic, critical, skeptical, apathetic, cynical, violent and destructive attitudes. It can be encountered as a very personal matter which poses deep existential problems, as when we conclude that we live in a meaningless abyss between the nothingness before birth and the nothingness after death.
Such negativity can form the basis for judgments about the meaning of existence as a whole, as when Macbeth says that life is “ full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” This overwhelmingly negative feeling can become so permanent that only suicide seems to offer a way out. ‘There is this emptiness in me. All the things in the world are not enough to drown out the voice of this emptiness that says: you are nothing’[1], writes the contemporary Chinese-American novelist Yiyun Li, giving new voice to the perennial sense of despair. Acute awareness of existential worthlessness can have specific causes - cruel parenting or the trauma of war - but it can also, as Blaise Pascal observes, simply be the result of someone being “in complete repose, without passions, without occupation, without amusement, without duty’. For at such moments, “Immediately there arises from the bottom of his soul boredom, grief, chagrin, scorn, despair.”[2]
And yet such feelings of existential nothingness can also lead to the recognition that our feeling of groundlessness is an inevitable consequence of being over-dependent on some basic habits of thinking. Buddhist teachings state that all things are without essential and enduring identity, that all existence is interconnected in a chain of co-dependent becoming within a state of constant flux. Therefore, a meditation on one’s own emptiness or nothingness can aid in relinquishing our grasp on the binary oppositions that usually dominate existence, and so be the prelude to an enlightening experience of peaceful mindfulness.
In this sense, exploring how Nothing performs, animates, and transforms can be a potential prelude to a healing process in which the usual segregations in our thinking begin to seem less rigid and therefore less terrorizing. Once we have familiarized ourselves with the negative, we can start to think dialectically: not negative v positive, but rather negative-positive, where we are positioning ourselves in a ‘fuzzy,’ in-between position, one from where we can pivot back and forth between poles.
The Taoist concept of yinyang is an ancient system of dialectical thinking. Buddhism calls itself the ‘middle way,’ because it invites the merging of contradictions, or the mutual conversion of binary opposites. These traditions aim to help us to stay in touch with the undelimited whole. As the Zen monk Hui Neng declares: “ All things are in your essential nature. If you see everyone’s bad and good but do not grasp or reject any of it, and do not become affected by it, your mind is like space – this is called greatness”. [3] The ‘nothing,’ ‘void,’ or ‘emptiness’ of Buddhism isn’t therefore referring to the absence of ‘something,’ and is intended to signal an unconceptualizable connectedness which cannot be grasped, circumscribed or delimited.
[1] Yiyun Li, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write You in Your Life, Random House, 2017
[2] Pascal, Pensées, No. 201
[3] Hui Neng, ‘The Sutra of Hui-Neng, Grand Master of Zen, With Hui-neng’s Commentary on the Diamond Sutra, trans. Thomas Cleary, Boston and London: Shambhala, 1998, 17
Cultural Difference in the Age of Covid-19. Part II
Koreans eating dinner.
In a previous post I introduced some rather broad-brush theory coming from the contemporary French philosopher and sinologist François Jullien concerning differences between Western and East Asian cultures in order to place responses to the current Covid-19 crisis in some kind of wider historical and social context.
In this post, I want to explore the ideas of a couple of Western social psychologists, to see what light they might shed on the issue.
Significant empirical research into psychological behaviour has revealed how even such a basic core concept as the understanding of ‘selfhood’ is determined by the cultural-historical environment and ossifies into recursive patterns of behaviour. The Canadian social psychologist Stephen Heine discusses an East Asian cultural bias towards what he calls the ‘interdependent self’, in which individuals are understood to be connected to each other via a network of relationships. This Heine contrasts to a Western model primarily based on the idea of an ‘autonomous self’, where selfhood is generated in contrast to others.
Echoing Heine, the American social psychologist Richard E. Nisbett has also identified two contrasting cognitive styles - ‘analytic’ (West) and ‘holistic’ (East). ‘Analytic thought’, he writes, “dissects the world into a limited number of discrete objects having particular attributes that can be categorized in clear ways”, and as a result “lends itself to being captured in language”. ‘Holistic thought,’ by contrast, “responds to a much wider array of objects and their relations, and […] makes fewer sharp distinctions among attributes or categories, [and so] is less well suited to linguistic representation.” Consequently, as Nisbett notes, “to the Asian the world is a complex place composed of continuous substances, understood in terms of the whole rather than in terms of the parts, and subject more to collective than to personal control”. In the Western’s case, on the other hand, “the world is a relatively simple place, composed of discrete objects that can be understood without undue attention to context, and highly subject to personal control.”
It isn’t difficult to see how these basically different understandings of the self’s relationship the world might impact on how societies respond to a viral pandemic. For example, it is interesting to consider how it might affect the use of a face mask. I often see Koreans walking around wearing a mask even in the countryside, far from crowds, as if they believe that the virus is in the air, and could be contracted. As a Westerner, I stubbornly hold to a way of understanding contagion that is in line with Nisbett’s analysis of the Western mindset, and therefore believe that the virus can be understood in terms of a person to person infection within a mindset in which “the world is a relatively simple place, composed of discrete objects that can be understood without undue attention to context.”
What if I was considering the virus from within a mindset in which “the world is a complex place composed of continuous substances, understood in terms of the whole rather than in terms of the parts, and subject more to collective than to personal control”? Perhaps I too would be a little more holistic in my understanding of how viral contagion happens.
For more information:
Richard Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and why, Free Press, 2010.
Steven B. Jackson, ‘Chatting Up Culture With Steven Heine: Part I and II’, Psychology Today, Online April 26 and April 30, 2012.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culture-conscious/201204/chatting-culture-steven-heine-part-i https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culture-conscious/201204/chatting-culture-steven-heine-part-ii
'THE BENIGN INDIFFERENCE OF THE UNIVERSE'.
Albert Camus and Covid-19
![‘L’Étranger’ [1942]. One of my ‘Book-Paintings’. Acrylic on canvas. 35x35cm.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d7b2c2c021ee75e46d4b93e/1585712238144-QBYAWQ7VT998MKOC11S8/Picture1.jpg)
‘L’Étranger’ [1942]. One of my ‘Book-Paintings’. Acrylic on canvas. 35x35cm.
I’m not the only person to be turning to Albert Camus in these extraordinary times. We have been made horribly aware of what Camus in L’Étranger [The Outsider] calls the ‘benign indifference of the universe’.[1] His 1947 novel La Peste [The Plague] uses the quarantining of an Algerian city during an outbreak of the plague as an allegory for the human condition. A bacteriological contagion becomes a metaphor for the dilemma of moral contagion. These are the last lines of the novel, spoken by Dr. Bernard Rieux, a physician who is witness and chronicler of the plague in his town: "He knew that this happy crowd was unaware of something that one can read in books, which is that the plague bacillus never dies or vanishes entirely, that it can remain dormant for dozens of years in furniture or clothing, that it waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs and old papers, and that perhaps the day will come when, for the instruction or misfortune of mankind, the plague will rouse its rats and send them to die in some well-contented city."
Confronted by Covid-19, the scientific mind, which we have come to trust above all others, seems helpless. We are reduced to the extraordinary primitive practices of of social distancing and self-isolation. Even the greatest superpower in the world is completely helpless. In such circumstances, Camus’s concept of the absurd seems highly relevant. At the corner of any street, he famously declared, the absurd can strike us suddenly in the face. This unmasking experience, Camus argued, is born when our needs are confronted by the indifferent silence of the world, when the ‘human’ encounters the in- or non-human, and feels lost. The sense of the absurd is therefore a consequence of the perceived divorce between our idea of who we are and the actual shape of our lives, between us as actors and the scenery we inhabit. In a world suddenly deprived of comforting illusions, we become strangers, exiled from the consoling beliefs, memories, and hopes of our neighbours and ancestors.
A sense of the absurd amounts to seeing life from death’s point of view – from the perspective of oblivion, and Camus argued that there is one clear solution: suicide. We can respond with an act of self-destruction based on the conscious recognition that our life is not intrinsically worth living, or not worth living in accordance with the conditions imposed by society. But Camus also argued that the absurd could supply new grounds for hope, a hope that grew from deep within a sense of life’s fundamental meaninglessness.
In Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), published in 1942, Camus took the hapless Sisyphus as his personification of the human condition - a man who rolls a huge rock up a hill only to see it roll down again, and then calmly repeats the task for all eternity. This, Camus argued, was a fitting image of humanity, one we should carry with us when we confront the absurdity of existence. The struggle to reach the summit is enough to fill our hearts, Camus write, and we should imagine that Sisyphus is happy. As another connoisseur of the absurd, the Romanian philosopher and essayist Emil Cioran (1911-1995), wrote in the 1980s: ‘When all the current reasons – moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on – no longer guide one’s life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life.’ [2]
A crisis like the current one helps us recognize that the cultural system through which life is justified rests on reflex actions, habits, deceptions, and economic interests that must be questioned. Its values no longer serve as a guide to life. But here’s the rub: we also know that after Covid-19 is no longer a mortal threat to our society we will all probably continue to adhere to this system, even after it has been called into question and seen to be absurd.
Camus believed that if the world could be made different through revolt and ethical refusal, it might still satisfy our demands for real meaning. Today, however, we are more likely to recognize the far more sobering truth: there exists no conceivable world about which fundamental doubts cannot be raised. In other words, the absurdity of our situation comes not from a collision between our expectations of the world and the world as it is, which is what Camus believed, but rather from a collision taking place deep within the structure of our existential being.
[1] Albert Camus, The Outsider, p. 120.
[2] Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, p.10.
CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN THE AGE OF COVID-19
I mentioned in an earlier post how the difference in official advice and popular attitude to wearing face masks between Western countries and those of East Asia in the current crisis is striking. South Koreans, like other East Asians, are more used to wearing them than Westerners. Their function is twofold: to protect the wearer (against pollution), and to protect others from the wearer (when, for example, the wearer may spread germs during a cold or flu bout).This second function means that Koreans are wearing their masks now not only to protect themselves but also to protect those with whom they come into contact. And insofar as up to 14 days can be the period when no symptoms are experienced even though one is infected, it does seem reasonable and socially responsible to wear a mask when one is in a public place. I also noted in a previous post how the social value of the face mask is in part symbolic, and that we should not underestimate the power of symbolism as a force of resistance to the virus on the level of collective cohesion.
The fact that even medical experts in the West initially seemed to refer to the role of the face mask primarily or wholly as a form of self-protection says much about the difference between an individualistic and collectivistic society. The former thinks primarily, perhaps excessively, about the interests of the atomized self, while the latter is more aware of how the wellbeing of the self is inextricably bound up with that of their community.
Recently, there has been considerably discussion in the Press about the different ways in which, say, South Korea and the United States have handled the pandemic. Here, for example, are two articles that try to address these difference in relation to South Korea.
Can we predict what social conventions will most effectively combat the spread of the Covid-19 virus? The apparent success of South Korea in rapidly responding to the present crisis and bringing the pandemic under control suggests a culture which, because of underlying cultural traits, is far more used to conformity and obedience than the West’s. The problem for us Westerners is going to be that such ‘Asiatic’ conformity and obedience have such negative connotations for the individualistic Westerners, who are unlikely to respond with the kind of inherent self-abnegation that is expected in Korea and other East Asian societies.
It’s always dangerous to talk in terms of rigid and general ‘cultural differences’, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have some validity, as long as we bear in mind that they are neither unchanging, or binding in the same way to all members of the same society. So, with this caveat in mind, I want to consider some ways in which we can understand why Eastern and Western societies have responded to Covid-19 differently, and not simply as a consequence of specific decisions by politicians.
In the rest of this post, I try to dig deeper into cultural difference, and focus in particular on what the eminent sinologist and François Jullien’s ideas might contribute to the debate.
Jullien argues that on the deepest level, the divergence between what he calls ‘Chinese’ thought (which would include cultures like Korea and Japan influenced by Chinese culture) and that of what he terms ‘Greek’ thought (or “Western’) amounts to two fundamentally different approaches to humanity’s relationship to the world. He describes these two different cultures as being characterised on the one hand by an inclination towards ‘’transcendence’ (West), and on the other to ‘immanence’ (East).
These differences are a consequence os the fact that, traditionally, Chinese thinking was not based on the activity of gathering objective knowledge through the senses, because China was especially sensitive to “the regular, spontaneous fecundity stemming simply from the alternation of the seasons”. In fact, Jullien asserts,“[t]here are two ways in which my existence is continuously connected to something outside. I breathe and I perceive”.
By granting “priority to a conception of reality as an object of knowledge”, the Greeks, by contrast, laid the groundwork for Western thought., writes Jullien. ‘[T]he mind moves upward from visual sensation to the construction of essences, and vision is corrected, structured, and at the same time transcended by reason.” An equation of the eye with the mind was thereby established, and this meant an over-emphasis on the importance of rational argument and analysis, where a whole-as-parts paradigm or bipolarity was applied to thought. “One could say – metaphorically, at least – that Greek thought was marked by the idea, at once tragic and beautiful, of ‘measure’ attempting to impose itself on chaos,” Jullien writes.
As a consequence, Western culture came to value discrete, clear, abstract ‘building blocks’ for cognition. Because it projects order from outside, Western thinking focuses on the causal explanation “according to which an antecedent and a consequence, A and B, are extrinsically related to one another”. Mathematical structures - point, line, plane and ratio - are of the first importance in the history of Western philosophy. Thus, as Jullien notes, Descartes could influentially assert “that the distinct serves as the gauge of truth, ‘that the things we conceive very clearly and distinctly are all true,’ in the oft quoted formula”.
On the one hand, writes Jullien, there is the Western philosophical tradition: “I can privilege the gaze and the activity of perception, the Greek choice, which led them to grant priority to a conception of reality as an object of knowledge: the mind moves upward from visual sensation to the construction of essences, and vision is corrected, structured, and at the same time transcended by reason.” Alternatively, there is the direction taken by Chinese philosophy, which “proceeded from the fact that I am alive, breathing in - breathing out.’ From this premise it was then possible to “deduce the principle of a regulating alternation from which the process of the world flows.” By prioritizing breath over perception the Chinese way was therefore grounded on a conception of the world founded “not on the activity of knowledge but on respiration.’. Jullien suggests that these differences can be summed up in ontological terms by saying that the West is preoccupied with ‘being’, while the East thinks in terms of ‘living.’
But how does this abstract level of understanding culture translate into day-to-day decision making and action? This will be the topic of my next post.
NOTE: I have quoted from Jullien’s The Propensity of Things, and The Great image has no shape, or, on the nonobjective in painting. Here is an Amazon link to these, and others of Jullien’s books:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=francois+jullien&ref=nb_sb_noss_1
GOD AND THE VIRUS
Shincheonji Church of Jesus, South Korea. A Covid-19 hot-spot.
In late February a member of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus in South Korea was confronted by the evidence that she had inadvertently spread the Covid-19 virus among her congregation, and thereby set in motion the domino effect that suddenly – and, as it turned out, temporarily - made South Korea the second worst affected country after China. In response to this revelation, the unfortunate ‘patient zero’ declared that this was incontrovertible evidence that Satan was jealous of the success of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus.
We can easily laugh at the dauntingly high level of cognitive dissonance necessary to believe such nonsense, but down the centuries variations on this justification have been common from believers of all religions, although this Korean woman’s opinion, which no doubt parroted that of the leader of the cult, is an interestingly parochial variation.
The monotheistic religions all argue that tragedy and misfortune are God’s way of punishing the sinful, or are evidence of humanity’s inability to comprehend the mind of God. During the Black Death, the Roman Catholic Church claimed that the horrible plague was God’s punishment, while at the same time also pleading with God to stop the pestilence. The other possible justification, the one that is more likely to be held by today’s less fundamentalist believer, is that ‘the ways of the Lord are mysterious’, We mere mortals are incapable of comprehending Him. In short, the faithful find assurance in the fact that everything is God’s will. He is never, ever, wrong.
But while those without the ‘talent’ for religious faith can scoff at the levels of dissimulation necessary for belief in a benevolent all-powerful God in a world of indiscriminate pain and suffering, the deep human need for the infallible has certainty survived secularization. Religious unbelievers still all too often submit to the logic of authoritative and incontestable power. We may not believe in God, but we still put faith in the over-arching authority of science, some ideology, a charismatic leader, or some ideal. We still claim that some things are beyond a shadow of doubt.
The marriage of science and technology is an especially seductive version of infallibility. But the scientist seems as powerless as the rest of us at the moment. This week Western ‘experts’ are reported to have run tests and to be re-assessing the usefulness of wearing a face mask to counter Covid-19.
Here in South Korea, over the past week or so, me and my partner has been anesthetizing ourselves courtesy of Netflix by watching an American tv series called Salvation. The ‘salvation’ in question seems to be science. But in the end, science fails, and instead everyone is thrown into the absolute otherness of an alien visitation. That seems to more or less be where we are now, except the invasion comes from our own habitat.
Psychologically, the cognitive process that leads to the craving for infallibility lies in the human infant’s prolonged period of absolute dependency on the parent. When we are babies, we automatically and necessarily assume that our provider is perfect, and once this delectable idea becomes ingrained, it is very difficult for the juvenile and adult self to exist without such certainty. Just consider how unappealing are the words associated with the opposite of infallibility: doubtful, uncertain, contingent, questionable, imperfect, faulty, defective, weak, useless, flawed, erring, worthless, unnecessary, meaningless, frightening, vulnerable, empty, needless.
But Homo sapiens’ cravings for infallibility and perfection may very well be our ultimate downfall. It seems paradoxical, but unless we are more willing to embrace the shadowy and uncertain parts of our consciousness, we will never escape the craving that has, in effect, set us on a collision course with nature.
SUBLIME CORONAVIRUS
With the arrival of Covid-19 human history has finally collided with nature.
As I’m interested in the concept of the sublime, I can but see the current crisis through the lens of the ‘negative sublime’. The concept of the sublime describes the experience of standing on a borderline, threshold, or boundary and therefore finding oneself in an unfamiliar and vulnerable position.
Etymologically, the term derives from the Latin sublimis (‘elevated,’ ‘lofty’), from the preposition sub, meaning ‘up to,’ and limen (the threshold, surround, or lintel of a doorway), and it also relates to limes - a boundary or limit. The concept of the sublime is therefore an attempt to map experiences characterized by bodily displacement and confusion onto phenomena that are obscure, complex, immense, and awe-inspiring, onto cognitive and emotional states associated with fear and terror. The sublime has two valences – positive and negative. In its positive mode, the sublime describes a destabilizing but invigorating experience of transcendence. In its negative mode, by contrast, the experience is one in which we are humbled and diminished by an encounter with something overwhelming. Both valences explore the role of pain rather than pleasure within the economy of the self.
The concept of the sublime is therefore an attempt to address humanity’s troubled relationship with nature from a secular point of view. Through drawing attention to existential limits va analogies to expansive horizons, stormy oceans, immense geological formations, and diffuse and indistinct atmospheres, the sublime is about the transformation of ontological situations caused by extreme situations.
The Covid-19 pandemic can be usefully described in terms of the ‘negative sublime’. Seeing it in this context is significant not least because we thought we had successfully divested nature of its troubling sublimities. We thought the sublime in nature was a hackneyed cliché associated with the vacation snap-shot and advertising copy. We thought it had been completely assimilated to mass culture, and become an ersatz sublimity designed to stimulate a jaded consumer. The now all too familiar images of ‘sublimity’ were routinely exploited to sell everything from new cars to male perfumes, and it features harmlessly in countless ‘end-of-the-world’ and sci-fi movie entertainments. The domestication and commodification of the sublime as a feature of our relationship to nature seemed total.
But we were wrong, and it’s very sobering.
THE SYMBOLISM OF THE FACE MASK
Here in South Korea more or less everyone in is wearing a face mask. According to the opinions of medical experts in the West, these people must be sadly misled or deluded, because a face mask is only useful in cases when we are specifically at risk or already diagnosed. Perhaps they are, medically speaking. But the judgment ignores the symbolic value of wearing a face mask.
The face masks says: ‘We are a beleaguered people who, confronted by a common and invisible enemy, have adopted the same persona – the same mask – as an act of solidarity.’ ‘Persona’ is a Greek word referring to the mask worn by an actor to portray his character. In psychology, ‘persona’ refers to the aspect of our character we often unconsciously present to others, or that is perceived by them. In this sense, the medical face mask is a signal that Koreans have suppressed the usual signs of individuality and position in the social hierarchy in the shared struggle against the virus. Through unconsciously announcing to each other their solidarity – their sameness when confronted by the threat of the virus - each individual is made to feel emotionally stronger as part of a greater collective.
The population of South Korea is about 51.4 million. That means there must be an awful lot of facemasks out there. The Western states, unlike South Korea, China, Japan, and other East Asian countries, have no tradition of wearing face masks in daily life (in these countries they are routinely worn against air pollution, and while one is sick and interacting with others) so there aren’t enough face masks available to clothe a whole population, and those that exist are sorely needed in situations where they can be of real medical value. Anyway, Western culture is far more inherently individualistic, and such an overt visual sign announcing that the the self has been subsumed into the collective is likely to be misunderstood and resisted.
But we Westerners do East Asians and others a great disservice by judging the face mask only in terms of its directly explicit and clearly denoted medical efficacy. We also do humanity as a whole a great disservice by ignoring the vital role played by largely unconscious symbolism in creating communal bonds, and nurturing hope and the spirit of rejuvenation. We tend to say something is ‘merely symbolic’, but this grossly underestimates the power of the symbol to construct, direct, and change lives. While Coronavirus will certainly be defeated thanks largely to medical vigilance and skill, the creative deployment of an effective symbolism will also play a vital part.
A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME
Joseph Beuys talks under the rose
Why had I never really noticed roses before that fateful day? And why, suddenly, did they blossom (apologies for the tired pun) into my life? The attempt to answer these questions is one reason for writing this book.
There’s a famous experiment by a group of psychologists in which participants were asked to watch a video of a basketball game and told to focus all their attention on counting the number of times one team took possession of the ball. Participants were so intent on fulfilling their designated task that they completely failed to see a man in a gorilla suit wander into the middle of the frame, perform a jig, and then wander out again![1] The psychologists wanted to test just how selective human vision is.
I thought of this experiment when I was trying to understand my own selective bias regarding roses and other flowers. But who was it told me to ‘keep my eyes on the ball’ – i.e. not get distracted by roses? My upbringing, of course. My culture. I was educated to consider flowers to be frivolous and ‘sissy’, the domain of females. My only contact with them should be as gifts, whereupon they could help me get what I wanted from the aforementioned females. In addition, I had been taught to believe that showing interest in flowers was a moral failing, a sign that I didn’t have my priorities right in the eyes of God and my peers. The virtue of frugality and the glory of the rose did not sit well together. If you compare a Presbyterian church interior, with which I was familiar, with a Roman Catholic one, you can see that, amongst much else, the Reformation was an assault on flowers – real, sculpted, and painted - and on the rose, the most sacred of all flowers to Catholics, in particular. But puritanism need not have a religious motivation. Any ideology will do. Most modern-day intellectuals are secular puritans because we focus on the ‘life of the mind’ and inevitably condescend towards the ‘life of the body’. In fact, anything deemed ‘beautiful’, that is, pleasurable and joyful, is likely to be suspect. And, as we consider ourselves custodians of ‘high culture’, we also tend to look down on something that is so pervasively embraced by ‘low culture’, deeming it kitsch, sentimental, commodified, and politically suspect.[2]
So, if I had to say in a very few words what it is that so fascinates me about the rose, it is the fact that it is both something I engage with as a plant, an intrinsic part of the vegetal world – of ‘nature’ - and also as an idea, or part of the human ‘culture’. But what is especially interesting is that with the rose both these roles are intertwined so completely that it makes the old familiar binary opposition ‘nature’ /’culture’ seem beside the point.
As my professional background is in the making and studying of visual signs, and most particularly, painting., I’m used to working with representations, and am attuned to viewing cultural artifacts as signs within a social code, a system whose purpose is to facilitate communication between people, but also often manipulates and controls them. A sign is never definitive proof of anything. It can be ambiguous, and it can be false. I am attuned to approaching images with a critical, demystifying mind, and am on the lookout for the ideology hiding behind the mediation, the trickery behind the fetish. But then I look at the specimen of ‘Cecille Brunner’ growing over the pergola in my garden, and all the suspicion gets blown to the wind by its delicately pink and fragrant spectacle.
The philosopher Paul Ricœur wrote that we can interpret culture according to two broad attitudes: ‘suspicion’ and ‘faith’.’[3] Equipped with the ideas of Marx, Nietzsche Freud, and the work of their disciples, most contemporary intellectuals primarily think within an atmosphere of ‘suspicion’. This means that where the rose is concerned, we can’t simply celebrate its fascinating history, its celebrated loveliness, its ubiquitous popularity. We must also ask what human hands are manipulating it and why. What has the rose has been made to say, and to what end? Any sign functions on two levels: denoted and connoted. A denoted meaning is manifest, explicit, obvious. With connoted meaning, which is parasitic on the first, it less easy to recognize when some kind of manipulation is taking place. Connotation occurs subliminally, and often unconsciously influences our beliefs and actions. In fact, it is on the level of connotation that the power of the image resides. So any truly valuable discussion of the rose as a cultural symbol will need to think about how it is involved in both denoting and connoting, and how the latter is working to control us. For example, while the rose clearly denotes feminine beauty, it can be said to connote a misogynistic idea of woman as merely frivolous, ornamental, and sexually available. While in a patriarchal society, men are routinely compared to animals like the lion, bear, or wolf, women are likened to a pretty plant. We send bunches of red roses on Valentine’s Day to denote our love for someone special, but they connote our participation in the values of the patriarchy, and also as consumers of a commercial business. Roses lain at war memorials denote our remembrance of the dead in battle, but they can be said to connote the sanctification and sublimation of state sanctioned violence.
But the demystifying acid of ‘suspicion’ is obviously insufficient. In fact, it is dangerous, because it can lead to an excessive reliance on the powers of critical reason, and the value of concept formation, at the expense of feeling, emotion, and imagination. The connotative dimension of an image is not necessarily only tied to patterns of abuse. Th imagination can use connotation to generate associations that fly free of the interests of the powerful. For example, in By Any Other Names we will be encountering many examples of imaginative synthesis, of the original use of metaphor and other figures of speech which, through analogy - or the forming of an unlikely correspondence – between seemingly unlike things. For example, D.H. Lawrence writes in a poem: ‘ She stoops to the sponge, and her swung breasts / Sway like full-blown yellow / Gloire de Dijon roses.’ The simile woman’s breast=rose blossom was a very familiar one when, in the early twentieth century, Lawrence wrote his poem. But Lawrence succeeds in imbuing it with powerful new value that rescues it from cliché because, unlike other poets, he actually specifies which rose. He thereby makes tangible and concrete an analogy that was in danger of becoming febrile and idealized.
We can also approach the rose motivated by a commitment to the other interpretative model: ‘faith.’ While it isn’t possible to return to the naïve or simple faith of someone who has never heard of, or choses to ignore, the unsettling messages delivered by Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, we nevertheless hope to restore meanings in spite of the critique justifiably unleashed by these masters of ‘suspicion’. This dimension of continuing ‘faith’ in the symbolic - faith even in a symbol that has undergone such banalization and commodification as the rose - seems especially important now because of the undertow of nihilism that pervades our culture. So this is the faith is of someone who believes that thinking about the rose will tell us something meaningful and truthful, and will only do this if, as Ricœur emphasizes, we remain ‘obedient’ to the symbol, if we proceeds by recollecting, recovering, and restoring the many meanings of the rose in history which undergird its complex reception today.
A portrait by Joshua Reynolds featuring the Damask Rose flower and bud.
A fresco from Pompeii featuring Gallica Roses and a nightingale.
Rose still-life by Henri Fantin-Latour.
NOTES
[1] The experiment was conducted in 1999, and is recounted, for example, in Edward Slingerland, What Science Offers the Humanities, Cambridge, 2008, p.49
[2] In the course of my research, I came across a painting by the little know Austrian Symbolist painter Maximilian Lenz (1860-1948) which sums up my, and many other intellectuals (male but also female), position regarding nature’s bounty. It is called ‘A Daydream’ or alternatively, ‘A World’, and was painted in 1899. It show an intellectual deep in thought taking a stroll across a flower-strewn meadow. Lenz was in earnest, but nowadays we can but smile at the blatant misogyny and biophobia. Here is Bram Dijkistra’s amusing description ‘ his mind quite obviously occupied with the exalted future of man, only to be beset by fiercely frolicking maidens and, worst of all, a bevy of transparently smocked young ladies carrying – indeed, becoming - huge stalks of blossoms. These decidedly daffy damsels personified tempting floral finitude as they urged the serious thinker to lose himself among their panting petals.’ ( Idols of Perversity, p.241, where the painting is illustrated).
[3] Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 27.
KOREAN DANSAEKHWA MONOCHROME PAINTING
Park Seo-Bo, Ecriture No.3-78, 1978. Pencil, oil on canvas, 130 x 162 cm. Private Collection.
Lee Ufan, From Line, 1978. Tate, London.
I’ve recently finished a book on the monochrome for Reaktion Books called The Simple Truth. The Monochrome in Modern Art, which will be published next Spring. In this Blog entry I’d like to introduce an intriguing aspect of Korean contemporary art – Dansaekhwa (One-Colour Painting). I discuss it in the book as part of my goal of writing a global history of the monochrome. In later Blogs I’ll come back to the monochrome as an important aspect of modern art, and try to tease out some of its enigmatic but often controversial significance.
Korean monochrome painting of the 1970s and 1980s marks a moment when the society that gave birth to it appeared almost as a cultural tabula rasa. The Republic of Korea was still recovering from a tragic period of civil war, facing continued confrontation with a belligerent communist North and a repressive military government at home. But the period also saw the dawning of a new more prosperous and eventually democratic state directed towards the emulation of Western , and especially American, capitalist models.
Artists associated with Dansaekhwa show a marked preference for earth-toned or white and off-white colours, and they applied paint in emphatically repetitive, process-based ways. Park Seo-bo (b. 1931) scratched rhythmically into a dull off-white paste of oil with a pencil, while Ha Chong-hyun (b. 1935) squeezed earth-toned oil paint from the reverse side of a canvas so it was extruded on the front. Chung Sanghwa (b. 1932) pleated canvases into monochromatic grids and then cut and painted into the cracks he produced. Yun Hyong-keun (b. 1928) treated oil paint as a fluid medium, staining large pieces of unprimed canvas that he worked while they were laid on the floor. Lee Ufan used a brush loaded with a paint composed of stone-based pigment and glue, and progressively depleted the amount of paint deposited by repeating a sequence of horizontal, vertical or random brushmarks according to a predetermined system. Furthermore, several Dansaekhwa artists used hanji, a traditional Korean paper made from the mulberry tree, instead of or in addition to canvas. For example, Chung Chang-Sup (1921–2011) laid hanji in a collage-like fashion onto canvas and then worked it into a rough terrain using oil paint.
The qualities of incompletion and seeming crudeness of execution evident in Korean monochrome paintings are often cited as particularly important attributes of the Korean aesthetic in general, which by comparison to China or Japan is more concerned with conveying an air of nonchalance or an unconcern with technical perfection. Therefore, an ethos of spontaneity, which is seemingly paradoxically fused with an ascetic sense of restraint, is usually associated with traditional Korean art and artefacts, as well as its music and dance. This emphasis on spontaneity can be traced in part to a uniquely Korean cultural heritage: the trance state central to its shamanism, which is fundamentally ecstatic and led to a pervasive admiration among Koreans for the encouragement of a temporary absence of order. Fused with the desire for naturalness, the ethos of spontaneity resonated especially strongly, and rawness, nonchalance and individuality, as well as humour and expressiveness, are usually identified as components of a particularly Korean aesthetic.[i] This foundation fused with the pervasive influence of Confucianism and of Seon (Zen) Buddhism, which fused Chinese Taoism with Indian Buddhism, to create a uniquely syncretic culture.
The emphasis on controlled concrete and repetitive processes is one of the most striking characteristics of the works of Dansaekhwa artists. It is not so much optical properties that are emphasized as the more intimately tactile, haptic, and bodily/somatic. Dansaekhwa artists explored various permutations in the interaction between specific bodily action and specific materials. ‘My kind of minimalism is a method that requires the space around the work to be energized more than the work itself,’ writes Lee Ufan of his practice. ‘The work is not a text made up of signs. I want it to be an energetic living body possessing variability and contradictions.’
The prevalence of white or off-white tones in many Dansaekhwa works can be related not only to the evocation of a Taoist-Buddhist interest in void but also to uniquely Korean responses to Confucian concepts as revealed in the ascetic moral code installed by the Joseon dynasty that ruled Korea between 1392 and 1897. In the official Neo-Confucian ideology, ostentatious display was frowned upon, and the studious life of the scholar highly esteemed. This promotion of an austere and self-abnegating philosophy is clearly evident in the architecture and interior furnishings of the nobility of this period and in the preferred styles of pottery, which are distinguished from Chinese and Japanese examples by their pronounced austerity. Seon, the dominant form of Buddhism in Korea, also advocates physical self-control through strict regimes of contemplation and meditation in order to achieve a level of inner peace. Thus the ability to combine self-discipline and naturalness became especially admired, and the achievement of the latter was understood to come through rigorous training.
The painters associated with Dansaekhwa also reflect this cultural heritage through their embracing of a practice that was concerned with the value of self-negation. ‘As one sheds one’s exterior shell, like the surface of granite exposed to time,’ Chung Chang-sup noted, ‘I will open myself to embrace time, ego, and nature in all traces, stains, and chance happenings.’ Park Seo-bo declared in a similar vein: ‘I want to reduce and reduce – to create pure emptiness. That is an Asian idea, an approach to nature. Nature and humans can connect in this way.’ Park’s works from the 1970s and early 1980s, such as Écriture, No. 14-79 (1979), display a far more controlled, rhythmic relationship to the marks he makes across the surface of his monochromatic oil-painted panels than those of, say, Cy Twombly, appearing overtly to signal a desire to relate to the calligraphic traditions of his culture. At the same time, however, the use of the French term Écriture - ‘writing’ - for the title of the series, indicates that Park was consciously forging a relationship with Western art.
Hyong-keun Yun, Solo Exhibition, David Zwirner, 20th Street, New York (14 January–18 February 2017). Courtesy PKM Gallery, Seoul and David Zwirner, New York/London.
Chung Sang-hwa, "Untitled 83-12-15" (1983)
/ Courtesy of the artist, Dominique Levy Gallery and Greene Naftali Gallery
CHUNG CHANG-SUP at Perrotin Gallery, Paris, 2017.
'Seven Keys to Modern Art' published in Korean
I recently published a book called ‘Seven Keys to Modern Art’ with Thames & Hudson. I’m pleased to say it has just been published in Korean by Ahn Graphics, so I thought this was a good time to introduce the book in my blog.
“Seven Keys’ is aimed at anyone interested in modern art. It is the belated fruit of all the years I spent giving guided tours, talks, workshops, and short courses in various museums and galleries, mostly in London. In the book I discuss 20 works of art by 20 different artists, ranging from Henri Matisse to Doris Salcedo. Each work is approached using the same seven ‘keys’. These ‘keys’ are not meant to be compatible. A work of art invites multiple and often contradictory interpretations.
Here are the seven ‘keys’:
1. THE HISTORICAL KEY
In this approach, a work of art is understood to be involved in an ongoing, developmental dialogue with subjects and styles inherited from earlier periods. The new often has more in common with the old than is at first recognized, and so the best way to understand the former is to compare and contrast it with the latter. Therefore, in this key the artwork is seen in a context that views it as a sign or symptom of the broad socio-cultural conditions and stylistic norms that prevail at the time it was made, rather than as an artefact with intrinsic aesthetic or expressive qualities. Art is judged to be important because it has symbolic value and must therefore be considered in relation to changes and continuities through time, organized in terms of recurring codes and stylistic properties.
2. THE BIOGRAPHICAL KEY
Paying attention to the life of the artist is considered in this mode to be the best way to understand his or her work. The latter is the expression of the former. There are two versions of this approach. The hard version, often called expression by ‘contagion’, argues that the character of an artist is experienced by a viewer directly via an encounter with their work. The soft version suggests that the uniqueness of any work of art is intimately related to a specific personality and local circumstances that give rise to it and depends for its power on the emotional and intellectual life of the maker, through which we are given access to more general social and psychological issues.
3. THE AESTHETIC KEY
In this mode, a work of art is approached primarily as a visual artefact, consisting of specific plastic or formal properties to which we respond emotionally and intellectually. The focus here is on our emotional responses to line, colour, form, texture, and so on. This mode recognizes that, in responding to a work of art, we use the same cognitive and affective processes as when appraising ordinary objects and circumstances, but within the aesthetic state of mind, the object of perception – the work of art – is removed from the realm of practical knowledge and goals. As a consequence, the aesthetic experience will also involve a degree of detachment, and a reflexive attitude. Everything we experience has the potential to become art, because everything can have an aesthetic dimension. But what a culture defines as art will be determined by social consensus, and how a work is judged ultimately comes down to a combination of factors that include the biological, personal and cultural.
4. THE EXPERIENTIAL KEY
The main concern here is how a work can communicate across time, place and culture, touching on basic affective and psychological realities. There are two aspects to this key. One is subjective and phenomenological, focusing on how a viewer directly responds to the stimulus of the work as a multisensory experience. The second analyses these responses by drawing on research into the psychology of perception and the neurobiological foundations of perception, imagination and creativity. Social conditioning greatly affects the ways in which we respond to art, determining the meanings we attribute to the experience, and the brain functions in tandem with the body and the surrounding environment to generate the specific experiences that are derived from the encounter with an artwork.
5. THE THEORETICAL KEY
This mode encourages a language-oriented and intellectual relationship to art rather than an aesthetic, affective or expressive one. It emphasizes the potential of art to make us think, instead of treating it as a way of accessing the artist’s psyche, engaging our sensibility, or exploring our sensory and emotional faculties. There are two broad possibilities. In the first, the manifest theoretical positions adopted by artists and critics and voiced at the time of making the work are addressed. The work of art is understood to be involved in exploring abstract ideas or immaterial subjects, such as existence, causality and truth. This approach links art with examining first principles and ultimate grounds, and an artwork is understood to exist within the context of deep and timeless existential questions about the meaning of life. In the second approach, the work of art is judged to require comprehensive review and analysis in relation to unexamined assumptions about value and meaning. In particular, attention is paid to the institutional frameworks in which the work functions, and the ways in which meaning is socially constructed and politically implicated, and how the work includes, in often unconscious ways, traces of the prejudices of the society within which it was produced.
6. THE SCEPTICAL KEY
The consensus view can’t be accepted without question, and this mode emphasizes that the cultural credentials of a work should not be taken for granted. Value judgments are largely the opinions of elites. Although the work is in a museum, praised by the experts, and sought after for its economic value, this does not place it beyond constructive criticism. Furthermore, decisions about the value of the art in our own era are inevitably myopic, because only the passage of time brings the necessary distance from which real judgments can be made. History is full of examples of fashion influencing judgments. It is therefore valuable to maintain a sceptical attitude. This key encourages the reader to play the ‘devil’s advocate’, to seek different opinions, and to adopt constructively critical viewpoints.
7. THE MARKET KEY
Art is deeply embedded in a complex web of power relations, involving different kinds of exchange, and the status of the work of art as a commodity within the capitalist economy, and as a symbolic and political token deployed by the state system, are the focus of attention in this mode. The work functions within an economic system that it helps to sustain, but also, paradoxically, can also actively critique and subvert.
These seven ‘keys’ converge on the same object – a single work of art – but they choose to see different things. On occasion, they are also clearly incompatible, in that the point of view promoted in one is ignored, contradicted or even denigrated in another. Inevitably, some of the keys will be more enlightening than others in relation to the specific character of the work they discuss, and this is reflected in the different running orders in which the keys are presented. But this order is fairly arbitrary, and the keys could be arranged in other ways.
KOREAN ‘REAL SCENERY’ LANDSCAPE PAINTING
I recently visited a fascinating exhibition at the National Museum in Seoul about a specifically Korean genre of the Chinese cultural tradition of ‘Mountain-Water’ painting, or landscape. While the Chinese painted imaginary scenes hybridized from real places, in the later seventeenth century some Korean artists evolved towards a style that was topographically more accurate, in the sense of depicting recognizable views of actual places on the Korean peninsula, above all the picturesque Geumgang Mountains, which at present are out-of-bounds for South Koreans, as they lie in North Korea. The work illustrated above is by one of the most famous Korean painter, Jeong Seon (1676–1759), and shows the characteristic needle peaks of the mountain range.
There is some speculation that the transition to the painting of actual places was inspired by Western art, most particularly that introduced to China by the Jesuits. Joseon Korea forbade any foreigners from setting foot in their territory, but from the early seventeenth to the early eighteenth century, Jesuits were welcome in China, and Koreans made frequent visits there.
Near to my house beside the DMZ I came across a surprising example of contemporary ‘real scenery’ landscape, painted in a gun emplacement. I presume it was intended to aid the gunners in night-time firing. The view is of what you see through the opening - the Imjin River - which I was happy to see was also the subject of one of the works in the exhibition.
'THE GLORIOUS GLOSTERS'. A British Korean War Story
‘Gloster Hill,’ five weeks after the battle, and after the Chinese offensive had finally been repulsed.
It may come as a surprise to some readers to learn that British soldiers fought during the Korean War (1950-1953) as part of the United Nations forces. Not far from where I live is a memorial commemorating one of their most heroic actions.
Between the 22nd and 25th April 1951 troops of the 1st Battalion the Gloucestershire Regiment and C Troop of the 170 Light (Mortar) Battery of the Royal Artillery were involved in holding off a hugely numerically superior force of Chinese. They had just been posted to guard the Imjin River, and their arrival coincided with a massive offensive, which soon swept them and other UN forces aside on its way south. But not until after a few days of heroic resistance. The fighting became known as the Battle of Solma-ri, and most of it happened at night, as was the Chinese army’s custom.
The first time I visited the memorial commemorating the battle, next to what became known as ‘Gloster Hill’, there was a small garden with a flagpole at the centre flying the Union Jack, and a bridge decorated with Union Jacks leading to two plaques laid into the rock face, one of which ends with the stirring phrase, ‘Fought valiantly for four days in defense of freedom.’ Last time I went to visit the site, I discovered the memorial been significantly augmented by a giant stone Gloucestershire Regiment beret (which is unique in having insignia badges both front and back), a documentary wall charting British involvement in the War through images, and a group of life size metal ‘Glorious Gloster’ soldiers, modeled to look as if they are moving cautiously forward on patrol. To me, they seemed rather too like giant versions of the Airfix model soldiers I used to play with as a boy.
The author with the Gloucestershire’s Memorial
What happened to Utopia?
As I live within walking distance of one of the most absurd of all self-proclaimed ‘Utopias’, and one of the most long-lasting - the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea - a few thoughts on the concept seem to be in order.
The neologism ‘utopia’ means ‘no-place’ or ‘nowhere’ in Greek. It was coined by Thomas More for his eponymous book, published in 1516. In this Utopia, writes More, “[n]obody owns anything but everyone is rich, for what greater wealth can there be than cheerfulness, peace of mind, and freedom from anxiety?” The title is also a pun, because when spoken it sounds like eu-topos, or ‘good place.’ So More aimed to bring the negative and the desire for a better society into fruitful partnership.
The dream of a perfect society didn’t originate with More, and is probably as old as humankind. It speaks of a desire for a better life than the one we have. What More did was to give this impossible place a new name, one that stuck. ‘Arcadia,’ ‘Heaven,’ ‘The Land of the Immortals,’ ‘Horai,’ ‘Shambala,’ ‘The Land of Milk and Honey,’ ‘The Pure Land,’ ‘Neverland,’ ‘Shangri-La,’ ‘The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,’ ‘The Matrix,’ are a few of the other names for this perfect place, coming from different periods, cultures, and ideological or artistic contexts.
More’s purpose was satirical. He aimed to expose the failures of society as it actually was, and worked in the empty space between a society that can be imagined and the one that really exists. He used the negative not in a purely nullifying or privative sense, but as a way of clearing the way for an imaginatively tangible alternative reality. The negation, ‘nowhere,’ exposes the oppressive positivity of ‘somewhere’, of regimes that claim to be sanctioned by God or natural right but actually perpetuate the selfish interests of an elite and are incurably bellicose. We may be condemned to live in a ‘topos’ – a place that is very far from perfect, but within our minds we are capable of a negation that generates a hypothetical ‘no-place’ that can then help us to resist the temptation to normalize cruelty, greed and inequality, and motivate us to bring about change. We can dream beyond the constraints of the every-day present world.
As Oscar Wilde wisely advised, all maps of the world should contain such a ‘nowhere’, although as he also remarked, once we land there we will almost certainly immediately feel like setting off again in search of another, better, ‘nowhere.’ And, like all utopian visions, More’s was inevitably constrained by the limited perspective of his present. Utopia has slaves. We easily overestimate our capacity to see beyond our own prejudiced and narrow horizon. “Nearly all creators of utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache”, writes George Orwell. ‘Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.” The twentieth century is full of failed ideologically-driven ‘utopias,’ the tragic consequences of confusing imagination with reality. When Utopia is understood to have actually once existed, or it is believed that it could one day actually exist, then the act of imaginative negation can easily become the basis for ruthless action in the present. It leads to the suppression of the difficult and usually tedious truth that all real social advances only ever take the form of small gains made piecemeal against a general background of unpredictability and misfortune.
SIMPLICITY
Cistercian abbey of Fontenay, France. 11th Century.
The simple is almost but not quite nothing. Etymologically, the word derives from the Latin simplex, from semel, meaning ‘once’, and plecto meaning ‘pleat’, ‘fold,’ or ‘weave.’ But simplicity is always relative. It only has meaning in relation to its polar opposite - complexity, or the ‘many folded.’
These roots suggest that the simple is very close to the untouched, unworked, or unmade, that is, close to nothing of apparent value. Often, simplicity is associated with the negative characteristics of naïvity, primitiveness, the childlike and untutored.
But within cultures characterized by constant activity and ever-increasing complexity, the intimate relationship between simplicity and meaningless has proven especially compelling. When a mystic, artist or scientist says they are seeking ‘simplicity’ it is usually in order to draw attention to the fact that they are searching for a revitalizing or clarifying essence. The relationship between simplicity and spiritual enlightenment was recognized long ago, as it was perceived that attention to the unadorned has a tranquilizing effect on the mind and the senses, relieving us from the ceaseless and painful task of thinking and doing.
In the West, Roman Catholicism embraced a complex theology, which manifested itself visually in prolific ornamentation and visual display, and theologically, in a complex metaphysics. But in teachings of the early Desert Fathers, and then in the Romanesque period within the monastic order, simplicity was highl valued. The architecture of Cistercian abbeys, for example, emphasise simple forms and the play of light upon stone surfaces, a reflection of the belief that the unadorned embodies God’s benign presence.
But the Cistercians were an exception with Catholicism, and the Protestants attacked what they saw as the carnality and idolatry of the Church of Rome. The demand for a return to the pure roots of Christianity meant the destructive purging of the many accretions that concealed the simple truth. Unnecessary visual display was judged to be vanity, and the appropriate relationship to the temptations of the world must be abstemious. Thus plainness in dress and in behaviour were encouraged.
Inspired by the spirit of the age epitomised by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s faith in the simple virtues of the ‘natural man’, the French revolutionaries of 1789 rejected all traditional religions , and in order to demonstrate they had repudiated its decadently flamboyant values also adopted a simpler dress code to that of the Ancien Régime.
As industrialization and urbanization spread, belief in the intrinsic value of simplicity as a way of drawing close to a more pure and untroubled way of life, spread. In England, the painter John Constable explained that his subject-matter was to be found under every hedgerow. It wasn’t necessary to take a degree at Oxford, fill one’s head with obtuse philosophy, or journey to Rome to look at masterpieces. All on needed to do was look humbly at the world around you. The American writer Henry David Thoreau declared from his hide-away beside Walden Pond: ‘simplify, simplify.’
To create the blueprint for a purer, more elemental and universal, and hence less troubled, world, one that lay behind or hidden within the complex one we inhabit, it was necessary to seek a ‘condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything)’, as T.S. Eliot put it in ‘Little Gidding’. Bereft of the old securities, we must learn to contemplate a more primal world. ‘After the leaves have fallen, we return / To a plain sense of things’, as Wallace Stevens writes.
But the importance of simplicity has been more clearly recognized beyond the West. In the austerely beautiful temple gardens of Kyoto, Japan, the importance of simplicity for Zen Buddhism is made tangible through carefully unforced arrangements of stone and raked sand. In Confucian Korea, simplicity was also highly valued. Even the households of the ruling elite were characterized by an austerity that is in stark contrast to the ostentatious display of Western aristocrats.
‘Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.’, writes the contemporary American designer and theorist John Maeda. But fertile simplicity is just a thin hair’s-breadth away - a single ‘pleat’ away – from the meaningless, and the creative use of simplicity therefore involves much more than merely the removal of the apparently superfluous or decorative, or the reliance on pure primary forms. As the German designer Dieter Rams declares: ‘Less, but better.’
Ryoanji temple rock garden, Kyoto, Japan.
A Korean hanok, home of the yanbang ruling class of Joseon Korea.
A radio designed by Dieter Rams for Braun in the 1950s.
NOTHING MATTERS
A mysterious black square symbolizing nothing and everything, from an occult tome from the seventeenth century by Robert Fludd called Utriusque Cosmi maioris salicet et minoris metaphysica...
What is greater than God, but more evil than the devil? What do the rich need, and the poor have in plenty? What if you eat it will surely kill you? What, according to Socrates, is the only thing you can be certain you know? And what must you stop at if you want to find the answers?
‘Nothing,’ of course.
I’ve been thinking about ‘nothing’ recently, as I’m planning a new book on the subject. It’s a kind of sequel to a book that’s coming out with Reaktion in the spring of next year entitled The Simple Truth. The Monochrome in Modern Art (more on this in future posts). The word ‘nothing’ usually refers to a state of nonexistence, or the property of having no property or of not being anything. By its very definition, ‘nothing’ is therefore boundless and eternal, beyond time and space. It eludes the coordinates that could turn it into something graspable. If you consider the idea of ‘nothing,’ you soon discover it cannot be conceived. If you try thinking about nothing at all, or try to do nothing, you also find It is impossible. Because the insertion of the word ‘nothing’ in a sentence usually implies that attention is to be given to the ‘something’ that has been negated, it’s necessary to place ‘scare’ marks around the word when it is meant to be understood as the focus of attention. Consider, for example, the difference in the meaning between the following: “I’m interested in nothing” and “I’m interested in ‘nothing’.”
‘Nothing’ is a constituent but inherently indefinable part of the reality we inhabit, and can incite potentially widely different conclusions about life’s purpose, spanning the extremes of hope and despair. In thinking about ‘nothing’ we must shift the usually unnoticed background to our thinking to the foreground. There are many things that concerns us that remain unsaid and unexpressed. Much of the time we dwell with absences, non-beings, nonexistence - the opposite of things actual and positive - but we rarely make them a manifest part of our thinking. Contemplating ‘nothing’ will mean getting acquainted with everything that is barely registered in our conscious and reasoning minds, but is nevertheless powerfully and sometimes violently experienced. We must redirect our attention away from a world dominated by the positivity of knowing and doing, of graspable things and bodies, and move into one that verbal language can only designate with negations or denials - not knowing , not doing, not existing, not being.
So, in some of the posts to come, I will be thinking about ‘nothing’ in particular. It is a surprisingly interesting subject. Here’s some Kierkegaard to get you thinking:
‘But the genuine subjective existing thinker is always just as negative as he is positive and vice versa: he is always that as long as he exists, not once and for all in a chimerical meditation…..He is cognizant of the negativity of the infinite in existence; he always keeps open the wound of negativity, which at all times is a saving factor (the others let the wound close and become positive–deceived)…..He is, therefore, never a teacher, but a learner, and if he is continually just as negative as positive, he is continually striving.’
Korean Folk Painting: Minhwa
The strange animal, clearly outlined in black ink and bright colours against a blank background without any horizon line, sits in front of a pine tree. Its jaws are open, revealing a set of fang-like teeth and a pink tongue. Oddly, the pupils of the eyes are yellow rather than white, and it also seems to be cross-eyed, as one eye is looking straight up, the other to the side, giving it a decidedly demented, even ‘stoned,’ expression. After a moment, we realize that the creature is looking at the magpie perched on a branch of the tree. Maybe they are having a conversation. One wouldn’t say this creature is very frightening. In fact, the impression is rather endearing. From the evidence of the zig-zag striped coat, it looks like a very stylized depiction of a tiger, but then we notice that the chest is covered in leopard spots. So while this creature is certainly inspired by the real tigers that used to roam old Korea, it is actually a strange mythical beast. Why was it painted? And why it is coupled with a magpie?
This Magpie-Tiger painting is from 19th century Korea, and is an especially famous example of a specific genre within Minhwa (literally, ‘people’s art’), the most accessible kind of traditional Korean art, and therefore an excellent way to introduce Korean traditional culture to the wider world. The anonymous painter who made this delightful painting was not concerned with making a realistic imitation of a tiger or magpie. His goal was to create a visually striking image based on a fixed repertoire of themes with specific meanings and practical purposes.
Minhwa is characteristically optimistic. It aims to convey a world without sorrow and pain. It is to be distinguished from the art of the nobility of the Korean Joseon dynasty, although it was also an intrinsic part of the lives of the royal court, and as such, Minhwa should not be confused with ‘folk art,’ in the sense of a kind of painting exclusively of the uneducated lower classes. Nevertheless, high culture in Joseon was dominated by Chinese cultural norms, and put a premium on intellectual and philosophical properties in art, and as result, while Minhwa was part of the lives of the upper classes, it was denigrated as stylistically crude, and as excessively bound to primitive superstition. But it is argued that Minhwa actually displays more intrinsically Korean characteristics, which ultimately derive from folkloric influences that blend animistic shamanism, Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism. As such, no other country has produced works comparable to Minhwa.
An example of Chaekgado - Book and object painting. A uniquely Korean style that blends elements of Western perspective with East Asian pictorial conventions
Both present-day Koreans and non-Koreans are likely to find Minhwa more than simply historically interesting. In fact, Minhwa can seem strangely familiar, even to an Englishman like me. This is because the dreams and hopes of the people of Joseon were not so very different from those of the English today, or from anyone else. They touch on the perennial desire for happiness and longevity. The style in which these universal aspirations is visualized is also highly accessible to non-Koreans on a purely aesthetic level. The simple outlines, flat patterning, bold colours, stylization to the point of caricature, and subject-matter drawn from nature and everyday life, make Minhwa an art that connects to a quasi-universal language of visual and stylistic preferences. Consequently, while the specific cultural context with which Minhwa was produced has completely disappeared, and although today people in the developed world are no longer consciously attached to an animistic worldview, the pictorial values of Minhwa allows us to perceive not only unsurmountable cultural differences but also a common share of cultural similarities.
Images from a folding screen.
Minhwa has been categorized as ‘decorative art’, that is, as purely aesthetic in the narrow sense of being visually pleasing and functional. But to describe Minhwa as ‘decorative art,’ is misleading, because for those who owned such works they were not only beautiful but also useful because they were understood to be imbued with magical power.
Minhwa has also been likened to the expressionistic paintings of modern artists like Picasso. Both comparisons are misleading. Minhwa cannot be described as ‘decorative’ in the Western sense because it is also symbolic, and functioned as part of the culture’s ritual processes. But nor can it be described as ‘expressionistic’ in the sense that modern Western painting is ‘expressionistic.’ Modern Western artists were often directly inspired by ‘primitive’ art, although Korean Minhwa was largely unknown in the West in the early twentieth century, and certainly did not have the impact of Japanese prints and African tribal art. However, the qualities that attracted Western artist to non-Western art is clearly evident in Minhwa. What Western artists were seeking in non-Western models was alternative traditions to the one that dominated their culture, which derived from the Renaissance, and put a premium on the rational analysis of form, and the representational illusion of three dimension as on a two-dimensional surface using perspective. Examples of non-Western art were appropriated as primarily aesthetically atypical phenomena with the capacity to subvert the norm, and their utility and symbolic function were ignored. For the avant-garde, ‘self-expression,’ ‘authenticity,’ ‘aesthetic autonomy,’ and ‘expressiveness’ were the most important artistic qualities, and were linked to the capacity to innovate according to inner necessity. As a result, emphasis was placed on the individualism of the style of the artist. Minhwa, by contrast is made by anonymous artists who followed specific pre-determined rules mandated by the requirements of their clientele, and they were committed to the expression of a clearly defined consensual worldview.
The power of Minhwa lies ultimately in the fact that it participates in a universal code – a common denominator for all living human beings, a core of desires and belief that is tied to basic human activities like eating, defecating, procreating, sleeping, and aging. Furthermore, despite the ‘disenchantment’ that has come with modernity, magical ways of thinking persist, and they connect us to a power that cannot be fully accounted for according to strictly rational criteria.
What makes Minhwa immediately accessible and appealing to both the modern Korean and the non-Korean eye is not its primarily role within a code that must be read like a text, and depends on study. Rather, we can respond directly to these painting’s extraordinary decorative and expressive force, which corresponds to experience as it occurs at the common human core more directly than words. Minhwa impacts at a pre-verbal level that is also trans-cultural.
Another example of Chaekgado on a folding screen.
Chaekgado on a folding screen.
Another popular theme: Flowers-and-Birds
THE GEESE ARE ARRIVING!
This is the time of year when thousands of Siberian geese, like these in the photograph above and at the end of this post, arrive in our neighbourhood for the winter. Hundreds fly directly over our village, usually in tight ‘V’ formation, but sometimes in more eccentric patterns. Soon they will be familiar visitors to the fallow rice fields around our village,where they often gather in huge numbers. Later, I’ll do a post on that spectacle, with a video so you get an idea of the noise they make.
Vast numbers of Siberian geese, white-naped and red-crowned cranes, as well as much less numerous black vulture, use the DMZ area seasonally. Black-faced spoonbills and swan geese, live here year-round. The accessible surrounding areas have become a popular destination for ‘twitchers’ in search of the rare water-birds that find sanctuary in the paddy fields, along the Han River delta, and in the extensive grasslands. But also Angora goats, and even the Amur leopard, the Asiatic black bear, and just perhaps, the otherwise long ago vanished from the peninsula, Siberian tiger, live within the DMZ. In addition, rare species of flora, such as edelweiss, and previously undocumented species like a type of mushroom, have also been discovered there.
For beyond the embankments, revetments, bunkers, barbed-wire fences and look-out posts, out towards the great and forbidding unknown of North Korea, the DMZ looks uncannily primordial. This is because no humans, or almost none, can set foot there. Indeed, a myth that has grown up around the DMZ is that it is ecologically untouched and untouchable no-man’s-land, one within which nature escapes human control, and as a result thrives abundantly.
But the truth concerning the DMZ’s flora and fauna is actually more complicated. Although the two sides are meant to stay out, human actions are still a constant threat to wildlife and vegetation. Mines abound, for example, and are set off regularly by animals. The area has also been the victim of concentrated showers of deadly defoliants, such as Agent Orange. The result, so it seems, have been some unintended deviations within the eco-system, such as vast populations of acacia trees, which are restricted elsewhere in South Korea because they have a tendency to crowd out all other trees, or the creeping perennial hogweed, an invader from its more usual habitats which are North America and Manchuria.
Anyway, here’s some more sky-writing.
A Visit to Panmunjom
A couple of years ago I visited Panmunjom for the first time. This is where Trump met Kim Jong-un, and where they crossed back and forth between the actual border between North and South in a nciely choreographed dance for the world Press. You can see the border in the picture above - a raised line running between the two blue buildings.
Panmujom is only a few miles from where I live, but you can’t just show up there, and have to take an officially sanctioned tour from Seoul, so I was part of a mixed bag of tourists, mostly Americans.
I noticed that the North Korean border guards convey old-fashioned swagger through their facial expressions and postures, as if they want to emulate actors from old war movies. This impression is increased by the cut of their uniforms, which seem to be caught in a time warp, circa 1953. In 2001, Christopher Hitchens had this to say about North Korea: “Unlike previous racist dictatorships, the North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, 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”. The guards at Panmunjom apparently come from privileged and loyal families, and they are clearly an elite. So they tend to look well fed, and are often rather photogenic. Their South Korean counterparts, on the other hand, have adopted more contemporary Western role models, in line with the soldier persona that transformed the wise-cracking ‘GI Joe’ into a muscle-bound ’Rambo’, and now into a ‘Terminator-style’ robotic automaton.
The South Korean MP’s wear reflective sunglasses, and stand in modified tae kwon do poses. They try to look super- or non-human, while the North Koreans’ facial expressions and postures register as far more ‘humanistic’, in the sense that they are permitted to be decidedly more individualized in their self-characterization. It strikes me that these North and South Korean men are acting out the roles their respective societies value highly. In the case of the North Koreans, they strive to embody the state ideology of juche – signifying self-reliance or mastery, combined with absolute loyalty to the ruler. The South Koreans, by contrast, want to embody the alluring fantasy of the ‘cyborg’ - a being that is half-human, half-machine.
North Korean guards show their curiosity.