(DRAFT) Thinking About Feeling the Korean War Veterans' Memorial

Thinking about Feeling the Korean War Veterans Memorial:

Martial Affect, Vibrant Materialism, and Becoming in the Korean

Diaspora1

Although a good deal has been written concerning the effects

of war, militarism, and militarization in the Korean and

diasporic context , to the best of my knowledge there has yet to

be serious consideration given to interrogating and theorizing

the status of what I am calling the martial diaspora of Korea. This

chapter contributes to a burgeoning literature that deals with

various movements and aspects of the Korean Diaspora by focusing,

in part, on the Korean War Veterans Memorial (KWVM) in

Washington, D.C. Much of the scholarship on the Korean Diaspora

has attended to the legacies of the Korean War. This has included

meditations on nationalist constructions of gender (Kang 1998;

Kim, E. 1998), investigations concerning the gendered,

racialized, and sexualized nature of relations between U.S.

soldiers and Korean women (Moon, K. 1997), treatises on the

migration and lives of military brides in the U.S. (Cho 2008; Yuh

2002), the “proletarianization” of race and sex (Lee 2010)

examinations of transracial and transnational adoption (Kim, E.

2010), and studies of the racialized socio-economic struggles of 1 Some of the rhythm, if not quite the rhyme, of this title owes a measure of gratitude to Lauren Berlant’s chapter “Thinking about Feeling Historical.”

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Korean immigrant families in the U.S. (Abelmann 2009; Abelmann

and Lie 1995; Park 1997). Other research has delved into the

discontents of assimilation experienced by non-U.S. diasporic

populations (e.g., Ryang 2008; Ryang and Lie 2009). Contemporary

post-war scholarship on the Korean Diaspora relates not only to

the Korean War and the militarized foundations of modernity in

South Korea (Moon, S. 2005), but also to the formation of U.S.-

South Korean ties that were fortified in a number of ways by

South Korea’s involvement in the war in Viet Nam (Abelmann and

Lie 1995; Kim, J. 2010).

The customary approach in studies of the Korean War and its

diasporic ramifications has been to situate socio-cultural and

economic analyses in specific historical contexts. This is

something that I find imperative and fully endorse. That being

said, I would like to use this chapter as an opportunity to

explore what Lauren Berlant (2011) has called, in a gesture that

both acknowledges the work of Michel Foucault even as it extends

and departs from him in certain ways, “the history of the

present.” Similar to Berlant, my reason for taking this

methodological approach stems mainly from my interest in the

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affective sensorium and its relation to a certain vibrant

materiality and their significance to the perception of the

historical present (p. 54). There are some who may see in this a

regressive move away from diachronic interpretation to what has

been viewed by many as a largely discredited synchronic mode of

analysis. While I do focus on the ongoing present, I do not wish

to supplant historical analysis. This chapter is meant simply to

be a stepping stone of sorts toward the development of an

adequate theoretical framework capable of illuminating the status

of martiality in the U.S. Korean Diaspora.

I experiment with a threefold approach in what follows:

conceptual elaboration, aesthetico-thought experiments in the

form of excursus, and anecdotal personal narratives to which I

have given the name ethnopraxis. More explicitly, I begin with a

short description of the KWVM and move to a brief examination of

a cluster of theoretical categories – the martial, vibrant

materiality, affect, and becoming – which have emerged as part of

recent trends in the political ecology of things and matter

(Bennett 2010; Coole and Frost 2010; Protevi 2008, 2009). These

concepts have helped me to think differently about spatiality and

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objects in general and, in particular, the KWVM. I supplement and

inflect this conceptual work with the brief and experimental

narrative device of excursus that will be interwoven with various

accounts of my experiences as a member of the U.S. Armed Forces;

first as a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West

Point and later as an officer in the U.S. Army. I present these

snippets of martial experience as a self-reflexive and partially

auto-ethnographic ethnopraxis inspired in part by my several

encounters with the KWVM.

On this last point, some would argue that personal

experience has very little if any epistemological purchase in

serious intellectual work. This line of reasoning would argue

that drawing from subjective accounts does little in helping us

to understand the complexities of any given situation and risks

descending into a narrow and narcissistic self-indulgence. I am

not so naïve as to presume that my life as a soldier and veteran

could or even should be representative of an ostensible Korean

America and its diaspora. I do insist, however, that something of

value intellectually and politically can be obtained from careful

attention to the textured specificity of lived experience. Thus,

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even as no straightforward synecdochal relationship can be

inferred from the martial encounters which have marked my life

and the broader history of warfare and its legacies in the Korean

and Korean diasporic context, I argue that the macropolitical

issues of the latter are, at the very least, vitally informed by

and can potentially be augmented through the work of

micropolitical critical self-reflexivity.2

My efforts here are not intended to obfuscate the history of

U.S. imperialism and its role in creating the conditions of

possibility for a memorial such as the KWVM. And neither do I

wish to ignore in crude fashion hegemonic state narratives that

are disseminated discursively and recapitulated in the physical

structures and spatial layout of the memorial itself. These are,

to be sure, strategies of signification which obviously encourage

particular readings of the KWVM and help to buttress officialist

paradigms and interests as expressed through comforting national

stories of valor and sacrifice. While I may not address

explicitly various ways of changing social and political

2 For a recent example of critical scholarship that brings together an evocative rendering of personal military experience and theoretical sophistication see Scranton, “Memories of My Green Machine: Posthumanism at War.” See also Scranton, “‘War and the City,’ Parts 1-5.”

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conditions of existence, the conceptual and personal work that I

do in this paper should be seen as an eminently political and

politicized endeavor. What I put forth here resonates with what

Nigel Thrift (2007a, p. 20) has called “an unsettled politics of

advocacy.” This is an undertaking that attempts to track that

which evades explanation by conventional analytical discourses

and takes seriously what may have been dismissed heretofore as

mere background noise; assumed to be too frivolous and thin for

serious consideration.

The focus of this paper, then, is not so much about the KWVM

in and of itself as it is about a certain form and process of en-

countering. The KWVM operates here as the occasion for a sustained

consideration of the theoretical status of spatiality, bodies,

and things. Moreover, it is a site insofar as a site is understood

as a dynamic process consisting of variable and unfinished states

through which the unfolding of events can become instantianted.

By en-counter I intend to convey an array of senses to include the

implications of face-to-face meetings, the coming upon of

something(s) or someone unexpectedly, various forms of

conflictual or interruptive engagement, and a connotation that

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stresses an increasing insistence on connections. I also intend to

convey what Louis Althusser (2006) once called “the materialism

of the encounter.” Althusser attempts in this later work to trace

an alternative genealogy of the (western) materialist tradition

through philosophical figures such as Lucretius (primacy of

“rain” and “clinamen”), Epicurus (primacy of the “swerve” of

parallel atoms), Machiavelli (primacy of “contingent”

encounters), Hobbes (primacy of the “aleatory” constitution of

the world), Spinoza (primacy of “void”), Rousseau (primacy of

“pure nature” and “radical absence of society”), Marx (primacy in

the capitalist mode of production of the aleatory “encounter-das

Vorgefundene” between owners of money and raw labor-power),

Heidegger (primacy of “there is” or “givenness-es gibt” of

contingency), Derrida (primacy of “absence” over presence and

“dissemination” over stable meaning), and Deleuze (primacy of

“positivity” over negativity), among others.3 What is pivotal to

Althusser’s account of materiality is the stress he places on the

aleatory as that which makes possible processual encounters from

the void. Understood from this angle, materiality is conditioned

3 This genealogy could also conceivably include Leucippus, for whom atomic movement was attributed to indeterminism.

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by contingency rather than essence.4 I develop this notion of

contingency in relation to vibrant materiality, affect, and

becoming in later portions of this paper. At this point, however,

I want to shift my attention to some of the conversations dealing

with monuments and memorials as a way to set up my description of

the KWVM.

Monumentality

Critical analyses of monuments, memorials, and other forms

of commemoration have addressed a wide-ranging set of issues.

Among many other topics, these inquiries have examined questions

of power (White 2006), the politics of recognition (Schwartz and

Bayma 1999), the aesthetic construction of citizenship (Crysler

and Kusno 1997), the production of cultural memory (Sturken

1997), and articulations of nationalism and modernity (Jager

2002). To a large degree, this research has demonstrated how

memorials and monuments, particularly those located in

Washington, D.C., typically deploy discursive and non-discursive

strategies that promote and legitimate state-sanctioned ways of

4 For a fascinating and rigorously developed account of absolute radical contingency vis-à-vis a critique of metaphysical “correlationism” see Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Chapter on the Necessity of Contingency. See also Meillassoux, “Document 1: Interview with Quentin Meillassoux,” “Interview withQuentin Meillassoux,” and “Metaphysics, Speculation, Correlation.”

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understanding and interacting with sites of national memory in

support of a national project of manufacturing “proper” subjects.

This is realized most often through the production of

epistemological, aesthetic, and pedagogical spaces that

explicitly venerate war and earnestly celebrate heroic sacrifice

and service to the nation. To a large extent, these studies have

situated memorials and monuments in their specific socio-cultural

and historical settings as a way to unpack the dense layers of

signification embodied by these physical commemorative markers.

As mentioned briefly in the introduction, this sort of

critical scrutiny remains crucial and the continued need for

scholarship conceived and conducted in this vein is clear.

Nonetheless, my task in this chapter is of a rather different

timbre and tack. I initiate a first attempt at thinking the KWVM

experimentally. My aim is to recast common sense notions about

war memorials and the process of memorializing. Thus, I do not

attempt, on the one hand, simply to romanticize the KWVM as a

sacred space of tribute to fallen and extant veterans of the

Korean War. And neither do I offer, on the other hand, a somewhat

predictable assessment of the KWVM as a site that commemorates

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U.S. neo-imperialism and its global project of domination.

Instead, I wish to open from a more nuanced angle a space to

speak and weigh otherwise on the lingering effects of war and its

(dis)remembrance. Rather than presenting a straightforward

critique of the mobilization of dominant narratives and

strategies of signification that, not unlike other sites of

martial commemoration, are certainly to be found at the KWVM, I

explore an unconventional reading of this site that emphasizes

(martial) affect, vibrant materiality, and the event of becoming

as an overcoming of memory (Pearson 2010; Stoekel 1998). Before

moving along that path, however, I want to present a short

description of the memorial proper. Following this, I will

present a more detailed discussion of some of the connections

between, and what it is I intend by, the terms martial, vibrant

materialism, affect, and becoming. The final section of this paper will

shift to the more experimental and fragmented register of

rendering interlacing counterpoints of excursus and ethnopraxes.

Korean War Veterans Memorial

On the western end of the Washington National Mall just

beyond a grove of trees nestled up in front of the Lincoln

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Memorial there is a small paved path that leads to the Korean War

Veterans Memorial. To the north and just across the reflecting

pool you will find the Vietnam Veterans and Vietnam Women’s

Memorials, and a bit further off to the east you will come upon

the World War II Memorial. The Korean War Veterans Memorial is an

intriguing mélange of symbols and is perhaps the most elaborate

of the monuments built after WWII. The idea for a national Korean

War Veterans Memorial first began circulating in the late 1970s.

And the formation of the National Committee for the Korean War

Memorial in 1981 was a watershed event that laid the groundwork

for a national site of commemoration dedicated to the extant and

deceased U.S. and U.N. service members who took part in this

conflict. Forty-two years to the day after the armistice was

signed in Korea on July 27, 1953, veterans gathered to listen to

President Clinton officially open and dedicate the KWVM.

In contrast to the jury of artists from the U.S. Commission

of Fine Arts who approved Maya Lin’s winning design for the

Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the U.S. Senate charged President

Reagan to appoint 12 Korean War veterans to a Korean War Veterans

Memorial Advisory Board (KWVMAB). In appointing a panel of

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veterans, the state established a particular aesthetic of war

that would differ considerably from the Vietnam Memorial

commission and thus influenced who had the right to articulate

and enforce this particular vision of war and remembrance. While

there is not enough space for me to go into depth about the

fascinating and somewhat convoluted design process of the KWVM, I

do want briefly to catalog some of the more interesting

highlights.5

The KWVM is a singular site when compared to other

monuments, both in its geographical layout and in its mixture of

natural (pools, grass, shrubs, trees, etc.) and physical

structures (statues, walls, photographs, etc.). The original

proposal included a formation of 38 statues of soldiers walking

in wedge formation symbolizing both the 38th parallel of the

Demilitarized Zone that continues to separate North and South

Korea and the 38-month duration of the war. Space constraints

eventually forced this number to be cut in half. Interestingly

enough, from the very beginning the KWVMAB was intent on having

an inclusive monument where ethnic and racial identities were

5 For a more extended discussion of the process behind constructing the KWVM see Schwartz and Bayma, “Commemoration and the Politics of Recognition: The Korean War Veterans Memorial.”

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expressed realistically in the statues. After a series of back

and forth battles with the Commission of Fine Arts that took

place over a period of years on issues such as whether there

should be a realist or impressionistic aesthetic, the final

composition of the 19 statues had muted and ambiguous ethnic

features. Service affiliations were also made less obvious to all

but the trained eye. Careful observation would reveal the

existence of 14 soldiers, 3 Marines, 1 Air Force spotter, and 1

Naval attaché. The final product was less realistic than the

panel of veterans wanted and less impressionistic than the

commission desired. Moreover, the compromise resulted in the use

of acid washed steel, making the statues look gray and weathered.

The inclusion of ponchos and helmets on the figures further

reduces their literalism as they now seem more formless. Indeed,

the dull grey and shapeless forms of the statues lend to them a

decidedly “ghostly” appearance. These phantom soldiers, then,

remain as the physical embodiment and product of a history of

ideological battles over political correctness and aesthetics.

Spectrality is echoed by the inclusion of shadowy

computerized photographic images of individuals who served in the

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war and which are embedded in a wall that parallels the formation

of statues. In contrast to the symbolic minimalism of the Vietnam

Veterans Memorial where the listing of names functions as a

symbolic act to de-institutionalize the production of memory,

there are no names on the KWVM’s wall of photographs. This

contributes as well to the haunting and almost haunted feeling of

the memorial. Finally, due to the reflective surface of the stone

wall, the grey steel statues can be seen reflected amidst the

throng of unknown and unnamed soldiers. The addition of these

reflections allows the originally planned number of 38 soldiers

to appear, albeit in an unanticipated mixture of ephemeral

concreteness. I would like to transition at this time to a more

explicit engagement of the conceptual categories that I will

mobilize to read against the grain the KWVM.

The Martial

The martial can be discerned as a type of “intermediary

concept” (Brown & Tucker 2010, p. 242) that articulates the

particular conditions of certain actual experiences and events.

It is a malleable category which I hope may help to clarify what

it means to formulate, and what is at stake in formulating, a way

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of understanding that neither thoughtlessly celebrates nor

effortlessly indicts militarization vis-à-vis demilitarization. I

recognize and underscore, instead, the uneven, multifaceted, and

mutually constitutive status of this relation. The martial works,

therefore, and initially operates through a deconstructive turn

that refuses hasty definitions. That which is martial emerges,

rather, through the interstices of a life, materializes in a

history, comes to light in a context, surfaces in a site, appears

in a relation, so on and so forth. The martial flows within,

through, amongst, and beyond subjects; it operates

institutionally while also mobilizing a shifting collection of

meanings and histories. The martial works intimately and

affectively: in-between, ineffable. The martial works

expressively, articulated aesthetically in monuments and

memorials, for instance, as well as in public acts such as those

found in martial claims to citizenship: super-citizenship via

citizen-soldiering. Furthermore, the martial should not solely be

thought of as referring to the violent domination that is

materialized in war, militarization, and militarism, although

this is clearly of utmost and urgent significance. The martial

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is, I argue, also and vitally about militancies and forms of

resistance. Ways of being, doing, and transforming that draw on

diverse resources which give life to how we might learn to fight

otherwise.

As a sort of quasi-rubric that is perpetually renewed

depending on the context on which it bears, the martial

contributes to critical military studies (e.g., De Landa 1991;

Der Derian 1998; Ferguson and Turnbull 1999; Frese and Harrell

2003; Gusterson and Besteman 2009; Gutmann and Lutz 2010; Kelly,

Jauregui, Mitchell, and Walton 2010; Lutz 2001, 2002, 2009; Price

2004, 2008; Redhead 2004; Rodriguez 2010; Shigematsu and Camacho

2010; Tengan 2008; Vine 2009; cf. Lucas 2009) and its gendered

implications (e.g., Enloe 1983, 2000a, 2000b; Feinman 1999; Moon

1997; Yuh 2002). My work extends this important scholarship to

the particular histories and situations affiliated with an

assorted collection of martial formations that continue to impact

the U.S. Korean Diaspora and the relations between the U.S. and

the two Koreas. The following questions animate my project: What

constitutes the martial and of what might it consist? How does

that which is martial operate as a marshaling force? Where and

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when does the martial matter and for whom? Which forms and

expressions does it take? What are its limitations and

potentialities? Which solidarities become available through

martial reckonings and which are foreclosed? How is the martial

produced, consumed, and “pro-sumed”? And how might a theory of

the martial relate to and help us to think anew about the

question of diaspora? For reasons of space, I am able only to

address one or two of these overarching questions in the current

version of this paper. Below I will explore tentatively how the

martial figures into my reading of the KWVM.

Vibrant Materialism

A swerving and expanded notion of materiality has been

developed in more recent work on the political ecology of

matter.6 And it is to this body of scholarship that I owe my

vibrant material reading of the KWVM, a reading which accentuates

the vitality of bodies and things.7 The work of Gilles Deleuze

6 Compare the work of Maurizio Lazzarato (1996, p. 133) on the status of “immaterial labor” as that which “produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity.”

7 For critical work being done in the vein of counter-hegemonic memorialization see, for instance, DeLappe and Simpson, “Virtual Commemoration: The Iraqi Memorial Project” and Miller, “Aesthetic of Strength:The Air Force Memorial and Virilio’s Last War.” Compare, however, Andermann and Arnold-de Simine, “Memory, Community, and the New Museum.”

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(e.g., 1983a, 1983b, 1994, 2004, 2007) and his collaborations

with Félix Guattari (1983, 1987, 1994) offer general inspiration

for this approach, which is broadly experimentalist in nature.

With respect to the specific problem of vibrant materiality, my

project is indebted to the thought-provoking claims developed by

Jane Bennett (2010) in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things.

Bennett’s work challenges us to take seriously the “vitality” of

bodies and things. Crucial to this assertion is the expansion and

complication of the theoretical status of bodies, matter, and

life.8 While acknowledging the critical importance and continued

need for historical materialist approaches, Bennett shifts her

focus from the lineage of materialism represented by Hegel-Marx-

Adorno to a materialist tradition inspired by Democritus-

Epicurus-Spinoza-Diderot-Deleuze. This move allows her to

understand the vibrant materiality of bodies as both human and

nonhuman.

Vitality, then, is a type of capacity of bodies, objects,

and life (organic and inorganic). Troubling the frequently taken

8 For a fascinating exploration of this point at the molecular and sub-molecular level studied by quantum physics see Brown, “The Inorganic Open: Nanotechnology and Physical Being”; see also Thrift, “Life, but not as we knowit.”

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for granted distinction between so-called “dead” matter and

agential life, “things” – commodities, food, garbage, metals,

blackouts, weather patterns, landscapes, architecture, etc. – can

no longer be viewed unproblematically as brute obstacles which

simply frustrate the will of humans. Influenced, in part, by

Bruno Latour’s (2005) theory of “actants,” Bennett initiates an

assault on the often unacknowledged anthropocentrism that

underlies questions of subjectivity, agency, life, and notions of

materiality inspired by historical materialism. An actant is any

entity, she explains, “[that is] a source of action…has efficacy,

can do things, has sufficient coherence to make a difference,

produce effects, [and can] alter the course of events…as quasi

agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies

of their own” (viii).

What is important to grasp here is that the locus of agency

is no longer to be found in a presupposed self-contained and

active human agent who acts on a seemingly inert world. Instead,

agency is to be located more precisely in assemblages; an

intensive and constantly shifting agglomeration/dissolution of

vibrant materialities. This Deleuzo-Guattarian term describes a

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process which keeps together in complex relations a diverse

network of bodies, things, signs, and modes of expression that

are in variable states (Deleuze 2007, pp. 175-176). It should be

noted, at this juncture, that Bennett neither espouses some form

of pan-psychic New Ageism on the one hand, nor a politically

regressive nihilism on the other. She is, in fact, quite attuned

to these and other criticisms and addresses the relation between

critique and political effectiveness as a complementary affair.

In short, if critique is to avoid becoming desiccated, it must be

nourished by positive constructions of alternatives to the status

quo, interventions which will themselves be open to subsequent

appraisal and modification. What is politically at stake in a

vibrant materialism, then, is an indirect political strategy that

develops a micropolitics of sensibility-formation (Bennett 2010). Connected

to this sensibility-formation is the notion of affect, to which I

turn in the next section. Later, I will marshal the insights of a

vibrant materiality to help me re-imagine possibility and

connectivity in the spatial temporality of the KWVM.

Affect

In the service of (eventually) formulating a theory of the

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martial vis-à-vis the U.S. Korean diaspora, I investigate in this

paper the basic problem of affect. I have found this rubric useful

precisely because of my interaction with the KWVM and the wash of

jumbled feelings that I have experienced on each of my visits to

the memorial. I found myself unable to express or easily

conceptualize this interaction or encounter. It was more of a felt

sensation than anything. It was only later that I became aware of

a burgeoning discourse engaging questions of affect. In what

follows I offer a brief overview of some of the conversations

that are currently taking place in affect studies.

For its proponents, many of whom have been clustered loosely

under the rubric of “new affect theorists,” affect as a category

of analysis has been touted as a refreshing, nuanced, and

promising way to push theoretical debates beyond the well-worn

deliberations concerning the status of language, representation,

subjectivity, embodiment, and so on. These questions ultimately

arise from the assumption of basic epistemological dualisms like

mind/body, consciousness/world, subject/object, human/other,

brain/environment, local/global, etc. Conceived as a subtle yet

forceful materiality, affect ostensibly allows us to slip

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between, move around, and disrupt conceptual aporetic binaries

such as those previously mentioned.

The idea of affect that I develop here is influenced by

Deleuze. He himself draws from Baruch Spinoza’s division of

affect into the categories of affectio and affectus. For Spinoza,

affectio designates “the state of a body as it affects or is

affected by another body” while affectus refers to “a body’s

continuous, intensive variation (increase-diminution) in its

capacity for acting” (Seigworth 2005, p. 162). Affectio, then, can

be understood as the form taken on by affect or, more succinctly,

the “effect” of affect. Thus, if one were to suggest that “power

is an affection of desire,” this would be to say nothing more

than that “power is an effect of desire” (p. 166). In contrast,

affectus can be viewed as the continuous “becoming” of affect

constituted by the passage of intensities of greater or lesser

degree (p. 167). Deleuze supplements the Spinozan dual conception

of affect by positing a third category of pure affect. This is

affect at its most concretely abstract, an “autonomous

virtuality” that is outside any interior/exterior distinction;

what he calls a pure immanence. For Deleuze, virtuality and

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actuality are “mutually exclusive, yet jointly sufficient,

characterizations of the real” (Boundas 2005, p. 296; see also

Boundas 1996). In other words, it is crucial to recognize how

this model conceptualizes the virtual and the actual as both

having a “real” status.

The actual/real operates creatively in the realm of

materiality and includes states of affairs, bodies, bodily

mixtures, individuals, etc. (p. 296; see also Colebrook 2005a,

2005c). The virtual/real are incorporeal events and singularities

and belong to the domain of what Deleuze calls the pure past. The

virtual should not be confused with potentiality or possibility,

it is more radical. The distinction circles around the status of

“the real” or realization. Potentiality is connected to

realization whereas the virtual is already real and must be

actualized. Temporally speaking, we assume that potentiality is

prior to its realization whereas the virtual always already

continues to exist and is therefore more real than anything else

(Lundborg 2009). With respect to the actual, it should not be

thought of in terms of resemblance or representation but as a

genuinely creative process (Lundborg 2009).

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A range of approaches to the study of affect (e.g., Ahmed

2004; Berlant 2011; Blackman 2010; Blackman and Venn 2010;

Brennan 2004; Cho 2008; Clough 2007, 2010; Colebrook 2005b;

Colman 2005; De Carolis 1996; Hansen 2004; Hardt and Negri 2000,

2004, 2009; Henriques 2010; hooks 2000; Kennedy 2000; Lim 2010;

Manning 2010; Massumi 2002; O’Sullivan 2001; Protevi 2008, 2009;

Stewart 2007; Thrift 2007b; Virno 1996; Walkerdine 2010) have

emerged on the academic scene informed by discourses such as

cultural Marxism (Anderson 1983; Lukàcs 1962; Jameson 1991;

Williams 1965, 1977), poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, feminist

theory, queer theory, critical race theory, critical new media

studies, and postcolonial theory, just to name a few of the many

interventions in this area.9 Confirming the significance of this

theoretical shift to affect is the appearance of several edited

volumes (Ball and Restuccia 2007; Clough 2007; Gregg and

Seigworth 2010; Tomkins 1995) which have assembled important

essays engaging variously with this problem.

The discourse of affect is not without its detractors. A

9 Also related to this broad trend toward affective questions is the work of Jacques Rancière who explores questions of aesthetics and its relation to politics vis-à-vis ruminations concerning the status of sensibility and perceptibility in Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy and The Politics of Aesthetics.

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number of criticisms have been levied against the so-called “turn

to affect.” Some of these critiques (Leys 2007, 2010, 2011;

Papoulias and Callard 2010) have taken to task affect theorists

for their sloppy use of neuroscientific research. One of the

points highlighted is the tendency of new affect theorists to

underplay or discount outright the highly contested nature of the

categories they are importing from neurobiological discourses.

Thus, two levels of confusion ensue whereby insufficient

attention to the complexity of arguments surrounding various

conceptual categories within neuroscience become the ambiguous and

therefore problematic archi-foundation for theorization within

affect studies itself. Others (Cecchetto 2011; Hemmings 2005)

have questioned the non-representational claims affiliated, in

part, with the “autonomy” of affect that is claimed to be prior

to consciousness and therefore remains, strictly speaking,

outside of social meaning. A particular concern raised by these

critics is the question of what sorts of political consequences

might ensue from an understanding of affective “freedom” that is

disarticulated from social context. Along these lines, Slavoj

Žižek (2004) has voiced a resolute suspicion regarding the

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contradictions that are supposedly inherent in a Deleuzian-

inspired affective politics. For Žižek, Berlant (2011, p. 14)

notes, the turn to affect amounts to little more than a

recapitulation of self-indulgent middle-class and yuppie

sensibilities disguised as a radically intractable movement of

being. Additional worries regarding how a focus on affect may

elide the counter-hegemonic interventions of feminist, critical

race, and postcolonial theorists, for instance, are also of

import.

These are valuable appraisals and many of them are quite

persuasive. Even so, rather than suggesting that affect must be

discarded in the wake of these critiques for some other category,

or that we should effect the conservative gesture of rehashing

older rubrics, I would submit that these criticisms actually

serve to nourish and help flesh out the potentialities that

continue to percolate in theories of affect. As Berlant suggests,

the limitations of affective frameworks notwithstanding, it does

not follow that an investment in affective possibilities

inevitably leads us into a theoretical cul-de-sac or primarily

consists in a politically regressive narcissistic passivism.

27

Along with Berlant, Brian Massumi (2002), Teresa Brennan (2004),

Grace Cho (2008), and others (e.g., Henriques 2010; Manning 2010;

Mazzarella 2010, Walkerdine 2010), I argue for an understanding

of affectivity as a shared process and not simply an isolated

punctual instance locatable in stand-alone entities. On this

point, it would do us well to recall the claims of Deleuze and

Guattari (1994, pp. 163-199) who suggest that affects operate in

the nervous system of worlds and not, as might be supposed, solely

or simply in persons.

The notion of affect that I deploy in this chapter

emphasizes certain things. I understand affect as a type of

“inventory of shimmers,” as Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth

describe in their introduction to the The Affect Theory Reader. Affect

is not to be confused with emotions or simple feelings (cf. Leys

2007, 2010, 2011), it is something more subtle and yet forceful

than either of these concepts. Even as emotions and feelings may

express and embody affect, the structure of affect is irreducible

to the spectrum of emotions that may or may not emerge in any

given situation. If we ascribe, as Lauren Berlant (2008) argues,

a simple one-to-one, mimetic, or mirroring correspondence between

28

movements of affectivity and emotional states, we risk

overlooking the messiness and confusion that constitutes

subjectivity as such. In short, an affective structure may

simultaneously have numerous emotional valences, some working

together in concert while others operate in tension with one

another, depending on the objects in question and their uniquely

expressed forms of receptivity.

Berlant has nicely described structural affect as a kind of

poking around and trying to get the drift of things, a feeling

out of a situation. Affect is born on the edge, in a threshold

space, located in flowing resonances and intensities that pass

through, between, and sometimes attach to various bodies and

worlds (organic and inorganic). Affect accumulates in unexpected

ways and is that which is somewhere and sometime on the hither

side of active consciousness, intentionality, and meaning. It can

be viewed as a constantly mutating capacity and possibility. Such

mutation calls to mind the event of becoming. The next section is

dedicated to elaborating a notion of becoming that challenges

conventional ideas about memory, surprising the latter’s

articulations by bending it toward a series of unanticipated

29

questions.

Becoming, Event, and the Overcoming of Memory

Becoming, for Deleuze, implies infinite movement and

produces, or “returns,” nothing but itself. It is the pure

movement, the very dynamism constitutive of changes between

particular events with no teleology (Stagoll 2005, p. 21).

Becoming has a double status in which deterritorialization and

reterritorialization meet, with no beginning or end. Having only

a “milieu,” the genesis and return of becoming occurs within

history but it is as such and strictly speaking not of the order

of history (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 110). Deleuze (1983a)

connects the continual production of unique events to Friedrich

Nietzsche’s concept of the “eternal return” and re-reads the

eternal return of the same as the repetition or return of

productive difference in the form of becoming.10 Repetition, more

specifically, “is constituted not from one present to another,

but between [my emphasis] the two coexistent series that these

presents form in function of the virtual object (object = x)”

(Deleuze 1994, p. 105). With respect to events, every event has

10 On Deleuze and the eternal return see Spinks, “Eternal Return” and Tampio, “The Politics of the Eternal Return.”

30

both a pure or virtual dimension while also being actualized in

particular states of affairs as a unique instant of production in

the continual flow that constitutes the cosmos (Stagoll 2005, p.

22). Becoming does not join self-contained discrete events in

linear fashion but rather moves through events as they flash in

momentary productive intensities.

Of special pertinence to this chapter is the intriguing

connection between becoming, events, monuments, and memory that

Deleuze and Guattari (1994) forge. For them, memory is a reactive

formation that must be overcome through the active and “untimely”

(Aion) formation of becoming. There is a peculiar “innocence” to

becoming, one that privileges productive forgetting over memory,

geography over linear history, diagrammatic maps to tracing, and

the ramifications of what they call the rhizome over arborescent

growth (Patton 2010, p. 98). The monument, then, must be detached

from memory and rethought from the perspective of becoming: anti-

memory (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 294; cf. Stoekel 1998).

Rather than being that which simply memorializes the past, the

monument must be understood as “a bloc of present sensations that owe

their preservation only to themselves and that provide the event

31

with the compound that celebrates it. The monument’s action is

not memory but [creative] fabulation” (pp. 167-168, emphasis

added). It is at this point that Deleuze and Guattari associate

the notions of affect and percept to the monument and landscape.

The “landscape sees,” they say, “[the] percept is the landscape

before man, in the absence of man…[and] affects are…nonhuman

becomings of man, just as percepts…are nonhuman landscapes of nature”

(p. 169, emphasis in original). Here the boundaries between

subject and external world blur as the self and environment fold

and refold continuously upon themselves, undoing the distinction

between interiority and exteriority. Importantly, affect and

percept have political valence insofar as they help to extricate

us from ourselves. They defy the narcissistic and infantilizing

gestures so prevalent in today’s culture and provide us with an

opportunity to discover impersonal and pre-individual

collectivities, some of which may establish the basis for certain

forms of ethical communities (Marks 2005, pp. 199-200).

Having provided brief treatments of the basic theoretical

categories that have influenced my thinking of the KWVM – the

martial, vibrant materialism, affect, and becoming – I wish to

32

dedicate the remainder of this paper to an elaboration of several

encounters with the KWVM through the devices of excursus and

personal narrative, or what I am calling ethnopraxis. In what

follows I attempt to perform the creative ethos that animates and

connects the still forming ideas and themes of this chapter. Even

when the KWVM does not figure explicitly in a particular excursus

or ethnopraxis, as is the case in a number of instances; it should

be seen as an active agent in the production of the

conglomeration of thoughts and voices to be found below. Among

other things, there will be ethnographic snapshots and reflection

in more traditional prose, verse, citations, and extended thought

experimental ruminations. As the reader will note, the aesthetic

is somewhat disjointed in places while in other areas it moves to

a smoother cadence. This should be read as performing the

sometimes uncertain and eclectic thought process churning within

me and sparked, in part, by my encounters with the KWVM.

The numerous stops and starts, the near constant moments of

indecision and (productive) forgetting might be read “in between

the lines,” so to speak. Such “between-ness” should also be heard

with an ear to the Nietzschean-inspired (Zarathustra) Deleuzian

33

notion of a “friend” as “a third person in between ‘I’ and ‘me’

who pushes me to overcome myself and to be overcome in order to

live” (Deleuze 1983a, p.6). In the context of an affective

vibrant materialism, I extend this notion of a “friend” to the

KWVM. It is in this very precise sense, then, that the KWVM and

me might be thought of as having a peculiar and particular sort

of friendship. Furthermore, between-ness ought to be understood

as having a specific temporality that disrupts linearity and

overcomes static memory. In short, what is being performed is a

form of what Deleuze and Guattari call an “abstract machine.” As

they explain it:

What we term machinic is precisely this synthesis of

heterogeneities as such.

Inasmuch as these heterogeneities are matters of

expression, we say that

their synthesis itself, their consistency or capture,

forms a properly machinic

‘statement’ or ‘enunciation.’ The varying relations

into which a color, sound,

gesture, movement, or position enters into the same

34

species and in different

species [and in inorganic life] form so many machinic

enunciations.

[Deleuze and Guattari 1987, pp. 330-331]

Thus, what you will en-counter in the subsequent section has a

machinic temporality, a “time machine” that takes shape as a kind

of scatter plot, or better yet, an n-dimensional kaleidoscopic

collage of sorts; roaming around and in and out, folding here and

there where I think about feeling the Korean War Veterans

Memorial. It should, for all of these reasons and perhaps more,

be approached with an inclination for that which is experimental

in nature.

Antimemory/Countermemory

Overture:

I stare dully at the large pile of hair on the ground and

slowly rub the smooth surface of my newly shaven head. The clamor

of voices surrounding me has intensified as a tall, menacing, and

utterly enraged male shatters my stupor by screaming into my

face, “Hey!!! Who said you could touch your head?! This is the U-

nited States Military Academy, boy. You better wake up or you‘re

35

skinny little ass will be back on the bus to Newark! Is. That.

Clear. New Cadet?” A second of panicked indecision grips my

throat before I blurt, “Sir, yes sir!” and in that moment enact

my interpellation into the “West Point experience.”

As a Korean American graduate of West Point, I am well

acquainted with the intensity of its ideological and repressive

dimensions. West Point remains an enduring and significant

fixture in various narratives of U.S. national memory and

mythology. And since at least the 1980s, one of the more

interesting and least studied permutations of the post-1965 surge

of Korean immigrants to the United States has been an

increasingly conspicuous presence of Korean Americans at the

United States Military Academy. The Citizen-Soldier tradition has

important historical precedents for Asian Americans in general.

Perhaps the most obvious example remains that of the 2nd

Battalion 442nd Regimental Combat Team, whose celebrated feats

during the Second World War have taken on near-legendary status.

What is more, for many Asian Americans, the elimination of the

draft after the Vietnam War has not uncoupled the link between

citizenship and military service. My focus is on the context-

36

specific experiences of Korean American military personnel. Of

special interest to me is coming to a better understanding of the

complexities of what it means to be a Korean American who comes

to be stationed in South Korea. Here, various expressions of U.S.

and South Korean nationalism encounter one another in particular

ways to articulate the formation of a reworked martial-citizen-

subjectivity for an increasingly significant portion of the post-

1965 Korean American community.

Excursus I: BwO

How to make yourself a body-without-organs (BwO)? Lodge yourself on a stratum,

experiment with the opportunities it offers…find potential movements of

deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them…try out continuums of

intensities…Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole “diagram” as opposed to still

signifying and subjective programs…the BwO reveals itself for what it is: connection of

desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities…a long process of

experimentation…to gradually give up interpretation, to construct flow by flow and

segment by segment lines of experimentation…for the BwO is all of that: necessarily a

Place, necessarily a Plane, necessarily a collectivity…[Deleuze and Guattari

1987, p. 161]

A process aimed at a continual becoming that is beyond, even

37

as it is always in relation to, subjectivity and interpretation,

the body-without-organs (BwO) is, for Deleuze and Guattari, that

which destabilizes systems of stratification and organization,

institutions such as official languages, the State, dominant

notions of family, etc. It should be noted that the BwO should

not be understood literally to signify an organ-less body.

Rather, the BwO is opposed to the despotic ordering of collective

assemblages of organs, or modes of experience. It thus suggests

the possibility of gaps and intervals for the genesis of

alternative and new experiences and states of being. I trek along

the nonlinear lines of making myself a BwO by reading the KWVM

landscape as “a field of sensation”; bringing body to the vibrant

materiality of martial affect.

Ethnopraxis: February 2008, KWVM

Making our way leisurely from one end of the Korean War

Veterans Memorial to the other, our eyes rest variously on the

ghostly statues of service members, softly touching the photo-

etched wall where anonymous faces of soldiers, sailors, airmen,

and Marines stare back at us, through us, as if seeing a scene

that slips just beyond our sight and sensibilities. We are

38

together yet ever alone in our thoughts. My time here seems

blocked. I do not know what to think of this place, this space.

For some reason I do not know what it is I feel. In fact, I am

quite unsure how it is that I should feel. I just stare and

continue to move along, slowly, almost as if I am an automaton.

Angling my head slightly rightward I glance over at him,

watch him with his head bent and lips pursed, eyes closed and

fists softly clenched by his heart in the gentle throes of an

impromptu ritual of sorts. I wonder to myself: what is he feeling,

what is he thinking, what is he calling to mind and forgetting? Am

I a witness to a silent and special prayer to the memories of

family and fallen? Or has he instead taken pause to drift along

swirling experiential currents that have carried him to this

moment, to this place; touched and possibly tainted still and

once more by a martial inheritance that, while all his own, may

augur nothing but the story of diasporic Korean America? He,

along with his sister, is an immigrant child of the war. Marrying

a white American G.I., his mother left behind her native soil and

the infidelity of his biological Korean father, perhaps trusting

that a new beginning might ensue. She would hope for and risk all

39

she had for a better life, if not for her, then at least for her

children; something more and maybe altogether else than what she

had managed to endure in life. There, in the land of promises.

Here, in America.

We met for the first time in an introductory Korean language

class at the University of Hawai‘i, somewhere around a decade and

a half prior to where we were in that moment at the KWVM. It is a

friendship forged, in part, on mutually felt yet singularly

experienced traumas; the scattered and scarred discontents of

U.S. Korean diasporic assimilation. We met for the first time

because neither of us could speak our so-called mother tongue,

and neither of us felt altogether comfortable with that, even if

this feeling most often circulated just below the shell of

consciousness, only now and again escaping to the surface as

ephemeral plumes of sensation. A sensation riddled with the haze

of lazy notions congealing in our minds. Clotted memories, loss

of words, and yet the beat goes on: questions remain…

And here we are again, slowly and unevenly trying to face

our ghosts. Distant drum beats and the sound of cadets marching

in formation float through my mind from another time. For some

40

reason, I hear The Long Grey Line beckoning to me in the dull

gaze of the steel statues of soldiers here in the KWVM. For the

image of the ghost, the “grey,” the trudging immaterial “corpses”

of the Long Grey Line of cadets flesh out the martial dream of an

unbroken centuries-long procession. This spectral image seems

captured so perfectly in uncanny fashion in the refrains of a

song memorized by every West Point cadet called “The Corps, The

Corps, The Corps”:

The Corps, the Corps, the Corps/ The Corps bareheaded, salute it/ With eyes up thanking

our God/ That we of the corps are treading/ Where they of the corps have trod/ They are

here in ghostly assemblage/ The men of the corps long dead/ And our hearts are

standing attention/ While we wait for their passing tread/ We sons of today, we salute

you/ You sons of an earlier day/ We follow close order behind you/ Where you have

pointed the way/ The long grey line of us stretches/ Through the years of a century told/

And the last man feels to his marrow/ The grip of your far off hold/ Grip hands with us

now, though we see not/ Grip hands with us strengthen our hearts/ As the long line

stiffens and straightens/ With the thrill that your presence imparts/ Grip hands, though

it be from the shadows / While we swear as you did of yore/ Or living or dying to honor/

The Corps, and The Corps, and The Corps!

Excursus II: War Machinery

41

The regime of the war machine is…that of affects, which relate only to the moving

body in itself…Affects are projectiles just like weapons…The martial arts have always

subordinated weapons to speed, and above all mental (absolute) speed; for this reason,

they are also the arts of suspense and immobility. The affect passes through both

extremes…the martial arts…follow ways, which are so many paths of the affect; upon

these ways, one learns to ‘unuse’ weapons as much as one learns to use them…Learning

to undo things, and to undo oneself, is proper to the war machine: the ‘not-doing’ of the

warrior, the undoing of the subject. A movement of decoding runs through the war

machine. [Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 400, emphasis added]

The becoming of a war machine opposes the capture of the

state apparatus, even as, also and always, it is in relation to

it. An intermingling of bodies: steel, grass, water, stone, wind,

sun, flesh, blood, spit. A vibrant material reading of the KWVM

allows us to see in this landscape a particular form of creative

social organization. The KWVM is not a passive assemblage of

inorganic elements waiting to be interacted with by an active

organic body (me). We are an assemblage, the inklings of a social

organization. We form an abstract (war) machine.

Ethnopraxis: October 2011, KWVM

I return to the KWVM. All I seem to do this time is take

42

photographs. Incessantly. I find comfort in the monotonous

activity of point-and-shoot digital camera technology. I look

around but feel disoriented, in a weird sort of way. There is a

strange serenity to my unease. My mind is like a sieve right now,

obtuse yet porous; the images swirl in perpetual ingress and

egress. I’m still not sure how I feel about all of this. For some

reason I start thinking about how I used to listen to the war

stories told to me every now and again by my father who would

tell me about the legendary exploits of the “Field Marshal,” as

he would refer to General Douglas MacArthur. The “ghost” of

MacArthur held a subtle yet unrelenting sway in my life. Perhaps

no better illustration of this influence exists than the time my

father urged me to name-drop General MacArthur as one of the

formative influences in my life while he prepped me for the

mandatory interview with a congressperson that I had to pass as

part of the admissions process to West Point. This enduring image

would move me, years later, to pursue a deeper inquiry into the

heritage of “Marshal MacArthur” in the Korean and diasporic

context through my doctoral dissertation; a study for which I

conducted ethnographic work amongst a family of South Korean

43

shamans who happened to incorporate General MacArthur’s spirit as

part of their traditional pantheon of gods. MacArthur’s phantom

returns as a god of shamans and a ghost of veterans…

Excursus III: Martial Simulacrum

The traditional notion of simulacrum has been based on the

distinction between an original model and a copy. A number of

social theorists (e.g., Baudrillard 2001; Jameson 1991) have

criticized this division as inadequate for understanding the

current state of postmodern society that is marked by a

destabilization of this difference. The simulacrum, from this

perspective, has become so widespread and its connection to a

supposed original has become so enfeebled that what exists today

are nothing but copies of copies (Massumi 1987). Gilles Deleuze

(1983b) begins with this idea of the destabilization of the

model/copy distinction and extends it by contending that models

and copies are part of the same simulated process. For Deleuze,

in fact, “[t]he simulacrum is not degraded copy, rather it

contains a positive power which negates both original and copy, both

model and reproduction [italics in original] (p. 53). Simulacrum

affirms its own difference. Reality, then, is produced as a

44

distinction between two second order productions (simulations)

and “is nothing but a well-tempered harmony of simulation”

(Massumi 1987, p. 92).

One type of simulation is hegemonic and replicates. This is

what takes place when certain properties are selected to produce

an ordered arrangement of resemblances that are, in actuality, a

collection of homogenizing actions. The other form of simulation

is that which upends the scheme of resemblance and replication as

such. Rather than selecting specific properties, it selects

everything in distributive fashion and multiplies potentials (p.

93). This latter type of simulation is also what Deleuze and his

frequent collaborator, Félix Guattari (1994), have called “art.”

Although Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation of art stays, for the

most part, within the realm of typical notions of artistry –

painting, sculpture, musical composition, writing, performance,

etc. – what is interesting about their take on art and relevant

for my purposes here is how they connect art, memory, and

sensation in the concept of the monument. From their angle, “the

monument is not something [simply] commemorating a past, it is a

bloc of present sensations [italics added]…The monument’s action is not

45

memory but fabulation [simulation]” (pp. 167-168; cf. Foucault

1972).

Art as the multiplication of potentials and the selection of

every possible property combined with an understanding of the

monument as a bloc of sensations describes well the KWVM.

Reworking the notion of monumental art and bending it toward a

reading of the KWVM allows us to see how this vibrant cultural

landscape is nothing but a shifting proliferation of multiple

potentialities. As a result, if we understand the KWVM as a

simulacral process in the manner just described, this demands

that we view its power (potential) as a constant movement of

becoming which operates by combining as many potentials as

possible. In this vein, we might begin to rethink the KWVM as in

a very specific sense always and also an “art” that marshals a

certain monument of “martial affect” (a particular bloc of

sensations). Expanding how we conceive of martial arts in general

and what would count as a martial art in particular, it is in the

precise manner described above that we might initiate from a

certain angle a glimpse of the KWVM in a heretofore unimagined

form: as a singular expression of a martial art.

46

Ethnopraxis: November 2011, KWVM

Twisting to my purposes and stretching beyond the frame of

the photographic text Roland Barthes’(1981) notion, the absence

of veterans and tourists at the KWVM today strikes me as a

punctum. It’s Veterans Day and I’m back again, hoping for an

opportunity to witness rituals of various sorts throughout the

day. I visited the week prior and talked to the Park Rangers

about whether there would be any official ceremonies. There were

none planned. This is in stark contrast to the Vietnam Veterans

Memorial. On the surface, it appears as if this is yet another

example of the somewhat banal notion that the Korean War is

America’s “forgotten” adventure. Somehow, and for some reason,

this memorial does not (yet?) warrant the official celebrations

that will take place at the World War II and Vietnam Memorials on

this day. There were a few wreaths that already had been laid

earlier that morning. But not much more. The Park Rangers had

told me to be there by 8 a.m. and so I was. Looks like whatever

tiny ceremony there might have been took place earlier than that.

I am pissed off at myself for missing it. I am at once

disappointed and relieved. Annoyed and strangely comforted. I

47

still feel a certain type of anxiousness around older veterans;

ashamed that I never fought in a “real” war with “real” bullets.

Sure, I graduated from West Point and that was impressive

enough, I suppose. But I got it all wrong after that. I should

have “gone Infantry” but chose instead Air Defense Artillery as

my branch designation because I was lazy and thought it would be

“laid back” and not so “high-speed,” less pressure and less

expected of me. The audio track to that Saturday Night Live skit

“Lowered Expectations” is on auto-repeat in my head. I even chose

to avoid Ranger School at all costs (regret it now), perhaps the

pinnacle in “high-speed” army culture. Secretly, I was afraid. I

was convinced that my shaky night/day land navigation skills

would haunt me and bite me in the ass. I was also lazy. In decent

shape physically but too unmotivated to actually train on my own

for the basic physical assessments in push-ups, sit-ups, chin-

ups, running, and road marching. If I were honest with myself, I

would have to admit that I had a pretty lousy attitude about the

whole thing. I did exactly what was required to pass and not a

bit more. I was a breath away from being a slacker, if such a

thing is even possible in a military environment. I was petrified

48

that I would be “re-cycled” again and again for one failure or

another, only to see me booted out of Ranger School eventually

for one reason or another.

It’s freezing out today. I literally can’t feel my toes. I

feel like such a goddamn wuss. It makes me think to myself just

how far I’ve fallen from my early Army days when I was stationed

near the DMZ in Korea. I used to train all the time in the frigid

conditions of a Korean winter and it makes me feel even more

anxious and ashamed. I push through for a half an hour more

waiting and hoping that someone, anyone will show up so that I

can at least feel like I did something of worth today. Nobody

comes. Most of them seem to head to the Lincoln Memorial or

towards the Vietnam and World War II Memorials. I snap a few

pictures of soldiers and call it a day. I kick myself, feeling

like this was a wasted opportunity since I wasn’t willing to

brave the cold for the next 10 hours just in case somebody showed

up. This place is starting to drive me crazy.

Excursus IV: Dream Diary, 10/02/05:11

11 Other than redacting personal names in the interest of preserving privacy, this is an unedited entry from a dream diary that I started in August of 2005 to help me deal with what had been up to that point over two years of reader’sand writer’s block. A solo struggle symptomatic of a martially inflected Korean Diasporic post-traumatic stress of sorts.

49

So I had a dream again where I was back at West Point except

that this time there were a bunch of Asian girls standing around

and they were wearing a combination of bathrobes and uniforms. I

was stuck in some sort of contraption with someone else whose

face I couldn’t see but who was short like me and wasn’t wearing

a uniform. Later on I saw that he was an Asian guy. But then he

sort of turned into a Jewish-Italian looking guy. We ended up

driving some vehicle through different company and platoon

formations and ended up disrupting all of them. I was wearing

camouflage and then I switched into “Class A’s.” When we were

driving through “the Quad” there was this Asian girl who was

wearing a tiara like she was Miss America or something and she

was waving and welcoming folks. There were Asians in the crowd

but I ignored most of them. Me and the Asian/Jew/Italian struck

up an odd conversation about the martial art known as “pushing

hands.” He was telling me how I was afraid to do it since it was

so hard. I asked him if he did it and he said yes and joked that

he had to restrain himself when he lost in competition, otherwise

the whole point of serenity and self/other awareness constitutive

of pushing hands would have been lost. Perhaps I need to

50

incorporate pushing hands in my life. Perhaps I need to start

looking back into people’s eyes when I’m talking to them instead

of looking at the floor or wherever; maybe I can redirect and

focus both my energy and theirs.

We ended up at the back of a dining hall. There were bagels

outside in a basket. This guy went in and this girl who I didn’t

even really see who was in the back of the truck-thing we had

been previously driving both went in ahead of me. They take out a

leaf-blower to return it somewhere and the contraption turned

into some sort of dining cart and one of the waiters told me to

come in. There were already a bunch of folks in there watching

TV. I saw *****. She’s always in my dreams these days because of

the feelings of failure and insecurity that I have when I think

about her. I feel a lot of respect for her. Here is a girl who is

physically in better shape, does better mentally than me, and has

more heart. I still can’t believe she beat my time on that

obstacle course. I feel completely fucking emasculated. Like a

fucking loser. She is just way more squared away than I ever was

and she just keeps popping up in my dreams over and over again.

Maybe she’s some sort of superego or something. So I entered the

51

dining hall and peeked in, sort of looking around for the leaf-

blower guy and girl and seeing who the other people were that

happened to be sitting in chairs in the back. I finally asked if

anyone could just sit in the free spots at the table. I headed

towards a table off to the right where ***** was. I felt slightly

humiliated again, sick to my stomach. It felt as if people had

been talking about me and my weirdness. Here’s the thing, my hair

felt too long. I felt like I was so out of place because I wasn’t

quite “in uniform.” Even if I were wearing good quality

camouflage and Class A’s, I felt like people saw me for a slob

and for being out of uniform because of my hair. Being out of

uniform and having a non-regulation haircut has been a recurring

part of my West Point dreams. Fucking annoying.

Coda: Otherwise in other ways

Rewind. The Korean War Veterans Memorial (KWVM). Redux: a

Korean Veteran’s War Machine (KVWM). We are trying to assemble

(assemblage as mode of radical thinking) a habit of creative

renewal of habits; trying to feel at home on the move, with or

without change of spatial location (Protevi 2010). We are

attempting through the conversion of memorial to (intensive war)

52

machine to invent what Char Roon Miller (2010) has called

“productive war on ourselves” and to “force flexibility upon

invincible necessity” (Arakawa and Gins 1997, p. 11). To

“fabulate” and “entertain” that which was previously unavailable

to us through “plastic habits” (Malabou 2008; see also Dewsbury

2011): KWVM becoming KVWM becoming KWVM becoming KVWM becoming…

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*(DRAFT)* Thinking About Feeling the Korean War Veterans' Memorial

Documents

(DRAFT) Thinking About Feeling the Korean War Veterans' Memorial