Combining disparate genres of auto-fiction, travelogue, audio transcription, poetry, and theory, artist TJ Shin’s “야생의 파도와 함께 with tides of the wild” assembles disparate memories and transfigurations of the landscape of the Korean Demilitarized Zone. A space of infinite duration, the site distorts time itself as a capsule of scattered cultural memory and a hegemonic state tool to rescript borders, territory, citizenship, and legibility. Examining the DMZ as a borderland, a remnant of the Korean War and ongoing US intervention, Shin critiques the ways in which nation-states co-opt the language of queer ecology to align, palliate, and even “correct” the historical and sociopolitical dimensions of military security, imperialism, and war.

As such, Shin investigates the unproductive stability of ecology and security; the conservation of time and memory; and the difference between nostalgia and déjà vu to theorize emergent forms of becoming that are singular and shattering.

6/17/23

Yesterday was my second time in the Civilian Control Zone (CCZ). I visited for the first time with my family on a tour bus in the winter of 2019. This time I went with the DMZ Ecology Research Institute, allowing less restricted access inside the forbidden zone. We had a special permit because the director of the institute owned a rice paddy farm inside the CCZ, which officially recognized him as a “civilian farmer” and granted him entry and relations with the military personnel guarding the 통일마을 Tongil-village, also known as the Unification Village.

We had two cars and I was in a smaller SUV. The director had forgotten to apply for my entrance permit. Since I had a Canadian passport, I had to pass as a foreign contract farmer working inside the rice paddy field. This subjected our car to a more intense search. Finally, we were granted four hours inside the CCZ and our passports and identification were confiscated for security measures. 

Clear skies. Flowers in full bloom. Wild chamomile and cicadas everywhere. Once inside, we split into groups to focus on different fields of study: ornithology, botany, and entomology. The director, facilitator, and I stayed on a small patch of a rice farm, walking very slowly. Look at the red soil from the rusting landmines. The earth is bleeding. Everything was serene and unspectacular. Inside a dense thicket of husks, red flags were planted in the soil, prompting my paranoia about landmines. But as quickly as this feeling came, it quietly settled and became still. I followed the director’s footsteps and matched them exactly; discontinuity continued, one step at a time. 

Young soldiers were dropped off carrying automatic guns and ammunition in a locked metal box. So young and fair. I heard gunshots and saw poorly camouflaged military tanks grazing through the even green. But the land was seamless and the wound the tanks punctured would gradually recede into the force of the green. 

I use the word green, not land or ecosystem or environment, to describe the incomprehension that first comes with the feeling of alienation in the encounter of vastness, only to later yield to the singular experience of vanishing. Expansive green, mundane green, continuous green, sublime green. It was this green that the scientists at the Institute were tasked with identifying and sorting. From this to that, unknowable to knowable, inalienable to alienable, amoral and moral into different divisions of appearance and knowledge. They photographed anything interesting that they could find. They would later sort these photos at their office for data and analysis for population control. With photography at their disposal, they move the green—an authentic experience—closer to the operator, then closer to the spectator. 

If authentic time is the “moment of vision” in which we discover the present drawn into relief, then inauthentic time can be understood as lost absorption, in which we come up to the representation of the relief and forget the responsivity of the present moment. Whereas one undergoes an experience, the other presents itself as a likeness, only to authenticate itself as the experience. Photography, in its evidentiary order, becomes denatured reality. 

After lunch, we drove back to the checkpoint. We took four hours exactly to avoid suspicion. The soldiers gave back our passports and licenses. The car wiggled through the black and yellow blockades. We left where we entered—one way in, one way out. I saw the endless barbed wire fence traversing the edges of the inlet, stopping the green only momentarily before it continued to grow on both sides. I saw the murky brown water of the 임진 Imjin River that flowed from north to south. 

All that we left, all that I experienced, is gone and sealed in the forbidden zone. The green, the gunfire, the rice paddy farm, the panic of entering. The van rummaging through the forest remains already and always faded. Memory becomes a mnemonic form of nature. 

6/22/23 

I went to two DMZ observatories with my new Super 8 camera that I got from a second-hand store. The first observatory was near a Buddhist temple on top of a hill just behind the 오두산 Odu Mountain. I hiked to the top and saw for the first time the barbed border fence unrestricted and unimpeded from the 77 highway. I took footage of the 임진 Imjin River. Just then, white cranes flew into the frame. 

Next, I went to the second observatory 오두산통일 전망대 Odusan Unification Tower. Driving up, I passed by two military stations but there was no checkpoint. 

I mounted my Super 8 camera on my tripod. When I was about to depress the trigger, a security guard came up to me. Asked if it was a recording device, “a camcorder.” I explained that it was an old video camera, believing he thought the Super 8, a relic of the 60s, might be a gun. 

He warned me that all video recording is restricted here. He looked through the viewfinder, which centered on a South Korean military defense base. Photography of North Korea was allowed. And looking was allowed. But video was not permitted because 한국 군사 기지가 너무 나와서 South Korean military defense base is too exposed. [1]

He pointed up the hill. Those military soldiers were looking at you and about to escort you out. We are too close to the military base. We are in fact on it. 

I packed my Super 8 and walked up to the observatory tower. There were three floors. The first and second floors featured an exhibit translated into Korean and English about peace, reconciliation, and hope; a 1953 ceasefire that ended the casualties and repatriated prisoners of war; the peacemaking of the United Nations that drew the border along the 38th parallel; and the Han River Estuary used jointly by the two Koreas for trade and commerce. 

There were several buses with South Asian tourists and kindergarten students on a school trip. Some asked for selfies with the uniformed South Korean soldiers. I saw a poster of a wired, unified peninsula with the word “hope” written across—Korea represented as a rhizomatic fiber optic cable or as an infrastructural floor map circulating electric currents. Soldiers were on their lunch break getting iced americanos on the top floor café that overlooked the Imjin River. 

The upper-level deck outside the building had multiple telescopes. There were old metal ones, which are common at observatories, but also “XR telescopes” featuring interactive touchscreens and computer-generated 3D graphics. They simulated endangered animals living near the border—red-crowned cranes, snakes, deer, and boars overlaid onto the real-life view. They also presented North Korea in high definition alongside information about the infrastructures. I had never seen a touchscreen telescope before. Both instruments produced the ideological effects of perspectival idealism and exposed their optical, virtual nature—seeing was technology. [2]

So what did I see through the magic glass? I saw civilians. Farmers. Abandoned buildings, tractors. Flocks of white cranes. Propaganda villages, bikes, civilians, guard posts. Rice paddy farms, boats. Military base. An inlet. I saw the same thing from here but also over there. I saw a magic trick that made me a Subject once displaced and full, “out of place” and “a part of a whole.” The two states regulated themselves through the other: the wire fence was only as big and as tall as the enemy’s. Their condition became purely subjunctive, only prepositional to the other. 

In looking, we sustain a perceiving and ordering self that settles in the eye, producing a subject that becomes the active perspectival center and meaning. Cinema and the border are alike in that they are both architectures and landscapes of projection. The spectacle, screen, and projection fuse to constitute an apparatus, and from its borders, arranges power to formulate a legible “subject” and “citizen.” But the very structure of seeing implies a self-reflexive return. Jacques Lacan explains this phenomenon as the moment when “I see myself seeing myself.” [3] What determines the self in the visible is the gaze that is outside. We see North Korea, but South Korea is also formed through her eyes. We become subjects not by looking but by accommodating the gaze of the Other. 

I took out my iPhone to record the telescopic view, the “magic trick.” Even military officers were on their phones texting. I took footage of South Korea’s military defense base. A weaving line, a weak line, a bureaucratic line, an official line, a symbolic line, a neutral line. The doubling of the image only worked when the iPhone lens matched perfectly to the telescope eye. A 1:1. An index. At times, when the mechanical eyes did not fit perfectly, there was an occlusion of vision, like a real eye experiencing an ocular migraine; darkness of vision, a Skotos. The gaze is not only returned but negated. I held a mirror up to the mirror. 

If the border is an inverted image, any attack on the reflection simply externalizes the splitting self. The dividing line is a screen where perception and representation can not be differentiated. To abolish the border, the very object of one’s opposition must be nullified. Resistance, once projected, simply returns to the perceiving subject as real from the outside. For both states must be annulled—to expose and be exposed, we must look at the perceptible absence of our own image reflecting back at us. 

If only I could document not to see, but to vanish; not to restore, but to unbind. 

위를 봐야돼. 밑에는 쳐다보지마. Look above, don’t even look below.

7/3/23

Yesterday, I joined a student research group: three students, two members at the DMZ Institute, and a student group leader with a scientific degree. We were studying the endangered golden frog. To understand what conditions are favorable to their survival, the group studied the differences in climate, environment, food, water, biodiversity, and 서식지조건 climate conditions between five different 둠벙 swamps. 

During the drive to the DMZ, the facilitators stressed the difference between evidence and speculation, and how conclusive analysis must follow an inductive logic determined by data analysis. Their paper must build on other published findings, meaning their hypothesis must extend a given argument. This was their role as scientists, to provide the language of logos from evidence;  to measure rational principle from testimony that could traverse the link from empiricism to “objective truth.” Science organizes language and language administers the organization of scientific thought. 

At each site, the group did the following: identify three different spots at each swamp, gather samples from the water using a mesh net, and dump their findings into a bucket. Afterwards, they would identify each species in their samples and make a tally of their findings in a chart. After sorting, the group made a generalized summary of what lived and grew through cross-elimination. We observed the gathered water sample, the pool of different critters, tadpoles, aquatic foliage, and parasites brought together inside a small plastic bucket out of sheer chance—like a representative democracy ordained by some inexorable power. It was their presence itself that provided some intractable testimony from the power of representation to the power of authentication. 

We visited the last site. We left the DMZ and went into a suburban area 내곡동 Naegokdong, 40 km south of border patrol. We were in the middle of a farm nestled inside a developing city. When I asked why we chose this site, the co-facilitator explained that a scientific paper published three years ago discovered an abundant population of the endangered golden frog in a 하층 pavement substratum connected by multiple public waterways. They traced the frog to this spot, a small swamp connected to public canals on a rice paddy field inside a growing city. 

He explained that these frogs can not adapt to industrialized agriculture because they rely on stagnant, undisturbed swamps. They can’t jump high like other frogs. Once so abundant that farmers would catch the frogs by hand and feed a handful to livestock, now they are threatened by urban development and irrigation systems cultivating rice paddy production. The pond was thick and still. A mushy plane of green sitting on the water. Like that, we saw at least four mature golden frogs. Camouflaged from green to green. Next, we found six frogs that got carried away into the connecting substratum, probably due to rain or flooding. He explained they would die there, unable to escape, powerless to jump to higher ground. 

Ironically of all places, it was a swampland beyond the DMZ, outside the “undeveloped” war zone, that hosted the endangered golden frog. A miracle. 

Maya Deren writes, “man’s greatest dream is to achieve a whole whose character is far more mysterious and miraculous—that dynamic, living whole in which the inter-action of the parts produces more than their sum total in any sense.” [4] She explains that the scientist and the artist dream of achieving a form of nature, a complex phenomenon that defies “dissectional analysis” or an interchangeable machine with predictable, equivalent “parts.” But because nature is irreducible, the conservationist, seeking to recreate an inviolable singularity, informs a logic of causation in a closed environment and extends his circuitry to produce a likeness of nature. In presenting anterior methods as the nature of forms, its means are simultaneously its ends. Concept of nature and its motive power of reality turn into itself, into its own wholeness and reconstitution of form. Causality and generality ascertain the form of a miracle. 

Despite the conservationist’s attempts to reconcile reality, we are still left with ambiguity. What moral justification recognizes intervention, divine or mortal? What is the conservationist’s judgment of determining the form of a miracle? I looked at the golden frogs living inside the recessed substratum, the incongruous strip of green on the surface of the slow running water, bordered by the pavement walls. Do we let the frogs live by removing them—adjusting them to another recreated environment—or do we let them die by letting them stay there—until the conservationists gather enough data to inform their next method? Is our intervention exonerated as part of inconscient phenomena or evaluated as an exercise of conscious, rational powers? How do we assess the inviolable consequences of the whole when all that conservation can do is simply recognize its own structure and measure its own motivation as an inevitability?

I imagined myself as the frog, looking up at the alien strip of concrete. Making due based on what would be inscrutable circumstances. A labyrinth of indecipherable letters, waiting for a miracle. For mercy. 

7/3/23

I drove an hour and a half from where I was staying in 야당 Yadang, which by name translates to “parliamentary opposition.” On the way, I saw several political banners against the South Korean President supporting the dumping of Fukushima nuclear wastewater into the Pacific Sea. [5] I finally arrived at 태풍 Typhoon Observatory and started my task of tracing the DMZ border from “start” to “finish.” From east to west, fulfilling a total vision. I was stopped by another military checkpoint. 

I drove past the Peace Park, beyond the sign that read “You are entering the Demilitarized Zone authorized by the United Nations.” On the hill, I was accosted by a military soldier. He expressed insurmountable frustration as if I acted unlawfully warranting disciplinary action. With a hand on his automatic rifle, he said something about driving up the hill when I should have parked below; only elders and disabled people were allowed to drive up there. There were no signs nearby. I was shocked by his reprobation. I acted “out of place” despite my fluent Korean, dark skin, and ethnic features. Shame washed over me. 

At the observation deck, I saw the view of the DMZ. This was different from all the other views I had seen. While I was looking, I recognized a strange feeling like I couldn’t remember what I was seeing. As if the form of the green was inadmissible to visual perception, incongruous to comprehension. And while I looked to understand what I couldn’t remember, what I couldn’t see, I “found” the DMZ. I found the DMZ not through looking but knowing. As if the DMZ emerged and came into completion. I had déjà vu. 

Some explain déjà vu as a neurological phenomenon, shallow processing related to electrical discharge in the brain, in the temporal lobe that stores memories, creating a strong sensation that an experience has occurred before. There are numerous studies of what incites the feeling of the already dreamed or already lived. It’s prevalent in people who are young, travel more, and watch films. As a result, it is understood as more common in people with higher education and socioeconomic status. Déjà vu, in this respect, is a social construction.  

But what fulfills déjà vu is sight. Sight becomes a necessary condition for its completion. Asynchronous neurological processing, a recollection from a dream, a sight from a viewfinder, a photograph from a postcard, or a sequence from a film all can bring on the experience of déjà vu, but all require sight to expose its vision. Then the image is inexorable. It is inevitable; wherever it comes from, however, it is constructed. It is both a recollection and a repetition, with the image simultaneously surpassing and fulfilling its history. 

Jean-Luc Nancy explains that love is an inherent contradiction of being, of “shattering,” of simultaneous sublation and fulfillment. “Love is the extreme movement, beyond the self, of a being reaching completion.” [6] What Nancy describes as love is a movement of being in its image. It becomes a site where knowledge and experience form an understanding through difference. An image repeats itself because it is repressed, and we enact its coming until we recognize it. But once we come to understand its representation, it shatters us. Love is this immanent coming and going, as Nancy explains; it “crosses” this finite movement, infinitely. “[Love] does not return to itself, because it leaves only in order to come again.” [7]

Déjà vu is love that crosses. Despite the predestination of the image, once dreamt, once seen, it will come again to shatter. It repeats until it shatters. And once shattered, the image eternalized interiorizes and reverses again. 

In the observation deck and theater, another soldier asked if I came alone and if I was a foreigner. I answered yes. He could recognize that I was a Westerner, moving his hands in the air illustratively, sexually, to explain I have a different “form.” Are you from California? Why did you come? He offered to play a video. Footage of soldiers with assault weapons in camouflage. Cranes flying above the military training ground. He ended the video early so I left soon after. On my way down the mountain, I saw herds of young soldiers walking down to their posts after lunch. 

If Body. There is no verb, no action, only a tendency that’s subjunctive, propositional. There is an IF but no THEN: and so, if one follows the IF, what does one find, then? [8]

Peace demands nothing because it wants nothing more and nothing less than its own perpetual habituation.

━━

Out of time, out of place
On time, in place
Out of time, in place
On time, out of place

7/3/23

In my 230-square-foot Airbnb officetel in Yadang, Paju, I watched two films back to back: Joint Security Area by Park Chan Wook and 6/45 by Park Gyu Tae. Joint Security Area (2000) takes place in one of the very few sites where North and South Korean military personnel stand face-to-face, although it is now closed to the public. The iconic blue buildings, the dividing United Nations borderline, and the rotating standing guards exist only in the imaginary.

In the film, a strong bond develops between North and South Korean soldiers despite conflicting accounts of war and ideological division, and soon after, their friendship dissolves the enemy line. What undercuts their alliance, however, as director Park Chan Wook suggests, is state violence and selective memory, especially in the face of violent military trauma. Peace can not be sustained under testimony. Friendship can not endure a crisis of memory. 

Twenty-two years later, we have 6/45 (2022), a box-office comedy updating the vernacular life of North and South Korean relations. A miraculous six million dollar ticket falls from the sky and travels with the wind over from South to North Korea, forcing the soldiers from both sides to cooperate and understand one another. It is a lottery ticket that drives peace: salvation out of destitution for the North Korean soldiers and security of retirement out of a weak job market for the South Korean soldiers. But any authentic relationship forged between the two parties is blocked by a regulative idea: the six million dollar lottery ticket must be cashed in South Korea since the concept of a lottery ticket is in itself a product of capitalist economy and private ownership. Director Park Gyu Tae suggests capitalism is not only inevitable, it is natural; capitalism trumps peace above all else. 

No longer taking place in the JSA, 6/45 uses computer-generated imagery to render an imaginary landscape of the DMZ. The establishing shot features two military standing posts in the middle of a striking, empty forest. The ground is infinite. The soldier’s initial meeting place is at a backend water supply tunnel, which forces them to hide underground from surveillance. There’s an old phone line that connects the two posts, alongside loudspeakers and a telescope for communication. Without having access to a fixed site like the Joint Security Area, the film imagines a decentralized technological network that supports and connects the infrastructures between the two states. The absence of a discernible site becomes admissible, even believable when considering the DMZ is an oneiric spectacle. So the film imagines a Terra nullius, the vast territory of green resembling the wild and free unoccupied market, conjuring the fantasy of a new socioeconomic order; a horizon that never ceases, just extending infinitely outwards.

군대가 임무를 성실하게 지키는지 확인해봐 see if the troops are diligently guarding. Only a bike lock was used to secure the wire-fenced posts.

7/1/23

I’m sitting on a wooden bench on a subway and I see a close-up of a man’s hand. It’s dirty and grimy. My heart drops. He has between his fingers a small camera lens. He shoots me without consent. I just know he’s a sexual predator.

7/27/23

Nothing developed the way I expected. three film strips are all black except seven photos. The Super 8 film is so underexposed it’s beyond color correction. I’m stunned that it has been rendered dark, another occultation of sight, scotomization of consciousness. 

7/9/23

It’s the start of the monsoon season in Korea. I worry that I’m dealing with an entirely different nature of obstruction, weathering of sight.  

I joined an ecotour to enter the 통일촌 Unification Village, which is the only way for non-civilians without a special permit to enter. I was on the bus with international and domestic South Asian and Korean tourists. It was pouring rain and only the devoted or the disoriented came. The tour only allowed three hours inside the CCZ with standard military clearance and state-sanctioned checkpoints. 

The tour guide with a microphone switched from Korean to English and explained while our passports were being verified that all men in South Korea are conscripted into the military for eighteen months. There are three exceptions to this rule: one, men with mental and/or physical disabilities; two, recipients of gold medals in the Asian Games or the Olympics; or three, civilians living inside the CCZ. She mentioned that the K-pop group BTS does not meet the following criteria, and therefore, is mandated to fulfill their conscription, referencing the recent national debate about their exemption in losing one of the most profitable gross domestic products. [9] The tour guide failed to mention the ongoing protest by activists demanding exemption for transgender people in light of alarming violence, abuse, and suicide within the military. I was relieved it wasn’t mentioned. I feared transphobic dismissal and retaliation from the crowd. 

The tour guide pointed out the blue painted line on the paved roads. That’s the United Nations’ official line. We are approaching the DMZ in 3…2…1!

We first arrived at 제3땅굴 Third Tunnel of Aggression. There were around ten tour buses parked on the lot. Photography is not allowed here. Herds of tourists went in and out of the military-tourist compound. There was a theater auditorium, a museum, and a war tunnel. We were first led to an eight-minute screening featuring a four-channel video installation and theater seats. There were around six rows on a raked stage with reclinable seats and handrails. The video explained the history of the tunnel: North Korea used dynamite to dig a 1,427-foot tunnel leading to Seoul in the 1970s, which was soon discovered and intercepted by South Korea in 1975. 

I remembered the tunnel from my visit in 2019 but everything else changed so drastically from what I had seen four years ago. Back when the conservative party President Park Geun-Hye was in leadership, the tourism video argued in defense of a counterterrorist defense strategy: South Korea must avoid future provocations and nuclear threats like this by fortifying the border with more missile testing and aggressive military policy. The new video scripted an optimistic narrative. It told a sentimental story of two countries rehabilitating from the wounds of war. Economic progress (the Eurasian train connecting the Koreas to Russia and Europe), international participation (the 2019 Winter Olympics and the North and South Korean Women’s hockey team), and ecological conservation (50% of endangered species now live in the DMZ) would move the divided countries into peace. 

Walking around the tour site, I noted an important detail. Every access point was wired in with a landmine warning sign that read “Do not enter.” Red triangle with a yellow outline and a white skull. Every tour site was contoured by landmines as if they were placed in perfect symmetry. Like a baroque garden, the bombs imposed the boundaries of the compound like a maze. One way in, one way out. Like a radial geometry that rested on a point, there was an assumed united center, a principal position for spectacle. 

In the adjacent museum, an exhibition of the emergent ecology of the DMZ featured butterflies, birds, critters, thickets, animals, guns, gear, and ammunition. A tour guide said, We cannot walk on the DMZ. Why? Because they’ll shoot us. Instead, the tourists were standing above a glass subterrarium featuring plastic plants and animals. I understood at that moment that nature was arranged like a deterrent, a powerful mine. It had become a measure of counter-terrorism. 

Nature is mediated through a spectacular order. Rehabilitated economy and ecological conservation offer a corrective to our divided reality by melding our antagonisms into unproductive stability. Endangered animals are scripted into national aspirations of citizenship and legibility. Conservation has become a matter of biopolitical security and management. The military promises tactical population control and census. Ecotourism has melded with the defense base: seeing demands more securitizing, and more securitizing demands more seeing. Meritocratic capitalism ensures the good life of a near-utopian future capable of relentlessly reproducing and maintaining life. Life is only understood as such when it promises growth. “Peace” is the theme of every tourist site. “Peace” is the current condition of the ongoing war and ceasefire. Positivity ensures the ongoingness of our indeterminable present. It extends into infinity. 

The tour bus stopped at our second stop, the 도라전망대 Dora Observatory. Everything was humid and muted. A thick mist hugged the mountain and clouded the entire view, shrouding the building in damp monochrome. But the bad forecast offered some level of protection. No one questioned me with my camera and telescopes and left me alone. 

On our way out, the tour guide said the farmers inside the DMZ are wealthy because they live without three things: strangers, beggars, and gates. Free from strangers because there is a secure border patrol, free from gates because everyone is a friendly neighbor, and free from beggars because the farmers are abundant with rice and produce. We were dropped off at the farmer’s co-op and encouraged to try their harvested rice, soybeans, and liquor. Instead, I bought a war plaque made out of the original DMZ metal fence—edition 50,715 of 150,625. You never know how much it will be worth after unification! 

I never knew war could be so slow and so peaceful. So green and so complete. When does this horizon end? How do we reach its limit?  I dream of all the landmines linked together so all of them could explode. [10] Time and space as we know it would unbind. 

Unification and conservation are incongruous, contingent projects. Unification is a method of conservation that seeks to imagine Korea restored to a time before American and Soviet occupation and Japanese colonization—a unified peninsula.  In the breaking of the 38th parallel, meaning the eventual removal of American aggression, Chinese policy, Russian military aid, South Korean state, and North Korean state, beyond a horizon we’ve never crossed before, we have to simultaneously abolish the image of the past that first sought unification. 

The film is a simultaneous account of a narrative, beginning at two separate points in time. The two points function almost as two distinctive narratives, the “Times” overlap during the diegesis of the film and a final conversion of the two points are achieved to one complete superimposition, to one point in Time. [11]

When time stands still, there remains the scar of the DMZ. Propaganda videos explain that time has stopped inside the DMZ ever since the signing of the 1953 Armistice Agreement. You could say the DMZ is “out of joint.” Those who seek to go “backward” in time before the atrocities of war coincidentally extend the historical sensorium further into time. And those who seek to go “forward” in time only return again to time standing still. If historical time is measured by a set of different events forming a recognizable pattern, history is only afforded to subjects stabilized by time. Without stability, time becomes so unbound that subjects fall “out of place” and into a teleological terrain. 

The line between the present and near-distant future that we call the horizon forms a continuous inflection. This line draws a map. It occupies a circle that radiates outwards into its own infinitude. It marks an arealization of a subjective reality fusing to that of self-territorialization. This communion promises a certainty: a place of origin and the continual proliferation of our contingencies into an interminable uniformity. Emptied of history and filled with nature, history becomes nature. 

I do not repeat because I repress. I repress because I repeat. 

I do not repeat because I regret. I regret because I repeat. 

I do not repeat because I repent. I repent because I repeat.

I return to Korea to revisit the primary scene of trauma. You could say that I long for the return because my repressive memory makes repetition a veritable compulsion. I imagine flight. Being-in-common. The wings of red-crowned cranes. The diaspora returns to the “wound” to authenticate history. We desire the border because it is a confirmation of our endurance in believing in belonging. We want to relive what-has-been. We want to see what we might still possess. Motherland becomes an optimistic object, a bond if broken would cause an intractable severance without the possibility of return. [12]

Gilles Deleuze writes, “When the consciousness of knowledge or the working through memory is missing, the knowledge in itself is the only repetition of its object; it is played, that is to say repeated, enacted instead of being known.” [13] Repressive memory disavows “consciousness of knowledge,” meaning that knowledge is represented as an object of repetition. Without recognition, an intensive return, repressive memory re-presents and returns back to knowledge that we already know. Without difference, memory simply effectuates an analogy of likeness. Motherland is the Idea and the diaspora, the image. The Nation is the Origin and the citizen is the derivative. Subjecthood is the Return and subjection is the motivating power.

Repressive memory shapes nostalgia. Nostalgia seeks itself as the object of knowledge pushing extensively outwards. Whereas in the déjà vu, the involuntary image repeats but also vanishes, nostalgia fills the sight by force and reiterates itself. That-has-been is a voluntary experience without difference whereas nothing can be transformed or refused. We return to find what we already know, the same. Nostalgia offers no shattering, no emanation. It subordinates the future to the past and the past metonymically perpetuates into the future. But we cannot anticipate the new when the past was never present. We cannot seize this unsurpassable horizon when we have forgotten the present. 

If the past is an expression of power, then difference is the power of expression that affirms movement. Difference traverses a new indeterminable horizon. It allows the impasse to pass by. Like déjà vu, difference carries out the object of its opposition and surpasses it. But once one horizon dissolves, another forms. And it’s precisely at this point that a new politic emerges, at the breach where difference and the same form a paradoxical contingency: what difference affirms all our movements?

I see barracks and military watch posts consumed by kudzu, camouflaged and almost digested. Whereas some might see sublation, even hopes of decolonization, I see ambivalence. Our optimisms are as transitory as the kudzu. Our attachments are as temporary as the watch posts. Cicadas fill the vast stretch of time.