University of Iowa
Iowa Research Online
Theses and Dissertations
2009
The politics of suffering in the public sphere: the
body in pain, empathy, and political spectacles
Young Cheon Cho
University of Iowa
Copyright 2009 Young Cheon Cho
This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/936
Recommended Citation
Cho, Young Cheon. "The politics of suffering in the public sphere: the body in pain, empathy, and political spectacles." PhD (Doctor of
Philosophy) thesis, University of Iowa, 2009.
http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/936.
Follow this and additional works at: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd
Part of the Communication Commons
THE POLITICS OF SUFFERING IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE:
THE BODY IN PAIN, EMPATHY, AND POLITICAL SPECTACLES
by
Young Cheon Cho
An Abstract
Of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in Communication Studies
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
May 2009
Thesis Supervisor: Professor Bruce E. Gronbeck
1
ABSTRACT
Can private bodily pain be transformed into a communication medium fit for the
public sphere? Can the body in pain be utilized as a means for political participation? If so,
how? Under what circumstances? By whom? And to what effect? To begin answering these
questions, this dissertation concentrates on extralinguistic confrontational practices such as
self-immolation suicide protests that are exercised by those who have been marginalized and
excluded from political participation. By focusing on hitherto neglected forms of
communication that are visual, spectacular, violent, unruly, and physical, the study expands
and complicates the current discussions about the public sphere that are usually yoked to
speculation on the boundaries of reason and words. Arguing that the body in pain is a
theoretically considerable and practically available mode of public participation, the
dissertation examines the rhetorical potency as well as fragility of body rhetoric.
Each chapter analyzes different cases of self-immolation, addressing such issues as
embodiment in publicity, the gap between private sensation and public discourse, the role of
emotion in constituting the public sphere, and the judgments of the audience. The cases offer
an opportunity not only to theorize how subaltern people appear out of the darkness of
sheltered existence and enter the space of appearance by utilizing their body, but also to
rethink the civic art of looking upon suffering. Through the exploration of the place of
embodied performance, visual spectacle, and moral stuntsmanship within the larger
discussion of democracy, the dissertation endeavors to rehabilitate publicity as a
nondialogical political value.
2
Abstract Approved: _______________________________________________________
Thesis Supervisor
________________________________________________________
Title and Department
________________________________________________________
Date
THE POLITICS OF SUFFERING IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE:
THE BODY IN PAIN, EMPATHY, AND POLITICAL SPECTACLES
by
Young Cheon Cho
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in Communication Studies
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
May 2009
Thesis Supervisor: Professor Bruce E. Gronbeck
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
___________________________
PH.D. THESIS
_____________
This is to certify that the Ph. D. thesis of
Young Cheon Cho
has been approved by the Examining Committee for the thesis requirement for the
Doctor of Philosophy degree in Communication Studies at the May 2009
graduation.
Thesis Committee: __________________________________________________
Bruce E. Gronbeck, Thesis Supervisor
__________________________________________________
John Durham Peters
__________________________________________________
David Depew
__________________________________________________
David Hingstman
__________________________________________________
Takis Poulakos
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................... iii
CHAPTER
I.
INTRODUCTION: THE PUBLIC SPHERE AND ITS
DISCONTENTS ...............................................................................................1
Intromission: Objects, Stakes, Commitments...................................................1
Models of the Public Sphere: Arendt and Habermas........................................4
Dialogue as the Main Medium of Participation in the Public Sphere ............11
Subaltern Counterpublics and the Question of Style......................................18
The Locus of the Body in Pain in the Public Sphere......................................27
Chapter Outlines .............................................................................................40
II.
THE EMBODIMENT IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE: THE ART OF
SELF-SUSPENSION IN THE SUBALTERN COUNTERPUBLICS...........44
The Art of Self-Abstraction in the Public Sphere...........................................44
The Self-Immolation of Chun Tae-Il..............................................................54
Self-Concretization in the Subaltern Public Sphere .......................................84
III.
THE POLITICS OF SELF-IMMOLATION: THE TENACITY AND
FRAGILITY OF THE BODY RHETORIC ...................................................96
The Body as a Site of Agency ........................................................................96
The Body Rhetoric of Self-Immolation........................................................109
The Rhetorical Potency and Limits of the Bodily Eloquence ......................121
IV.
PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY IN THE GLOBAL PUBLIC
SPHERE: SCALE, MEDIA EVENTS AND DISTANT SUFFERING.......131
Lee’s Suicide Protest in Cancún ...................................................................131
The Global Public Sphere and the Problem of Scale....................................134
Media Events: Civic Participation in the Global Public Sphere...................143
Distant Suffering: The Promises and Limits of Compassion .......................149
V.
CONCLUSION: THE BODY IN PAIN AND THE REALM OF
APPEARANCE ............................................................................................159
Critical Questions and Future Directions .....................................................164
WORKS CITED ...........................................................................................168
ii
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure
1.
The Film Posters on Chun Tae-il: The Original Domestic Poster (left) and its
Europe Premier Version (right) ................................................................................55
2.
A Scene from the Film, The Beautiful Life of Chun Tae-Il: Chun Tae-il is
Burning Himself with the Labor Law in his Hand ...................................................80
3.
A Newspaper Photograph of Park’s Self-Immolation ............................................111
4.
The Photos of Chung Won Shik. ............................................................................129
5.
Lee’s Suicide Protest in Cancun. ............................................................................132
iii
1
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION: THE PUBLIC SPHERE AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Intromission: Objects, Stakes, Commitments
Communication theories have long been driven by political and ethical
commitments, whether explicit or implicit. The notion of the public sphere nicely ties
these commitments together, exemplifying the political and moral vision of
communication theories. Moreover, few concepts have been as studied in the past two
decades as the public sphere in communication and political theories. The notion has
taken a central place in the study of public discourse, rhetoric, media, political
communication, development of modernity, and most of all, the possibility of liberal
deliberative democracy.
In spite of, or more precisely because of, the popularity of the term, the notion
itself remains undertheorized. The idea of the public appears so self-evident in many
fields that few bother to define the term with zeal. As Michael Warner (2002) points out,
“[p]erhaps because contemporary life without the idea of a public is so unthinkable, the
idea itself tends to be taken for granted, and thus little understood” (8-9). The ironic lack
of conceptual elaboration on the idea of the public is also visible in the field of rhetorical
studies whose primary focus is on public address. In the institutional and disciplinary
setting of speech communication in the U.S., rhetorical studies has been largely
dominated by “rhetorical criticism and its substantive twin, public address” (Gaonkar
2
2002 401). With the ascendance of public address over theory and history, oratory has
long enjoyed its paradigmatic status as the main object of analysis. 1
The past few decades in rhetorical criticism have witnessed the booming of
revisionary movement whose dedicated efforts were concentrated on mainly two aspects:
expansion of its object of analysis beyond oratory and the concomitant theoretical
exploration. On the one hand, the object domain has been extended to include various
genres of discourses such as visual spectacles, scientific knowledge, journalism,
collective memory, and architecture that were largely outside the purview of the
conventional rhetoric. 2 With this change, the main object of critique in rhetorical
criticism shifted from public address to public discourse. On the other hand, in the
process of making new objects apprehensible, theoretical perspectives also become
diverse and complex. Interpretive schemes in rhetorical criticism are no longer limited to
1 For example, in their 1948 essay, Albert Craig Baird, Lester Thonssen and Waldo
Braden (Thonssen et al. 1970) designate ‘public speaking’ as the privileged object of critique in
rhetorical criticism. Rhetorical criticism, according to them, is “a logical extension of the theory
and practice of public speaking.”
2 The concern with the expansion of object of critique in rhetorical criticism can be found
from the very moment of its establishment as an academic discipline. In his 1925 essay on “The
Literary Criticism of Oratory,” Wichelns (1958) tries to enlarge the object domain by including
“the thought of the people.” However, the main examples in his analysis still remain limited to
the official speeches of “inventive genius.” Wrage (1947) is more explicit in his attempt to
broaden the object of critique in rhetorical criticism. He emphasizes the need to examine popular
opinions, beliefs, and constellations of attitudes that are more than monumental distillations of
thought in philosophy, religion, literature, and science. While Wichelns gestures toward
vernacular rhetoric, Wrage more explicitly extends the object of rhetorical criticism to
“expression in the market place” or “aphoristic crumbs which fall into stomachs.” The principal
call for expansion of the objects of rhetorical criticism came with the 1970 National
Developmental Project on Rhetoric. Its Committee on the Advancement and Refinement of
Rhetorical Criticism's first recommendation read as follows: “Rhetorical criticism must broaden
its scope to examine the full range of rhetorical transactions; that is, informal conversations,
group settings, public settings, mass media messages, picketing, sloganeering, chanting, singing,
marching, gesturing, ritual, institutional and cultural symbols, cross cultural transactions, and so
forth” (Bitzer and Black 1971 225).
3
‘neo-Aristotelianism’ or ‘close reading.’ With the movement toward and influence from
interdisciplinarity, new theoretical vocabularies were actively deployed from such
various fields as hermeneutics, critical theory, psychoanalysis, structuralism,
deconstruction, post-colonialism, to name only a few. What is problematic in the midst of
the developments in both object and method in rhetorical criticism is the want of explicit
theoretical endeavors to elaborate the notion of the public itself. As Dilip Gaonkar (2002)
notices, “[t]he idea of the ‘public’ has had a shadowy existence in rhetorical criticism,
always present in its taken-for-granted quality but underelaborated” (412).
While trying to keep the directions found in the revisionary movement, I put the
task of elaborating the notion of the public at the heart of this dissertation. If rhetorical
criticism has the double objectives of “simultaneously illuminating the critical object and
facilitating ‘concept formation’” (Gaonkar 2002 411), my dissertation is one attempt to
kill two birds with one stone with the very idea of the public. In terms of its object of
analysis, my dissertation endeavors to go beyond the limitations of traditional oratory,
and to question its status as the paradigmatic genre of public address. More specifically, I
concentrate on extralinguistic confrontational practices such as self-immolation suicide
protests that are exercised by those who have been marginalized and excluded from
political participation. My attempt to expand the object domain of rhetorical studies
beyond oratory informs and supplements the task of conceptual elaboration on the notion
of the public. By focusing on hitherto neglected forms of communication that are visual,
spectacular, violent, unruly, and physical, I intend to expand and complicate the current
discussions about the public sphere that are usually yoked to the boundaries of reason and
words. Through the exploration of the place of visual spectacle, embodied performance,
4
and moral stuntsmanship within the larger discussion of democracy, my dissertation
inquires what the prospects can be of reconstructing norms of public communication
today.
In an effort to explicate objects, stakes, and commitments of the dissertation, I
begin with an overview of the notion of the public sphere, focusing on the two most
influential theorizations by Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas. In mapping what I
believe to be the key features of the ancient and modern public sphere models, I attempt
to open up a space to engage with the idea of the public sphere from the perspective of
rhetoric and communication studies. This engagement involves questioning the privileged
status of dialogue as the main medium of participation in the public sphere, as well as
elaborating the locus of the body in the public sphere. In the process, I intend to elaborate
the notion of the subaltern counterpublics, arguing that the body in pain is a crucial
element of it. I end this introduction with brief summaries of the chapters that follow it.
Models of the Public Sphere: Arendt and Habermas
While the origin of the idea of the public sphere can be traced back to ancient
Greece, most current discussions are influenced by Habermas. Habermas’ larger political
project, his theory of communication, and his scattered comments on media converge on
the concept of the public sphere (Peters 1993 541-542). It is the leading motive
throughout his theories: the theory of communicative action, discourse-ethics theory,
procedural-discursive democracy theory, civil society and the constitutional state theory.
The introduction of the idea of unconstrained communication as a standard for legitimate
5
political order 3 in the later works also can be understood as a development from his
earlier concept of the public sphere (Peters 1991 249).
Public Sphere, however, is not an exotic concept from Critical Theory. While the
popularity of the term in the English speaking world is primarily indebted to the
translation of the Habermas’ work (1989), The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, its original German term
Öffentlichkeit can be translated into more familiar ideas such as publicity, the public,
publicness, and openness (Strum 1994). Thus, the inquiries about the notion should not
be limited to the historically specific bourgeois space implied by the English term. In
fact, the notion of the public sphere runs deeply through the history of Western political
philosophy, and the ways in which the public/private distinction is drawn and
reformulated have been always one of the key prisms through which different spectrums
of political philosophies diverge.
The origin of the idea of the public sphere can be traced back to ancient Greece.
The public sphere, for the Greeks, stood in a sharp opposition to the private realm
(Arendt 1958). The private realm such as the household, home, and family was not
something precious to be protected from the vagaries of institutional power as we
moderns think, but instead a realm of deprivation. Privacy meant being deprived of things
essential to humans, that is, of being seen and heard by other people. This divested nature
of the private realm is illustrated by an etymological fact that the current English word
3 Habermas’s main concern lies in what can be legitimized as truth rather than what truth
is. In other words, his inquiry is focused on legitimacy from the viewpoint of social philosophy
rather than on truth from that of epistemology. It should be no surprise that communication plays
a central role in his project, given that legitimacy is inseparable from, and in fact accorded by, the
intersubjective process of communicative action.
6
‘idiot’ comes from the Greek word for private. The private realm was bound to the
necessity of life, and was mainly the place of production (slaves) and of reproduction
(women).
The public realm, on the other hand, was the realm of politics, action, and
freedom. It was the space of appearance where one could be seen and heard by other
humans. The rise of the polis meant that a human being received besides a private life a
second life, a political life (Arendt 1958 24). The presence of others and the plurality of
agents constituted the sine qua non of the public realm. In various public settings such as
democratic assemblies, courts, theaters, and battlefields, men (and men only) strived to
excel and distinguish themselves from all others. Unlike the private realm where
necessity of life yoked everyone equally, the public realm was reserved for individual
excellence as well as full humanity. Every activity in the public sphere has a potential to
attain “excellence never matched in privacy” (49). The distinction of public/private was
distinctively hierarchical.
The best reward for excellence performed in the public realm was immortal fame.
Men, as finite beings, were eager to achieve fame that could outlast not only the moment
of speech and action, but also the life of the doer of great deeds and the speaker of great
words (Arendt 1968). Glory, however, always went hand in hand with doom. The public
sphere was also full of dangers. Participants in the public realm risked revelation of
oneself to others, and thus possible humiliation, to say the least. Just as one could achieve
excellence and glory, so could he be subject to shame and censure, depending upon his
public performance. As Arendt (1958) vividly shows, the public sphere was filled with a
shining, yet at the same time harsh light.
7
The distinction between the public and the private realm, according to Arendt,
blurred with the rise of the social in modernity. The activities which had remained in the
private realm were permitted to appear in public, and gradually became the common
concern. With the advent of society, 4 Arendt argues, both the public and private spheres
disappeared because the public has become a function of the private and the private has
become the only common concern left (69). Arendt sees in the breakdown of the
distinction between public/private realms the ultimate disintegration of the public realm
itself. The extension of the private realm resulting from the advent of society did not
mean that the private matters could reconstitute the public sphere. On the contrary, “the
sameness prevailing in a society” (214) brought about the disintegration of the public
sphere, because conformity caused by ‘society’ inevitably terminates ‘action.’
It is decisive that society, on all its levels, excludes the
possibility of action, which formerly was excluded from the
household. Instead, society expects from each of its members a
certain kind of behavior, imposing innumerable and various rules,
all of which tend to "normalize" its members, to make them
behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement.
…… society has conquered the public realm, and that distinction
and difference have become private matters of the individual
(Arendt 1958 40-41).
Even though Arendt illuminates some fundamental characteristics of the public
realm such as the revelation of actors and the accompanying risks, her idealization of the
ancient Greek polis and the uncompromising critique of the social have been attacked.
Cohen and Arato (1992) argue that Arendt failed to demonstrate how her normative ideal
4 Arendt defines ‘society’ as “the collective of families economically organized into the
facsimile of one super-human family” (29). As is clear with the definition, she distinguished the
social from the public. The root of the social was, for Arendt, not in the public, but in the private
realm.
8
of the public sphere can be compatible with modernity (177-200). Warner (2002) also
indicates that Arendt’s model is “fairly antiquated,” because of its “unfortunate
faithfulness to the metaphor of the polis rather than a complex understanding of how
politics happen” (62). In a similar vein, Habermas (1977) points out that the modern
bourgeois society and the modern state escape her dichotomy of public and private. In
modernity, he adds, it is almost impossible to find a state relieved of the administrative
processing of social problems, not to mention politics cleansed of socio-economic issues
(14-15). In this context, Habermas tries to develop a model of socially rooted public
sphere. He finds the indispensable condition for the modern public sphere in ‘society’
which was the very cause of the disintegration of the public realm for Arendt.
Habermas (1989) details the formation of the modern bourgeois public sphere by
focusing on the emergence of the middle class public in eighteenth-century and early
nineteenth-century Europe. He finds the origin of the modern public sphere in the
development of capitalism. With the development of capitalism, a new stratum of the
bourgeoisie arose occupying a central position within the public. They were from the
outset a reading public, and soon came to publicly criticize the activities of authorities
that hitherto had remained in secrecy. The public sphere in the eighteenth century was
already a counter public sphere, in the sense that it emerged through a critique of the
established authority and power of the Absolutist state:
The inhibited judgments were called “public” in view of a
public sphere that without question had counted as a sphere of
public authority, but was now casting itself loose as a forum in
which the private people, come together to form a public, readied
themselves to compel public authority to legitimate itself before
public opinion. The publicum developed into the public, the
subjectum into the [reasoning] subject, the receiver of regulation
from above into the ruling authorities' adversary (Habermas 1989
25-26).
9
Salons, coffee houses, and table societies provided forums for free access and
open discussion, and organized critical rational debate among private individuals. Public
opinion came into existence as the outcome of the critical reflection of the public.
Previously regarded as vulgar opinion or popular sentiment, public opinion now became
the only legitimate source that could bring rule into convergence with reason (Habermas
1989 90). While Habermas admits that the identification of property owners with human
beings can be an ideology, he understands the bourgeois public sphere as a discursive
realm where unprecedented progress—enlightenment and rationality— was achieved. It
was an unprecedented and revolutionary progress, for Habermas, that reason emerged as
a legitimate source. 5
In recounting the bourgeois public sphere, Habermas heavily depends upon Kant.
The “idea of the bourgeois public sphere,” according to Habermas, “attained its
theoretically fully developed form with Kant’s elaboration of the principle of publicity in
his philosophy of right and philosophy of history” (102). 6 Habermas’ model of the
bourgeois public sphere can be seen as an attempt to give substance to Kant’s philosophy
5 In this context, Best and Kellner (1991) suggest that The Structural Transformation of
the Public Sphere not only provides important clues as to what aspects of modernity Habermas
wishes to preserve, but also serves to explain why he would oppose later postmodern theories.
Habermas, they argue, finds in the earlier bourgeois public sphere the historical matrix of a
valuable legacy of modernity including democracy, communicative action, and rational consensus
(233-240).
6 Arendt (1992) also maintains that publicity is the key concept in understanding Kant’s
political thinking. She maintains that “the transcendental principle of publicness” rules all
political action for Kant. Moreover, according to Arendt, the importance of publicness extends to
Kant’s moral philosophy as well; “[p]ublicness is already the criterion of rightness in his moral
philosophy,” because “[m]orality means being fit to be seen” (49). In this context, evil thoughts,
for Kant, are secret by definition (18).
10
that aimed to rationalize politics by morality. 7 Kant conceives of the public sphere as the
method of enlightenment. He maintains that enlightenment has to be mediated by the
public sphere (Habermas 1989 104). This can be accomplished by the mediation of ‘the
principle of publicity’ and ‘the public use of reason.’
The public use of man’s reason must always be free, and it
alone can bring about enlightenment among men; the private use of
reason may quite often be very narrowly restricted, however,
without undue hindrance to the progress of enlightenment. But by
the public use of one’s own reason I mean that use which anyone
may make of it as a man of learning addressing the entire reading
public. What I term the private use of reason is that which a person
may make of it in a particular civil post or office with which he is
entrusted. …… It is, of course, impermissible to argue in such
cases; obedience is imperative. …… Conversely, as a scholar
addressing the real public (i.e. the world at large) through his
writings, the clergyman making public use of his reason enjoys
unlimited freedom to use his own reason and to speak in his own
person (Kant 1991 55-57).
By the famous distinction, Kant implies that there is a way of being public
through one’s public use of reason that is not constrained or limited by the duties of
office. In the passage above, “as a scholar” refers to ‘as a member of a society without
distinctions of rank or social condition’ while “before the reading public” means
‘addressing oneself to a community not defined by being part of an institution’ (Chartier
1991 25). In other words, public use of reason is not confined to scholars. Habermas
argues that “the public sphere was realized in the public use of reason by all who were
adept at it” (Habermas 1989 105). Private people can form themselves into a public by
the public use of their reason.
7 Habermas’ work, especially its insistence on the democratic potential of the
Enlightenment, can also be read as a critical response to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of
Enlightenment and the political pessimism of Adorno’s writings (Hohendahl 1992).
11
The public use of reason is supplemented by the principle of publicity which
guarantees free access and open discussion. There should be no limitation or prohibition
in using one’s reason publicly. No religious or political authority could restrict the critical
activities of reason. Through the process of enlightenment, the public acquired the new
meaning of the congregate of citizens who reflected rationally. 8 Under absolutism,
Kant’s transcendental principle of publicity could be an ethical preference irrelevant to
politics. By the time the bourgeois public sphere came into existence, however,
Habermas believes that it held good as the principle that could guarantee the convergence
of politics and morality. By actualizing Kant’s idea of ‘public use of reason’ and ‘the
principle of publicity,’ Habermas resurrects Arendt’s ‘action’ in the modern bourgeois
public sphere.
Dialogue as the Main Medium of
Participation in the Public Sphere
The ancient public realm belonged to the state. On the contrary, the modern
public sphere was about the state, but not a part of it. Rather, it was firmly rooted in the
private realm and was directly against the state. In his model, Habermas accords a new
importance to the modern private sphere. 9 In the intimate sphere (Intimsphäre) whose
prime example was the conjugal family, private individuals developed subjectivity and
8 The history of words reveals this momentous shift. In Great Britain, from the middle of
the seventeenth century on, there was talk of ‘public,’ whereas until then ‘world’ or ‘mankind’
was used instead. Similarly, in France le public and in Germany Publikum began to be spoken.
All of these were instances of a “critical public” (Habermas 1989 26).
9 The change of the private sphere from the deprived realm to something to be prized and
protected is most evident in John Stuart Mill. For Mill, liberty means not freedom to enter the
public sphere, but rights to be shielded from intrusion of the state (Peters and Cmiel 1991 201207). See also Habermas (1989), especially 129-140.
12
found humanity (Habermas 1989 43-46). While humanity, for Arendt, could be found
only in the public realm, the intimate sphere took its place in the modern bourgeois public
sphere. Habermas also establishes a more democratic version of the public sphere in
which the process of enlightenment, in principle, was open to all, whereas Arendt’s
model of the public realm was possible only at the expense of the private realm.
Habermas explains the difference between the ancient public realm and the modern
bourgeois public sphere as follows:
The political task of the bourgeois public sphere was the
regulation of civil society (in contradistinction to the res publica).
With the background experience of a private sphere that had
become interiorized human closeness it challenged the established
authority of the monarch; in this sense its character was from the
beginning both private and polemical at once. The Greek model of
the public sphere lacked both characteristics, for the private status
of the master of the household, upon which depended his political
status as citizen, rested on domination without any illusion of
freedom evoked human intimacy. The conduct of the citizen was
agonistic merely in the sportive competition with each other that
was a mock war against the external enemy and not in dispute with
his own government (Habermas 1989 52).
In spite of these differences, both the ancient and the modern public sphere share
one commonality; they were constituted by way of the medium of citizen’s talk. It was
speech and conversation that lay at the center of both models. The public sphere, whether
ancient or modern, can be conceptualized as the locale where conversation takes place.
Face-to-face interaction in assembly is bestowed as the primary means of participation in
the public sphere. Modern salons and coffee houses were not quite different from the
ancient Greek polis in that they were the locales where citizens got together and had
13
conversations. For both Arendt and Habermas, the primacy of conversation is
accentuated as the essence of public life. 10
In her model, Arendt privileges action as the activity that is most fit to the public
realm among the three fundamental human activities (vita activa), and action is
inseparable from speech and words. 11 Disclosure of one’s own image, which is a
fundamental function of the public realm, is possible through words. Speech and action
were so closely related to each other that speechless action would no longer be action
(Arendt 1958 178). The polis, the most talkative of all bodies politic, was more than
anything else a discursive arena. To force people by violence, not by words, was deemed
pre-political and thus the characteristic of life outside the polis. 12 While violence was
regarded as the means to handle the necessity in the private realm, words and speech
were constitutive of the public realm:
Most political action, in so far as it remains outside the
sphere of violence, is indeed transacted in words, but more
10 One qualification needs to be made here. While both Arendt and Habermas agree on
the importance of speech and words in the public realm, their attitudes toward the symbolic
aspects in the idea of the public diverge. The most critical difference between the two theorists
can be found in their respective definitions of the term, ‘public.’ While Habermas hails critical
rational debate or deliberation among individuals as the most important component, Arendt
defines public realm as space of appearance where one can disclose one’s own image. Contrary to
Habermas who stands in a strong iconoclastic tradition, Arendt acknowledges that the notion of
the public has a very salient symbolic aspect. In fact, for Arendt, appearance constitutes reality
(Arendt 1958; 1978). One can argue that these differences stem from their different focus;
Habermas’ focus is on actors, while spectatorship is more important for Arendt. For Arendt’s
notion of spectatorship with relation to judgment, see Beiner (1992).
11 Habermas (1977) interprets that Arendt conceptualizes power as the ability to agree
upon common course of action in unconstrained communication. Aside from validity of
Habermas’ interpretation, it is clear that the late Habermas’ concept of communicative power
heavily was influenced by Arendt’s notion of action.
12 For Arendt’s notion of violence that is aligned with ‘force,’ rather than with ‘power,’
see Arendt (1970).
14
fundamentally that finding the right words at the right moment,
quite apart from the information or communication they may
convey, is action. Only sheer violence is mute. …… Everybody
outside the polis -slaves and barbarians- was aneu logou, deprived,
of course, not of the faculty of speech, but of a way of life in which
speech and only speech made sense and where the central concern
of all citizens was to talk with each other (Arendt 1958 26-27).
The primacy of talk spreads to, and is more salient, in the modern bourgeois
public sphere. Even though the coffee houses of England, the salons of France, and the
table societies of Germany differed in various ways, they were common in that they all
“organized discussion among private people” (Habermas 1989 36). Moreover, the “true
judgment was supposed to be discovered only through discussion” (54), and the results
from the public discussion were in accord with reason. Face-to-face discussion, for
Habermas, was the vehicle and process of enlightenment (259). Even ‘public opinion’
and ‘the public,’ the critical constitutive elements of the public sphere, cannot be
separated from citizens’ talk. Public opinion is the outcome of discussion among private
individuals, and it is through discussion that individuals form a public. 13
Undoubtedly, Habermas also pays attention to the roles that press and publication
played in the formation of the public sphere in eighteenth-century England. However, for
Habermas, conversation and the printed media were not two different things; to read was
to have conversation.
The dialogue form too, employed by many of the articles,
attested to their proximity to the spoken word. One and the same
discussion transposed into a different medium was continued in
13 What is important to notice here is that ‘discussion’ in the Habermasian public sphere
is not formal; rather, it is informal and spontaneous conversation. In other words, the basic format
of public deliberation in Habermas’ theorization of the public sphere is non-purposive and nongoal-directed conversation rather than formal and goal-directed discussion (Kim 1997; 1999; Kim
et al. 1999; Wyatt et al. 2000). In fact, the famous notion of communicative action in later
Habermas (Habermas 1984a; 1984b; 1987) can be thought of as another name for conversation.
15
order to reenter, via reading, the original conversational medium
(Habermas 1989 42).
Habermas may well belong to “the cult of conversation” (Schudson 1997 297).
Only audition in assembly seems to be qualified as the desirable mode of public life for
Habermas. Habermas’ penchant for dialogue is connected with his pursuit of Carl
Schmitt’s ‘principle of identity’ (Peters 1993). According to Schmitt, there are two
contrasting principles of political form; identity and representation. The principle of
identity constitutes the ground of participatory democracy because identity between the
state and the subjects is assumed to be achieved through participation of all citizens.
Habermas’ depiction of the bourgeois public sphere, especially his accounts about the
formation of public opinion, is congruent with the principle of identity. In the bourgeois
public sphere, private individuals formed public opinion by which they criticized and
controlled the state. It is important to note here that public opinion, as “the enlightened
outcome of common and public reflection” (Habermas 1989 96), was the direct outcome
of conversation between private individuals. Conversation is accorded a normative role
by Habermas as the chief medium to realize the principle of identity.
Contrary to the principle of identity, the principle of representation states that
“there is no ‘people’ without representation, whether by a delegate or other means”
(Peters 1993 546). Both an absolutist monarchy and a parliamentary government follow
the principle of representation, since the people are not identical with the government in
either instance but are represented by others who stand for them. Habermas
conceptualizes the public sphere based on the principle of representation as representative
public sphere or representative publicity (repräsentative Őffentlichkeit). He develops the
concept of representation, mainly depending on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and
16
Method (1975). According to Gadamer, representation originally meant ‘copy’ or
‘representation in a picture.’ But in the light of the Christian idea of the incarnation and
the mystical body, representation acquired a completely new meaning: replacement.
Since then, to represent has come to connote ‘to make present’ even if something is not
present. This can be clarified when one thinks of various symbols such as the Holy Rood
in religious plays that signified the represented presence of the divine itself (Gadamer
1975 513-514). While the invisible entity is presupposed absent, representation makes the
invisible entity visible.
This sense of representation took place through the body of the monarch in the
representative public sphere. Representative publicity was confined to a person, the
feudal lord who created publicity through his presence. It was public in the sense that the
glory of the feudal lord was shown to all members of the society. The various festivals
including jousting matches, dances, and theater as well as many symbols such as badges,
arms, dress, and coiffure were publicly staged to signify the dignity of the monarch. The
feudal pomp and its public display were critical in maintaining and even creating power
and authority. The publicity of ceremonial splendor made visible an otherwise invisible
political order.
[R]epresentation pretended to make something invisible
visible through the public presence of the person of the lord. ……
Representation in the sense in which the members of a national
assembly represent a nation or a lawyer represents his clients had
nothing to do with this publicity of representation inseparable from
the lord’s concrete existence, that, as an “aura,” surrounded and
endowed his authority (Habermas 1989 7).
The representative public sphere was modeled on theatrical spectacle, and staged
‘before’ rather than ‘for’ the people. The common people were a necessary part of the
17
representative publicity, but excluded from its glory. While the modern bourgeois public
sphere was open to all, representative public sphere had exclusion as its inner core
(Habermas 1989 9). In this sense, it was directly opposed to the principle of identity. In
the representative public sphere, there was no public who used their reason publicly or
participated in politics through conversation, but only the public representation of the
monarch’s authority. Habermas is not hesitant to show his distrust toward the
representative publicity, because it was the representation of authority rather than critical
discussion, and was a spectacle rather than political participation.
The notion of representative publicity is indispensable in understanding
Habermas’ attitude against other forms of communication that are not based upon
dialogue. His distrust of representation is not confined to the representative public sphere
during the Middle Ages. His acclamation of conversation expands to the disapproval of
mass communication in the twentieth century. While Habermas understands the press in
the eighteenth century as “preeminent institution” (Habermas 1989 181) of the public
sphere, 14 mass communication delineated in the latter half of The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere is very negative. 15 The phrase of “changes from a
culture-debating to a culture-consuming public” (Habermas 1989 159) captures
Habermas’ view of mass media. Mass communication is based upon the model of theater,
rather than upon dialogue among individuals. For Habermas, “the world fashioned by the
14 This is because the press was not different from dialogue for Habermas, as was
discussed before.
15 Many critics argue that the weakest part of Habermas’ book is not his delineation of
the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere, but rather his portrayal of its alleged decline. For
the implication of this pitfall with regard to modernity, see Thompson (1995), especially pp. 7375.
18
mass media is a public sphere in appearance only” (Habermas 1989 171). Habermas finds
“the refeudalization of the public sphere” 16 in the mass media saturated environment that
has little semblance of critical rational dialogue.
Habermas’ problematic attitude toward representation begets a host of interrelated
questions. By elevating face-to-face interaction, whether it be conceptualized as rational
dialogue or critical discussion, as the means to fulfill the principle of identity in the
bourgeois public sphere, he excludes other forms of communication that are spectacular,
ritual, visible, violent, unruly, physical and rhetorical, which mainly depend on
‘representation.’ Is representation, however, merely a form of governance as he depicts in
the accounts of the representative public sphere? More significantly, can spectacular,
violent, or unruly forms of communication be utilized as means for democratic
participation? What about the body in pain? What do visual spectacle, performance, and
display before the public have to do with participatory democracy? What is the role of
aesthetics or emotion in constituting the public sphere? With these questions in mind, I
now turn to the notion of subaltern counter public sphere.
Subaltern Counterpublics and the Question of Style
Dominant publics are by definition those that can take their discourse pragmatics
and their lifeworlds for granted, misrecognizing the indefinite scope of their
expansive address as universality or normalcy. Counterpublics are spaces of
16 Apparently, the phrase of ‘the refeudalization of the public sphere’ is deduced from
the much wider historical development. From the late nineteenth century, the societalization of
the state simultaneously with an increasing stateification of society gradually destroyed the basis
of the bourgeois public sphere; the separation of state and society. Through this mutual
infiltration (Habermas 1989 141-151), society became refeudalized. At the same time, as the
liberal constitutional state that supported the bourgeois public sphere changed into the socialwelfare state, the expected function of the public sphere could not be observed (222-235).
19
circulation in which it is hoped that the poesis of scene making will be
transformative, not replicative merely.
Michael Warner
Habermas’ theorization of the public sphere has stimulated a wide range of
theoretical and historical studies as well as numerous critics (Calhoun 1992; Crossley and
Roberts 2004; Robbins 1993). The various criticisms of Habermas have been made
surrounding two closely interrelated questions. First, theoretically, can the model of the
bourgeois public sphere be set up as a normative goal? Second, historically, did the
bourgeois public sphere which Habermas stylizes really exist?
On the first question, many commentators have pointed out the restricted nature
of the public sphere, its alleged characteristics of openness and accessibility
notwithstanding. They claim that the public sphere can be constituted only by a number
of exclusions, especially along the lines of gender, class, and race. Marxist theorists
question Habermas’ belief that material interests and competing ideological factors could
be effectively set aside in the pursuit of consensus through dialogue in the public sphere.
Negt and Kluge (1993) claim that, contrary to the explanation of Habermas, the
bourgeois capitalists of the nineteenth century employed the public sphere mainly to
serve their own private, economic interests. They indicate that the bourgeois public
sphere has an ideological character from its inception by naturalizing its material basis. In
this sense, some Marxist critics such as Ulf Milde even label Habermas as a “late
bourgeois ideologue” (Hohendahl 1979 103).
20
Feminist critics chastise Habermas for his failure to comprehend that the public
sphere is deeply rooted in a set of gender related assumptions (Meehan 1995). 17 Paying
particular attention to the dichotomy between the private and the public, they maintain
that the differentiation resulted in the exclusion of women from the discussion of the
public sphere. With the famous phrase, ‘the personal is political,’ feminists argue that
personal life could and should be transformed into a topic of public deliberation, and
sometimes be intervened by political action. 18 More radical interpreters of the phrase
maintain that politics should be personalized, because every political view that appeals to
transcendence or the universal ideals can be read as manifestation of particular interests
(Warner 2002 34). At any rate, the demarcation between the public and the private
ingrained in theorizations of the public sphere has come to be imagined as a binary
opposition in need of demolition after feminism’s problematization of it. According to
these criticisms, the bourgeois public sphere cannot be set as a normative goal. When the
normative weight that the public sphere carries borrows much of its power from the
possibility of open access, Marxists and feminists reminds us that it is not in the least
open to all.
17 One of the lesser known blind spots of Habermas’ gendered theorization of the public
sphere is that his distinction between ‘intimate sphere’ and ‘political public sphere,’ or ‘literary
public sphere’ and ‘political public sphere’ corresponds to dichotomy between female and male.
The literary public sphere, even though it was an embryonic form the political public sphere, was
a shadowed public sphere compared to its counterpart; the political public sphere.
18 This seemingly benign claim needs qualifications, especially where the intervention of
state machinery actually creates or exacerbates rather than solves many problems in private
sectors. See, for example, the following statement of Madhu Kishwar, the editor of the Indian
feminist journal Manushi, who has taken a sustained position against state intervention; “My
reservations were not related to a lack of commitment to women’s equality but to my mistrust of
the state machinery and of attempts to arm the state with even more repressive powers than it
already has” (Sunder Rajan 1993 13).
21
Whether the bourgeois public sphere Habermas stylizes did exist in history is also
in doubt. Chartier (1991) questions whether the principle of identity was realized in the
form of the bourgeois public sphere during the eighteenth century. He indicates that the
public sphere was founded upon not only an enlargement of the critical public, but also
exclusion.
[It involved] an enlargement because the large number of
outlets for publicity [periodicals in particular] created a critical
community ……; [it also involved] an exclusion …… because the
majority of people were kept out of the political debate that
derived from literary criticism because they lacked the special
competence that made possible “the public of private persons
making use of reason” (Chartier 1991 22).
Chartier adds that the very process of exclusion gave full importance to the
concept of representation during the eighteenth century. Being “eliminated from the
political public sphere by their ‘literary’ inadequacy, the people needed to make their
presence felt in some manner, ‘represented’ by those whose vocation it was to be their
mentors or their spokesmen and who expressed thoughts the people were incapable of
formulating” (Chartier 1991 22). In the period when Habermas sees the full blossoming
of the principle of identity, Chartier finds the reigning influence of the principle of
representation.
Curran (1991) points out that Habermas’ interpretation of the eighteenth and
nineteenth century English society from which he derives the ideal type of the public
sphere is mostly based on the perspective of the traditional Whig. However, the Whig
interpretation has been attacked as largely groundless by the liberal revisionists and
radical historians. For example, the newspapers which Habermas celebrates as the prime
institution of the public sphere were not so much the embodiment of disinterested
22
rationality as the engines of propaganda for the bourgeois. Curran (1991) claims that
most of eighteenth-century journalism had been subject to political control by organized
interests.
Schudson (1992) casts doubt on whether the public sphere of citizens’ political
participation and rational critical discourse of politics existed in American history. After
considering literacy, political parties, journalism, and suffrage, he concludes that the
public sphere Habermas presents did not exist in America. The politics in colonial
America, he proposes, is characterized not by participation in rational and critical
discussion, but by community rituals and campaigns of the nineteenth century political
parties, which were no better than “circus entertainment.” He concludes that pursuit of
Habermas’ model, which did not exist in American history, can be an irony (160).
Darnton’s (1982) analysis of the eighteenth-century French journalism also belies
the rational characteristics of public discourse. He explains that political literature before
the French Revolution was not that of the high-minded liberal philosophy but much
closer to the politicopornography that mainly covered the moral hazards or sexual
corruptions of celebrities. In another article (Darnton 1991), he also claims that the work
of Habermas has no historical ground and thus his model of the public sphere should be
read only as a philosophical investigation.
According to these studies, Habermas’ model of the public sphere as citizens’
political participation through rational discussion is not congruous with the actual
workings of the public sphere. It seems almost impossible to mitigate the charges raised
against Habermas that he exaggerates the enlightening and rational aspects of the public
sphere. Given the historical background when Habermas wrote The Structural
23
Transformation of the Public Sphere, it is understandable why Habermas was so eager to
rehabilitate a model of democracy with a rational core, even at the expense of historical
validity of his model of the public sphere. The target of the book was clear; populist
‘mass’ democracy, embodied in the Nazi regime on the one hand, and the technocracy of
postwar West Germany in the early 1960s on the other. Both political forms reduced
democracy to “a process of acclamation” (Hirschkop 2004 50), and Habermas wanted to
propose an alternative that can bring rule into confluence with reason. It was also
imperative for the leading light of the second generation of the Frankfurt School to build
a sound historical grounding that is missing from his predecessors’ theory of the culture
industry, as it was developed in the Dialectic of Enlightenment by Adorno and
Horkheimer (2002). 19 Being captivated by the recourse to the Enlightenment, however,
he did construct a model that has never existed in pure form.
Despite the theoretically and historically flawed nature of the bourgeois public
sphere, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere leaves no room for other
public spheres. In the preface of the book, Habermas regards plebeian public sphere as a
“variant” of the bourgeois public sphere. The plebeian public sphere, for Habermas, was
not only “suppressed in the historical process,” but also “remains oriented toward the
intentions of the bourgeois public sphere” (Habermas 1989 xviii). 20 It is important here
19 The influence of Adorno and Horkheimer on Habermas is salient in the second half of
the book. Habermas’ accounts on the disintegration of the public sphere are not fundamentally
different from Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique. In this sense, Hohendahl (1979) argues that
Habermas, by uncritically accepting Adorno’s results, makes himself into an advocate of a
cultural elitism which runs counter to his point of departure (91).
20 After various criticisms, Habermas later changes the earlier position by
acknowledging the pitfalls that were created by not taking into account the existence of the
competing public spheres. He says that “a different picture emerges if from the very beginning
one admits the coexistence of competing public spheres and takes account of the dynamics of
24
to note that The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere has a subtitle. In fact, the
secret to understand Habermas’ theorization of the public sphere lies in the subtitle of the
book; An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. The object of Habermas’ inquiry
is a historically specific and limited form of a public sphere.
Since the publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,
scholars (Asen and Brouwer 2001; Negt and Kluge 1993) have attempted to open up a
space for consideration of ‘counterpublics,’ the notion of multiplicity of publics in
opposition to singularity, uniformity, and rationality of the bourgeois public sphere. Most
notable is Nancy Fraser (1992)’s idea of “subaltern counterpublics.” Arguing that “it is
precisely because he [Habermas] fails to examine these other public spheres that he ends
up idealizing the liberal public sphere” (115), Fraser emphasizes the need to formulate
“an alternative, postbourgeois conception of the public sphere” (112).
The task of developing an ‘alternative’ public sphere, however, involves several
difficulties. In the process of criticizing or complementing the exclusive characteristics of
the public sphere, ironically enough, critics often end up reaffirming the view that the
liberal bourgeois public sphere that Habermas depicts is the public sphere. For example,
the claim that women were excluded from the public sphere, upon reflection, is possible
only after accepting the bourgeois public’s claim to be the public. The unintended
valorization of the bourgeois public sphere as an unrealized utopian ideal, far from being
innocent, has its own ideological functions. As Fraser points out, “[t]he official public
those processes of communication that are excluded from the dominant public sphere” (Habermas
1992 425).
25
sphere, then, was, and indeed is, the prime institutional site for the construction of the
consent that defines the new, hegemonic mode of domination” (117).
Another difficulty, which is more relevant to the task of the current dissertation, is
how to elaborate alternative styles of political participation that better fit with ‘subaltern
counterpublics.’ A call for serious consideration of styles in the discussion of the public
sphere can sound strange to many. Habermas himself is reluctant to invite aesthetic
dimensions into the realm of the public sphere, as is evident in his description of the
representative publicity. His unwillingness is, however, never benign in its effects. The
question of style played a crucial yet rather exclusive role. For example, a style deemed
‘rational,’ ‘virtuous,’ ‘courageous,’ and ‘manly’ was promoted in the eighteenth-century
public sphere, resulting in the exclusion of women from political life (Landes 1988).
Fraser (1992) also notices the importance of style and its exclusive function. According
to her, “discursive interaction within the bourgeois public sphere was governed by
protocols of style and decorum that were themselves correlates and markers of status
inequality. These functioned informally to marginalize women and members of the
plebeian classes and to prevent them from participating as peers” (119). The public
sphere can accommodate some expressive modes and not others. Even in the absence of
formal exclusions from without, the seed of exclusion is already sown in the invitation to
participate in the public sphere as long as a certain style remains dominant and privileged
from within.
Consideration of counter publics needs to go beyond the myopic emphasis on the
‘oppositional’ nature of counter publics, that is, the limiting focus on its critical relation
to power and authority. In fact, the bourgeois public sphere developed by Habermas was
26
a counter public itself in the sense that it arose as a critique of the Absolutist states.
Imaginations about counter publics should include serious and due attention to styles of
participation. In this context, Michael Warner (2002) problematizes Nancy Fraser’s
notion of subaltern counterpublics, questioning “what makes such a public ‘counter’ or
‘oppositional’?” (118). Noting that the oppositional character of Fraser’s subaltern
counterpublics mainly comes from its content alone, Warner diagnoses that “Fraser’s
description of what counterpublics do… sounds like the classically Habermasian
description of rational-critical publics, with the word ‘oppositional’ inserted” (118). He
suggests that the conflict that counterpublic engages with ought to “extend not just to
ideas or policy questions but to the speech genres and modes of address that constitute
the public or to the hierarchy among media. The discourse that constitutes it is not merely
a different or alternative idiom but one that in other contexts would be regarded with
hostility or with a sense of indecorousness” (119). Counterpublics can be properly
‘counter’ to the extent that they can provide different styles of engaging in political
participation.
Habermas seldom questions that the tone of public life should be mainly critical
and rational. Even proponents of counter publics who criticize Habermas largely fall
short in supplying alternative modes of public expression. 21 With the growing skepticism
about the reigning protocols of what counts as rational-critical debate, my dissertation
turns its attention to the body in pain as a theoretically considerable and practically
available mode of public participation. Infiltration of the bodies into the public realm
21 For a few exceptions, see Warner (1992; 2002), Gronbeck (1993; 1995), Hauser
(2000; 2006), Peters (1999; 2005), and DeLuca (1999a; 1999b; DeLuca and Peeples 2002).
27
needs not to be decried as the return of Fascism or totalitarianism. Rather, as I will argue
throughout the dissertation, the body in pain can be explored as a major source of
democratic expression that is especially valuable in considering subaltern counterpublics.
While critical rational dialogue has been, and still is, one of the most viable
options for public deliberation, it should not exhaust all the options. There can be nonrational, but still critical, modes of public expression. Drama, spectacles, play, affect, and
outrageous acts of attention-getting are all precious resources that can enrich and
invigorate the public imagination and democracy. Exploring the possibilities and limits of
these resources, my dissertation intends to “rehabilitate publicity as a nondialogical
political good” (Peters 1999 108). This entails the shift of our attention from rational
cognition to embodied action as a critical mode of public participation, and the body in
pain occupies an indispensable place in the shift. In an effort to open up a space for the
shift, I examine the locus of the body in pain in the public sphere in the following section.
The Locus of the Body in Pain in the Public Sphere
The “natural” experience underlying the Stoic as well as the Epicurean
independence of the world is not labor or slavery but pain.
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt (1958) differentiates a world of individual experiences and the
public realm of ‘the common’. Bodily pain, along with other personal forces such as “the
passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses” remains “an
uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized
and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance” (50).
Even though Arendt leaves open the possibility of transforming private experiences into
28
the public realm, 22 she is somewhat reluctant to endorse this transformation, because the
‘intensification’ of subjective emotions and private feelings “will always come to pass at
the expense of the assurance of the reality of the world and men” (50).
Among all the subjective emotions and private feelings, great bodily pain, “the
most intense feeling we know of,” according to Arendt, “is at the same time the most
private and least communicable of all” (50-51). Pain is characterized by its utter privacy
and unsharability, and thus, unlike other private feelings that are left with the possibilities
of being put into the public realm, is “perhaps the only experience which we are unable to
transform into a shape fit for public appearance” (51). Pain, in other words, as “truly a
borderline experience between life as ‘being among men’ (inter homines esse) and death,
is so subjective and removed from the world of things and men that it cannot assume an
appearance at all” (51). Bodily pain, “the most radical subjectivity” (51) for Arendt, has
no place in the public realm.
In fact, the body in pain bears almost exactly opposite qualities of the public
realm for Arendt. The term ‘public’ means two interrelated phenomena: first, that which
can be seen and heard by everyone, and second, the world itself. 23 Pain, more than
anything that “goes on within the confines of the body,” is in diametric contradiction to
22 This transformation requires two processes: storytelling (or ‘talk’) on the part of
actors, and the presence of others. Arendt maintains that “[e]ach time we talk about things that
can be experienced only in privacy or intimacy, we bring them out into a sphere where they will
assume a kind of reality which, their intensity notwithstanding, they never could have had before.
The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the
world and ourselves” (50).
23 Arendt’s well-known definition of the term ‘public’ goes as follows: “The term
‘public’ signifies… first, that everything appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody
and has the widest possible publicity… Second, the term ‘public’ signifies the world itself, in so
far as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned place in it” (50-52).
29
her characterization of the term public. It not only is “securely shielded against the
visibility and audibility of the public realm,” but also “ejects one radically from the
world” (112). Pain is the least possible for being seen and heard by others, because it
“cannot even be adequately voiced, much less represented in the outside world” (141).
Furthermore, pain has the strongest capacity to deprive us of our feeling for the reality of
the world. Pain ejects one from the world, fostering mistrust of or independence from the
world. Painful experiences, among all other bodily sensations, are “the only sense
experiences that are so independent from the world that they do not contain the
experience of any worldly object” (114). For instance, Arendt argues that the pain caused
by a sword does not tell anything “whatsoever of the quality or even the worldly
existence of a sword” (114). Pain is the epitome of independence from the world and
worldly objects, let alone from other men. In pain, the reality of the outer world is cast
open to doubt. For this reason, if there is any locus in which bodily pain can reside
among the three distinct realms of vita activa, it is not the shining public realm of action,
but labor, which is “the most private” (112) of human activities. Just as the human body
in the activity of labor is “thrown back upon itself” (115), so does the “loss of world”
occur in pain (115).
Hannah Arendt is not alone in claiming the sheer privacy of the bodily pain. In
her influential study, The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry (1985) also asserts that pain is
necessarily a private experience. 24 Pain, especially another person’s physical pain,
24 In another lesser-known essay, Scarry argues that pain as a private experience is also
manifested in the realm of popular culture. She finds in the various images of advertisements and
commercials for aspirin and nonaspirin substitutes the representation of pain “not as the person in
pain is seen from the outside, but as the pain itself is felt from the inside” (1994 30-31). In other
30
“however portentous, has no reality because it has not yet manifested itself on the visible
surface of the earth” (3). Even when we are within a touching distance with someone in
acute pain, the pain of the other feels unreal to us. While the experience of one’s own
physical pain constitutes the paradigm of certainty, hearing about another person’s
physical pain the paradigm of doubt. The pain of the other can never be completely
confirmed. 25 The paradigm of doubt is partly, if not mainly, due to pain’s “unsharability
through its resistance to language” (4). Pain, Scarry argues, not only resists to language,
but “actively destroys” it. Moreover, physical pain has no referential content to the world.
Pain “is not of or for anything” (5). Just as Arendt argues that pain ejects one from the
world, so does Scarry suggest that there is a very slim if not null room in the public world
for pain. Pain more than anything else is characterized by its “radical subjectivity.” 26
While Scarry shares with Arendt a view on bodily pain’s privacy, unsharability,
and wordlessness, she is more open to the possibility of the body in pain to enter the
public realm. Even though the person in pain is “so bereft of the resources of speech, it is
not surprising that the language for pain should sometimes be brought into being by those
who are not themselves in pain but who speak on behalf of those who are” (6). In fact,
Scarry is endorsing “avenues by which this most radically private of experiences begins
words, pain in the realm of popular culture has been defined as something internal and private
that resists representation.
25 This reflects one of the fundamental communication problems: the “veracity gap”.
Historically, numerous attempts including torture were made to bridge this veracity gap; see
Peters (2005), especially pp. 250-259.
26 This view is not, of course, uncontestable. For example, Wittgenstein (2001) might
agree with Scarry, given that he acknowledges the futility of attempts to explain pain with any
referential theories of language. This, however, does not lead him to confine pain to the radical
subjectivity. For Wittgenstein, pain is not merely a private experience. It is a public relationship.
31
to enter the realm of public discourse” (6). This is mainly because Scarry has different
political purposes from those of Arendt; that is, the collective task of diminishing pain.
To be able to accomplish this political purpose, it becomes crucial for her to leave open
the possibility to verbally express pain. For example, the success of Amnesty
International’s attempt to bring about the cessation of torture depends upon its ability to
verbalize the pain of the tortured and “communicate the reality of physical pain to those
who are not themselves in pain” (9). Scarry’s endorsement for the possibilities of the
body in pain to enter the public realm, however, does not change her basic proposition of
pain-in-itself as necessarily a private, thought-destroying event.
It seems that the status of the bodily pain as something fundamentally private is
indisputable in both theories of the public realm and the body in pain, at least in each of
the best known versions, represented by Hannah Arendt and Elaine Scarry respectively.
Words are fundamental constituents of the public realm along with deeds (Arendt 1958).
Pain, however, not only resists language, but actively destroys it (Scarry 1985).
Moreover, physical pain has no referential content to the world that guarantees the
existence of the public realm. Pain’s undeniable privacy to inner sensations, its resistance
to language, and its non-referential tendency to the world seem to guarantee that the locus
of the body in pain be kept outside the public realm.
To properly understand the delegation of the bodily pain into the private realm,
one needs to consider the historical context out of which the theorization took place, and
the ‘big picture’ under which the particular attitudes toward the body in pain took its
shape. In the case of Arendt, this involves examinations of her experience and struggle
with Fascism. The politics of the Fascist era is more than anything else physical. The
32
devastating consequences of infiltration of the bodies into the public realm were
witnessed during the Fascist era in “[t]he deliberate use of physical violence as a political
instrument, the genocidal policies which depended on racial theories of physical
characteristics, the creation of a mass political audience through relentless projection of
the national leaders’ appearance, voice and gestures in mass rallies” (Outram 1989 7). In
fact, the image of the body is the key to understand totalitarianism. The logic of
totalitarianism resorts to the image of the body, especially a bodily function. The
emergence of totalitarianism can be best described with the aid of the bodily metaphors:
“[i]t is as if the body had to assure itself of its own identity by expelling its waste matter,
or as if it had to close in upon itself by withdrawing from the outside, by averting the
threat of an intrusion by alien elements… The campaign against the enemy is feverish;
fever is good, it is a signal, within society, that there is some evil to combat” (Lefort 1986
298). In totalitarian ideology, even the party becomes a part of the body. Once the party
is identified with the People-as-One, it occupies the position of the head. At any rate, the
idea of the body dominating the public realm cannot be a pleasant idea for those who
went through totalitarianism.
Arendt’s attribution of pain as something utterly private can also be interpreted
keeping in mind the sweeping historical development she delineates—the demise of the
public realm. 27 Concentration on the bodily sensation, for Arendt, is one ramification of
the demise. She argues that hedonism, whose doctrine says “only bodily sensations are
real,” shares one thing in common with modern enchantment about small happiness: the
27 The book Human Condition can be read as an attempt to write a history of depravity
of the public realm from the ancient Greece to modernity.
33
retreat to the private realm. Hedonism as well as the “Petit Bonheur of the modern French
people” is “but the most radical form of a non-political, totally private way of life, the
true fulfillment of Epicurus’ Lathe biōsas kai mē politeuesthai (live in hiding and do not
care about the world)” (113). Arendt sees in hedonism’s obsession with bodily sensations
as well as in the happiness achieved in isolation a similar lamentable phenomenon: retreat
to the worldlessness. 28
One of the reasons why bodily pain is relegated to the private realm for Arendt is
that pain lies outside the realm of generative performativity. Pain, like any other necessity
of life, is not defined or transformed by creative fashioning that is the sine qua non
characteristic of the public realm. In addition, pain is characterized by sameness. That the
sheer monotony exists in all suffering is another reason why Arendt was opposed to the
body in pain entering the public realm. The public realm for Arendt is a place that
guarantees the plurality of agencies. The sheer monotony of pain does not fit well with
the public realm where the disclosure of unique agency is encouraged.
While Arendt’s theorization of the bodily pain as something fundamentally
private is understandable especially given the aforementioned context, it still has some
unanticipated effects. The place of the private in Arendt, who insists on the distinction
between public and private, far from trying to dissolve it, has been a sticking and vexing
point especially within feminism. Arendt can be easily interpreted as sticking to a
hierarchy that the contemporary feminists have tried to demolish or at least to blur.
Arendt, moreover, seems to deny that something private can have immense political
28 The tracing of a crucial term, immortality, shows the decay of the public realm in
modernity with the rise of the social. Striving for immortality, once a great reward for excellence
performed in the public realm, is now equated with “the private vice of vanity” (56).
34
significance. While her enchantment with the public realm can be interpreted as
phallocentric commitment, privacy has also invaluable dimension in her treatment of the
relationship between public and private: the sense of rootedness and protection from the
shining but harsh light of the public realm. In fact, recent theorization by feminists,
especially those who try to recuperate Arendt as a main source of insight in their
projects, 29 argued that public and private in Arendt refer less to the hierarchical norms of
gender than to the different conditions for human activity. In spite of the recent
articulations, feminists still see in her rigid distinction between public and private as well
as her scanting discussion of the private at least a worthy antagonist to grapple with.
Arendt’s relegation of the bodily pain to the private realm can be more vexing,
and even lamentable, when one tries to understand the historically marginalized others. In
one of the footnotes in Human Condition, Arendt quotes from Barrow’s book, Slavery in
the Roman Empire, that “it is impossible to write a character sketch of any slave who
lived.… Until they emerge into freedom and notoriety, they remain shadowy types rather
than persons” (Arendt 1958 50). In On Revolution, Arendt also notices that the real curse
of poverty, at least since the French Revolution, is darkness rather than want; that “they
[the poor] remain excluded from the light of the public realm where excellence can shine;
they stand in darkness wherever they go” (Arendt 1963 63). Arendt regards as the
political predicament of the poor, more than anything else, invisibility. The early works
by Karl Marx, 30 who saw through the political predicament (not social one in Arendtian
29 Most notable among these are Honig (1995) and Kristeva (2001).
30 Arendt evaluates that the “later” Marx succumbed to the very modern view where the
social question or the economy, rather than the political one, takes precedence. This unfortunate
conversion was due to Marx’s ambition to raise his ‘science’ to the rank of natural science as well
35
terminology) 31 of the poor better than anyone else, can be seen as motivated by “the
desire to rehabilitate posthumously those to whose injured lives history had added the
insult of oblivion” (64). That oblivion can be the curse of the poor, however strange it
sounds to the moderns, is best described by John Adams:
The poor man’s conscience is clear; yet he is ashamed…
He feels himself out of the sight of others, groping in the dark.
Mankind takes no notice of him. He rambles and wanders
unheeded. In the midst of a crowd, at church, in the market… he is
in as much obscurity as he would be in a garret or a cellar. He is
not disapproved, censured, or reproached; he is only not seen… To
be wholly overlooked, and to know it, are intolerable. If Crusoe on
his island had the library of Alexandria, and a certainty that he
should never again see the face of man, would he ever open a
volume? (quoted from Arendt 63-64)
While Arendt recognized the “crippling consequences of obscurity, in contrast to
the more obvious ruin which want brought to human life” (64), she did not recognize that
the relegation of the bodily pain into the private realm can be one of the main
contributors to the curse of oblivion. The shadowy existence of slavery is partly, if not
mainly, explained by the barrier of the public realm that relegates their bodily pain to the
private realm 32 . Given that visibility and audibility constitutes publicity for Arendt, the
as to the Hegelian legacy, especially “the reversibility of concepts” (Arendt 1963 59). In other
words, in later Marx, the political problematic of the contingent man-made violence was
displaced to that of social necessity. With this change, Arendt sees degeneration, that is,
abundance not freedom becomes the aim of revolution.
31 Arendt’s rigid distinction between the political and the social can be criticized as her
inability to see the economic problems as political ones, which can be devastating when
understanding the modern political problems including the Welfare state. This was already
pointed out by numerous scholars, most notably by Habermas (1977).
32 The curse of darkness in slavery, that they were simply not seen or wholly overlooked,
is in part explained by social construction of collective memory. For instance, Sontag (2003)
argues that the nonexistence of a slave museum in the U.S. can be best explained by the selfrighteousness in the American mind that wants to think that evil happened not here but out there.
36
invisibility of the poor means that there is no public realm for them. Then, the question is
how the hitherto invisible can enter the public realm. The bodily pain can be perhaps the
only resource or the means for the historically marginalized to appear out of the darkness
of sheltered existence and enter into the public realm. What is usually private and
incommunicable, contained within the boundaries of the sufferer’s body, can contribute
to, to borrow Scarry’s term, “the making of the world.”
Arendt’s stern relegation of pain to the private realm and Scarry’s basic premise
of pain’s incommunicability have a limiting effect in developing a politics of pain and
suffering with regard to the public realm. For Arendt, what is considered to be irrelevant
or unworthy of being seen or heard becomes “automatically” a private matter (Arendt
1958 51). Pain is one prime exemplar that is not “fit” for the realm of appearance.
However, the demarcation between public and private itself is a political matter of
importance, as it is supported by the famous phrase, ‘the personal is political.’ In fact, the
major political movements of the last half century in the West have been revolving
around the personal identity formation of minoritized subjects. These movements made it
clear that what is fit for the public realm cannot be automatically resolved. Arendt’s
position becomes problematic, given that one of the main modes of expressing
themselves in the space of appearance has been revolving around the bodily pain. Once
bodily pain is relegated to and kept within the private realm, the voices of women, slaves,
and the poor can hardly escape the curse of oblivion.
Scarry’s basic premise of pain’s utter resistance to language has also been
criticized to be constraining when envisaging a politics and ethics of pain of the subaltern.
Examining the Sati practice in India, for example, Sunder Rajan argues that “[t]o attribute
37
pain’s resistance-to-representation to the essential nature of pain itself is to ignore the
cultural, historical, gender-specific and generic variations in the representation of pain”
(Sunder Rajan 1993 22). Dissatisfied with the limits of a phenomenology of pain that was
developed by Scarry, Sunder Rajan attempts to elaborate “both a phenomenology of pain
and a politics that recognizes pain as constitutive of the subject [as agent]” (23). Scarry’s
“western meditation on the subject of the body in pain,” according to Sunder Rajan, can
be appropriated, but at the same time should be contested for “a specific historical and
feminist project in the interests of the female subject as agent” (15). In spite of what
Scarry calls the ‘radical subjectivity’ of pain, the body in pain has played a crucial role,
especially for the subaltern.
The term, ‘subaltern,’ needs clarification here. In the preface of Selected
Subaltern Studies, Ranajit Guha (1988b) explains that the word ‘subaltern’ stands for ‘of
inferior rank’; it is “a name for the general attribute of subordination… whether this is
expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way” (35).
Edward Said (1988) notices that the word ‘subaltern’ presupposes its implied opposite,
“‘dominant’ or ‘elite,’ that is, groups in power” (v-vi). The provenance of the word is
rather extraordinary. It was born out of censorship, and thus is an exemplar of catachresis.
The term, subaltern, was derived from Gramsci’s usage in the Prison Notebooks. Gramsci
used the term, because he was obliged to censor himself in prison. As Spivak puts it in an
interview, it was “the description of a military thing” (de Kock 1992 45). The term
reflects Gramsci’s realization that class formation questions are not enough to solve the
38
so-called north-south problems of Italy. 33 Since then, it became popular mainly by the
use of a group of scholars who attempted to rewrite the history of colonial India “to
articulate the hidden or suppressed accounts of numerous groups—women, minorities,
disadvantaged or dispossessed groups, refugees, exiles, etc” (Said 1988 vi).
The alternative historiography developed by the subaltern scholars can be easily
articulated with the notion of counter publics. It may sound very familiar to proponents of
counter publics when Edward Said articulates one of the prerogatives of the subaltern
studies as “to rewrite the history of colonial India from the distinct and separate point of
view of the masses, using unconventional or neglected sources in popular memory, oral
discourse, previously unexamined colonial administrative documents. This new history…
then provides an alternative history to the official one” (Said 1988 vi), Both the
subaltern studies group and the counter public sphere scholars share deep dissatisfaction
with ‘elite’ historiography, and attempt to build an alternative historiography that is
“sharply contestary” (Said 1988 vii) to the dominant or official one. The crucial terms
often deployed in the subaltern historiography such as ‘people,’ ‘resistance’ and
‘mobilization,’ (Guha 1988a) also open a possibility of connecting the subaltern
historiography to the discussions of counter publics. 34
What is more important and relevant to the task of my dissertation is that
subaltern studies pay serious attention the place of the body in pain. The subaltern, by
definition, cannot speak (Spivak 1988a). The subalterns are defined by their inability to
33 In this context, Spivak argues that subaltern is different from the working class (de
Kock 1992 45-46).
34 There are, of course, differences as well. In the subaltern studies, the battles are waged
on two fronts; elitism as well as colonialism.
39
speak. Silence is a constituting component of the subalterns. Unable to be represented
within the dominant system of representation, subaltern consciousness turns into
something similar to Kant’s das Ding an sich. The raison d'être of subaltern scholars then
becomes to “plot a story, unravel a narrative and give the subaltern a voice in history”
(Sunder Rajan 1993 55). 35 In the absence of the subaltern voice, attempts to grapple
with and dig through the subaltern subject or consciousness have been made by paying
attention to the traces of the body in pain.
The famous article by Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” comes out of an
incident in which “a subaltern person had tried extremely hard to speak, to the extent of
making her damned suicide into a message” (de Kock 1992 44). In Spivak’s (1988)
interpretation of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri’s suicide, a bodily cue—her menstruation—
plays a pivotal role. Paying attention to the fact that Bhuvaneswari waited for the onset of
menstruation in order to commit suicide, Spivak reads her suicide as an attempt to
“rewrite the social text of sati-suicide in an interventionist way” (307). Guha (1987) also
tries to reclaim an act of resistance for Chandra, a deceased subaltern subject, by looking
at “the domain of the female body” (162). For Guha, the death of a subaltern constitutes
speech that cannot be otherwise heard. For Sunder Rajan (1993) who attempts to
(re)constitute subaltern subjectivity in the interests of a subaltern praxis, the body of the
subaltern, especially their pain becomes essential. The subaltern body, especially “pain”,
for Sunder Rajan, forms “a specific, gendered ground for subjectivity” (34).
35 Spivak (1988a) is much more cautious in giving the subaltern a voice in history. She
seems to propose that scholars need to listen to the subaltern after systematically ‘unlearning’
their privileges.
40
While the subaltern scholars differ with each other in their political purposes and
theoretical groundings, 36 Guha, Spivak, and Sunder Rajan all share their endeavors to
read a story in the body of the subaltern. The body in pain becomes one of the most
crucial archives and treasure houses of the subaltern consciousness. This is not surprising,
given that the subaltern studies are motivated, intrigued and baffled by the absence of
records of the subaltern. In pursuing a project to ‘know’ the subject of sati, both Mani
(1998) and Spivak (1988a) are frustrated by the unavailability of records of women. The
historian or story-teller seldom encounters the testimony of the subaltern’s voice. For the
subaltern studies scholars, arguments about the body in pain’s essential privacy and
incommunicability are devastatingly restraining.
Chapter Outlines
Can the body in pain be transformed to be fit to the public sphere? If so, how?
Under what circumstances? By whom? And for what effects? Chapter two, three, and
four all grapple with the questions above, yet with different foci. Chapter two aims to
complicate the issue of embodiment in the public sphere. Participation in the public
sphere is predicated upon the art of self-abstraction. In other words, participants in the
public sphere are supposed to leave out, rise above, or “bracket” everything personal or
particular, including their body. Pointing out that corporeality in the public realm or
embodiment as a subject of the public has been, and still remains, one of the most
36 Coming out of Maoist tradition, Guha (1988a) also exhibits a nationalist, and
somewhat essentialist tendency. Spivak’s famous notion of ‘strategic essentialism’ needs to be
read as a response to Guha’s essentialism. For Spivak’s intervention with the subaltern studies
group, see Spivak (1988b).
41
significant sites of struggle, I examine the case of a self-immolation protest by Chun Taeil as an extreme attempt to enter the public realm. What is at stake in chapter two is the
importance of asking the question, ‘whose body?’ when addressing the issue of
embodiment in the public sphere. By paying particular attention to how Chun Tae-il uses
his body to enter the public sphere, this chapter attempts to show that there is a different
form of self-suspension practiced by subaltern counterpublics that is distinguished from
self-abstraction used by a liberal subject. The body rhetoric of Chun Tae-il’s selfimmolation will demonstrate how ‘private’ body in pain can be made publicly relevant.
Chapter three focuses on the promises and limitations of the politics of suffering
by examining a series of self-immolation protests of South Korea in 1991. While noticing
the rhetorical power of self-immolators’ bodies in pain to form powerful identification for
an audience that feels empathy for the sufferer’s anguish, this chapter attempts to show
that the body is still an ambiguous form of signification. The body in pain can be fragile
in the process of being transformed from personal pain to a public argument, especially
without an attendant discourse to protect its ambiguous message from competing and
confounding interpretations. While chapter two deals with how the subaltern enters the
public realm by voluntarily causing pain to their body, this chapter is more focused on
spectators’ interpretations.
In chapter four, I examine theatrical politics in the larger discussion of
globalization. More attention is now being given to the symbiosis between political
spectacles and moral protests in the current televisual environment. By staging or
performing image events for mass media dissemination, local or national political
resistance easily turns into global issues. By especially focusing on the visual and
42
performative aspects of resistance, this chapter intends to discuss and delineate a
transformation of citizen participation in the global public sphere, explore a possibility
for enacting “globalization from below,” and consider the emergence of new forms of
participatory democracy. A farmer’s suicide protest at the WTO meeting in Cancún 2003
will be closely examined, because the case is highly significant as a model that
demonstrates not only the way in which local struggles achieve global significance but
also how global citizens can exploit the immense possibilities of mass media to enact
forms of activism adapted to a globally wired society. In the meanwhile, Special attention
will be paid to the discussion of empathy. By critically dealing with such issues as the
centrality of pain in the discussion of compassion, the kinship between sight and
compassion, sadistic voyeurism inherent in spectatorial sympathy, and the articulation
between moral virtues and political vices, this chapter also purports to raise questions
about the possible link between compassion and action. Chapter five summarizes and
concludes the previous arguments.
The comparative perspective, which I believe is necessary of any contemporary
critical inquiry, will feed into the articulation of the dissertation. Each of the chapters
deals with ‘cases’ that took place in South Korea and Asia. Lamenting the tendency in the
discussion of the public sphere that relegates history only to the background, Hohendahl
(1992) argues that a theory of the public sphere must not lose historical elements. He
indicates that questions of the good public life have to be argued and negotiated within a
particular public space informed by specific cultural traditions, because values are
culture-bound and cannot be generalized. All politics is not generic, but concrete.
Hohendahl adds that what Habermas conceptualized as the public sphere is arguably the
43
public sphere of Western Europe at best. Considering particular historical and cultural
contexts seriously, my dissertation intends to offer international criticism of theories of
politics and democratic deliberation that have a primarily Euro-American provenance.
Rather than referring to the conception in abstract philosophical terms alone, some
concrete examples or ‘stuff’ of specific cultural traditions are required. Examining the
cases of self-immolation practice in South Korea is an attempt to satisfy this need.
44
CHAPTER II
THE EMBODIMENT IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE: THE ART OF SELFSUSPENSION IN THE SUBALTERN COUNTERPUBLICS
The Art of Self-Abstraction in the Public Sphere
The political meaning of the public subject’s self-alienation is one of the most
important sites of struggle in contemporary culture.
Michael Warner
Theories and practices of the public sphere rest upon certain accounts of selfhood.
To think, speak, listen, watch and act as a member of a public is to assume a certain kind
of personhood. The self as a participant in the public sphere must be able to set aside,
bracket, and rise above everything particular and personal. Private interests, intense inner
feelings, and idiosyncratic partiality are to be suspended. All participants in the public
sphere should pay the entrance fee before the gate of the public sphere of transcending
personal commitments and private interests. At the kernel of the theories and practices of
publicity lies the requirement of public subjectivity, or more precisely, the art of selfabstraction.
Publicity forces us to alienate ourselves. As the subjects of publicity, we enter
into a different relationship to ourselves. When individuals are “reading and debating…
as a public, [they] adopt a very special rhetoric about their own personhood” (Warner
1992 382). We imagine indifference to any particularities such as race, gender, class, and
culture, namely what defines us as ourselves. The public subjects are alienated from
themselves in the process of self-abstraction where they are required to maintain a
detachment from their personal interests. As Michael Warner succinctly explains, “a
principle of negativity” is essential to self-abstraction:
45
In the bourgeois public sphere,… a principle of negativity
was axiomatic: the validity of what you say in public bears a
negative relation to your person. What you say will carry force not
because of who you are but despite who you are. Implicit in this
principle is a utopian universality that would allow people to
transcend the given realities of their bodies and their status
(Warner 1992 382).
Rules by which the notion of the public sphere operates are based upon a sort of
distance any public subject is demanded to acquire from his own particular absolute.
The art of self-abstraction, or the alienation of the public subject, is not limited to
the operation of the public sphere. Democracy, or more precisely liberal democracy, is
precisely based upon the same process. To an elementary, but (or thus) fundamental
question ‘who is the subject of democracy?’ Žižek gives the following Lacanian answer,
suggesting that democracy operates in the similar vein:
[T]he subject of democracy is not a human person, ‘man’ in
all the richness of his needs, interests, and beliefs. The subject of
democracy, like the subject of psychoanalysis, is none other than
the Cartesian subject in all its abstraction, the empty punctuality
we reach after subtracting all its particular contents. In other
words, there is a structural homology between the Cartesian
procedure of radical doubt that produces the cogito, an empty point
or reflective self-reference as a remainder, and the preamble of
every democratic proclamation ‘all people without regard to (race,
sex, religion, wealth, social status)… it is an abstraction of all
positive features, a dissolution of all substantial, innate links,
which produces an entity strictly correlative to the Cartesian cogito
as a point of pure, nonsubstantial subjectivity (Žižek 1991 163).
Democracy is formal. The handy definition of democracy, that it treats everyone
equally without regard to gender, sex, race, social status, etc., shows that democracy itself
rests upon the art of self-abstraction. The ‘without regard to’ is the condition of
possibility for democracy. From this perspective, democracy can be said to be
“fundamentally anti-humanistic” (Žižek 1991 163). Its measure is not of concrete and
46
actual men, but a formal abstraction. Contrary to commonly held beliefs that democracy
is about human sociability and community building, Žižek contends that “[t]here is in the
very notion of democracy no place for the fullness of concrete human content, for the
genuineness of community links: democracy is a formal link of abstract individuals”
(1991 163). 37 Just as Warner argues that alienation is inextricable in the formation of the
public subjects, Žižek suggests that democracy also necessitates “alienation,” the formal
abstraction of its participants from their private singularity. 38
The art of self-abstraction, as a key element in any theorizations of the public, has
also been a key bone of contention. The diverse ways in which self-abstraction has been
labeled reveal the wide spectrum of different perspectives or attitudes toward it—“as a
universalizing transcendence, as ideological repression, as utopian wish, as
schizocapitalist vertigo, or simply as a routine difference of register” (Warner 1992 377).
On the one hand, self-abstraction, especially in the long tradition influenced by Stoicism,
has been regarded as a virtue. In this line of thought, not a Cartesian cogito as Žižek
contends, but the Stoic self takes the central stage of self-abstraction. 39 While the
underpinning stoic tradition in the arguments for self-abstraction has become almost
forgotten, especially with the rise of modern professionalism and objectivism, one can
37 If one admits with Žižek that democracy is formal, the attempt to replace its empty
characteristics with a commitment to a great community, as was the case of Dewey (1927), might
not prove very effective.
38 Democracy “lives on the split between the ‘public’ and ‘private,’ it is possible only
within the framework of what was once, when the voice of Marxism was still heard, called
‘alienation’” (Žižek 1991, 164).
39 Peters argues that “[t]hinking of the public as a place of danger and exposure where
private sensitivities must be kept on hold is not just a liberal notion, but more fundamentally a
stoic one” (1995b 668).
47
find the long lineage from Cicero through Mill and Adam Smith where the account of the
Stoic self-abstraction figures prominently (Peters 1995b; 2005). Here self-abstraction
becomes self-suspension: “self-abstraction is an equal-opportunity requirement; everyone
has to go beyond themselves” (Peters 1995b 671). The faculty to abstract oneself,
especially in the well known notion of Adam Smith’s impartial spectator (Smith 2002),
means to see oneself as another. Not only one’s private welfare needs to be bracketed, but
also one needs to see oneself from the perspective of others. The inextricable relationship
between publicity and self-abstraction is reaffirmed here, because the virtue of selfabstraction can be obtained through exposure to the public realm. Publicity plays a
crucial role in providing its participants with an opportunity for self-regulation. Publicity,
as a morally regulative agent, yields some ethically positive results. By learning “the
tragic necessity of [self-] discipline” (Peters 1995b 672), the public subject is expected to
acquire openness to others. World citizenship and cosmopolitanism can be imagined only
after taming the beast within each breast. The virtue of stoic self-discipline can still
remain as a viable option in today’s world where what Arendt called human plurality is
experienced in a violent way.
As is the case with other virtues, however, a virtue of self-abstraction is hard to
attain. What is problematic is that the difficulty exacerbates along the lines of gender,
class, and race. Contrary to the camp sympathetic toward the virtuous aspect of its Stoic
legacy, others (Deem 2002; Fraser 1992; 1995; Warner 1992; 2002) have contended that
the act of self-abstraction can be an ideological cover for domination. The argument that
self-abstraction is the prerequisite to enter the public realm can operate as a preventive
hindrance to historically oppressed others. The art of self-abstraction can be not only the
48
ethical moment of transcendence, but also a major source of domination. In fact, the most
intense critiques of the notion of the public have been raised against and aimed at the art.
The main question is who enjoys the benefit of publicity’s self-abstraction. The ability to
abstract oneself in publicity always has been an unequally available and distributed
resource. As Warner (1992) compendiously explains, “[s]elf-abstraction from male
bodies confirms masculinity. Self-abstraction from female bodies denies femininity”
(383). The art of self-abstraction, or bracketing everything personal and particular when
entering the public sphere, has been favorable to white male property owners.
Historically, the art has been neither ‘universal’ nor ‘open to all.’ In the face of existing
inequalities, the bracketing can nurture rather than constrain privilege in class, race, and
gender. With the rhetoric of openness to all, the art of self-abstraction can turn into an
ideology, covering historically specific interests. In the gesture of eliding the specificity
of particular bodies, publicity “hyperembodies” others (Deem 2002).
The issue of embodiment is a key here. The logic of self-abstraction provides a
privilege for those whose bodies are unmarked: the male, the white, and the middle class.
While all individuals as a subject of the public sphere have to leave out their
particularities, some particularities such as whiteness and maleness are already positively
oriented to the procedure of abstraction. Just as the white seldom recognize themselves
through the category of race, some particularities are scarcely even imagined as
particularities. The prevalent use of the term ‘feminism,’ and the striking absence of its
pair expression ‘masculinism,’ attest that some particulars are more particular than the
others. As long as some particularities are regarded as particulars, they are more resistant
to what Žižek (1991) calls the process of ‘mediation.’ While certain bodies could go
49
unmarked, other features of bodies carry “the humiliating positivity of the particular”
(Warner 1992 382). When a subject whose particularity is seen as particular enters the
public realm, (s)/he has to go through a certain kind of humiliation, whether the
humiliation takes a form that is very brutal or very refined, and thus all the more cruel.
Self-abstraction “can be a physically damaging regime for it encourages terror and selfloathing in those whose bodies are marked in such a way that self-abstraction is
impossible” (Peters 1995b 658). In the asymmetry of embodiment, the art of selfabstraction turns into “a minoritizing liberal logic” (Warner 1992 385).
The public subject is supposed to be disembodied. The logic of self-abstraction
exiles the positivity of constituents of the public in its process of interpellation. To enter
the public realm, one needs to wear the mask of disembodied impersonality. The
disincorporation was salient in the eighteenth century authorship in print. While the
faculty of disincorporation in written texts has long been something hauntingly
troublesome since Plato, 40 it was in the eighteenth-century public print discourse that
disincorporation of authors became the convention (Warner 1992). The written text
became no longer regarded as the personal extension of the author. The discourses in the
bourgeois public sphere are characterized by disembodied anonymity. 41 Habermas’s
account of the literary public sphere in the eighteenth-century does not capture this
40 For Plato’s famous attack on the written texts, see Phaedrus. Even though Plato
started worrying about the faculty of disincorporation in a then new medium of writing, written
text was still regarded as extension of its author in Plato’s time. For instance, when Socrates saw
the written speech of Lysias under Phaedrus’s cloak, he reproaches Phaedrus for having brought
“Lysias himself” (Plato 1995 228D-228E).
41 Evaluations on the anonymity vary. The anonymity can be seen a way to certify
citizen’s disinterested concern for public good. For Foucault (1977), however, this anonymity is
to certify the efficacy for the operation of power, as can be exemplified by the anonymity of the
person who is sitting in panopticism to watch the wards.
50
development. According to Habermas, the periodicals at the time were characterized by
“their proximity to the spoken word” (Habermas 1989 42). Its function was to foster
discussion among private individuals “in order to reenter, via reading, the original
conversational medium” (42). In other words, Habermas imagines that the emergence of
the literary public sphere that was brought into existence by print culture was the mere
extension of intimate dialogues. He fails to recognize the distinct feature of print culture
that is not compatible with embodied orality culture.
Contrary to Habermas’s account, a disembodied public subject is a prosthetic
person, as was the case with the Spectator for Steele (Warner 1992 380-382). The
prosthetic body does not express the given body. Nor does it get pinned down or reduced
to the natural body. In the case of Steele, the prosthetic body had a function of “tak[ing]
abuse for the private person” (Warner 1992 381). By using the prosthetic body that does
not reduce to or express his own particular body, Steele could “provide himself with a
kind of prophylaxis against violation” (381). Thanks to the abstract public subject of the
Spectator, Richard Steele could have a liberty not to worry about risks that could be done
to his personal body. The particular body of the author (Richard Steele) could now have
the print (the Spectator) say and argue for the author. Through publicity’s self-abstraction,
Steele could enjoy the benefit of disincorporation over his own particular body.
The problem with self-abstraction is not just that publicity abstracts certain bodies
more seamlessly than others, but that it can never fully abstract the body. The abstracting
discourse of publicity cannot operate without a certain remainder. As Warner points out,
“public discourse from the beginning offered a utopian self-abstraction, but in ways that
left a residue of unrecuperated particularity, both for its privileged subjects and for those
51
it minoritized” (1992 384). Žižek gives the fuller account of the remainder with regard to
formal democracy. Finding Rorty’s liberal utopia, 42 which is based upon clearly
differentiated domains of public and private, “problematically imprecise,” Žižek argues
that “[t]he problem with this liberal dream is that the split between the public and private
never comes about without a certain remainder” (Žižek 1991 159). While Rorty’s liberal
utopia presupposes the possibility of a public law that is not smeared by “a ‘pathological’
stain of enjoyment” (160), Žižek sees in the very public law a radically private and
obscene character. The obscene law or superego “draws the ‘energy’ for the pressure it
exerts on the subject from the very enjoyment of which it deprives him by acting as an
agency of prohibition” (159). For this reason, Žižek recommends that one read Kant
along with, not separate from, Sade, so that one can realize that the possibility of Kantian
duty is always already smudged by private obscene enjoyment. The remainder can be
better explained by resorting to Marx, who found out the secret of the economic
doppelganger of formal democracy — the market:
[T]he ‘formal democracy’ of the market, its equivalent
exchange, implies ‘exploitation,’ appropriation of the surplus
value, but this imbalance is not an indication of an ‘imperfect’
realization of the principle of equivalent exchange, rather
equivalent market exchange is the very form of ‘exploitation,’ of
the appropriation of surplus value. That is to say, formal
equivalence is the form of a nonequivalence of contents (Žižek
1991 166).
For Marx, the nonequivalence of contents in the commodity is easily forgotten
because of the mystically abstract power of money. Lurking beneath the appearance of
the equivalent exchange in the market is the remainder; the leap in the dark in the act of
42 On Rorty’s liberal utopia, see his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Rorty 1989).
52
selling. What Marx criticizes by his theory of value is that money, by giving an
impression of equivalent exchange, conceals the fact that there is always-already an
asymmetry among commodities let alone between a commodity owner and a money
owner, or a seller and a buyer (柄谷行人 [Karatani], 1998). Just as market hides, but can
never fully remove, the inherent exploitation with its logic of formal exchange, nor can
formal democracy erase its own remainder. In this sense, Žižek argues that “[t]he
problem is not that this abstraction proper to democracy dissolves all concrete substantial
ties, but rather that it can never dissolve them” (164-165). The abstracting discourse of
publicity is not an exception. While the discrepancy between the abstract “citoyen and the
bourgeois bearer of particular, ‘pathological’ interests” (Žižek 1991 164) is stitched up
rather smoothly in Habermas’ accounts, there is always a leftover, or certain remainder in
the process of abstraction—the inadequate particularity of individual bodies. The weakest
link of the bourgeois public sphere emerges and manifests itself “whenever the public
sphere can no longer turn a blind eye to its privileged bodies” (Warner 1992 397).
So far, I have been trying to show that corporeality in the public realm or
embodiment as a subject of the public has been, and still remains, one of the most
significant sites of struggle in the theorizations or elaborations of the notion of the public
sphere. In fact, numerous critiques on the Habermas’s public sphere model can be
interpreted as variant expressions of discontents about the art of self-abstraction.
Feminists, Marxists, and critical race theorists have all indicated, directly or indirectly,
that the feat of self-abstraction cannot be enjoyed especially by those whose bodies are
marked, and that the art of self-bracketing itself can serve as a form of control. For
example, Nancy Fraser (1992; 1995) points out as a fundamental assumption central to
53
the public sphere the possibility of suspending or ‘bracketing’ everything personal or
particular including the social inequalities among the interlocutors. The public sphere is
“an arena in which interlocutors would set aside such characteristics as differences in
birth and fortune and speak to one another as if they were social and economic peers”
(Fraser 1992 118). Questioning if it is possible at all “even in principle” for participants
to deliberate as if they were social peers, Fraser expresses a deep dissatisfaction with the
‘as if’ characteristic in the public sphere.
While Fraser is right in pointing out that the feat of self-abstraction is unequally
distributed, she does not elaborate if and how other forms of self-suspension can be
operative. Rather than simply mourning the unequal distribution of the art of selfabstraction, further theoretical and historical interventions on the public sphere need to be
made focusing on the following questions. If the historically marginalized cannot enjoy
self-abstraction, what other options do they have in order to enter the public sphere?
Should everyone who wishes to appear in the public realm pay the same entrance fee of
self-purgation? Are there any other kinds of self-suspension? Is there any alternative form
of embodiment in the public realm for those whose bodies are marked? How and by what
means can the subaltern be seen and heard by others?
With these questions in mind, I examine in the following the case of selfimmolation by Chun Tae-il. By paying a particular attention to how Chun Tae-il enters
the public sphere using his body, this chapter intends to complicate the issue of
embodiment in the public sphere. In the meanwhile, I will argue that there is a different
form of self-suspension practiced by subaltern counterpublics that is distinguished from
self-abstraction used by a liberal subject.
54
The Self-Immolation of Chun Tae-Il
The bus has come. They say it is like a carton of packed bean sprouts. The bus
expands like a balloon being filled with oxygen; gaudy oxygen with long hair;
oxygen wearing a hat; oxygen of all diverse colors and shapes is pushing the sides
of steel and glass. If it could only expand just a little bit further. Finally one or
two of them screamed. They let out what sounded like an animal wail, crying out
as if it is the only way to send a message that their existence should be seen and
recognized. But who will see and notice?
Chun Tae-il
Human beings need to be recognized. By being recognized, they exist. Life is
theatrical performance.
Chun Tae-il
Chun Tae-Il was a laborer who worked as a cutter at the Pyungwha (Peace)
Market in Seoul. He burned himself to death on the street in front of the market to protest
against the horrible working conditions in the garment industry on November 13, 1970, at
the age of 22. Chun Tae-il is the first self-immolator in the modern history of South
Korea. Even though there might have been religiously motivated self-immolations in a
remote temple, Chun Tae-il’s appearance into the public realm was widely seen and
heard by the whole society. After his death, numerous articles along with more than
twenty books were published on his life, philosophy, and impacts in Korean as well as
Japanese. 43 Several documentaries were made on his self-immolation and broadcast on
the major networks in South Korea. In 1995, a full-length biographical film entitled The
Beautiful Life of Chun Tae-Il was made, and had its premier in Europe. It attracted
800,000 spectators to theaters in South Korea alone. Additionally, the ‘Theatre Hankang’
in Korea presented dramatized accounts of Chun Tae-Il’s life in 2000 and 2001. Chun
43 For the list of the books on Chun Tae-il, visit http://chuntaeil.org/.
55
Tae-il’s self-immolation was not only a significant moment of labor movement, but
continues to be one of the defining cultural and political events in the modern history of
South Korea. 44
Figure 1. The Film Posters on Chun Tae-il: The Original Domestic Poster (left) and its
Europe Premier Version (right)
From 1966 until he died from self-immolation in 1970, Chun Tae-Il kept a
journal. While some of the journals were stolen or lost, five notebooks in which he kept
his journal as well as some letters and essays he wrote were published in the book titled
44 The Chun Tae-il Commemoration Society was formed in 1981 to aid laborers in harsh
conditions. In 1985, a memorial hall for Chun Tae-il was built with the money collected by fund
raising of the Commemoration Society. Suggested by the fact that Chun Tae-il left several drafts
of novels, the Chun Tae-il Literary Award has been established and given annually to the works
that deal with labor issues or that are written by laborers since 1988. The Chun Tae-il Laborer
Award has also been established in 1988, and a group or individual who had been devoted to
labor movement has been given the award annually.
56
Don’t Let My Death Be in Vain. 45 Moreover, Cho Young-Rae’s definitive biography of
Chun Tae-Il, which was written based upon the massive volume of writings Chun Tae-Il
left in the journal, details the development of Chun Tae-il’s life, philosophy, and decision
to his self-immolation. The question about the subaltern speaking in public tends to focus,
due to the absence of record, not on whether it is well done or ill done, but on that it is
done at all. The writings that Chun Tae-il left as well as the biography offer a rare
opportunity to look into the subaltern consciousness. 46
The original Korean edition of the biography of Chun Tae-Il has an important
history of its own. The book was written by Cho Young-Rae during the three years he
was a fugitive from the police due to his involvement in the protest against the military
regime. It was first published in 1983 under the circumspect title: ‘The Life and Death of
a Young Worker,’ without disclosing the identity of the author. In fact, the biography was
published with the Chun Tae-Il Memorial Committee named as its author. These
measures were taken in order to mitigate any punitive reaction by the repressive regime
in power at the time. The sale of the book was quickly banned by The Ministry of Culture
and Information. In addition, the publication ceremony could not take place because the
police blockaded the venue, put some of the guests including Chun Tae-Il’s mother, Lee
So-Sun, under house arrest, and prevented distribution of the book. Despite the dictatorial
proscription, the biography has been read avidly and widely by university students and
progressive intellectuals ever since it first appeared.
45 Some diaries and letters can be accessed online at http://chuntaeil.org/.
46 In the following, my descriptions on Chun Tae-Il are heavily influenced by the two
books.
57
In 1991, the revised version of the book was published. There were several
changes from the first edition. In the revised edition, missing parts in the first edition
have been restored. Some wording, converted on the account of the political situation of
the time, has been changed back to the original text (조 [Cho] 1991 9). The title of the
book was changed from ‘Life and Death of a Young Laborer’ to ‘Biography of Chun
Tae-Il.’ There was no longer any need to keep the anonymous title. Furthermore, readers
were already calling the book ‘Biography of Chun Tae-Il.’ Lastly, the author of the
biography was revealed. Cho Young-Rae, who then died before the publication of the
revised edition, was said to have felt deep regret at the possibility that the biography
might be responsible for the deaths of other young people after Chun Tae-il’s selfimmolation (조 [Cho] 1991 10). These changes attest that the publication of the first
edition of the biography itself was a major event.
Chun Tae-il was born in Taegu on August 26, 1948, around the time when Korea
had just been liberated from Japan and was once again embroiled in the turmoil of the
superpowers’ ideological struggle that was brought about by the Cold War. Chun Tae-il’s
father was a needle-worker in a garment factory, but when he grew older he ran a private
sewing business at home with two sewing machines. In the small-scale garment business,
trade was heavily dependent on the speculative nature of transactions. He was driven to
alcohol after his business collapsed repeatedly. Chun Tae-il’ mother, Lee So-Sun, was
regarded to be sagacious and strong-willed. Her father, who had fought in the
Independence Movement against Japan, was arrested by the Japanese police and executed
in the hills beside her village. When she was three years old, her mother remarried. SoSun was thenceforth subjected to the misery of living with an uncaring step-parent as
58
well as the drudgery of farm work. Before she was married, she was dragged off by the
Japanese as a daishintai (挺身隊) for a life of forced labor. 47 Upon Korea’s liberation
from Japan on 15th of August in 1945, Lee So-Sun returned home and married Chun
Sang-Soo, Chun Tae-il’s father. From then on she had to go from door to door, selling
things out of a wicker basket, and sometimes even begging, for the livelihood of her
family (조 [Cho] 1991 35-36). While the “subaltern” is a contested term, Chun Tae-Il’s
life has many elements that can be qualified under the term. 48
A starving empty stomach, an exhausted body and a weary heart, an unfulfilled
dream of education because of poverty, lifelong contemptuous treatment by the wealthy,
a lifetime of manual labor and wandering… Chun Tae-il’s journal especially in his
childhood period is full of the record that the wretched of the earth had to go through. In
his journal, he once wrote that “[d]o you believe there are people like us? Insects live
better than us. And dogs with masters are better off” (조 [Cho] 1991 79). What he called
“the affluent environment” haunted him throughout his childhood.
It was in the spring of 1964 that Chun Tae-il first set foot inside the Pyungwha
Market as a helper. He was 16 years old. It was not until the autumn of 1965 that he
became a full-time worker at the market. Until then he was still polishing shoes or selling
umbrellas on the side. The Pyungwha Market and nearby two other markets had the total
47 Daishintai usually refers to military comfort women (従軍慰安婦) who were forced into
sexual slavery for Japanese military brothels during World War II. In Cho’s text, however, it is
unclear whether ‘forced labor’ that So-Sun had to go through was sexual in nature.
48 One qualification should be made. The subaltern is no longer the subaltern once (s)/he
speaks. Chun Tae-il’s appearance in the public realm as well as his own writings makes it
difficult to call him ‘the subaltern’ in the same way the term has been used in the subaltern
studies.
59
number of workers of 20,000. About 70% of the clothing demand of the entire nation was
being met from these three markets. The appalling working conditions in the Pyungwha
Market during the time of Chun Tae-il can be best described with an example of “darakbang” (attic room). Workers are locked in “darak-bang” with sewing machines, cutting
boards and tables. The height between the floor and the ceiling in “darak-bang” was 1.5
meters. It was originally a room three meters high, but by putting a false ceiling halfway
up the walls, the employers could easily double the work space. Because of the height,
workers could not walk upright. Working more than 14 to 16 hours a day in a dim
workplace without sunlight or clean air, 49 workers often took the anti-sleep pills the
factory owner provided during the busy time when they would work all night, sometimes
two or three nights consecutively. Only three bathrooms served more than 2,000 workers.
They got two days off in a month. The monthly wage for the hard work was about 3,000
won, which equated to $7.50, or approximately 25 cents per day.
Because of the appalling working conditions, many workers were suffering from
various health problems. According to Chun Tae-il’s 1970 survey, 100% of the cutters
were suffering from digestive and gastroenteric disorders, neuralgia, tuberculosis or other
pneumonia-type ailments. 90% of the machinists suffered from neuralgia, digestive
disorders, gastroenteritis or second-degree tuberculosis. Even though the Labor Standards
Law stipulated that employers must provide an annual health check-up for all employees,
it was exceptionally rare for this to actually happen. Chun Tae-il wrote: “[o]f about 30
workers only two or three are given a perfunctory check-up at a hospital designated by
49 Chun Tae-il found out in 1970 that there was a complete absence of ventilation
facilities, though there were over 10,000 workers at any time in the Peace Market buildings.
60
the Peace Market Corporation. The X-ray machines that are used have no film in them,
and no diagnosis is given afterwards” (조 [Cho] 1991 115).
After realizing the horrible working conditions, Chun Tae-il decided to quit his
job as a machinist and to become a cutter. He wrote:
When I realized that the cutters were behaving unfairly I
decided I would become a cutter so that I could side with the
workers and make a fair deal with the factory owner. In all except
the large factories the cutters took on the role of factory manager
and handled the hiring as well as the firing of workers. That is why
the cutter is indispensable to the owner. The workers’ suggestions
are passed on to the owner through the cutter. The cutter should
remain neutral. But naturally he is favorable to the factory owner,
who pays his wage (조 [Cho] 1991 118).
The cutter can be compared to, in Malcolm X’s words, ‘house negroes.’ Chun
Tae-il wanted to be a good house negro who could benefit the field negroes, because the
existence of a good house negro can make the most immediate difference in the lives of
the field negroes. At this point of time, the scope of his decision was limited to helping
other factory workers, especially young females, and standing on the side of the workers
to ensure fairness in the signing of contracts or in the event of conflict with the owner.
Within a short time, Chun Tai-il started thinking beyond these limited goals.
Chun Tae-il’s personal efforts to help the young women factory workers were
well known. By walking the two to three-hour distance, he could save the bus fare and be
able to buy some pieces of bread for the helpers who had nothing to eat for lunch. There
were many days when he ended up spending the night at the Mia-ri Police Station when,
coming out late from work, he could not get home before the curfew. Soon the policemen
became familiar with Tae-il and let him pass, so he would arrive home at one or two in
the morning. This went on for three or four years, up to the time he died. There were
61
apparent limits to what Chun Tae-il as a cutter could do to help the young factory
workers. The more he learned about their condition, the more he realized that he was
powerless to solve the underlying problems. Just as Marx grasped that the social
problems have political roots, Tae-il also realized the political nature of economic
adversity. Moreover, the employers interfered and prevented his meager efforts to
support the helpers. One day a young woman machinist spat out blood while she was
working at her sewing machine. Tae-il quickly collected some money to take her to a
hospital, where it was discovered that she had a case of third-degree tuberculosis, one of
the common industrial diseases at the Peace Market. She was promptly fired. She was a
commodity for which there was no longer a demand. This incident left a tremendous
impact on Tae-il. The young woman was dismissed with an illness that would require
more money to cure than she had earned in all of her years at the Peace Market.
It was around this time when Chun Tae-il found out the existence and the contents
of the Labor Law. Ironically, the discovery was made while his father was trying to
dissuade his son from becoming involved in the labor movement. Chun Tae-il’s father,
concerned about the misfortunes that could befall his son, told Chun Tae-il everything he
knew about the labor movement for the purpose of showing his son how difficult, and
even impossible, it would be (조 [Cho] 1991 152). The history of the Korean labor
movement, up until Tae-il’s self-immolation, had been one of an extreme oppression. The
Korean peninsula after the Second World War represented a unique battlefield of diverse
ideologies as a result of the cold war between the superpowers. The Korean War, which
resulted from the confrontation between the left-wing and the right-wing, or more
precisely from the division of the country at the end of Second World War into North
62
Korea and South Korea by the former Soviet Union and the U.S. respectively,50
produced hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of casualties. It resulted in proAmerican rightists taking over power in the south of the peninsula and virtually
obliterating the left wing in the process. This suppression of so-called ‘communist
leftists’ extended to the blotting out of all dissidents and stifled even the civil rights
movement. This situation greatly affected the lives of “the people” in general, but had a
particularly negative effect upon the labor movement. Anti-communist feelings,
especially after the Korean War, were promoted by the government, often called a puppet
of the U.S., to such an extent that any collective action taken by the poor or the deprived
was regarded as a threat to the order or ‘the nation.’ The labor movement in particular
was equated with Communist insurgency and therefore was subject to considerable
repression. In fact, when Tae-il was working at the market, the labor movement was
virtually non-existent because of the severe suppression from the government backed up
by the U.S.
The discovery of the Labor Law was one of the most defining events of Chun
Tae-il’s life. Article 1 of the Labor Law stated: ‘The purpose of the law is to determine
the standards for labor condition in order to protect and improve the basic living
conditions of workers.’ Chun Tae-il was enveloped by shocking bliss to see that there is a
law whose purpose is to protect workers. Article 42 of the Law, which stipulates
“Excluding times of rest, the number of hours that a laborer will work shall be eight
hours a day, 48 hours a week on the average. With the consent of a worker, this can be
50 The reasons why Korea, not Japan as was the case with Germany, was divided by the
superpowers at the end of the Second World War are worth investigating, but goes beyond the
scope of this dissertation.
63
increased to 60 hours a week,” and article 45, which specifies “Employees must receive
at least one paid holiday per week,” shocked Chun Tae-il, who had helplessly confronted
no less than 14 hours of work per day and 98 hours per week. He also found out the
stipulation on hazardous working condition (Article 43), the provision for one day per
month paid time-off for women (Article 59), the stipulation for educational facilities for
workers under the age of 18 (Article 63), health care (Article 71), accident compensation
(Chapter 8), and the prevention of night shift work for women and for those under 18
(Article 56). In addition, the Labor Law had penal provisions in cases employers
infringed the rights of workers. For example, when an employer violated the regulation of
a maximum work day of seven hours (in some cases nine hours) for workers between the
ages of 13 and 16, (s)/he could be sentenced to a two-year prison term or be fined up to
20,000 won. Article 108 stipulated that Labor Inspectors who intentionally kept silent
about employers’ breaches of the Labor Law could be sentenced to a maximum of three
years in prison or a suspension of their license for a maximum of five years. Chun Tae-il
felt like a fool for not having known that there were “such good regulations,” for not
having protested once to his employer over their violation, and for having been deceived.
He realized acutely that not only he but also the workers in the Pyungwha Market were
‘fools,’ because, not being aware of the law that protected their rights, they were being
systematically exploited.
Around late June of 1969, Chun Tae-il organized a meeting of ‘fools,’ which was
named ‘Baabohye’ [Society of Fools]. Chun Tae-il proposed the name of ‘Fools’ for a
cutters’ meeting and its members agreed to accept the name. In his proposal to name the
meeting, Chun Tae-il explained, “[w]e have every right to be treated like human beings
64
but up to now we have lived like machines, not once protesting against our employer who
exploits us. That is why ours is a meeting of fools. First of all, we have to realize that we
have been fools, for that is the only way we can cease being fools” (조 [Cho] 1991 161162). Chun Tae-il’s proposal was accepted unanimously by the members. They called
themselves fools because they believed that they had lived like fools. They also called
themselves fools because they were planning to achieve something that only fools would
dream of at the time. Chun Tae-il recounted incidents when he had asked some senior
workers to participate, only to be rebuffed by one and all, with the same response,
“[w]hat do you think you are doing? Don’t you know what you are trying to do is
impossible to achieve? Only fools would think of doing that sort of things” (조 [Cho]
1991 162). While they realized that they had been fools, they were still or even more than
before, regarded by others to be fools.
It might not be a coincidence that Chun Tae-il named the meeting ‘Society of
Fools,’ given historical development of the term in South Korea since the Japanese
colonial period. The generation that experienced the 36 years of Japanese colonial rule
and the political turmoil after Liberation in 1945, as well as the chaos of the Korean War,
had developed selective affinity with the ‘prudent’ life, which often was equated with the
servile life. In the historical milieu where survival takes the highest priority, ‘prudent
virtues’ were equated with compromise, obedience, humility, and moderation. Chun Taeil and the members of ‘Fools’ rejected prudence by proclaiming themselves fools. It is
only fools, to the majority, who will risk being fired or physically beaten while struggling
for something as pointless as better working conditions, while prudent ones ‘prudently’
65
try to make money to go into business. Chun Tae-il and the members were fools because
they did not know how to compromise or how to make concessions.
Prudence, as it has been developed since Aristotle, is moderate and conservative.
For Aristotle, prudence is neither defect nor excess (Aristotle 1999). Aristotle’s judge is
conservative in the sense that Aristotelian prudence is a communitarian virtue. The
Aristotelian phronimos must recognize what is probable within the boundary of ethos of
each polis and appeal to what the community values. As Charland (2003) argues, “[w]hen
inspired by Aristotle,… the experience from which that knowledge would be derived is
tied to the polis and thus cannot easily escape the charge of ‘conventionalism’ that is
often leveled at contemporary communitarians” (271). As long as prudence remains a
communitarian virtue, “prudential figures cannot remain fully ‘other,’ either as outlaws
or the abject” (Charland 2003 265). Chun Tae-il and the members of the ‘Fools,’ as
dissidents who violate communitarian norms, could not be prudent. When the senior
cutters in the Peace Market called Tae-il a fool in response to his request for participation
in the effort to build up solidarity among workers, Tae-il said to himself, “Fine, I am a
fool.” That was less self-ridicule than a mockery for the prudent and shrewd.
Chun Tae-il’s naming of the organization ‘Fools’ can have more affinity with the
Cynic tradition. Unlike the Aristotelian phronimos, the preaching of the Cynics was
mainly made by intentionally and publicly going against social institutions. As was
exemplified by Diogenes who masturbated in the marketplace, the Cynics “employed the
technique of displacing or transposing a rule from a domain where the rule was accepted
to a domain where it was not in order to show how arbitrary the rule was” (Foucault 2001
121). By calling themselves openly and shamelessly fools, Chun Tae-il and others are
66
allied with the Cynics who wanted to hurt the pride of their interlocutors by calling into
question dominant opinions, norms, habits, and institutional rules. The Cynics elicited
some truth effects by often utilizing scandalous aspects, and not concealing the
shamelessness (anaideia). Performing shamelessness in public, the Cynics successfully
shamed the mask of normalcy. Just as the Cynics’ outrageous and unruly performances
had the function of criticism, so does Chun Tae’il’s naming of himself as a fool carry out
the function of criticism—mockery of the prudent. Chun Tae-il also shares another
similarity with the Cynics in that they are in a position of inferiority. Just as the Cynics
was almost always disregarded by the noble philosophers of Greece—Aristotle referred
to Diogenes as ‘the dog’ in his Rhetoric (Aristotle 1991)—, Chun Tae-il was also called a
fool. 51
The Society of Fools came up with several agenda. Their primary goal was to
fight for the enforcement of the Labor Standards Law for the 30,000 workers in the Peace
Market. They also agreed to study the Labor Standards Law as thoroughly as possible.
Their eventual goal was to turn the Society of Fools into a labor union. They felt the
urgent need to investigate the actual labor conditions of the workers, believing that the
publicity of the reality at the Market could garner outside support for their cause. Finally,
they agreed to seek out a philanthropist who could invest money in order to open a model
business that would comply fully with the stipulations in the Labor Standards Law. The
reason for this proposal was to prove that one could still make a profit while running the
51 Chun Tae-il’s comparison with the Cynics needs at least one qualification. The
antisocial behaviors of the Cynics are inseparable from their exaltation of individual freedom
(Griffin 1986a). Chun Tae-il, however, is much more oriented toward the community of workers
rather than the glory of his own freedom.
67
business in compliance with the Labor Standards Law. The employers had been
repeatedly telling Chun Tae-il and other cutters in the market that they could not raise the
wages because business was not good, and that without employers there could be no
employees. Once they could demonstrate how it was possible to run the business, abiding
by the law and still make a profit, the employers would not repeat the same arguments.
To be able to do this, they had to come up with the money to launch the business. What
they hoped for was to find a philanthropist who would donate the money once the news
regarding the market was told to the outside (조 [Cho] 1991 169-171).
Shortly after the Society of Fools was founded, Chun Tae-il purchased a book,
one written by a scholar to explain the Labor Standards Law. Its price, 2,700 won, was
almost his one month’s salary, which Tae-il and his entire family members needed to
survive. 52 He managed to buy the book and started reading the book whenever and
wherever. It was very difficult for Chun Tae-il to understand it, though. It had been
written originally for law students, and Tae-il’s schooling amounted to no more than two
years of elementary school followed by barely a year of middle school. Each page had
many legal concepts and terminologies that were beyond his comprehension. It was at
that time that he began to wish he had a university student friend, who could explain the
difficult words to him. 53 By this time, Tae-il was fired from his job, for the reason that
52 At this time, Tae-il’s father had passed away, and Tae-il had to support his whole
family.
53 When the biography of Chun Tae-il was still banned, it was illegally but widely read
by college students. Tae-il’s wish to have a college student friend was well known among college
students partly because it provoked shame among its readers of college students. Kim (2002),
after examining the testimonials left at a grave of Park Seung-Hee who self-immolated herself in
1991, argues that shame, among other emotional responses to self-immolation, is one of the most
salient emotions. Kim also argues that shame is strongly associated with the audience’s renewed
and enhanced commitment to self-immolators’ cause.
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he was involved in the labor movement, and was stirring up the laborers in the factories,
talking about labor conditions and the Labor Standards Law. Previously he could easily
find another job because of his skill as a cutter, but this time no one would take him on
since he was now regarded as a dangerous threat to the factory owners.
Around August or September of 1969, Tae-il produced 300 copies of a
questionnaire on labor conditions. Members of the Society of Fools discreetly distributed
the questionnaire to the workers at the Market. However, several employers found copies
of the questionnaire and tore them up. Consequently, of the 100 questionnaires only 30
were returned, while 200 remained undistributed. The questionnaire incident created
upheaval in the Peace Market Corporation and Tae-il could no longer even put his foot in
the workplaces of the Peace Market. Tae-il analyzed all the collected questionnaires and
went to see the Labor Inspector in City Hall. It was the responsibility of a Labor
Inspector to check and see to it that factories complied with the provisions of the Labor
Standards Law, and in the case of a violation, to make a report for rectification. Chun
Tai-il was full of hope, never questioning whether the Labor Inspector could be in
collusion with the factory owners as they scratched each other’s backs. He was
astonished by the reception he got from the inspector. The inspector showed no surprise
or the slightest interest, even after hearing about the violating conditions at the Market.
Tae-il was taken aback by the indifferent attitude of the inspector. He wondered if the
Labor Inspector already knew about the situation at the Market. Tae-il decided to petition
the Ministry of Labor. But the outcome was the same. A survey of labor conditions in the
Market was promised but no measures were taken and nothing was heard about it again.
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It was a great shock for Tae-il. He had believed that once the appalling working
condition is exposed, the government or its organ, if not the Labor Inspectors themselves,
would force the employers to abide by the Labor Standards Law. But the authorities
actually seemed to be on the side of the factory owners. It was too much of a shock for
Tae-il, and for some time he was in a state of despondency. In a letter to his friend, Tae-il
wrote that he was suffering from self-torment. But he could get out of reprehending
himself when he saw a woman trying to get on a bus. Tae-il wrote: “How stupid I was. I
could not help reprehending myself when I saw a woman trying to get on a crowded bus,
carrying a round basket filled with merchandise on her head. Behold, what an honest,
faithful and sincere human being she was in her struggle for survival.” 54 The sight of the
woman could move Tae-il away from the abyss of self-belittling. Chun Tae-il now
realized that the roots of injustices were deeper than he had imagined. From this
realization, he did not even send a long letter to the president of South Korea, after
having written it. 55 His first attempt for publicity ended without any success.
In his journal from March of 1970, Chun Tae-il recorded elaborate ideas and
agendas for a model garment factory where the workers would be given humane
treatment in accordance with the Labor Standards Law. It is a business plan of about 30
pages long, starting with the following note:
I truly want to do…
54 For another case of “dignity in the pity-free-matter-of-factness” (a Greek amputee),
see Peters (2005 231). The woman’s lack of shame or pride might have led Tae-il to realize that
self-pity or self-pride is not the way out of his situation.
55 The letter can be found in Chun (1988 136-139).
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What: to have the Labor Standards Law implemented in the
garment industry.
With Whom: the young workers in the industry
When: Before June 1970 (by the lunar calendar)
Where: In the Peace Market (전 [Chun] 1988 155).
Chun Tae-il’s 30-page business plan included the basic principles of the business;
all the necessary equipment itemized by number and cost; number of personnel and
workers and their wages; total anticipated monthly income and expenses; a detailed study
and record of the 45 markets in Seoul; a meticulous scheme of treatment of workers,
including educational and recreational facilities, as well as an evaluation of the prospects
of success of the business, and all the safety precautions that should be undertaken. 56
Midway through the plan he describes the purpose of his endeavor as follows: “To prove
to those in the business world that it is possible to have a successful business even after
paying taxes and observing the Labor Standards Law; and to rescue as soon as possible
the young laborers who are working under horrible conditions in our indifferent society”
(전 [Chun] 1988 167). The business plan embodied his dream of an exemplary model of
the garment industry which might lay the ground for better working conditions for all
laborers. Tae-il, however, more than anyone else, knew that this plan was, as he wrote in
his journal, ‘unrealistic and outlandish.’
56 Chun Tae-il, as a cutter who knew the market situation and price very well, estimated
the wages as follows. Machinists, whose average pay was around 10,000 won at the time, would
get paid 30,000 won a month. Helpers who received 1,000 to 1,500 won, would get 8,000 won.
Five teachers, hired to educate the workers, would be paid 25,000 won each. The employer would
pay per capita fees of 800 won for sanitation expenses and 1,000 won for education per month per
employee. Working time would be reduced to eight hours and divided into day and night shifts. In
order to provide the workers with comfortable working conditions, there would be many facilities
that are not found in other factories such as an efficient heating system, table-tennis table, library,
etc. There would be 25 working days a month.
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Chun Tae-il thus far took three different ways in his struggles to better the
working conditions in the Market. First, he became a more powerful cutter and used his
position to try to take care of the young, especially female factory workers. This was
most immediate, but also very limited approach. He soon realized that the good heart of
an individual cannot do much. Second, having investigated the conditions in the Peace
Market, he appealed to the Ministry of Labor, demanding that they ensure the Labor
Standards law was implemented. This appeal to law or petition was denied helplessly.
Third, he conceived to establish a model business in which the Labor Standards Law
would be observed while still making profits. To be able to implement this idea, he
thought the only possible way that might work was to donate one of his eyes to a needy
person. He writes “I do not have university friends. And there is no one in my family who
can provide me with the amount of money I need. The only thing that I have which I can
offer to society, which society would need, is my eyes; that is to donate one of my eyes.
If I donated my eye to society, I might be introduced to philanthropists” (전 [Chun] 1988
156). Chun Tae-il knew that the body is the only resource that he had to offer. Tae-il
hoped to find a philanthropist who, reading about the news in the paper, would be moved
by Tae-il’s goodwill to believe in him to the extent of investing capital in his project. In
fact, he read a newspaper article about a blind man, and wrote a letter to him, offering
one of his eyes for a cornea transplant. However, the letter was stamped ‘Return to
Sender,’ which later was found in his journal. After numerous attempts to get the thirty
million won that was needed to launch the model business project, Tae-il gave up the
dream.
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From this moment on, Chun Tae-il’s struggle takes a different approach where
publicity becomes a keyword. In September 1970, Chun Tae-il reappeared at the Peace
Market. It had been impossible for him to find a job a year earlier due to his reputation
among the employers as an instigator of labor unrest. However, the rumor had been
largely forgotten during his absence and there were new businesses run by people who
had not heard of Chun Tae-il. The members of the Society of Fools, dispersed during his
absence, came together again with the reappearance of Tae-il. After that, Tae-il made
frequent visits to Seoul City Hall and to the Ministry of Labor to file petitions. But this
time, he was also contacting journalists to see if they might be interested in publicizing
the ominous working conditions in the Market. Tae-il and two other cutters went to the
Dong-A Broadcasting Company and met with the producer of the ‘Citizen’s Voice’
program. Tae-il explained the situation at the Peace Market and asked for a chance to
appear on the program. But the producer told them to come back with concrete statistics
and reliable data, saying that he could not broadcast an abstract story without real
evidence. On the way out of the building of the TV station, Tae-il stopped by the main
office at the Ministry of Labor. There he ran into some newspaper reporters. He implored
them to write a story about the labor conditions at the Peace Market, to which they
responded favorably, suggesting that Tae-il should do a more comprehensive
investigation of the market and come up with more detailed data, then officially submit it
with as many signatures as they could collect.
The prospect of exposing the Peace Market conditions in a newspaper was like a
light in the darkness. Tae-il and his friends distributed a questionnaire in the Peace
Market. Mindful of the fiasco created after having distributed questionnaires the previous
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year, they took great care to ensure that the employers would not find out this time. They
made sure that the questionnaires were given out when the employers were not present.
They even skipped places where a relative of the factory owner was working. As a result,
they were able to collect 126 completed questionnaires in just a few days. Tae-il and
other workers analyzed the collected questionnaires, and also gathered additional
information that had not been included in the questionnaire such as factory sizes, the
heights of the attics, numbers of employees, lighting conditions, ventilation, water supply,
and bathroom facilities in the several hundred factories of the Peace Market. They also
succeeded in getting more than 90 signatures for the petition to the Ministry of Labor.
On October 6 1970, Chun Tae-il and his colleagues submitted ‘A Petition to
Improve Working Conditions in the Garment Industry of the Peace Market’ to the
Minister of Labor. The petition contained the result of the survey. 120 out of 126 laborers
(95%) worked 14-16 hours a day on average; 96 laborers (77%) suffered from
tuberculosis or other respiratory diseases; 102 laborers (81%) could not eat properly due
to gastroenteric ailments; and all of the workers had eye infections, which made them
unable to open their eyes in bright places and made their eyes perpetually ‘gummy.’ It
also described the structure of the factories. There was no ventilation, though there were
more than 10,000 workers, and no place where workers could benefit from sunlight, even
during their break time. There were only three fresh water outlets in all the 400 factories.
On October 7 1970, one day after they submitted the petition to the Ministry of
Labor, there was an article in the newspapers on the dire working conditions at the Peace
Market. The story was printed as top news in the city section, under the heading of ‘16
Hours of Daily Labor in the Back Room,’ with the subheadings of ‘20,000 girls
74
exploited,’ ‘Almost all have occupational diseases,’ ‘Zero Points for the working
conditions at Garment Factories at the Peace Market.’ Chun Tae-il and members of the
Samdong Association 57 jumped with joy, saying “I doubted that we were seen as human
beings, but we are, seeing that our stories are in the newspaper” (조 [Cho] 1991 266).
They bought 300 copies of the Kyunghyang Daily. Since they did not have money, one of
the members left his watch as a deposit, promising to pay the balance once the
newspapers were sold. Even though the cost of a paper was a bit high for workers, some
came up to give them words of encouragement and paid even five times or fifty times of
the original cost of a paper. Tae-il and others were enthralled by visibility that publicity
brought about.
Once exposed in the public realm, the risk of revelation ensued. The day after the
newspaper coverage, the management of the Peace Market Corporation began to look for
the source of the news in the market. Late that night the members of the Samdong
Association had a meeting at which it was decided to submit their demands to the Peace
Market Corporation as follows: First, the working hours should be 8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
in the summer, and 9:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. in the winter. Second, every Sunday should be
a holiday. In unavoidable circumstances demanding overtime, the employer must get the
employee’s consent for overtime, and must pay an allowance for it. Third, the
Association will press charges against employers who are found violating the work hours.
57 When Chun Tae-il returned to the market, the Society of Fools was almost disbanded
with members getting fired and being drafted to the military service. Six members of the Society
of Fools came together again with the reappearance of Tae-il. Six more cutters joined shortly
after, making twelve altogether. They changed the name of their organization from the Society of
Fools to the Samdong Friendship Association. Samdong signified the three markets (Peace,
Donghwa and Tongil) that were central to the garment industry in Seoul.
75
Fourth, all workers should get a biennial health check-up. They should also get
inoculated when there is a contagious disease going around. Fifth, the wage of the helpers
should be increased 100% from the present 3,000 won to 6,000 won. Sixth, a general
assembly of the Samdong Association shall be held every third Sunday of the month, at
ten o’clock at the agreed place. Seventh, special meetings can be called for at any given
moment in case of need.
While one needs to have courage to enter the public realm, the publicity also gave
them courage to do something that they have never thought possible before. The next day,
Chun Tae-il and two other members visited the office of the Peace Market Corporation
with their demands. In addition, they also demanded abolition of the attics, installation of
a ventilation system and better lighting system, menstruation leave for women workers,
and support for unionization. It was an unprecedented event. While they had wanted to
make an appeal to the President of the Peace Market Corporation a number of times, they
felt too intimidated to do it. This time it was different. Thanks to the visibility given by
the newspaper coverage, they felt much more courageous to meet the representative of
the employers and make their demands. The management tried to placate them, telling
them it would be difficult to do anything immediately, but if they could wait a while, they
would try to install the ventilation and lighting system. Chun Tae-il and other members
left the office without arguing. At this time Chun Tae-il was unemployed. He was fired
once the owner had become aware of Tae-il’s involvement in the labor movement. Tae-il
was sacked from his job after 15 days without even getting paid the wages he had earned.
After the newspaper coverage, Tae-il and his friends went to the factory where Tae-il had
worked to demand his wages, and received 5,000 won. Other members and their
76
acquaintances, who also had not been paid after getting fired, went collectively for their
due wages, and were able to get the money.
While the laborers, especially the cutters of the Samdong Association, were full of
the spirit after the news coverage, the management of the Peace Market and even the
government became concerned. It was then just seven months before the presidential
election of 1971 and the Park Jung-hee regime had become more sensitive to public
opinion. Further report on the atrocious nature of the Peace Market working conditions
and on the ineptitude of the Ministry of Labor would not be favorable for the regime.
That was when the Ministry of Labor decided to act by bustling about conducting
investigations and promising to press charges against factories violating the Labor
Standards Law. A Labor Inspector from the Ministry came to see the members of the
Samdong Association. He called Tae-il and others ‘model young men,’ and told them
they would be given an award on Labor Day. Along with the Inspector, however,
detectives from the Korean Central Intelligence Agency began to be seen around the
market. In the midst of the heightened activity, the Director of Labor Law at the Ministry
came to the Peace Market in mid-October to meet with the Samdong members. He
suggested that all the unemployed members of the Samdong Association get a job, and
give him a week so that he can take some measures to meet the demands of workers.
While Tae-il and others got hired in the Market again, there was no sign of improvement
in the working conditions after a week. Tae-il went to see the Director and inquired as to
why the promises were not being fulfilled. The Director replied that although he had tried,
the demands were impossible to meet.
77
Tae-il called a meeting of the Samdong Association. Reporting on his meeting
with the Director, he proposed that they stage a street protest at the gate of the Ministry of
Labor on October 20. Tae-il knew that the annual inspection of the Ministry of Labor was
scheduled to be conducted in Parliament on that day. The choice of the date was
deliberate to maximize the visibility and effect of their demonstration. While some
members were frightened and hesitant about demonstration, Tae-il persuaded them that it
was high time to act because their demands would be easily ignored after the presidential
election. He was sure that it was the opportune moment (kairos). The members of the
Samdong Association agreed to carry out a demonstration on October 20. Street protest in
Korean is called ‘demo,’ a shortened version of demonstration. As is defined in Oxford
English Dictionary, demonstration is closely associated with publicity, especially with a
visual emphasis. While academics might be more familiar with its third definition of “the
action or process of demonstrating or making evident by reasoning,” the first entry of the
term is “the action of showing forth or exhibiting; making known.” The second meaning,
“a display, show, manifestation, exhibition, expression” attests the visual aspect of the
term. Publicity and visibility are crucial to demonstration. Demonstration also
presupposes the existence and possible support from the audience. Rather than appealing
to oppressor’s conscience, mercy or sympathy, demonstration threatens the oppressor by
publicly shaming him in front of the wider audience.
The authorities, having kept a close watch on the members of the Association,
anticipated the planned demonstration. The Labor Inspector came to see Tae-il and asked
him to wait a couple of days, promising that he would exercise all his power to see to it
that employers would accede to the demands of the workers. The Association decided to
78
postpone the October 20 demonstration. The day after the annual inspection hearing in
Parliament, Tae-il met with the Labor Inspector, who offered to buy him lunch. To Taeil’s question why he had not kept his promise, the Inspector blatantly said, “Now that the
labor hearing before parliament is over, do what you want to do.” The right and
opportune moment is precious not only because it rarely comes, but also because it is
recognized as kairos only afterwards. The owl of Minerva already flew away. The
members of the Association became furious at Tae-il’s report, and decided to stage a
demonstration on the street in front of the Peace Market at 1:00 p.m. on October 24.
Again the time and place was chosen to maximize publicity. The workers’ lunch time
starts at 1:00 p.m. and many pass by that street to restaurants. Tae-il also asked one of the
reporters to come to the scene of the demonstration. On the day, the members of the
Samdong Association went around the factories telling the workers; “[t]here will be good
entertainment during lunch time in front of the Market, do come.” At 1:00 p.m., the
police and the security guards began to try to disperse the crowd, using their clubs.
Detectives were spread out all over the Peace Market. Some employers locked up their
factories and did not let the workers out. The members of the Association realized that
things were not going according to the plan. Tae-il talked to Detective Oh, who had been
sympathetic to the workers, but who was actually collecting information on them. The
detective promised that things would improve by November 7. The demonstration was
cancelled again.
When nothing happened by November 7, Tae-il proposed a public ritual of
burning the book of Labor Standards Law. During the demonstration, Tae-il planned to
read some important articles from the Labor Standards Law book, and then say “What’s
79
the use of these provisions? If they are not followed, they better be burnt at the stake.”
Then he would carry out the ritual burning of the book, and shout the slogans such as
“We are not machines,” “Give us sunshine once a week,” “Who can bear 16 hour work a
day?” For the ritual burning of the book, Tae-il said he would bring a can of petrol. Chun
Tae-il’s determination to burn the Labor Standards Law book is symbolically significant.
It was the book that he had cherished and read over and over again, without sleeping. It
had been the wellspring and the tangible expression of all his hopes, the guarantee of
rights of all workers. Now he was determined to burn it. Underlying his resolution is the
realization that the Labor Law played a part in concealing the workers’ miserable
situation by its very existence, rather than guaranteed better labor conditions.
While the news coverage of the working conditions in the Peace Market
succeeded in making a small crack in the thick wall, the Ministry of Labor and employers
of the Peace Market, temporarily agitated, were brazenly ignoring the laborers’ demands.
The world was forgetting the news. Tae-il might have known that another questionnaire
would not do much in creating publicity. To be able to go into the public realm where the
workers’ voices are heard, another kind of publicity was needed. On November 13, 1970,
around 1:00 p.m., security guards blocked the entrance to the alley by the street in front
of the Peace Market to prevent the workers from coming out. However, there were some
500 workers milling about. By this time, several members of the Samdong Association
had already been detained by the guards in the security office. Even the placards they
prepared were also torn by detectives. The demonstration seemed to be canceled off again.
It was at this moment when Chun Tae-il poured a can of petrol over himself and
set himself afire with the Labor Standards Law in his hand. The flames enveloped him
80
within seconds. He ran, with his body on fire, to the alley where 500 workers or so were
being pushed and jostled by security guards and the police. “Observe the Labor Standards
Law,” “We are not machines,” “Let us have Sundays off.” He shouted these slogans
while running, then he collapsed. The flames engulfing Tae-il’s fallen body burned for
about three minutes. The fire was quenched by a friend who took of his jacket and
covered the flames with it. Chun Tae-il shouted “Don’t let my death be in vain.”
Reporters who got there a little late went over to ask what his motive was, but Tae-il’s
enunciation could not be understood. He was taken to the Medical Centre nearby by an
ambulance.
Figure 2. A Scene from the Film, The Beautiful Life of Chun Tae-Il: Chun Tae-il is
Burning Himself with the Labor Law in his Hand
The cutters and other workers gathered at the site upon hearing the news. Around
2:30 p.m. they began to stage a demonstration. They no longer had the placards since
81
they had been confiscated by the police. On new placards Choi Jong-in and several others
bit their fingers and wrote in blood. Holding the makeshift placards up, the workers
fought with the riot police.
Once in the hospital, Tae-il could talk to his mother and friends, but could not get
a proper treatment because he did not have money. In fact, it was the first and last time
that Tae-il visited or was taken to the hospital. In the evening that day, he passed away.
His last words were “I’m hungry…” which reflected poignantly the 22 years of his life.
Chun Tae-il’s self-immolation was not a spontaneous act. He did not set himself
afire just because there was a can of petrol beside him in a desperate situation during the
demonstration. Well before his self-immolation, Chun Tae-il wrote in his journal about
his resolution to ‘desert’ or ‘throw away’ himself. 58 He also left a following will:
“Friends, do not forget me as I am at this moment. Even if
thunder rumbles and lightning strikes this weak body; even if the
sky collapses on me, I, cherished in your memory, will have no
fear. But if there is any fear left, I shall discard that self forever. I,
whom you know, am part of your realm. I have pushed and pushed
the boulder beyond my strength and I leave the rest to you. I am
going away for a while to rest. To a place beyond this life where I
hope nobody will be threatened by the power of the wealthy or the
sword of force. Push the boulder to its destination, for I have not
yet finished pushing it in this world. Even if I am exiled from the
after-world, if only I could have pushed and pushed the boulder to
its destination” (조 [Cho] 1991 303-304).
58 In the journal he wrote on August 9, 1970, Chun Tae-il writes: “For how long have I
hesitated and agonized over this resolution?; At this moment, I have come to an absolute
resolution; I have to come back; I must come back; To my poor brothers and sisters; To the haven
of my heart; To the young hearts at the Pyungwha (Peace) Market that are my ultimate ideal; I,
who have made the vow over my life; In those long hours of contemplation; I have to care those
fragile lives; I will go by deserting me, by throwing myself away; Be patient, wait only a little bit
more; So as not to leave you; I will give all of me; You are the home of my heart; ……. Today is
Saturday, the second Saturday in August; The day I have made my decision; When countless
innocent lives are withering; I am struggling to be a dew for them; God, have mercy on me” (조
[Cho] 1991 238-239).
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When Chun Tae-il committed self-immolation, the death of laborers usually did
not come close to getting publicity. Every day, many workers were dying. Occupational
diseases mainly caused by the atrocious working conditions in the factories were killing
many laborers. Every year, thousands of miners were buried alive in collapsed coal mine
shafts. The life of laborers was often compared to that of a fly, in the sense that their
deaths, just like that of a fly, did not merit the attention of the world.
While deaths of numerous laborers did not have the proper names, thus rendered
anonymous and fell into the curse of oblivion, the case of Chun Tae-Il was different.
With his death, the atrocities in labor environment became known, turning the attention
of the society to the suffering of the laborers. People started to talk about ‘laborers,’ and
‘labor movement,’ subjects that they had not dared to broach before. It was when
utterance of the word ‘labor’ was interpreted as an attempt to overthrow the U.S.
supported government, lending hands to the enemy of the immanent threat of communist
regime, North Korea. Labor issues, previously hidden in the dark, appeared in the shining
daylight of the public realm; in newspapers and magazines as well as in the discussions
of intellectuals, students and laborers themselves.
Chun Tae-il’s death threw the whole society into turmoil. Thousands of university
students started protesting against the government’s labor policy and students of 400
students at Seoul National University began an indefinite hunger strike. The issues of
economic inequality and the horrific working conditions were developed into political
ones. Students at Yonsei University and Korea University held a rally, adopting a
declaration of citizens’ rights in which they criticized the political dictatorship and the
83
widening economic gaps among social classes. The government, in response, ordered the
indefinite closure of Seoul National University.
The event of Chun Tae-il’s death especially awakened young workers and
generated the labor movement. Throughout the corners of factories, laborers rose up in
protest with unprecedented intensity. A brief glance at daily newspapers at the time, even
after considering that all protests were not reported at the daily newspapers, gives an idea
of the intensity of protests. On November 20, 50 female workers from a factory in
Chongju went to Seoul and staged a demonstration in front of the Ministry of Labor
demanding their wages. It was an unprecedented event. On November 25 at Chosun
Hotel, a joint venture between Korea and the U.S., five workers tried to resurrect their
union, which had been dissolved after the abduction of its leader. In response to the
hotel’s decision to fire five leaders of the movement, one of the leaders attempted to set
himself ablaze in protest. On November 27, 21 members of a labor union, protesting
against the company’s attempt to disintegrate the establishment of the union, attempted to
set themselves on fire. On December 21, 12 co-workers of Chun Tae-il, accompanied by
his mother, went up to the roof of the Pyungwha Market to stage a demonstration against
the disruption of union activity. They threatened to jump off the roof if the police did not
stop harassing the union. The police accepted their demands. The following year, on 2
February 1971, Kim Cha-ho, a twenty-year-old restaurant worker in Seoul, opened a
propane gas cylinder in a self-immolation attempt. In the presence of about 50 of his coworkers, he confronted the police for about two hours before finally setting himself a fire.
The police intervened and doused the fire. Protesting against his 18 hour working day for
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wage of 4,500 won a month, 59 he declared that through his death he wanted to bring
about better working conditions for restaurant workers nationwide, as Chun Tae-il had
done for garment workers.
The unprecedented explosion of laborers’ actions cannot be thought of separately
from Chun Tae-il’s death. His death and the social upheaval afterwards made labor issues
the primary public topic. Having ignored labor issues in the past as if such matters had
never existed before Chun Tae-il’s death, the media were now reporting them day after
day. The 1971 New Year’s edition of Dong-A Daily newspaper stated that if the Korean
War represented the 1950s and the April 19 student revolution symbolized the 1960s,
then Chun Tae-il’s death was the most significant event of the 1970s. The press began to
expose the atrocious labor conditions, to criticize the government’s labor policy, and to
demand reform of labor regulations.
Self-Concretization in the Subaltern Public Sphere
If there is a kind of ‘proof’ of the sincerity of the parrhesiastes, it is his courage.
Michel Foucault
The liberal notion of the public sphere has been criticized from many fronts
(Calhoun 1992). At the heart of various critiques lies the distrust of the possibilities of
self-abstraction. Numerous scholars have been pointing out that liberal claims of selfabstraction are a barrier to participation that is experienced and exacerbated along the
lines of class, gender, and race. The often repeated attacks on the ‘critical-rational’
59 The official exchange rate at the time was approximately 400 Korean won to 1 US
dollar. Thus, the monthly income of this 20-year-old was little more than $11 in 1971.
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characteristics in the idea of public also stem from, in part, dissatisfaction with the
prerequisite that participants be hollowed of personal commitments. Even communitarian
critics who belong to the political right join the attack by expressing their discontent with
self-abstraction, especially its disembodied rationality, since they maintain that any
meaningful political action should be rooted in and grow out of a concrete community.
Whether private individuals, as Warner (2002) argues, are “seduced” into abandoning
their individualities or are actively seeking self-purgation, the issue of self-abstraction in
the public sphere is still a lingering one.
There have been several attempts to find different approaches to self-abstraction.
Žižek proposes that we need to assume an attitude of irony that can be summarized by the
dictum, “I know very well (that the democratic form is just a form spoiled by stains of
‘pathological’ imbalance), but just the same (I act as if democracy were possible)” (1991
168). When accompanied by irony, Žižek maintains, the formality of democracy, or the
split between the historical and positive subject and its formal doppelganger can
constitute the very strength of democracy, far from indicating its fatal flaw. Michael
Warner tells another story. Unlike the privileged subjects who could enjoy the feat of
self-abstraction on the very basis that enabled the art in the first place—their unmarked
body—Warner argues that “minoritized subjects had few strategies open to them” (384).
Warner turns his attention to consumption and graffiti writing (Warner 1992), or to erotic
vomiting (Warner 2002), as few of the possibilities that minoritized subjects can
recuperate in order to gain access to publicness. Nancy Fraser (1992; 1995) goes one step
further by proposing that we abandon the art of bracketing altogether, because she sees
the operative phrase of the public sphere, ‘as if,’ as a hindrance to its emancipatory
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power. Instead of uncritically seeking the art of self-abstraction, she suggests that “[i]n
most cases, it would be more appropriate to unbracket inequalities in the sense of
explicitly thematizing them” (1995 290). For Fraser, remainder in the process of
bracketing is as important, if not more, as an ‘as if.’
The case of Chun Tae-il can provide us with a different direction on the same
question. His struggles to be seen, heard and recognized by others as well as his various,
but often futile, attempts to publicize the atrocious working conditions at the garment
factory attest to the claims that an entrance fee to the public realm is unequally charged to
its participants. In fact, Chun Tae-il’s self-immolation can be seen as a way to pay the
cost of entering the public realm. The entrance fee for minoritized subjects can be life
itself, and bracketing one’s own private self-interests can mean that they have to set aside
one of the most basic self-interests; self-preservation or survival. If “publicity and selfpurgation are a matched pair” (Peters 1995), the self-immolation of Chun Tae-il reveals
the limit condition of self-purgation in the public sphere. Self-abstraction in selfimmolation is not limited to philosophic aloofness or gentlemanly honor; it can literally
mean self-elimination as an extreme form of self-suspension. Chun Tae-il was well aware
that the entry fee is to set aside everything private and particular: in his case, his personal
biological body.
That the price of self-abstraction applies differently, however, does not mean that
minoritized subjects cannot enter the public sphere. While the art of self-abstraction—
the fundamental prerequisite for anyone to enter into the public sphere—is also available
to the subaltern, it takes a different form from that of liberal subjects. As the case of Chun
Tae-il shows, self-abstraction for the minoritized subjects is performed not by leaving out
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all the particularities, but by actively employing them. Chun Tae-il did not try to exclude
his personal body in the process of self-purgation. Rather, he emphatically incorporated
his personal body as a means to enter the public sphere. Self-immolation shows a way to
create a different style of embodiment in the public sphere; not through self-abstraction,
but via self-concretization.
Given the history of various exclusions from the bourgeois public sphere, the case
of Chun Tae-il can illuminate how the subaltern can speak where there is no space from
which the subject can speak (Spivak 1988a). When denied access to the public sphere by
the rules of reason and the protocols of decorum as well as by the art of self-abstraction
itself, the subaltern peoples’ primary tactic can be body rhetoric. Unable to simply
register in the dominant system of representation, they are left with their bodies as the
only available means of expression. Chun Tae-il’s self-immolation showcases how the
subaltern can make their appearance in the public realm; by voluntarily causing pain to
their last resource, the body. Through his self-immolation, Chun Tae-il could finally act
as a public figure. While his life at the factory was mainly private in the sense that it was
not seen and heard, his death made its way to the space of appearance full of observers
who would see and judge the action. In this sense, his death, rather than his life, was
public.
Can the body in pain or even death properly belong to the public realm? Death is
primarily dis-appearance, whereas the public realm is space of appearance (Arendt 1958).
Arendt’s comments on death as primarily disappearance, and thus as something not
suitable for space of appearance make perfect sense when the discussion is limited to the
subjects who are relatively free to make their appearances in the public realm. However,
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if the political predicament of the poor is invisibility and darkness as Arendt (1963)
maintains, the body in pain or death can be one way to enter the space of appearance,
especially for the subaltern. While Arendt (1958) rightly distinguishes labor from labor
movements that are registered under ‘action,’ not ‘labor,’ she does, regrettably, restrict
the body in pain to the private realm. The body in pain, especially voluntarily caused
infliction, is not enclosed from the common world. Once the physical body passes
beyond the gates of privacy through displays of pain in the space of appearance, it departs
from a private individual’s anguish. In this way, Chun Tae-il transformed his personal
pain into a public argument. The body in pain or death can be, for the subaltern, the final
recourse of self-extension to the world.
While it is not my intention to emphasize individual heroism with the case of
Chun Tae-il, it is noteworthy here that his self-immolation can be interpreted in the frame
of heroic suicide, particularly in the long legacy of Stoicism. Chun Tae-il’s selfimmolation resembles many characteristics of Roman suicide: the centrality of
theatricality, the presence of a considerable audience, the ostentatious lack of fear in the
face of death, the calm and deliberate nature of suicide, and the “stiff upper lip attitude”
(Griffin 1986a 66). Almost all the images of heroic dignity during the Early Roman
Empire center on death, or imprisonment and imminent death. Heroic suicide was not
limited to the Romans. It was also salient in the Revolutionary political culture of which
the emulation of the classical models of Stoicism was an important part. Between 1793
and 1797, twenty seven members of the National Convention in France committed or
attempted to commit suicide (Outram 1989 90). Heroic suicide during the French
Revolution also shares with Chun Tae-il’s self-immolation two crucial elements:
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theatricality and publicity. The political figures were like actors in a theatre, playing roles
of the heroes of austerity, principle, dignity and reserve. In the period when the definition
of the public man was of one open to the gaze of others, 60 the heroic suicide by
revolutionaries could hardly have been other than public.
The heroic suicide both in the early Roman Empire and during the French
Revolution seems to predate Chun Tae-il’s self-immolation. Appearances, however, can
be deceiving. The link between Chun Tae-il’s self-immolation and the heroic suicide are
unassailable only when one ignores the question of ‘whose suicide?’ Roman suicide, or
death with panache, was a privileged form of capital punishment that is exclusively
reserved for upper class defendants (Griffin 1986b; Rist 1969). While it is hard to avoid
imagining suicide as “the characteristic Roman way of death” (Griffin 1986a 64), it is
important to note that heroic suicide was limited to the upper order. Dying noble and
memorable deaths provided the Roman nobility with a rare opportunity to acquire glory
and fame that was increasingly less available in the autocratic system of government in
the Empire (Griffin 1986b). The cult of suicide among the members of the upper orders
can be partly, if not mainly, by the desire for self-glorification. Especially since Seneca,
suicide was glorified as the superb act of freedom, to the extent that “suicide itself makes
one a free man” (Rist 1969 248). 61 While suicides by nobility were widely hailed as a
sign of a free act, suicides by the lower class, or “servile suicides” were heard “only when
they can be used to exhort or reproach their betters” (Griffin 1986b 199-200). For
60 For the detailed description, see Outram (1989), especially chapter 3.
61 Rist adds that Seneca did not demonstrate why suicide is “more of a free act” (248).
Questioning an unexamined premise of nobility in suicide, Rist complains that “[t]he Stoic can
never be humble” (252).
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example, Seneca used examples of servile suicide to illustrate contempt for death among
the lowly. The suicide of a freed woman of Julia and Epicharis were “used to show up
ignoble conduct by their betters” (201). 62 The methods of suicide were socially
differentiated as well. Hanging, drowning and jumping off heights were normally
eschewed by the upper classes (Griffin 1986b 202), because these methods were not
compatible with the purpose of self-glorification of the nobility.
Also during the Revolution, the Stoic self-presentation of heroic dignity was for
the male political elite. Heroic suicide was the practice among the male bourgeois, often
while imprisoned, and in imminent proximity to a judicial death sentence. Before the
Revolution, suicide was not a part of the repertoire of political gestures at the disposal of
the political elite (Outram 1989 91). Faced with the extreme situations in which acts of
heroic dignity might seem appropriate, they tried to recreate dignity by connecting, not to
their current circumstances of defeat and imprisonment, but to the heroic figures of
classical antiquity. It was Cato who was to emerge as the leading role-model for heroic
suicide during the Revolution. Cato’s lifelong search for extraordinary dignity,
incredibilem gravitatem, was praised. It was also in Seneca that the Revolutionary elite
found validation for the act of suicide as a notion of true freedom. From the classical
sources such as Cato and Seneca, the elite found main ideas about suicide as connected
with freedom, gravitas, exemplary virtue, and heroic status (Outram 1989). Display of
Stoic self-control in the face of death was valued higher than political combat or even
survival to the bourgeoisie.
62 These might be another example of Spivak (1988)’s thesis that the subaltern cannot
speak.
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The explosion of heroic suicide during the Revolution is partly explained by
selfish motives. The bourgeois revolutionaries chose death over other political resistance
which under the Stoic umbrella could look like action for freedom. By resorting to selfglorified forms of mortification, they could present the last act of life’s drama as the
opposite of passivity and powerlessness. “Having become figures of symbolic virtue,” as
Outram (1989) points out, “the suicides and Stoics were also sheltered from the minute
dissection of personality and action which would have been their fate in the rest of their
public lives had they lived” (103). As a way to avoid public humiliation, the bourgeois
revolutionaries resorted to the achievement of a heroic status that can be consigned by the
performance of heroic dignity.
What is noteworthy here is that the maintenance of a class identity was one of the
underlying motives of the heroic suicide. During the Revolution, the roles of heroic, Stoic
manhood was a matrix in which crucial elements of bourgeois identity were forged. Once
convicted on a capital charge, the elite were confronted with a form of vulgar (or at least
egalitarian) execution: the guillotine. The death at the guillotine was regarded as
peculiarly humiliating for the bourgeoisie because it stripped them of a chance to display
Stoic self-control in the face of death. The guillotine frustrated any opportunity to act out
the heroic roles. Devoid of drama, the guillotine placed the self-image of the middle-class
under threat. The fears of degradation aroused by the guillotine were so great that the
bourgeoisie thought it was “far better to die thus, in front of a chosen audience of one’s
equals, than in the derisorily brief theatre and before the unpredictable, heterogeneous
spectators, at the guillotine” (Outram 1989 103).
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The adoption of Stoicism and the popularity of heroic suicide cannot be fully
understood without taking into account another fear of the middle-class: imprisonment
with members of the criminal classes or lower orders. Heroic-suicide was a means to
maintain the distance between the upper class and the lower criminal world which they
might encounter during imprisonment. By sticking into a willed, controlled and
sanctioned imperviousness, the revolutionary elite could preserve the superiority of the
wise man (bourgeois) over the slave (the criminal). In this sense, their suicide “still held
on to self-possession in its most literal sense” (Outram 1989 100). The heroic suicide
served the function of avoiding the humiliation of public execution before a lower class
on the one hand, and also of preserving the self-possession that was integral to the
maintenance of social authority.
This marks a crucial difference from Chun Tae-il’s self-immolation. The heroic
suicide was not open to the peripheral political groups. Rather their exclusion was the
purpose of the heroic suicides. By establishing the elite figure as the archetypal public
actor, heroic suicide served to exclude the already marginalized bodies from access to
dignified personification. Displaying self-control before a lower-class audience, the
Revolutionary elite strived to accomplish the important task of maintaining a class
distinction. Most important, heroic suicide was chosen by those who were already in the
public realm, whereas Chun Tae-il’s self-immolation was a trial to enter the public sphere.
Heroic suicide was a response to an affront to dignity that the bourgeoisie were assumed
to have possessed. Already in the public realm, the Roman nobility and the Revolutionary
elite could be concerned about how they wished to appear to be. On the contrary, Chun
Tae-il’s self-immolation and the subsequent deaths of workers were not so much about
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how they wished to organize their appearance of their death for others as about if they
could appear at all in the public realm. Despite the seeming similarities, a comparison
between heroic suicide and self-immolation reveals their differences.
When entering the public sphere, one adopts a specific role to act out. Just as a
professional actor tries to set him or herself aside and inhabit the somatic world of her
character, the subject of publicity has to leave out his/her self and act out a character.
Role-playing was central to heroic suicide. Seneca tried to re-enact the death of Socrates;
the Revolutionary elite, that of Cato and Seneca. Heroic suicide was a way to reclaim
authority and control through the embodiment of classical virtue displayed in a physical
person. Successful personification of the classic values was essential in the struggle for
political authority. While role-playing in the public realm can be a way to (re)achieve
dignity, the performer’s agency often evaporates in the process, because the actor’s
“agency consists not in the actions of the role she performs but in her ability to
disempower one self for the sake of another” (Asad 2003 75). Chun Tae-il’s selfimmolation had little to do with an attempt for the maintenance of heroic virtue which
would serve to strengthen the performer’s dignity or pride. Rather, it reminds us of “the
tragic necessity of discipline for public life” (Peters 1995b 672), or the inevitability of
self-purgation in any role-playing.
Chun Tae-il’s self-immolation complicates the prerequisite of self-abstraction in
the public realm. Every participant needs to have the faculty to empty oneself at the gate
of the public sphere. Self-immolation seems to confirm an old dictum that there is an
entrance fee to the public sphere, even though the price to pay can literally mean selfobliteration. However, self-immolation also differs from the traditional self-purgation in
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that the art of self-concretization rather than self-abstraction is used as one, and
sometimes only, way to enter the public realm. Self-immolators do not leave out their
particular body, but fully use it in the process. Self-immolation reminds us of the
importance of the question, “whose body?” when addressing the issue of embodiment in
the public realm.
The main difference between self-abstraction and self-concretization lies in the
attitude about risk taking. The contrast becomes clearer when one considers the benefits
of prosthetic body that was acquired as the result of self-abstraction. As Warner (1992)
showcases with the disembodied anonymity in the print culture, 63 the prosthetic body
served to minimize the risk that might occur to one’s natural body. Self-immolation does
not produce the abstracted and thus protected body. If courage is one of the most decisive
elements to enter into the space of appearance as Arendt (1958) indicates, the body
rhetoric of self-immolation shows how the subaltern can enter the shining public realm:
by having courage to put his or her own private body at risk.
Self-immolations are not bizarre aberrations of paying the entrance fee. They are
a form of public embodiment for the subaltern. Self-immolation retains its link to a body
in the procedure of self-abstraction. In this way, it appeals to universality without
abstraction. Self immolation teaches us the meaning of embodiment in the public realm,
that human action is sited in a concrete material body. It is a way to appear in the public
realm through “human thingliness” (Peters 2005). By infusing the private body into
public action, self-immolation shows how ‘private’ body in pain can be made publicly
63 Warner (1992) observes that “[i]n the ventriloquistic act of taking up his speech, ...
Steele both imagines an intimate violation of his person and provides himself with a kind of
prophylaxis against violation” (381).
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relevant. The body rhetoric of self-immolation demonstrates an extreme trial to enter the
realm of appearance, the realm of action, and the public sphere: through the fully
embodied door crashing.
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CHAPTER III
THE POLITICS OF SELF-IMMOLATION: THE TENACITY AND
FRAGILITY OF THE BODY RHETORIC
The soul is the prison of the body.
Michel Foucault
The Body as a Site of Agency
There has been an explosion of interest in the subject of the body in the past two
decades. 64 Instrumental here is Foucault’s analysis (1977; 1978; 1980) that emphasizes
human physicality as a major object of control. From torture as a public spectacle to the
modern formulation of general codes and unified rules of procedure, Foucault traces how
control has been sought to reach the body and beyond. Foucault (1977) maintains that the
body is inseparable from the operation of power; the body is “directly involved in a
political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it,
train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs” (25).
With modernity’s creation of ‘man’ accompanied by various discourses, the individual
body became docile, passive, analyzable, and medicalized. Increased state intervention in
medical provision, in nutrition, and in population planning emphasized the body as an
area where the conjunction of political and physical management was made manifest.
64 Surveying the field of body studies, Shilling (2005) categorizes several related yet
distinct foci on the subject; the commercialized body of consumer culture, the feminine body in
‘second wave’ feminism, the body as an object of various forms of control (influenced by
Foucault’s analysis of governmentality), and the technological body heralded by the Human
Genome Project and cyborg studies.
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Influenced by the works of Foucault, feminist intellectuals (Bartky 1988; Bordo
1993; Butler 1993; 1999; Grosz 1994) observe that the body is the focal site of struggle
over the shape of power. Contrary to Foucault who deals with a relatively
undifferentiated set of bodies that are subject to institutional control, feminist critics pay
special attention to the gendered body. 65 For example, by using Foucault’s insights for
her feminist cultural criticism, Bordo (1993) stresses how cultural practices are already
and always inscribed “on our bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies,
sensations, and pleasures” (142). With feminism’s contribution to a flourishing interest in
the body, the body is placed at the centre of social thought.
While Foucault’s works paved a way to an important realization that the body
cannot be thought of separately from the network of power, the body as resources
through which new political possibilities might be created has been relatively neglected.
As Outram (1989) maintains, “Foucault’s willingness to see bodies only as objects or
symbols through which existing power relations are acted out, prevents him from writing
a history in which, on the contrary, bodies are active creators of new power relations, and
sustain individuals in their confrontations with and against systems of power” (23). Also
65 While heavily influenced by Foucault, feminists also show their discontents with his
notion of the body. For example, Bartky (1988) argues that “Foucault treats the body throughout
as if it were one, as if the bodily experiences of men and women did not differ and as if men and
women bore the same relationship to the characteristic institutions of modern life” (63). While
Bartky contends that Foucault is “blind to those disciplines that produce a modality of
embodiment that is peculiarly feminine” (64), her analysis on how the ideal body of femininity is
constructed through various disciplinary practices is heavily indebted to Foucault. Grosz (1994)
also finds a decisive defect in Foucault’s corporeal ontology from the feminist point of view.
According to her, “Foucault seems to imply that bodies preexist power, that they are or may be
the raw materials on which power works and the sites for possible resistance to the particular
forms power takes” (155). Noticing that the concept of the body that Foucault uses is neutral,
abstract, and sexually indifferent, Grosz asserts that “Foucault talks only about the male body”
(157).
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in feminist writings, especially under Foucault’s influence, the main focus was mainly on
discourses imposed on bodies, at the expense of exploring a history of how various
subjects use their bodies for political resistance.
Even anthropology, one discipline where the centrality of the body seems assured
with its core topics such as human sexuality, physiology, emotions, performance, and the
politics of reproduction, suffers a similar fate. Talal Asad (2003) argues that “[t]he
anthropological literature on the subject [of the body] seems to me marked by a lack of
adequate attention to … the human body as a site of agency – and in particular by an
inadequate sensitivity to the different ways that an agent engages with pain and
suffering” (68). The resistance or hesitance to address the body as a site of agency comes
not only from theoretical legacies—most notably the ages-long mind/body hierarchy, but
also from the wider cultural and social changes that occurred in modern times. Influenced
by medical revolution, the tendency to desacralize the body, to remove it from other
levels of meaning was dominant in political culture. Furthermore, political embodiment
as a subject for consideration can easily invoke the nightmare of Fascism.
The invocation of political trauma usually takes place when one does not raise the
question of ‘whose body?’ The dominant discourses on the body, under the influence of
Foucault, make it difficult to address the simple question. It is instructive here that
Margaret Lock (1993), upon reviewing the vast anthropological literature on the subject
of the body, notices the close connection between bodily dissent and “other ‘peripheral’
peoples”:
Bodily dissent has been interpreted until recently as
marginal, pathological, or so much exotica, or else has been passed
over, unnoticed and unrecorded. Historicized, grounded
ethnography, stimulated by close attention paid for the first time to
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the everyday lives of women, children, and other ‘peripheral’
peoples has led to a reformulation of theory. The body, imbued
with social meaning, is now historically situated, and becomes not
only a signifier of belonging and order [as is in the older
anthropological work], but also an active forum for the expression
of dissent and loss, thus ascribing it individual agency (141).
The term, “agency” that Lock uses at the end of the quotation does not harmonize
smoothly with the body, especially with the body in pain. When we say that someone is
in pain and suffering, we tend to think that he or she is not an agent. To suffer bodily
pain, we usually think, is to be in a passive state.
However, one can think of the body in pain not merely as a passive state, but as
agentive. In religious traditions, especially in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions of
obligation, pain was accorded an agentive role (Asad 2003). 66 For Christian martyrs,
broken bodies are not a symbol of defeat, but of victory. As Judith Perkins (1995) notices,
“[f]ar from shunning physical suffering, the martyrs actively sought to live it. Like
Christ’s passion on the cross, the martyrs’ passivity was an act of triumph. That openness
to pain was precisely part of the structure of their agency as Christians” (117).
Martyrdoms, especially the pain and suffering of the Christian saints possess redemptive
and visionary powers (Morris 1991 125-151). Even in Buddhism and Chinese medicine,
pain is agentive. 67 While religions have much to say about pain as agency, this chapter
focuses on its power in creating secular action.
66 The religious root of the word pain is clear. As Elaine Scarry (1985) notices, “the very
word ‘pain’ has its etymological home in ‘poena’ or ‘punishment’”(16).
67 For “monkish machismo” in ascetic practices of South Korean monks, see Buswell
(1992). For body modification practices in Buddhism, see Yün-hua (1965). Benn (1998; 2001;
2004; 2007) gives a rich details of the history of self immolation in Buddhism and its relationship
to Chinese medicine. For the notion of the body in Buddhism in general, see Wilson (2004).
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In the field of rhetoric, there have been studies that pay attention to the rhetorical
and political dimensions of the body in pain in the space of appearance. Since antiquity,
rhetorical canons have included bodily gesture and posture of orators among its sources
of influence. Especially, rhetoric’s oral tradition has theorized discourse in a manner that,
at least implicitly, acknowledges its worldly appearance as an embodied performance
(Gronbeck 1993; Hauser 1999; 2000).
Edmund Burke, like other rhetorical theorists, 68 is interested in words. In his A
Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757),
he points out that “the proper manner of conveying the affections of the mind from one to
another, is by words; there is a great insufficiency in all other methods of
communication” (II-4). Unlike many other rhetorical theorists, however, Burke is not
confined to the realm of symbolicity. Instead, he explores the effects of words beyond the
realm of symbolicity, rather than their meanings within symbolicity. More specifically,
Burke examines the evocative power of signs and words that takes us beyond reason.
Burke theorizes this evocative power as the sublime. He defines the sublime as
“whatever excites the delight” (I-18). The delight, according to Burke, is different from
positive pleasure in that it turns on pain. Whatever is fitted to excite the ideas of pain and
danger, “that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible” is a source of the sublime (I-7).
Terror, as “the common stock of everything that is sublime” (II-6), becomes the ruling
68 Burke is a rhetorical theorist. His main question in the book, “how do we produce the
effect of the sublime?”, sounds like a typical question for rhetorical theorists. The part II of his
inquiry that deals with how to create the effects of the sublime can be read within the handbook
tradition of rhetoric. To evoke the sublime, one can turn upon pain, invent whatever is terrible,
make something obscure and uncertain, create greatness of dimension, etc… The list goes on and
on.
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principle of the sublime (II-2). The sublime overpowers the soul, suspends its action, and
fills it with terror (II-18). According to Burke, the “most genuine effect and truest test of
the sublime” is “delightful horror” (II-9).
While the sublime is productive of the strongest emotion that mind is capable of
feeling (I-7), it is inscrutable to reason. The sublime causes astonishment, the “state of
the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror” (II-1). The
great power of the sublime not only anticipates, but also is beyond the reach of, our
reasoning. It “robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning” (II-2). When we
confront the sublime, the imagination as well as the sense is lost (II-8). In the sublime,
“the mind is so dazzled as to make it impossible to attend to that exact coherence and
agreement of the allusions” (II-14). While the sublime leaves a strong impression upon us,
it is the most incomprehensible (II-15).
Quite contrary to German Idealism, Burkes starts from sensation. He derides and
ridicules ‘pure and intellectual ideas’, because “[p]eople are not liable to be mistaken in
their feelings, but they are very frequently wrong in the names they give them, and in
their reasoning about them” (I-2). Moreover, “the influence of reason in producing our
passions is nothing near so extensive as it is commonly believed” (I-13), and “in the
refined and abstracted light, the imagination and passions are little or nothing affected”
(II-6). Nevertheless, it is a practice much too common “to attribute the cause of feelings
which merely arise from the mechanical structure of our bodies, or from the natural frame
and constitution of our minds, to certain conclusions of the reasoning faculty.” Burke has
an admonition for this common practice of contemplation: “it is only necessary that we
should open our eyes” (II-6).
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For above reasons, Burke trusts the realm of animality rather than that of
symbolicity. First comes the evocative, or animality, and then, only afterwards we submit
it to reflection. Burke believes that “[m]en often act right from their feelings, who
afterwards reason but ill on them from principle: but as it is impossible to avoid an
attempt at such reasoning, and equally impossible to prevent its having some influence on
our practice, surely it is worth taking some pains to have it just, and founded on the basis
of sure experience” (I-19). Turning away from idealization, Burke takes a stance of
pseudo-empiricist. The basis of his inquiry is the senses. Even the power of imagination
is dependent upon senses for Burke. In On Taste, he argues “it must be observed, that this
power of the imagination is incapable of producing anything absolutely new; it can only
vary the disposition of those ideas which it has received from the senses.” Similarly, he
believes that his inquiry “will be better deduced from the nature of the subject, and from
the occasion, than from any rules that can be given” (II-5). Assigning a mitigated role to
reason, 69 Burke traces all the several senses, of hearing, smelling and tasting. Taste, not
reason, becomes universal in Burke (On Taste).
Against the long tradition where highly individualistic reason, as a calculating
machine, has been accredited, Burke offers a comprehensive theory of sociality firmly
anchored on the body. What allows us to make a claim about our similarity with each
other can be found in our bodies, especially bodies vulnerable to terror. What is most
interesting in Burke’s argument is that he finds social glue in the distresses of others. We
are induced, “with no small uneasiness”, to approach the distresses of others, or what
69 The discontinuity of his arguments about the role of reason in “On Taste” has more to
do with the fact that Burke goes an extra inning to satisfy his critics. He quiets them by saying at
the end of the article that reason has its role.
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Foucault called “the spectacle of the scaffold.” 70 For Burke, it is this sociality of
aesthetics that binds us.
When the misfortune of others is before our eyes, it produces terror and pity as
well as delight. Burke is “convinced we have a degree of delight, and that no small one,
in the real misfortunes and pains of others” (I-14). This delight does not come from our
immunity from the distress as in fictions. Actually, “the nearer it approaches the reality,
and the farther it removes us from all idea of fiction, the more perfect is its power” (I-15).
Focusing on the sociality of aesthetic experience, Burke takes anti-social motives as very
social. Through very different routes, Burke arrives at a similar destination with Kant
who formulates “asocial sociability.” Instead of resorting to reason, Burke rearticulates
the social through bodily experiences tinged with the sublime.
Burke expands his theory of sociality into the realm of politics. He argues that
politics is operated by constant terror; “[t]he power which arises from institution in kings
and commanders, has the same connexion with terror. Sovereigns are frequently
addressed with the title of dread majesty” (II-6). Power, according to Burke, derives all
its sublimity from terror with which it is generally accompanied (II-6). And power is
never with more spectacular effect than when unexpected forgiveness from dread majesty
interrupted the execution of the body of the condemned (Foucault 1977 53). Burke also
insists that power is closely related to pain. Or more acutely put, power reveals itself
through pain of the body. Here the body becomes the site and source not only of the
aesthetic experience but also for the manifestation of power. The effect of sublimity is
70 The subject that serves as an example for both Burke and Foucault is Francis
Damiens.
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most apparent in its political function. Burke teaches us that we get to the morale not by
social contract, but by the disarray of terror.
In an unpublished manuscript, “The Thinking of the Body,” Kenneth Burke tries
to elaborate the link between the two sides of a Möbius strip 71 : between language and
the body, between the realm of symbolicity and of animality, or between poetic Sphinx
and bodily sphincter. Finding the kin relationship between the two, Burke argues that all
vocabulary has three non-linguistic sources to draw upon: the human body (pain), the
world’s body (lightning or flood), and the body politic (right or justice). For example,
“the possible moral and political function of art can be likened to (bodily) ‘drainage’”
(91). Likewise, “though calm meditation may not so obviously engage the body, there
certainly must be a physiological counterpart to any such attitude that we may experience
as readers or spectators” (90). From this point of view, Burke focuses his attention on the
poetic ‘embodiment’ in terms of images for human body, world’s body, and body politic.
Once we pay attention to how the body might figure in the terminology of poetic
expression and response, ‘hermeneutic problems’ come to the fore, which can be
summarized as follows: “we find on one side the constant susceptibility of language to so
draw upon undeclared puns that the phonetic accidents of words affect their meaning, or
‘essence’; and on the other side there is the vagueness in imagery whereby one can never
say for certain just what motives are involved” (105). At issue are slipperiness of
language, authorial intention, and interpretation of audience. Due to these elements and
often the combination of these factors, every expression has an ironic risk. One example
71 Kenneth Burke is a thinker of the Möbius strip. He enjoys deriding widely held, and
usually sustained, dichotomies. What seems to be utterly distinct from each other is revealed,
through his puns, to be interrelated, making one surface.
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might be enough to prove this point: “how Brick has lost his botency (b and p being
cognates, voiced and unvoiced variants of the same sound)” (95). Looking for Augean
possibilities, Burke, as a reader, is going through various poetic expressions where the
‘range’ of a term’s problematic radiations is found.
Here again, Burke is interested in recuperating new possibilities in the realm of
act. Given that the hermeneutic problem is always involved in bodily euphemisms,
writers can deliberately put the term for one bodily function in place of another for
various effects (93) or readers can, under various conditions, accidentally read the
sentence, “how Brick has lost his botency” in a different way, replacing cognates. It is in
the hermeneutic problems that Burke finds new possibilities for ‘act.’ Arguing that “the
very ‘freedom’ of poetry would be likely to encourage the use of subterfuges whereby
any ordinary tests of propriety must be in various ways transcended” (96), Burke prefers
the point in which the norms of everyday social propriety vanish.
Burke struggles with the old habit of equating moral evil and bodily functions in
Western culture. “Where moralistic motives are involved”, in other words, everywhere in
human societies, “we are entitled to look for the likelihood that terms ambiguously bodything will figure” (107). Beyond the explicit cases, Burke tries to find other occasions
when such motives are implicitly symbolized. For Western culture can be defined as an
aesthetically euphemistic cult of bodily uncleanness (100). Just as a person of low social
status might become well-to-do and break with his past, the image of a body-function can
transcend its lowly origins (92-93). In Western culture, the expressions surrounding
‘Demonic Trinity,’ a solemn bodily parody of the Holy Trinity, have been treated as but
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“a translation of the idea of the moralistic negative (the realm of the thou-shalt-not, of No
No!) into terms of body-imagery” (92).
What Burke sets as his target here is the ‘Idealistic Lie.’ Through the moralizing
value of ‘discipline,’ Nature has been degraded in comparison with Spirit (101); “it is by
discipline… that ‘sure and useful results’ are derived from Nature’s ‘heaps and rubbish’”
(101). Against prevalent tendency toward sublimation of Nature into Spirit, Burke
attempts to set the places for Nature, the negative, and the body. He thinks of the bodyimage as “enigmatically reflexive vital element prior to all symbolicity, and to all the
rules of symbol-constructed Order” (108). Burke is strongly against the “astoundingly
fertile inventiveness of the Idealistic Lie” (102).
Reminiscent of Žižek (1991), Burke shows how Spirit has been smeared by the
bodily uncleanness. While Žižek notices the radically obscene characteristics of Kantian
good will, Burke shows “how the principle of ‘uncleanness’ can be involved in the very
Discipline that would provide the cleansing” (101). However much Western culture is
ethically infused with the help of ‘discipline,’ Burke points out that it cannot wholly
eliminate the negative. Both the aesthetic and ethical propriety imply a rigorous feeling
for thou-shalt-not’s (104). And the negative attains its highest manifestations in Ethics
inasmuch as human character is formed with regard to the thou-shalt-not’s of culture
(100).
While Kenneth Burke successfully leads us to question the abiding preconception
of the body as a natural object outside the realm of discourses, Burke’s speculation in
“The Thinking of the Body” belongs not so much to the realm of Rhetoric as the realm of
Poetics. It is more focused on “internal relations among the terms in a given text” (104)
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rather than the response of an audience, and thus has its own limitations. 72 More explicit
attempts to theorize the body as a site of political struggle are relatively recent. Rhetorical
critics in the 20th century have paid attention to the impact of bodies to advance
assertions of belief, solidarity, and dissent. Ever since the onset of the civil rights
movement, the social movement/agitation scholars in the field of rhetoric have focused
on and considered the implications of bodily confrontations beyond the boundaries of
conventional politics and formal argumentation. Contrary to the traditional delimitation
of argumentation as linguistic, recent studies suggest that bodies are central to the force
of arguments.
By examining the hunger strike of prisoners of conscience, Hauser (Hauser 1999;
2000; 2006; Hauser and Thackaberry 1996) points to the suffering body’s impressive
rhetorical potential, the power of a body in pain to form deep and powerful identification
with an audience that feels empathy for the sufferer’s anguish. Political prisoners,
according to Hauser, often use their bodies as their rhetorical means of last resort but
often also as their most (perhaps only) effective rhetorical weapon to confront and best
the state.
DeLuca (1999a; 1999b; DeLuca and Peeples 2002) also shows that diverse social
activists highlight their bodies for argumentation and advocacy while slighting formal
modes of public argument. Environment activist groups, according to DeLuca, have
challenged the meanings of the world not through good reasons but through vulnerable
bodies, not through rational arguments but through bodies at risk. Using their bodies to
72 To the objection that we need to extend our focus to the social beyond literature,
Kenneth Burke might argue that we can look upon literature as an incipient form of action. See
his Counter Statement (Burke 1968).
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perform their arguments, members of Earth First!, ACT UP, and Queer Nation practiced
a mode of argument that is less focused on an abstract, universalized reason and more
attuned to the feelings that accompany lived experiences. They affront formal modes of
public argument while performing unorthodox political tactics that highlight bodies as
resources for argumentation and advocacy. By resorting to corporeal reference, they raise
basic questions about reason, modes of assertion, strategy, and public knowledge that
invite the audience to rethink traditional understandings of argument as a verbal and
linear reasoning process. They suggest that our bodies, especially the body in pain, are
important and powerful sources of assertion and contention.
To suggest that bodies argue not only defies the traditional delimitation of
argumentation as linguistic, but also is controversial. The body is an organism. Its
biological status is not symbolic. We experience our own body in ways that are
unavailable to others. Our bodily pain is our own and known only secondhand to others.
There is what Scarry (1985) calls the ‘absolute split’ between one’s sense of one’s own
reality and the reality of other persons. As Peters (2001) puts it, “[s]ensation is encircled
into privately personal ontologies. Only words are public” (771).
But our bodies are also in the world. Pain’s utter privacy seems unassailable only
if we restrict pain to the subjective side of experiencing physical pain or to what goes on
within the confines of the body in distress. In addition to the utterly private and
unsharable physical experience of the body in pain, there also are rhetorical and political
dimensions to pain. Limiting our understanding of the body to its status as a biological
organism ignores the body’s symbolic significance and the numerous ways in which it is
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used as a form of signification. Although physical pain has no voice, 73 it manages to
speak and argue.
In this chapter, I will try to go beyond the phenomenology of pain and
problematize the idea of pain-in-itself as necessarily a private, thought-destroying event.
Asking how to transform biological events such as suffering, pain, and death into ones
morally and politically significant, I argue that the living body’s ability to suffer makes it
active in particular social and historical contexts. If the operation of power involves the
application of disciplines on the body as Foucault shows, domination can also be resisted
first and foremost by the body.
The Body Rhetoric of Self-Immolation
At the end of the mind, the body. But at the end of the body, the mind.
Paul Valéry
On April, 26, 1991, Kang Kyung Dae, a twenty-year-old freshman at Seoul’s
Myungji University, was grabbed by plainclothes riot police and beaten to death with iron
pipes and clubs while he was participating in a demonstration against the arrest of the
student representative of the university. A shopkeeper who was a witness was quoted as
saying that four plainclothes policemen began beating him on the head with steel pipes
and truncheons as he tried to climb over a fence to escape the police officers.
Kang’s death immediately threw South Korea into turmoil. On the following day,
across twenty cities nationwide, 20,000 people participated in anti-government protests
73 One might argue that physical pain also has voice: moans, cry, shriek, and wail.
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over Kang’s death. About thirty five groups, including three opposition parties and the
nation’s leading dissident organizations, held a news conference and denounced the death
of the student, calling it a murder. Eager to avoid giving the opposition groups a means of
winning popular approval, president Roh Tae Woo fired the Interior Minister. Prime
Minister Roh Jai Bong, however, told parliament that “the death occurred because some
police used excessive violence,” adding that Kang’s death was an accident caused by
some policemen.
On April, 29, a twenty-year-old female college student, Park Seung Hee, set
herself ablaze at an anti-government rally to protest the beating death of Kang. She set
herself on fire as some 1,000 students held a rally at Chonnam University. Enveloped in
flames, she ran about thirty yards toward the rallying students, screaming “[d]own with
Roh government, bring Kang back to life.” She was rushed to the University hospital, but
remained in a critical condition after receiving a tracheotomy. She was reported, on the
way to the hospital, to have said to other students, “Please kill me, since it is too
agonizing to bear the agony from the burns.” In a will that Park left, she wrote, “I will
leave with no hesitation, hoping that others will keep fighting against the Roh
government, instead of going back to their place after having a little bit of sorrow and
compassion for Kang’s death.”
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Figure 3. A Newspaper Photograph of Park’s Self-Immolation 74
Even if muted, Park’s burning body managed to speak. Having heard of Park’s
self-immolation, about 70,000 students and citizens fought riot police across cities,
demanding President Roh’s ouster. They insisted that the violence of government that
had taken Kang’s life was about to take away another young life and the cabinet should
resign from a sense of responsibility for Park’s self-immolation. Especially in Kwangju,
where Park set herself on fire the day before, some 10,000 students pushed and shoved
riot police in nighttime street protests around the hospital where Park was in a critical
condition. At Chonnam University, where Park was a student, students decided to dismiss
74 Among the major national newspapers in Korea, the Hankyoreh is the only one that
published the photos of self-immolations. The Hankyoreh is a newspaper established through
grassroots fundraising in 1988, shortly after the popular uprising against the military dictatorship
in 1987. Unlike other national newspapers in Korea that are owned by a family or business
conglomerates such as Samsung, the Hankyoreh was established by about 62,000 shareholders
ranging from teachers to housewives. Initially, it was run by former journalists who had been
expelled from other media industries because of their opposition to censorship.
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classes and hold anti-government rallies until the cabinet resigned. Even professors
joined the protests. Over 100 professors in Hanshin University and Kyoungnam
University issued a statement calling for the resignation of the cabinet en masse. A group
of Catholic priests also issued a statement and urged the government to give up their
oppressive ruling system. However, the newly appointed Interior Minister refused to
disband plainclothes riot police, stating that Kang’s death was merely an accident caused
by a few bad apples. Moreover, the government put the blame upon a ‘culture of violent
demonstration.’
A second student’s attempt at self-immolation occurred on May 1, while 100,000
people demonstrated in Seoul and elsewhere against riot squads. Kim Young Kyun,
nineteen years old, doused himself with paint thinner and set himself on fire as some 300
students held a rally at Andong University. Engulfed in flames, Kim ran toward the
rallying students, shouting “[d]own with Roh Tae Woo’s murderous oppression.” Kim
was unconscious in a serious condition at a hospital, where he died the next day. As a
form of argument, the vivid visual spectacle of the self-immolators’ bodies brought about
a strong impact. For example, the school officials said 200 students were attending the
rally when Kim acted, but within an hour their ranks swelled to more than 4,000.
The suffering body’s transformation from personal pain to public signs requires
voices to spread news of its anguish. At the juncture between private experience and
public discourse lies the media as the primary modern institution of publicity. While
forming public discourses about the muted private body, publicity can alter the body’s
rhetorical effects (Hauser 2000). Media can frame the assertions that speechless private
bodies make, often in a direction that goes against the wishes of self-immolators. News
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organizations tend to frame radical groups negatively as disrupters of the social order
(Gitlin 1980). The self-immolators are in hostile territory with little control when their
pain is transformed into discourse by the publicity of media. From the very beginning of
Kang’s death, the media in South Korea reported starkly contrasting versions of events
with those of demonstrators, focusing on the violent characteristics of the protesters. For
example, numerous pictures appeared in the press showing that a policeman suffered
second-degree burns on his right hand from Molotov cocktails thrown by protesters.
Little place was secured for the picture of self-immolations among a plethora of other
images of protesters surrounding a riot police unit, taking some policemen’s helmets and
gas masks; police vehicles burned; and student protesters throwing Molotov cocktails at
the riot police.
The media portrayed the protests as violent challenges not only to the regime but
also to ‘most of civil citizens.’ Traffic congestions caused by protests were covered
during the rallies with images of traffic at a total standstill, showing that demonstrating
students were causing an inconvenience for most citizens by blocking streets in central
Seoul. The media also framed the dissident groups as lacking wider social support,
brining the effect of separating the demonstrators from wider members of the society.
Reporters said that “the current round of unrest lacks the broader social support needed to
achieve the students’ demands,” or “the recent demonstrations have not gained much
backing beyond a corps of dissident students and labor activists.” The most widely used
frame by the media was to put the blame upon both the police and protesters. Editorials in
the newspapers argued that the first and foremost prerequisite to solve the situation was
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to cut off the vicious circle of violent student demonstrations and the ruthless suppression
of them by the police (not by the government).
Demonstrations were depicted as a serious threat to democracy whose soul is
dialogue (Habermas 1974; 1977; 1984a; 1989; 1992; 1996; Kim 1997; 1999), not
‘violent’ protests or the body in pain. They were framed as a minority unwilling to
exploit available democratic channels. It was said in the editorials that protesters’ easy
recourse to violence threatened to drown out the subtle political choices that democracy
is all about. Protests were depicted as the product of an immature democracy. Most
significantly, muted self-immolations were described as frenzied acts burned with
ambition to be heroes, a perverse symptom of disregard for human life, and a rash
impulse of youth signaling terrorism and fascism.
Against the frame of media, various opposition groups issued counter-statements,
arguing that self-immolations of students were caused by the government’s heavy-handed
rules. The chairman of Korean Teachers and Educational Workers Union, one of the
leading opposition groups, claimed that “we need to consider what is the fundamental
reason to drive young students to deaths rather than to see them simply as a tendency of
disregard for human life,” while also stating “we urge that students fight alive rather than
to express their will through the extreme way of self-immolation.” Several other leading
opposition leaders also issued a statement urging students to restrain from selfimmolations no matter how pressing they felt it was to fight against the government.
In the meantime, another form of bodily argumentation followed the selfimmolations. About twenty political prisoners confined in Deagu prison started hunger
strikes, protesting the death of Kang. In Andong, where Kim Young Kyun died from self-
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immolation, twenty three priests issued a statement that they would start hunger strikes
for an indefinite period to “share self-immolators’ pain.” They said that there is a passage
in The Bible that there is no greater love than sacrificing one’s life for colleagues,
positing that they could not regard students’ self-immolation as an impulse of youth even
though they were not idealizing such extreme sacrifices as self-immolation. Professors in
the southeastern cities of Pusan and nearby Chinju launched all-night sit-in protests for an
indefinite period, calling for a thorough investigation of the case and stern punishment of
those responsible.
In spite of these rallies, President Roh said, at a luncheon with lawyers, that “the
government has no choice but to deal resolutely with violent and destructive acts of leftist
forces if one corner of our society is bent on overturning the democratic system through a
class revolution.” He also commented that “it would not have happened if both police and
students had had more self-control and will to comply to the order of law,” adding that
“[s]ince riot police are as young as students and as such, can lose their temper when their
colleagues are hit by Molotov cocktails, they should be cautious not to endanger students’
lives when they are forced to use clubs.” Urging reasonable dialogue rather than frenzied
body rhetoric, Information Minister Choi Chang Yun said that “[w]e need a new protest
culture. We have to have peaceful legal demonstrations and peaceful labor strikes. We
have to learn.” He also remarked that it would be treasonous to use Kang’s death
politically.
On May 3, Chon Se Yong, a sophomore at Kyungwon University, doused himself
in paint thinner and set himself ablaze in the on-going protests. The third that week,
engulfed in flames, jumped from an engineering building, screaming “[d]own with the
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Roh regime!” before 200 demonstrators at the university. He was rushed to a nearby
hospital where he died a few hours later. While being transferred to a hospital, Chon kept
repeating slogans such as “down with Roh, bring Kang back to life.” Hearing of Chon’s
self-immolations, 200,000 students, dissidents, workers, and citizens in twenty three
cities defied a government ban and hit the streets of Seoul and provincial cities
demanding President Roh’s resignation and the immediate disbanding of the combat
police force used to quell protests. About fifty professors at Kyoungwon University,
where Chon was a student, issued a statement, saying that “the repeated sacrifices of
students result from the shameless government that turned a deaf ear to the protests.”
In the meantime, one of the leading dissidents, Moon Kyu Hyun, started a hungerstrike in jail, requesting the disbandment of plainclothes riot police, the resignation of
Roh, and the end of students’ self-immolation. Over 200 prisoners of conscience in Seoul
joined the hunger strike. Also forty Catholic priests in Kwangju started a hunger strike
without time limit after issuing a statement that “[a]ll citizens should unite in solidarity
and protest against the government so as to stop the tragedy of sacrifice by our sons and
daughters.” Prisoners of conscience, as Hauser (Hauser 1999; 2000; 2006; Hauser and
Thackaberry 1996) observes, having lost control of their bodies and the attendant
freedoms of movement, assembly, and expression, often transform their bodies into a last
but probably most potent resource for subverting their oppressors. 75 The hunger-strike is
an attempt at subverting a power by becoming helpless before it. As Gandhi showed, the
75 Even human excrement and the accompanying stench can be used as a resource for
political resistance. Bobby Sands and the inmates of the H-Blocks of Long Kesh prison
systematically smeared the walls of their cells with their own excrement before they started the
hunger strike. For the ‘dirty protest,’ see Feldman (1991), especially chapter 6.
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hunger-strike seeks to overpower the oppressor through a display of powerlessness. The
strikers’ starvation poses a moral dilemma to the authorities: either yield to save my life
or, by refusing to fold, stand publicly condemned for your moral intransigence.
Visibility is a key here. In itself, wordless and wasting, the fasting body cannot
force the authority to cave in, but its public display of anorexic helplessness can be a
great threat to the authorities. Insofar as this act of helplessness succeeds in eliciting
pressure from external groups, it can have a great effect. The wordless starvation before
the unbending authority calls its outside witnesses to a moral exercise. Witnessing the
body’s self-consumption turns public attention to the authority’s intransigence. As the
physical body of the striker diminishes, its rhetorical efficacy grows, as long as it
succeeds in eliciting witnesses of the larger audience. Through transforming its powerless
physical form into a powerful moral statement, the fasting body of hunger strikers calls
into question the legitimacy of the authorities.
On May 8, a twenty seven-year-old leading dissident, Kim Ki Sul, set himself on
fire and jumped off a five-story building at Seoul’s Sogang University in support of the
demands for the overthrow of the Roh regime. “Down with Roh Tae-woo who commits
violence and murder,” he was heard to shout as the flames engulfed him. He was
pronounced dead after being rushed to a hospital. In a letter Kim left behind, he wrote
that “[f]or the citizens of this country who live amidst sorrow and pain, I am convinced
that something must be done.”
The authorities attempted to control the self-immolator’s voice by framing it in
certain ways. After the suicide, the public prosecutor general called for an investigation
into what he said appeared to be an organized program among dissident leaders to compel
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young followers to kill themselves to advance the movement, pointing out that each death
became another focal point for further demonstrations. Asserting that dissident groups
were using self-immolation as an instrument of revolution, the prosecutor’s office
announced that they undertook a secret investigation whether Chonminnyon, of which
Kim was a member, instigated Kim’s self-immolation. In response, Chonminnyon
criticized the prosecution as an attempt to pervert ongoing widespread anti-government
protests.
The authorities sometimes employ the assistance of others. The president of
Kyongwon University, where Chon was a student, asserted that Chon’s self-immolation
was done by drawing lots among dissident students. He also said to professors who were
participating in anti-government protests that self-immolation suicide groups had been
formed among students. Protesters claimed that “it is totally non-sense that he thinks
one’s life can be decided by drawing lots. His remarks are insulting to those who died.”
The president of Sogang University, where Kim committed self-immolation, also said
that there was a hidden force inciting young students who were thirsting after justice,
insinuating that the North Korea regime is involved in a series of self-immolations. 76
The general student association responded that they were to conduct a campaign to
collect signatures calling for withdrawal of insulting remarks to departed souls.
76 One can easily find parallel cases worldwide. For example, the antiwar movement
during the Vietnam War era was framed in various ways: “a coming together of treasonous,
violent, bomb-throwing youths, cowards who would not fight for their country, licentious
hedonists who scorned the middle-class lifestyle, Communist dupes who took orders from
Moscow, Peking, and Hanoi” (Zaroulis and Sullivan 1984 xii). The U.S. Government made
repeated efforts to link the antiwar movement to an ‘international Communist conspiracy.’
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In spite of the authorities’ attempts to damage the moral integrity of protesters,
about 300,000 students, workers and citizens fought police in eighty seven cities on May
9. While more than 45,000 police were deployed around the country, swinging
truncheons and firing tear gas, the police lost control of major streets in central Seoul and
a number of other cities. Fifty nine of the nation’s 150 colleges and universities voted to
boycott classes and staged anti-government rallies on campus, and spilled out the gates
and onto the streets. The Catholic committee announced that ninety seven priests were
participating in hunger strikes and many other Catholics were visiting the place where
hunger strikes were being held to encourage them. Another forty Christian priests started
open-ended hunger strikes. At a cabinet meeting, however, Prime Minister Roh said he
had no intention of stepping down, and rejected the demand for the cabinet to resign en
masse. He also said he would take a firm stand in dealing with the sources of disorder. In
a reference to self-immolations, he accused dissidents of using human life ‘as a tool for
radical political struggle.’
On May 10, Yoon Yong Ha, twenty years old, the fifth protester to set himself on
fire, died after he was sent to a hospital. Yoon doused himself with paint thinner, set
himself alight in a restroom at Chonnam University, and then rushed out toward a
crowded auditorium yelling “[d]own with Roh Tae-woo” before collapsing. Mocking the
idea that other people could ever influence anybody to do something as terrible as to take
their own life, Yoon left a will in which he wrote, “[w]ho pulls the strings of selfimmolation from behind? Who can tell others to throw away their only one life? Roh
should apologize to the public and step down.” Student activists issued a statement in
resentment that it was not the lot drawing but the government that led Yoon to commit
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self-immolation by concocting the story of hidden force of self-immolation and distorting
the deaths of students for their own political interests. Meanwhile, eighty priests in
Inchon joined the hunger strike, issuing a statement to support other priests in hungerstrike for five days. Five hundred students in National Association of College Students
also joined the hunger-strike. In a conciliatory gesture, President Roh ordered his
administration to release about 200 political prisoners.
More than 500,000 people took to streets and clashed with the police throughout
the nation on May 18, the eleventh anniversary of the 1980 Kwangju uprising. That was
the largest protest since President Roh seized power in February 1988. The police were
deployed nationwide and military troops in Seoul were on high alert during the day.
Three more people set themselves on fire on the day. A thirty nine-year-old woman, Lee
Jeong Sun, doused herself with paint thinner on an elevated railway bridge just after
Kang’s funeral march began. She then set herself alight, shouting anti-government
slogans, and jumped off the bridge into a crowd. She was rushed to a hospital, where she
was pronounced dead. Lee left a note demanding the dissolution of the plainclothes riot
police and the resignation of Roh’s “military dictatorship.” 77
In Bosong, an eighteen-year-old high school student, Kim Chol Su, set himself on
fire with paint thinner in his high school classroom after attending a ceremony of the
Kwangju uprising. In the third self-immolation of the day, a bus driver in Kwangju, Cha
77 While Roh Tae-woo was a core member of the military dictator Chun Doo Hwan’s
junta that ordered the brutal suppression of demonstrators in Kwangju in May 1980 under U.S.
sanction, Roh was the first elected president in the modern history of South Korea. The
nationwide uprising of June 1987 put an end to the tyrannical rule of Chun Du-hwan’s regime and
established a democratic constitution and the direct presidential election by popular vote. Roh
won the ensuing presidential election of December 1987 because both major opposition
candidates, Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung, ran against him, splitting the opposition vote.
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Tae Kwon, lit himself on fire after watching television reports on the earlier two selfimmolations. These self-immolations brought the total number of protesters to set
themselves alight since Kang’s death to eight. Also in Kwangju, Park, who committed
self-immolation immediately after Kang’s death, died after nearly three weeks in a
hospital, triggering other protests.
The final self-immolation in the month occurred on May 22. A twenty four-yearold man, Chung Sang Soon, set himself afire and leaped in flames, shouting “[d]own
With Roh Tae Woo!” from the roof of a morgue at the Chonnam University Hospital in
Kwangju, where Park died. He was hospitalized with burns over more than 90% of his
body. A suicide note was found in his pocket, saying he decided to follow other youths
who had set themselves ablaze to protest. Finally, Prime Minister Roh resigned to take
responsibility for political and social turmoil and President Roh immediately reshuffled
the cabinet.
The Rhetorical Potency and Limits of the Bodily Eloquence
The failure to express pain—whether the failure to objectify its attributes or
instead the failure, once those attributes are objectified, to refer them to their
original site in the human body—will always work to allow its appropriation and
conflation with debased forms of power; conversely, the successful expression of
pain will always work to expose and make impossible that appropriation and
conflation.
Elaine Scarry
Deliberative democracy usually champions procedural norms derived from
idealized models of conversation (Habermas 1974; 1989; 1992; 1996). Theories of the
public sphere represent this position. Political participation in the public sphere has been,
and is still widely, conceived within the frame of civil, reasoned, and verbal discourse.
However, the restriction of political participation to civil discourse can easily make
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marginal groups voiceless in the public sphere. It is telling that there are few famous
subaltern speakers or memorable speeches. Invitation to rational dialogue without
allowing a room for other forms of political participation is as exclusive as opening a byinvitation-only forum. It goes directly against the essence of the term, public, especially
its openness and accessibility.
The focus on corporeality and bodily pain leads us to reconsider the current
discussions of the public sphere that are usually limited to the bonds of reason and words.
The rhetoric of the body challenges a number of tenets of the public sphere, starting with
the notion that the public sphere is characterized by ‘reasoned discourse,’ with ‘reasoned’
connoting ‘civil’ or ‘rational,’ and with ‘discourse’ implying ‘words.’ The politics of
suffering refuses to collaborate in what Allen Feldman calls “the essential myth of formal
rationalization” (1991 2-3). Self-immolation constitutes a performative critique of
disembodied rationality.
The public arena of South Korea in 1991 was filled with display of bodily
resistance. Protesters transformed their bodies into the instrument and symbol of their
dissent. In the face of the formidable authority, to have dialogue using one’s public
reason is usually idle, easily co-opted, and often impossible. When left with their bodies
as the most effective (and probably the only) means for interrogating imposed silence,
self-immolators killed themselves in a very painful fashion to make public spectacles.
Given the urgency of the political situation combined with the lack of other options for
political participation, 78 one can ‘rationally’ choose such a drastic option as a final
78 In his examination of various suicide notes left by self-immolators, Park (2004) finds
an “overwhelming sense of frustration at the lack of options available for participation in
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alternative. In self-immolations, bodily resistance or emotional display do not necessarily
lead to irrationality.
Self-immolations are a fundamentally public phenomenon. They do not occur in
isolation. Unlike other forms of modern suicides that are commonly committed in a
private setting, self-immolations take place either before cameras that would relay the
performances or before audiences that would witness them. The self-immolators’ body in
pain acquires political agency only insofar as it is seen by others. Transformation of the
private body to a public symbol needs the harsh, yet shining, light of publicity. 79 Faith in
publicity, that glare will somehow drive out evil, underpins the action of self-immolators.
Self-immolation highlights the ages-old function of the public realm; that it puts the body
on display to be seen.
The body in pain is rhetorically potent. While not argumentative in the traditional
sense, self-immolators did make a forceful statement of conviction by dramatizing their
bodies in pain. Here, the body’s limit, not the mind’s expanse, becomes the source of
argument (Stormer 1999). Through its argumentative performances, self-immolation
exemplifies the meaning of political practices that are embodied. The self-immolators’
body becomes a signifying site and agency that extends beyond the protocols of
deliberative reasoning. It makes an indirect yet powerful argument that could subvert the
authority by making it morally culpable before the larger community of witnesses. Like
constructive social change” (95). He reasons that “[s]uicide came to be seen as the only viable
option [for political participation]” (89).
79 Bobby Sands and the Blanketmen were well aware of this, when they abandoned the
Dirty Protest for the hunger strike (Feldman 1991). The Dirty Protest remained invisible to the
world outside, no matter how effective it was inside the prison.
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martyr’s death, self-immolation demonstrates “the limit-case of persuasion” (Peters 2001
713). While the spectacle of the immolator’s disintegrating body “proves nothing”
(Ricoeur 1980 146), witnessing of it can entail “the vanishing point at which proof stops
and credence begins” (Peters 2001 713). Through the credence that the disintegrating
body elicits from the witnessing audience, it also becomes a subversive threat to its
oppressor’s superior power.
Body rhetoric not only is bounded by temporal constraints but also actively
mobilizes them. Through a succession of hunger-strikes and a series of self-immolations,
the protesters indicated that the authority might end the death march should it choose. By
publicly exposing the authority’s power to stop as well as its refusal to do so, they put
under public view the state’s ignorance, insensitivity, and brutality. The ongoing selfimmolations and hunger strikes also gave bystanders a sense of urgency, inviting them to
consider what cause would allow a person to perish and what action would stop deaths.
This way, the self-immolator’s body brings about a legitimacy crisis to the authority. The
urgency and moral intensity of the extinguishing body grow as their inspiring source
fades gradually and consistently.
Although the self-immolators’ bodies in pain possess rhetorical power, the body is
still an ambiguous form of signification. Witnesses may impose an interpretation on selfimmolations, but the meaning attributed to them is not necessarily the assertion being
advanced. Different people who witness the ‘same’ event can produce remarkably
divergent accounts (Peters 2001). The political and perceptual complications surrounding
the body in pain come at least partially, if not mainly, from the veracity gap; “[w]ords can
be exchanged, but experiences cannot” (Peters 2005 250). There is a gap between
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sensation and discourse. Insofar as a body may make a public statement, it requires a
context and significant symbols (most typically words) to explain its actions.
While pain has long been regarded as an aide for producing truth and bridging the
veracity gap, as is shown in the history of torture, the gap between inner sensation and
outer words often remains uncrossed, even in self-immolations. The discourses
surrounding the will of Kim Ki Sul who burned himself to death on May 8, 1991, in the
ongoing protests can help illustrate the point. After Kim’s self-immolation, the
prosecution and police asserted that Kang Ki Hoon, Kim’s friend and fellow activist, had
assisted and ghostwritten a will for Kim. Kim’s will was verified by the National Institute
of Scientific Investigation (NISI), and the NISI concluded that the will was written by
Kang. With the result from the NISI, the Roh regime argued that Kang played a part in
Kim’s death and even forged his friend’s will to illegally oppose the Roh administration.
Kang was sentenced to imprisonment for three years and two months. While later in 2008
investigation by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission 80 concluded that Kim’s will
was actually handwritten by Kim, not by Kang as was originally claimed by the
government, discourses surrounding the so called forgery of the will of the deceased (and
thus mute) shows the fragility of bodily eloquence, especially its readiness to be hijacked
or reinterpreted unfavorably.
80 The Commission was established in 2005 under the presidency of Kim Dae Jung to
inquire on power abuse cases of previous authoritarian regimes. The alleged faked will
surrounding Kim Ki Sul’s self-immolation in 1991 was one of the first cases of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission. It concluded that the government led by former President Roh Taewoo made a false charge against Kang Ki Hoon. The statement said, “[b]y faking the case, the
Roh Tae-woo administration tried to distract public attention from the series of self-immolations
of those who protested against its violent suppression at that time.”
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The body in pain sends a message. However, what exactly the message means is
not always clear. The discussions and polemics surrounding the practice of sati 81 in India
inform us of the complicated relationship between agency and intention. The intention of
the woman who commits suicide has always been central in framing the debate. In other
words, the two main questions that have been asked surrounding the practice were: “was
the sati voluntary?” or “were the women forced upon the pyre?” Intentionality plays a
key role in answering the questions. For defenders of sati, satis are voluntary, while for
its opponents, all of them are coerced. Interpreting the intention is a tricky game.
The defenders assert that sati is a case of an individual decision, granting the
woman “the fullest integrity of free will,” in other words, agency. From this assertion
arise comparisons and analogies with other socially valorized male acts of selfannihilation. Feminists, on the other hand, in the efforts to demystify the deification of
sati crusaders, argue that sati is a mainly murder. This is not a comfortable position to
take either, given that it has an effect of emptying a victim’s subjectivity of any agency.
The predicament “between subject-constitution (i.e. ‘she wanted to die’) and objectformation (i.e. ‘she must be saved from dying’), is a paralyzing one” (Sunder Rajan 1993
19). In this context, Sunder Rajan contends, “when the individual woman’s subjectivity is
read in terms of intention, intentionality can only be a matter of conjecture and, finally,
ideological conviction” (18).
81 ‘Sati’ refers “both to ‘the Hindu widow who immolates herself on the funeral pile with
her husband’s body,’ and to ‘the immolation of a Hindu widow in this way’” (Sunder Rajan 1993
35).
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The precise meanings of bodily dissent are very hard to locate. Like all nonverbal
communication, ambiguity plays a key role even in martyrdom. 82 As Paul Ricoeur points
out, “[t]he argument of the martyr is always suspect; a cause which has martyrs is not
necessarily a just cause. But, precisely, the martyr is not an argument, even less a proof.
It is a test, a limit situation” (Ricoeur 1980 129). The body in pain can be fragile in the
process of being transformed from personal pain to a public argument, especially without
an attendant discourse to anchor its ambiguous message from alternative and
confounding readings. Self-immolations could be dismissed as incivility, as a mark of
incapacity to communicate, or as senseless acts of convicted communists. Like any other
media, the body in pain is a medium that cannot guarantee transparent reception.
However, the body in pain is not in any simple way determined or limited by
verbal frames. The body in pain is both verbally constructed and excessive. That is,
bodies simultaneously are constructed in discourses and exceed those discourses. Of
particular interest here is the role of emotion. Just like the body in pain, emotion does not
fit well with theories of the public sphere. The public realm is characterized by the
general suspicion or suppression of emotional display. As Hariman and Lucaites (2007)
observe, “[w]hen public life appears emotional, it is assumed to be imperiled” (137).
Emotional reaction is presumed to be subordinated to self-control in the public sphere.
The public sphere is based on muted affect. Nevertheless, the public realm of South
Korea in 1991 reminds us that the public sphere is often filled with affects that diverge
from formal political rationalities, yet play a crucial role in enabling public action. While
82 This ambiguity can also be used as “weapons of the weak” (Scott 1985). See the
following Ethiopian proverb that James Scott quotes at the beginning of his book: “[w]hen the
great lord passes the wise peasant bows deeply and silently farts” (Scott 1990).
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theories of the public sphere largely overlook the power of emotions that motivate human
action, public participation can be better facilitated when the public is moved.
Even though many claim that compassion is replication of another’s feeling, it
also involves interpretation. The compassion of spectators arises from the consideration
of what he himself would feel if he was in the same situation. We feel bad for the dead,
not because the dead feel that way, but because we interpret that we would feel bad if we
were in that situation. Compassion takes up the onlookers’ point of view. We sympathize
with the insane, speechless infants, the dead (Smith 2002 7-8) and a woman in India
(Nussbaum 2001 309) who might be insensible to their own misery. Compassion then
becomes a hermeneutical problem. Onlookers’ judgments about what is happening to the
sufferers are unpredictable in many ways.
On June 3, 1991, Chung Won Shik, a conservative educator who was appointed as
a Korea’s new prime minister after student protests forced his predecessor to quit, arrived
to deliver a lecture at the Hankook University of Foreign Studies. He was pelted with
eggs and flour by demonstrators, and was escorted out of the university lecture hall,
dusted with the flour and spattered with the eggs that students had thrown at him.
Demonstrators dragged him to a gate, the police said, but Chung was not hurt. That was a
turning point for a series of protests. The old teacher’s face became the major target of
empathy, garnering all the media attention. Public emotion is disproportionate. The
incident demonstrates the crucial role that decorum and propriety play in the public
sphere. The Confucius piety was powerful enough to turn the public mood suddenly
against the demonstrators.
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Figure 4. The Photos of Chung Won Shik
With the alleged forgery of the will, there were charges that some of the students
were pressured into self-immolation. Then there was television footage showing the
students roughing up South Korea’s prime minister and pelting him with eggs. The heat
of demonstrations to which a series of self-immolations and hunger strikes had given
impetus was abruptly overpowered and terminated by publicity of Chung Won Shik’s
gingerbread face. The transformation from private experience, whether it is pain or
emotion, to public words is always unstable and thus historically, culturally, socially and
politically constructed.
A series of events that took place in South Korea in the year of 1991 shows how
the body in pain can be intermingled with moral and political action. While the living
body is the object of sensations (and in that sense passive), its ability to respond to
causes, to use its own pain in unique ways in particular social relationships, makes it
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active. It also demonstrates that the physical body is not only our most intimate and
private experience but our most public form.
The case of South Korea in 1991 offers, borrowing Paul Ricoeur’s expression, “a
test, a limit situation.” What was revealed in the test is the potency as well as fragility of
the body, pain, and emotion in the public sphere. Paul Ricoeur captures the ambivalence
of the bodily eloquence when he says, “[a] strange hermeneutic circle is set in motion; the
circle of Manifestation and of Suffering. The martyr proves nothing, we say, but a truth
which is not strong enough to lead a man to sacrifice lacks proof” (Ricoeur 1980 146).
Far from being the desperate stunts of the disillusioned or an expression of
unmediated anger or impatience, self-immolation is a symbolic act. It is a form of
symbolic politics with a democratic flavor, for unlike common terror, its effects are
subordinated to the judgments of its audience. Fostering sympathy, empathy, guilt,
shame, or anger at injustice among publics, the body rhetoric of self-burning performance
encourages by-standing publics in certain ways. Subjecting its effects to the judgments of
its audience, the self-immolator risks his or her own ethos in the performance. The
success of this performance can be attained only if it secures audience identification, and
only if this act elicits some responses from the audience.
Self-immolation has a democratic flavor, not because it is merely oppositional to
repressive government, but because it invites a critical popular regard by addressing the
performance to a judging audience. Self-immolation suicides show us that the body in
pain is not only a means to participate in the public realm, but also, far from getting
independence of world and other men as Arendt (1958) indicates, it is utterly dependent
upon the world and other men.
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CHAPTER IV
PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY IN THE GLOBAL PUBLIC
SPHERE: SCALE, MEDIA EVENTS AND DISTANT SUFFERING
Lee’s Suicide Protest in Cancún
The WTO (World Trade Organization) meeting in Cancún 2003 was surprised by
a suicide protest by a fifty six-year-old Korean farmer. On September 10, Lee Kyung
Hae, scaled the security fences separating the democratic globalization 83 protesters from
the resort where the WTO negotiations were in progress. In a checked shirt bearing a sign
that declared “WTO KILLS FARMERS,” a point he soon made literal, 84 Lee turned to
his compatriots and said: “[d]on’t worry about me, just struggle your hardest.” He then
stabbed himself in the chest with a knife and fell from the fence. The knife pierced 4cm
into the left atrium of his heart and he died several hours later at a local hospital.
The suicide of Lee Kyung Hae was neither the random act of a disturbed man nor
a display of nationalist showmanship coupled with personal psychological problems. 85
83 Following DeLuca and Peeples (2002), I use the term ‘democratic globalization’
instead of ‘anti-globalization’ to argue against mass media’s prevalent labeling of such protests as
“Luddites, Nativists, simpletons, or unruly college kids who simply are against things and do not
understand the realities of the world” (147).
84 For Lee, words on the placards that he used during his protest “cease to be a figure of
speech, a metaphor” (Andriolo 2006). Before his suicide, Lee had also conducted many hunger
strikes. In 2002, he put up a tent and fasted for a month in front of the WTO building in Geneva.
At that time, he was embodying the starving of farmers through his symbolic performance.
85 Lee was one of the most prosperous and renowned farmers in South Korea and well
known as a charismatic farm leader who had mastered a hostile land through his constant
experiments. After graduating from a university in Seoul where he studied agricultural science, he
invited experts from Germany to help with electric fencing - then almost unknown in Korea - and
erected a mini cable-car to transport hay from the higher slopes to the sheds below. He also made
his farm a teaching college with live-in students who were invited to get hands-on experience of
modern agriculture. In 1988, this earned him a UN award for rural leadership. Then calamity, in
the form of a shift in international trade, struck him when the government opened the market to
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Lee’s horrifying mode of protest was a symbolic and political act that highlighted the
cruel consequences of globalization on agricultural communities around the planet. He
was dramatizing the plight of millions of small farmers who have found their whole way
of life brutally undercut by an onslaught of rice imported from subsidizing countries like
the U.S. For example, with eighty percent working as small-scale tenant farmers, Korean
farmers know that they can never compete head-on with rice produced by the huge agribusinesses of the U.S., or apples grown in Chinese farms that can tap into unlimited
cheap labor. As Appadurai (2001) argues, Lee’s death shows how globalization produces
“problems that manifest themselves in intensely local forms but have contexts that are
anything but local” (6).
Figure 5. Lee’s Suicide Protest in Cancún
imports of Australian cows which led to a collapse in the price of beef. His farm herd became
suddenly almost worthless.
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While Lee’s deadly protest exemplifies the destructive forces of global capital
flows and the New World Order backed by ‘free’ trade, it also provokes a consideration
of new forms of participatory democracy. Most literature on globalization has hitherto
focused either on the current workings of capital on a global basis or on its cultural logic
and as a result, economic and cultural aspects of globalization have been explored in
great detail by many astute critics. The concern of this chapter is with political aspects of
globalization, more specifically, the conditions of possibility for what Appadurai (2001)
calls ‘grassroots globalization’ or ‘globalization from below.’
Calling for “a serious commitment to the study of globalization from below, its
institutions, its horizons, and its vocabularies” (19), Appadurai suggests that “successful
transnational advocacy networks might be useful players in any new architecture of
global governance” (18). However, Appadurai admits that they “often lack the assets, the
vision, the planning, and the brute energy of capital to globalize through the capture of
markets, the hijacking of public resources, the erosion of state sovereignties, and the
control of media.” This leads us to ask a host of interrelated questions: how can citizens
enact an international civil society? What are the conditions of possibility for the success
of ‘globalization from below’? How will globalization affect chances for international
citizens’ participation? Is participation possible on a global scale? What does
globalization mean for democracy?
Lee’s protest can shed light on these questions. His death immediately drew
media attention around the globe with his picture, whether the scene of suicide itself—
minutes before and shortly after he plunged a Swiss army knife into his chest— or the
scene of Koreans mourning before a portrait of Lee, seen around the world, shown by
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The New York Times, LA Times, BBC and on other news outlets spanning the globe.
Lee’s action is highly significant as a model that demonstrates not only the way in which
local struggles achieve global significance but also how to exploit the immense
possibilities of mass media to enact forms of activism adapted to a globally wired society.
Increasing attention is being paid to political spectacles such as Lee’s suicide in
the current televisual environment. In the age of globalization, by staging or performing
image events for mass media dissemination, local or national political resistance easily
becomes a global issue. The popular protest in the Tiananmen Square demonstrates how
national politics cannot be separated any longer from broader geopolitical issues. 86 By
especially focusing on the visual and performative aspects of resistance, this chapter
intends to discuss and delineate a transformation of citizen participation in the global
public sphere, explore a possibility for enacting ‘globalization from below,’ and consider
the emergence of new forms of participatory democracy.
The Global Public Sphere and the Problem of Scale
It should be no surprise that I turn to the notion of the public sphere to explore the
conditions of possibility of ‘globalization from below.’ The terms such as ‘globalization
from below,’ ‘grassroots globalization,’ ‘global citizenship,’ and ‘international civil
society’ are all linked with the idea of the public sphere. The use of the term, the public
sphere, is also ubiquitous in literature on globalization. The most cursory of searches
ends up with a plethora of titles containing the term. Despite this sweeping usage, the
86 Examining the iconic photo of a Chinese confronting a tank, Hariman and
Lucaites (2007) argue that the photo constitutes liberalism, especially its celebration of
individual self-determination, as the dominant frame for a global order.
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initial conceptualization of the public sphere by Habermas does not neatly slip into the
discussion of globalization without some modifications.
For Habermas, the public sphere is the locale where face-to-face conversation or
discussion takes place. Habermas’ longing for bodily presence and face-to-face
conversations becomes problematic especially with regard to the possibility of the global
public sphere, once one asks the following questions: Is face-to-face interaction possible
on a large scale? Is audition alone the fundamental form of public sphere? Why not
vision, or imagination? How is the public sphere possible in a geographically dispersed
society? Can there be democratic participation at a distance? It seems that the ‘global’
public sphere is an oxymoron as long as the public sphere remains a place of embodied
voices, of people talking to each other, of conversation.
In Habermas’ public sphere model, the answer to the question on how and
through what institution the public converse with each other and how they can participate
in politics is simple: assembly. This simple answer, however, is possible because the
number of those who congregated and conversed in modern salons was restricted.
Ancient philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle, and modern thinkers such as
Rousseau and Montesquieu all advocated a small-scale body politic (Dahl and Tufte
1973). Plato calculated the optimal number of citizens in a democracy as 5,040, and
Aristotle thought that “the range of the unamplified human voice” (Dahl and Tufte 1973
5) set a limit for democracy. For democracy to work, Aristotle believed that all citizens
should be able to assemble at one place and still hear a speaker. As Arendt (1958)
succinctly puts it:
The Greeks, whose city-state was the most individualistic
and least conformable body politic known to us, were quite aware
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of the fact that the polis, with its emphasis on action and speech,
could survive only if the number of citizens remained restricted.
Large numbers of people, crowded together, develop an almost
irresistible inclination toward despotism, be this the despotism of a
person or of majority rule .... The unfortunate truth about
behaviorism and the validity of its "laws" is that the more people
there are, the more likely they are to behave and the less likely to
tolerate non-behavior (43).
Scale has long been one of the major obstacles to democracy. Since ancient
Greece, the question of “how large should a political system be in order to bring
government closer to the people, for civic participation or participatory democracy?” has
been raised by numerous political and cultural theorists. Until around the eighteenth
century, there was little dissent from the view that a good polity had to be small in
territory and population (Dahl and Tufte 1973). It was seldom questioned that the size of
the public who can take part in the political realm has natural limitations. If democracy is
about self-governing, smallness has been thought to enhance the opportunities for
participation in and control of the government in many ways. 87
As the numbers of citizens grew larger, however, it became impossible for the
citizens to gather at one place and converse with each other. The size of the public who
can take part in face-to-face conversation has natural limitations. As modern societies got
complicated and its scale got larger, “scale seemed the prime symptom of a disruptive
modernity” (Peters 1989 248). John Dewey’s project of turning the great society into a
great community or of finding “the conditions under which it is possible for the Great
87 The most daring rebuttal of the classical view can be found in Madison. Madison
contended that size was not only a necessity, but also an advantage (Dahl and Tufte 1973). He
turned the classical argument on its head, making smallness into a vice and largeness into a
virtue. The greater the size, according the Madison, the greater the “variety of parties and
interests” (Carey 1989 8). Contrary to the traditional argument, Madison thought that a
representative democracy is better. This view is not unrelated to the fact that Madison was an
elitist (Peters 1999). He had more trust in the wisdom of the few than that of the many.
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Society to approach more closely and vitally the status of a Great Community” (Dewey
1927 157) is one answer to this problematic. The possibility of the public, for Dewey,
depended upon how to solve the problem of scale. “The prime difficulty” in his search for
the Great Community “is that of discovering the means by which a scattered, mobile and
manifold public may so recognize itself as to define and express its interests” (146).
Throughout his book, The Public and its Problems, Dewey was concerned about
enduring and extensive, but unpredictable consequences that were brought about by the
expansion of social scale. As long as a communal life constitutes the idea of democracy,
the expansion of scale poses a great danger in finding “conditions under which the Great
Society may become the Great Community” (147).
Dewey takes his point of departure from “the objective fact” that human acts have
consequences upon others. According to Dewey, there are two different kinds of
consequences, “those which affect the persons directly engaged in a transaction, and
those which affect others beyond those immediately concerned” (12). The public, the
cardinal term for Dewey’s whole project, comes into existence only with the expansion of
indirect transactions beyond small-scale community. He wrote, “[t]hose indirectly and
seriously affected for good or for evil form a group distinctive enough to require
recognition and a name. The name selected is The Public” (35). The public, for Dewey, is
the product of the unprecedented struggle to deal with indirect, but significant
consequences that affect the destiny of small town communities that were previously
bound only to direct consequences. In this sense, Dewey predates Michael Warner’s
(2002) theorization of the public as a relation among strangers.
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The consequences of indirect transactions that came along with the expansion of
social scale were so disruptive and unpredictable that Dewey tries to ‘canalize’
(trans)actions and control their unpredictability. He argues that “[t]he line between
private and public is to be drawn on the basis of the extent and scope of the consequences
of acts which are so important as to need control, whether by inhibition or by promotion”
(15). Out of the need to have “indirect consequences systematically cared for” (16),
Dewey’s theorization came to wear its distinctive defensive overtone. With the “attack on
the small town” (Carey 1991) brought about by increased indirect transactions, society
itself became “an epistemological problem” (Peters 1989 249). Unlike the small town
community, society became simply too large to understand. Once hailed destruction of
distance now became a liability. Societies were no longer the simple aggregate of the
small-scale communities, but seemed to be turned into an abstraction the consequences of
which could not be secured.
Although scale was one of the major obstacles to ‘the public and its problems,’
the problem of scale poses a serious threat to the possibility of global public sphere.
Plato’s optimal number of citizens for democracy is well below the number compared to
that of the global public sphere. International citizens are significantly separated in space
(Gupta and Ferguson 1992), and thus, there is a tremendous difficulty of formulating
large-scale political movements (Appadurai 2001). Yet, we cannot put too much hope in
any singular emergence of political revolt as Hardt and Negri (2000) hope. 88 Therefore,
88 For Hardt and Negri (2000) a singular revolt is effective enough to “leap vertically,
directly to the virtual center of Empire” and “attack at the heart of Empire” (58).
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the first step to theorize the global public sphere would be to consider the public sphere in
the light of the problem of scale.
It is noteworthy here to see a critical role played by the development of printing in
transforming geographically scattered individuals into the public. According to Gabriel
de Tarde (1969), private individuals became members of the public because they could
read the same things at the same time through newspapers:
[T]hese men do not come in contact, do not meet or hear
each other: they are all sitting in their own homes scattered over a
vast territory, reading the same newspaper. What then is the bond
between them? This bond lies in their simultaneous conviction or
passion and in their awareness of sharing at the same time an idea
or a wish with a great number of other men. It suffices for a man to
know this, even without seeing these others, to be influenced by
them en masse (Tarde 1969 278).
Tarde believes that face-to-face discussion is not indispensable to the formation of
the public. By reading the same newspapers and magazines, private individuals can form
the public without meeting each other. In other words, the public is “bound only by
impersonal communications of sufficient frequency and regularity” (Tarde 1969 280).
While reading the newspapers, they imagine and turn themselves into members of the
public.
Benedict Anderson (1991) suggests that all communities, including a nation, are
cultural constructs. He especially pays attention to the social-cultural process in which a
nation was constructed as a model of the most meaningful community in modernity.
According to Anderson, the development of print-capitalism made possible the mass
production and mass consumption of newspapers or novels, which, in turn, brought about
the consciousness of the national community. Print-capitalism “made it possible for
rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to
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others, in profoundly new ways” (36). The mass production of printed materials such as
newspapers and novels fertilized by the development of print-capitalism contributed
greatly to the formation of national community.
Anderson argues that the traditional accounts asserting that national community
could be formed insofar as the nation has its own territory or language are fallible. For
Anderson, the media of representation which served to create the common meanings
were more crucial in the formation of national community than having its own
territory. 89 The reason why he pays attention to novels and newspapers is that “the novel
and the newspaper …… provided the technical means for ‘re-presenting’ the kind of
imagined community that is the nation” (25). In this context, Anderson defines nations as
‘imagined communities.’
It is imagined because the members of even the smallest
nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them,
or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of
their communion.… In fact, all communities larger than primordial
villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are
imagined (6). 90
Anderson suggests that people feel themselves related to others who live in a
society by reading the same newspapers and novels. By reporting the non-relevant events
happening at the same time, newspapers make the readers imagine themselves connected
not only to the reported events but also to other people who may read the same
89 He observes that “Christendom, the Islamic Ummah, and even the Middle Kingdom
were imaginable largely through the medium of a sacred language and written script” (Anderson
1991 12-13).
90 Michael McGee (1975) also argues that ‘the people’ are based upon representational
practices. For McGee, all collective identities, “whether as small as a Sunday school class or as
big as a whole society,” are essentially fictions.
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newspapers. This imagined connection is strengthened by “the date at top of the
newspaper, the single most important emblem on it” (33), because this calendarial
coincidence provides readers of the newspaper with “the essential connection.” Here I
can do no better than quoting him at length:
The obsolescence of the newspaper on the morrow of its
printing—curious that one of the earlier mass-produced
commodities should so prefigure the inbuilt obsolescence of
modern durables— nonetheless, for just this reason, creates this
extraordinary mass ceremony: the almost precisely simultaneous
consumption ('imagining') of the newspaper-as-fiction. We know
that particular morning and evening editions will overwhelmingly
be consumed between this hour and that, only on this day, not that.
The significance of this mass ceremony—Hegel observed that
newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning
prayers—is paradoxical. It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair
of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the
ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by
thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is
confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.
Furthermore, this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily or halfdaily intervals throughout the calendar. What more vivid figure can
be envisioned? At the same time, the newspaper reader, observing
exact replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway,
barbershop, or residential neighbours, is continually reassured that
the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life. …… fiction
seeps quietly and continuously into reality, creating that
remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the
hallmark of modern nations (Anderson 1991 35-36).
The long quotation above explains the formation of the public in a geographically
dispersed society. Contrary to Habermas who, with his faith in the principle of identity,
explains that private individuals constitute the public by conversation, Anderson suggests
that individuals imagine themselves as a member of the public through access to
symbolic representation.
While Anderson’s focus is mainly on the formation of the nation-state in tandem
with the emergence of capitalism and the circulation of the printing-press, his model is
useful here because it gives us useful conceptual tools to link imagined communities with
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a global public sphere that is not confined in the small locale. These accounts can explain
the process of the formation of the public sphere on a large scale: the global public
sphere. They lead us to move beyond naturalized conceptions of the spatialized public
and to explore instead the production of community in a global scale. In this regard,
Thompson (1995) indicates that traditional accounts that define publicness as ‘a
dialogical conversation in a shared locale’ cannot explain modern societies appropriately.
The development of media has created new forms of publicness which are quite different
from the ‘traditional publicness of co-presence.’ Some actions and events can acquire
publicness by the media, even if individuals do not get together and have conversation
about them.
The mediated publicness neither is confined to the locale, 91 nor necessitates
conversation between individuals. Rather, mediated publicness is characterized as
despatialized and non-dialogical. The new form of publicness involves visibility
associated with the media. In this sense, publicness in the age of globalization can be
reconceptualized as mediated visibility. If anyone insists on the idea of publicness as
face-to-face conversation and understands the emergence of the mediated communication
through media as the historical downfall from ‘the glorious past,’ the satisfactory
explanation of the nature of publicness in the modern global society would be almost
impossible.
By considering the role of the imagination and the sphere of mediated
representations, we can be better equipped with some theoretical frameworks to consider
91 Keane (1995) also agrees that the public sphere which is bound to locale cannot be
sustained in modern societies.
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the global public sphere. As Gupta and Ferguson (1992) notice, “something like a
transnational public sphere has rendered any strictly bounded sense of community or
locality obsolete. At the same time, it has enabled the creation of forms of solidarity and
identity that do not rest on an appropriation of space where contiguity and face-to-face
contact are paramount” (9). In this context, Appadurai (1996) explores the place of
imagination in the age of modern globalization. Extending Benedict Anderson’s work, he
argues that there is a similar link to be found between the work of the imagination and the
emergence of a postnational political world. Of particular interest for him is the role of
the electronic media. Imagination, when combined with electronic mediation, provides a
staging ground for collective action. Later, Appadurai (2001) further develops the link
between imagination and the possibility of an emancipatory politics. He suggests that we
redefine imagination as “one positive force that encourages an emancipatory politics of
globalization” (6). For Appadurai, imagination becomes “the faculty through which
collective patterns of dissent and new designs for collective life emerge.” In the
following, I will explore how the global public sphere can serve to design new forms of
civic association and collaboration across national boundaries.
Media Events: Civic Participation in the Global Public Sphere
As Aristotle is teaching one man how most effectively to make people say ‘yes,’
he is teaching an opponent how to make them say just as forceful a ‘no.’
Kenneth Burke
If one seeks to find an answer to the question who the public is that would give
publicity to the intended act to begin with, for Kant, it is the reading public. In the Prussia
of the last decades of the eighteenth century, “there could be no truly public realm other
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than this reading and writing public” (Arendt 1992 60). Regarding the bourgeois public
sphere, Habermas gives a similar answer: “it was the bourgeois reading public of the
eighteenth century. This public remained rooted in the world of letters” (Habermas 1989
85). Given Habermas’ privileging of dialogue as the main medium of participation in the
public sphere, one might add ‘talking’ in front of the public, making it ‘the reading and
talking public.’ In the global public sphere in the twenty-first century, however, if one
seeks to answer the same question, it might be the watching public.
Habermas’ hostility toward theatricality is well known. While the relationship
between politics and theatre has long been one of the major issues in humanities, 92 he
vehemently resists aesthetic elements from entering the realm of politics. Public life
modeled on theater for Habermas, whether it is representative publicity in the Middle
Ages, or modern mass media spectacles, is a danger to deliberative rationality. Theatrical
spectacles conjure up the images such as manipulation of mass audience, strong
emotional (thus irrational) responses from stupefied viewers, and the experience of
Nazism. While Habermas rigidly separates aesthetic dimension from political practice, 93
such an iconoclastic stance toward theatricality can be misleading. Visual and theatrical
representation is not merely a form of governance as Habermas asserts.
92 It was Friedrich Schiller who gave an impetus to the concept of theatre state. For
Schiller, it is through aesthetic education that the transformation of political realm is possible.
However, the writer who coined the term ‘aesthetic state’ was more interested in ‘fullness of life’
than in power. As Josef Chytry (1989) points out, “[h]is ideal of an aesthetic state, drawing on the
model of the ancient Greeks, remained resolutely compatible with the small state, and, fully
consonant with Weimar ideas on genuine organic culture, it eschewed explicit social and political
radicalism in its image of the steady nurturing of the aesthetic individual, for whom the state
embodied his or her own harmony writ large” (102).
93 Hariman (1995) argues that even in the works of Frankfurt school and Terry Eagleton
that explicitly attack the idea of an apolitical aesthetic realm, one can find that “a thoroughly
modernist conception of aesthetic autonomy persists” (190).
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Even though Habermas depicts the eighteenth century, with the demise of the
representative publicity, as the century of dialogue, the eighteenth century and the
nineteenth century was still heavily invested with the act of seeing and being seen. As
Outram (1989) points out, “[t]he nobility, like the monarchy, had been a centre of seeing,
in the sense that the gaze of society was directed at its members. They existed to be seen,
their lavish outward display focusing the sight of others, and contrasting sharply with the
dull, unostentatious, typically black costume of the professional middle class” (42). The
efforts to be seen or to be the public body were not limited to the nobility. The members
of the middle-class also “devoted great effort… to constructing new public bodies…
They too were to be looked at” (Outram 1989 44).
Requesting that we consider more seriously the place of visual representation in
democracy and public culture, Hariman & Lucaites (2007) maintain visual culture is
essential in understanding and animating public life. Against the widespread view that
sees “visual practices as threats to practical reasoning or as ornamental devices that may
be a necessary concession to holding the attention of a mass audience, we believe they
can provide crucial social, emotional, and mnemonic materials for political identity and
action” (14). For Hariman and Lucaites, “public culture is a visual culture” (295), and
thus, they propose we adopt the notion of “the visual public sphere” (299), in which
publics are formed through a common spectatorship. By closely analyzing the iconic
images, Hariman and Lucaites argue that visual culture constitutes certain kinds of
citizenship by showing the audience what kind of citizenship is possible. 94
94 The idea that spectatorship is closely related to citizenship can also be found in Kant’s
famous phrase, the citizen of the world. The original German term that Kant used for the citizen
of the world is Weltbetrachter, a world-spectator (Arendt 1992 44). While it is not certain how
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While Hariman and Lucaites offer useful tools and models of analyzing visual
representation in public culture, their analysis makes it difficult to imagine the theatre of
the oppressed. 95 This limitation mainly comes from their object of analysis, iconic
photos. As they acknowledge, iconic photographs are ‘mainstream,’ and thus their
analysis is “a story, of necessity, of dominant media and mainstream cultural discourses”
(288). What is particularly interesting, though underdeveloped, in their analysis is that
they find the precursor of the distrust of visual representation in the denigration of
another art, rhetoric:
The alternating disregard of and paranoia about visual
practices in the public media have telling similarities with the
conventional denigration of the art of rhetoric. Both are said to be
too grounded in popular opinion, too emotional, insufficiently
knowledgeable, artistically muddled, wrongly motivated, ethically
corrosive, and politically dangerous (Hariman and Lucaites 2007
4).
In spite of the age-old denigration of the art, Aristotle (1991) sees rhetoric, as
technē, morally neutral. It can be used both for good and ill. The same holds true for
visual representations. While visual spectacles can be a stage of the sovereign before the
people, they have also served for Thich Quang Duc, Chun Tae-Il, and Lee Kyung Hae.
Diverse activists have used media events to create visual spectacles, which invite us to
think of “[c]ritique through spectacle, not critique versus spectacle” (DeLuca and Peeples
2002 134).
and through what routes a world spectator has been translated to the citizen of the world, it clearly
predates Hariman and Lucaites’ argument that construction of citizenship has something to do
with spectatorship.
95 It also seems that, with their insistent claim to go beyond ideology criticism
notwithstanding, their analysis is often kept within the circuit of ideology critique.
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Hardt and Negri (2000) point out that traditional forms of struggle are
unimaginable in the postmodern society of the spectacle. On the spectacular terrain, “the
old calls for a focus less on image and more on issues and substance in political
campaigns that we heard not so long ago seem hopelessly naïve” (322). Today’s
televisual world characterized by image and spectacle is not merely something to lament.
Moreover, the idea of public, since its Greek and Latin origins, has had the visual and
symbolic meaning of theatrical spectacle which were known and shown to all members
of society (Peters 1995a). Spectacular or visible forms of communication can be thought
of as a new form of participatory democracy.
Tsing (2001) shows us that the search for financial capital depends on spectacle.
Dependence on spectacle, however, is not limited to the financial capital of neoliberalism. Since the WTO protests in Seattle, global democratization activists have
recognized the image event or spectacle designed for mass media dissemination as an
important contemporary form of citizen participation (DeLuca & Peeples, 2002). For
example, in Cancún where Lee committed suicide, demonstrators threw corn on speakers
at news briefings by the United States and took off swimsuits to spell out “No W.T.O.”
with their bodies in the sand. Lee’s deadly protest was one among those efforts to draw
attention from the media by creating newsworthy spectacles. Unable to buy air time like
corporations and mainstream political parties are able to do, many activist groups today
use their bodies to create image events that attract media attention to reach a broader
audience (DeLuca 1999a; 1999b; DeLuca and Peeples 2002; Hartley 1992; Hauser 2000).
Far from sticking to an old dictum, ‘thinking globally and acting locally,’ the activists
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have transformed the local protests into global agenda by creating media spectacles to
generate the public sphere on the global scale.
The media events or political spectacles do not fit well with conventional
conceptions of politics, deliberative democracy, and the public sphere that emphasizes
rationality, civility, and decorum. However, as DeLuca (1999b) argues, “[t]o dismiss
image events as rude and crude is to cling to ‘presuppositions of civility and rationality’
that supports those in positions of authority and thus allows civility to serve as masks for
the protection of privilege and the silencing of protest” (14-15). Although image events
are often spectacular, they do not exclusively belong to the displays of rulers. For
centuries activists have performed civil disobedience in order to generate publicity for
social change on various issues. In the age of mediated publicity, image events are “the
central mode of public discourse both for conventional electoral politics and for
alternative grassroots politics” (DeLuca 1999a 17).
Very often, image events revolve around images of bodies, especially the body in
pain. Hardt and Negri (2000) argue that struggles around the world are “all but
incommunicable,” because “they cannot communicate, because their languages cannot be
translated” (55). In spite of “the paradox of incommunicability” to which Hardt and Negri
refer, the visual form of contending bodies, such as Lee’s vivid and graphic depiction of
social antagonism needs less ‘translation’ and can be very powerful in their assertive
force. Regardless of race, age, class, and national identity, the viewers around the globe
all share at least one thing: the vulnerability of their bodies.
DeLuca (1999a) also shows that diverse social activists, especially environment
activist groups, highlight their bodies in the global public sphere. Slighting formal modes
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of public argument, environment activist groups have challenged the meanings of the
world not through good reasons but through vulnerable bodies, not through rational
arguments but through bodies at risk. Using their bodies to perform their arguments,
members of Earth First!, ACT UP, and Queer Nation perform unorthodox political tactics
that highlight bodies as the most powerful resources (DeLuca 1999b). Especially when
they are shut out from the public sphere dominated by reasoned discourse, social
activists’ primary tactic of political participation and the means by which they can reach
wider audiences can be the spectacle of the self-inflicted body in pain, disseminated
through mediatized images.
In itself, the suffering body may not have any persuasive power, but insofar as its
public display succeeds in eliciting pressure from external groups, it can have a great
effect. Spectacular media events created through one’s vulnerable body can be a new
form of participatory democracy. They subject its effects to the ‘imagination’ of a wider
global audience. With much less efforts of translation, the images of body in pain can
serve as a means of dramatizing injustice, generating emotional energy, building
solidarity, and affirming identity across national boundaries. Rewriting the social text by
performing the body rhetoric in front of cameras, the activists enact a new form of global
public sphere.
Distant Suffering: The Promises and Limits of Compassion
Testimony gives something to be interpreted.
Paul Ricoeur
The previous discussion of the significance of media events in participatory
democracy is based upon one assumption: the happy marriage between sights of distant
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suffering and the audience’s empathy that somehow leads to a certain kind of action. This
romantic view on the power of empathy is expressed by many. For example, while
examining the power of the iconic photograph of the Kent State massacre, Hariman and
Lucaites (2007) put high hopes for the role that emotion, especially empathy, can play in
building solidarity and constructing citizenship. Empathy, for Hariman and Lucaites, is
crucial in constituting citizenship: “[c]itizenship is transferable from one body to the
other, not by legal entitlement or any contractual relationship, but through acts of
empathy, affectional identification, and emotional expression on behalf of the other”
(145). Despite high hopes put on empathy, as Peters (2005) warns, “whether we will
greet such exposure [to media events] with activism, cynicism, or pleasure is a hard
question” (221). Here arises the need to examine the promises and limits of compassion.
The centrality of pain in the discussion of compassion is significant. The German
word for compassion, Mitleid means sharing together of Leid: pain. In the second book of
Rhetoric, Aristotle (1991) defines pity as “a certain pain at an apparently destructive or
painful evil happening to one who does not deserve it and which a person might expect
himself or one of his own to suffer, and this when it seems close at hand” (1385b.2).
Aristotle adds that all pitiable things consist of pains (1386a.8). For Aristotle, compassion
is a particular type of pain. Nussbaum (2001), whose works show the clear influence of
Aristotle, also maintains that, unlike empathy, 96 compassion is “a painful emotion
occasioned by the awareness of another person’s underserved misfortune” (301).
Halttunen (1995) points out that the cult of sensibility should be understood in
96 Empathy is an imaginative reconstruction of another person’s experience. Nussbaum
(2001) argues that empathy involves no particular evaluation of other’s experience, which
distinguish itself from compassion.
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conjunction with the modern view of pain as loathsome, unacceptable and revolting, “a
source of moral horror” (311). 97
The recent interests in empathy are linked with the failure of the modern project
to resolve the dilemmas of the human condition mainly through reason. Instead of
resorting to reason (alone), theorists have come to view emotions as positive guidance for
ethical action and deliberation. For example, Nussbaum (2001) asks what positive
contribution emotions make to deliberation. Among other emotions, Nussbaum sees
compassion as “the emotion most frequently viewed with approval in the tradition, and
most frequently taken to provide a good foundation for rational deliberation and
appropriate action, in public as well as private life” (299). Compassion, Nussbaum
maintains, has the power to “push the boundaries of the self further outward than many
types of love” (300).
Yet, the cult of sensibility is not a new product of a late twentieth-century cultural
phenomenon. The intellectual origins of the humanitarian sensibility go back to the
Latitudinarian divines of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The
Latitudinarians argued that human nature is instinctively sympathetic, which exerted an
important influence on Shaftesbury (Halttunen 1995). Especially, the philosophers of the
Scottish Enlightenment “developed further Shaftesbury’s views on human benevolence,
finding in sensibility the best way to counteract the perils of rampant self-interest and
preserve moral community in a rapidly commercializing society” (305).
97 Like humanitarian sensibility, the revulsion from pain is “distinctly modern”
(Halttunen 1995 304) compared to a pre-modern acceptance of the inescapability of pain.
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During the eighteenth century, a new set of attitudes and emotional conventions
were encouraged, leading to extend compassion to animals and to previously despised
types of persons such as slaves, criminals, and the insane. The earliest beneficiaries of
humanitarian reform for compassion were animals, as “humanitarians began to call for an
end to animal abuse, including such blood sports as cock fighting and cock throwing, bull
and bear baiting, and stag hunting” (Halttunen 1995 319). The public infliction of pain or
death on the bodies of criminal offenders also came under critique. 98 Even ‘football’
became the object of reform concern (320). The eighteenth century witnessed the power
of sympathy that identified a wide range of formerly unquestioned social practices as
unacceptable cruelties to be put an end.
Eighteenth century moral philosophers paid particular attention to the kin
relationship between sight and sympathy. David Hume contends that “virtue is
distinguished by the pleasure, and vice by the pain, that any action, sentiment or character
gives us by the mere view and contemplation” (quoted from Halttunen, 305). Francis
Hutcheson also notes that “when we see or know the pain, distress, or misery of any kind
which another suffers, and turn our thoughts to it, we feel a strong sense of pity, and a
great proneness to relieve, where no contrary passion withholds us” (quoted from
Halttunen, 305). Influenced by Locke’s understanding of the primacy of vision among the
senses, eighteenth-century Scottish moral philosophers addressed sympathy as a
sentiment stirred primarily through sight. This visual emphasis is shared and fully
98 For Foucault (1977), the aim of reform was not humane. Its real aim is “not to punish
less, but to punish better;… to insert the power to punish more deeply into the social body” (82).
See also Haskell (1985a; 1985b).
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developed by Adam Smith who developed the notion of the ‘impartial spectator’ (Peters
1995b; Smith 2002).
What is problematic with spectatorial sympathy is that sentimentality is entirely
compatible with a taste for brutality. There is beauty in ruins. When the misfortune of
others is before our eyes, it produces terror and pity as well as delight. While one can
trace back the acknowledgement of the wish to see something gruesome to Homer’s
Odyssey, or Plato’s The Republic (Book IV), it was Edmund Burke (1998) who explicitly
acknowledges the pleasure in watching the pain of others in his A Philosophical Enquiry
into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Burke is “convinced we have a
degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others” (I14). This delight does not come from our immunity from the distress as in fictions, quite
the contrary: “the nearer it approaches the reality, and the farther it removes us from all
idea of fiction, the more perfect is its power” (I-15). 99 Susan Sontag (2003) also points
out that images of the repulsive can also allure, admitting that most depictions of
tormented, mutilated bodies do arouse a prurient interest. Sontag acknowledges that “the
appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that
show bodies naked” (41).
This sadistic voyeurism present in the pleasure of spectatorial sympathy is the
problem that eighteenth century reformers faced. As Halttunen (1995) puts it:
99 See the following famous passage: “Choose a day on which to represent the most
sublime and affecting tragedy we have; appoint the most favourite actors; spare no cost upon the
scenes and decorations, unite the greatest efforts of poetry, painting, and music; and when you
have collected your audience, just at the moment when their minds are erect with expectation, let
it be reported that a state criminal of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining
square; in a moment the emptiness of the theatre would demonstrate the comparative weakness of
the imitative arts, and proclaim the triumph of the real sympathy” (I-15).
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[h]umanitarian reformers were caught in a contradiction…
To arouse popular opposition to the evil practices they sought to
eradicate, they deemed it necessary to display those practices in all
their horror: ‘civilized’ virtue required a shocked spectatorial
sympathy in response to pain scenarios both real and willfully
imagined. But,.. viewing the spectacle of suffering could inflict
terrible moral damage on the spectator, turning him or her into a
‘savage’ with an ‘atrocious passion’ for cruelty” (330).
In the process of educating the populace that there are evil practices to be stopped,
humanitarian reformers ran the risk of cultivating a positive taste for cruelty. Like
substance addiction, some people actively sought to get exposed to the gruesome sight.
Sentimental literature and art was not free from this accusation. Even Uncle Tom’s Cabin
was read by many as the stimulus for the alluring ‘delicious’ pain of others (Halttunen
1995 331-332).
When people see torments, wounds, and deaths, they get pleasure not so much
from the grief described as from ‘the secret comparison’ which they make between
themselves and the person who suffers. People prize their good fortunes that exempt
themselves from such calamities. Seen from this perspective, spectatorial sympathy
works on the very basis of social distance that it claims to demolish. The eighteenthcentury middle-class reaction to the guillotine exemplifies the social distance that
sensibilité could not cross. The middle-class victims would not allow the lower class to
sympathize with them. The issue that they faced was not only about the relation of that
class to a punishing state, but also that of “maintaining a class definition in the face… of
potential lower-class sympathy” (Outram 1989 117). The middle-class victims during the
century of the sensibility knew better than anyone else that it is humiliating to receive
empathy. As Outram succinctly puts it:
155
Middle-class reaction to the guillotine had not much to do
with that increasing ‘sensibility’ to physical suffering which some
recent historians have seen as the hallmark of changing attitudes to
public punishment in the late eighteenth century. Although some
appeal is made,… the main area of concern is always with the
nature of the interaction between middle-class victims and lowerclass crowd… It was not a drama of the unfolding of human
sympathies between individuals, on which the rhetoric of
sensibility turns. The problem for the middle class… was precisely
the reverse: they were afraid to release the human emotions of fear
and regret in front of a crowd… Sensibilité was part of an intraclass language; a rigid self-control was the only proper attitude in
the face of inter-class relations (122).
Sympathy presupposes a certain notion of distance between the sufferer and the
observer: this is not happening to me, I’m not dying. While empathy involves a
participatory enactment of the situation of the sufferer, it is always combined with the
awareness that one is not oneself the sufferer. As Nussbaum (2001) acknowledges, “[t]his
awareness of one’s separate life is quite important if empathy is to be closely related to
compassion: for if it is to be for another, and not for oneself, that one feels compassion,
one must be aware both of the bad lot of the sufferer and of the fact that it is, right now,
not one’s own” (327). 100 Moreover, empathy is dependent upon not only a certain
distance, but also on a privilege of “standing back from the aggressiveness of the world
which frees us for observation and for elective attention” (Sontag 2003 118).
The dubious privilege of being spectators, or even of declining to be spectators, of
other people’s pain raises the question about the possible link between compassion and
action. While Nussbaum (2001) asserts there is “a very strong connection” between
compassion and beneficent action (335; 339), compassion might be an unstable emotion
100 The popularity of discussion of empathy in the U.S. academy might be explained by
the social distance on which empathy is based. Some might hope that the act of inflicting pain to
others through American foreign policies can be redeemed through empathic identification with
sufferers’ anguish.
156
that withers unless translated into action. As Sontag (2003) admits, wherever people feel
safe, they will be easily indifferent. In a famous passage concerning an earthquake, Adam
Smith (2002) shows how “a man of humanity in Europe” responsed to the news of an
earthquake in China: “[i]f he was to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep tonight; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security
over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren” (193). While the target of Smith’s
pinkie analogy is the liberal guilt (Ellison 1999), or those who are “emotional athletes
and practical cripples” (Peters 2004), Smith also reminds us that compassion does not
necessarily dictate a course of action. One can and should wish distant sufferers well, but
very often can offer nothing more.
What is more problematic with the link between compassion and action is that
there are also chances for the hijacking of sympathy or “the articulation between moral
virtues and political vices” (Peters 2004). We have witnessed how often the moral
command to have sympathy with the pain of others can be utilized by various political
programs of fighting. The Bush administration exemplifies this; the moral imperatives to
have compassion with suffering Iraqi women (or ‘people’) ties somehow to a war cry for
the American military endeavor. September 11 taught us the fatally dangerous link
between compassion and action. An attack on the fragile link between beautiful morality
and its political pirating also comes from a different camp. Hardt and Negri (2000) also
point out that humanitarian NGOs are in effect “some of the most powerful pacific
weapons” of the orders of Empire (36). Moral interventions of NGOs are vulnerable to
usurpation by a frontline force of imperial intervention.
157
Pointing out the specific historical context of Spain, Sontag (2003) contends that
“To read in the pictures, as Woolf does, only what confirms a general abhorrence of war
is to stand back from an engagement with Spain as a country with a history. It is to
dismiss politics” (9). For many humanitarian sensibilities, war is generic. The case
against war usually does not carry information about who and when and where. In real
politics, however, what matters is precisely who is killed and by whom. All politics is not
generic, but concrete. This is why the generic discussion of sympathy that relegates
historical questions to the background is often found wanting.
In spite of the unstable and unpredictable link between compassion and action,
image events still deserve our attention as a form of civic participation in the global
public sphere. In The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt (1978) indicates that spectacles
reveal their meanings only to spectators. It is spectators, not actors, who can know and
understand the full meanings of spectacles. The Greek word for spectators, theatai, from
which the later philosophical term ‘theory’ is derived, implies “a view that is hidden from
those who take part in the spectacle and actualize it” (93). Contrary to the common belief
that the spectator is secondary to the actor, in other words, that one must first create a
spectacle in order for others to judge it, Arendt reminds us that “no one in his right mind
would ever put on a spectacle without being sure of having spectators to watch it”
(Arendt 1992 61-62). Kant, who Marx calls the philosopher of the French Revolution,
also thought that the French Revolution was a public realm not because of the actors but
because of the acclaiming spectators. The public realm “is constituted by the critics and
the spectators, not by actors or the makers” (Arendt 1992 63).
158
That the full meaning of spectacles or media events belongs to spectators, not to
actors, is not something to lament or to be shamed by. In fact, that is the precise meaning
of the public realm. As Arendt emphasizes, “[b]eing seen and being heard by others
derive their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different
position. This is the meaning of public life” (Arendt 1958 57). That address does not
always determine reception, as any teacher would know, is the first lesson any public
actor should be familiar with. The public realm is not based upon certainty. It always
defies any guarantee.
The public realm is based upon the unpredictability and irreversibility of human
action. That is the beauty, not the defect of the public realm. As Arendt beautifully puts it,
“that deeds possess such an enormous capacity for endurance, superior to every other
man-made product, could be a matter of pride if men were able to bear its burden, the
burden of irreversibility and unpredictability, from which the action process draws its
very strength” (Arendt 1958 233). While the full meaning of a spectacle cannot be
determined by the actors, the ‘pride’ to which Arendt refers does not belong to spectators
either. In order to get a full meaning of a spectacle, there is also the price that spectators
have to pay: withdrawal from action, no matter how temporal it is (Arendt 1978). Lee’s
protest shows us one way to bear the burden as an actor, to appear before spectators of
world-citizens, to initiate an event to be judged by the audiences.
159
CHAPTER V
CONCLUSION: THE BODY IN PAIN AND THE REALM OF
APPEARANCE
In a short story, “A Hunger Artist,” Franz Kafka (1971) shows that the aim of a
hunger artist is not survival, but the shining light. That is why “[n]othing annoyed the
artist more than such watchers” who intended “to give the hunger artist the chance of a
little refreshment” (269). Much more to the taste of the artist were “the watchers who sat
close up to the bars, who were not content with the dim night lighting of the hall but
focused him in the full glare of the electric pocket torch given them by the impresario”
(269). Unaware that what a hunger artist seeks after is not food, but audiences, the
watchers were helping the artist by becoming the audience themselves. This is why a
hunger artist is the happiest when watchers “focused him in the full glare of the electric
pocket torch” (269), for “[t]he harsh light did not trouble him at all” (269). What those
who voluntarily put their lives at risk need the most is the glaring light in the public
realm.
Kafka also knew that there is always a gap and distance between the actor and the
spectators. Watchers were usually rewarded by “an enormous breakfast” for watching a
hunger artist. However, when “they were invited to take on a night’s vigil without a
breakfast, merely for the sake of the cause, they made themselves scarce” (269). What is
the most interesting part in Kafka’s story is when he interprets the intentions of a hunger
artist. Kafka speculates that the hunger artist’s thinness may have been caused by
“dissatisfaction with himself,” because “he alone knew, what no other initiate knew, how
easy it was to fast. It was the easiest thing in the world” (270). Having watchers surveil
the hunger artist was thus “nothing but a formality, instituted to reassure the masses,
160
for… the artist would never in any circumstances, not even under forcible compulsion,
swallow the smallest morsel of ford; the honor of his profession forbade it” (268-269).
Kafka shows in a nasty way that the interpretations of the audience very often do not
match the intention of a body artist.
While interpretation of intention is a risky adventure, what we can get from
Kafka’s story is that there is a very strong connection between the body in pain and
publicity. Theories of the public sphere, with their emphases on disembodied rationality,
seldom do justice to the visceral force that the notion contains. However, as its
etymological history shows, the word ‘public’ retains the bodily association. The term
‘public’ derives from the Latin poplicus, an early form of populus (“people”). Then it
evolved to publicus in connection with pubes in the sense of adult men. Public
membership was closely linked to bodily maturity (Warner 2002 23). 101
Pain has also long been in a strange way an inextricable part of the public realm.
The shining light in the public realm in the ancient Greece was also a very harsh one, as
Arendt (1958) keeps reminding her readers. While the images of the ancient public realm
where excellence (arête) can shine are more comfortably imagined to have aligned with
democratic assemblies, the courts, and the theatre, the battlefield was also one of the
main institutions of the public realm. In the battlefield, the participants risked not only
revelation but also their life. It was in the battlefield that such figures as Achilles and
Hector achieved immortality, the best reward for excellence in the public realm.
101 Peters (2005) also notices that “’[p]ublic,’ as the persistent typos tell us, is
etymologically related to ‘pubic’” (106).
161
In the Stoic tradition, pain has been a key element in self-hardening and selfpurgation that is required for those who wish to appear in the public. Cicero puts an
ability to endure pain as the prerequisite of those in public station (Peters 1995b 667).
Pain was a touchstone against which one can rub to test one’s degree of self-control and
self-mastery. In the eighteenth century, as Foucault (1977) vividly shows, even though
the ‘experience’ of bodily pain was gradually kept outside the public realm, the ‘political
economy’ of the body in pain did appear and even played a crucial role in the more
ghoulish version of a space of appearance. Public torture and execution of the condemned
must be seen and especially the tortured body was “open for all to see” (Foucault 1977
35). Even in the liberal tradition, the notion of the public is imbued with “homeopathic
machismo: the faith that imbibing the poison strengthens rather than wrecks the
constitution” (Peters 1995b 669). 102
In this context, my dissertation seeks for the possibility of reading the body in
pain with an Arendtian understanding of the political. While Arendt’s influence is salient
throughout my analysis, the dissertation also contains a critique of Arendt by
emphasizing pain as appearance. This entails rethinking of the body in pain beyond the
realm of privacy and resituating it as an agency of participation. Shifting the focus from
the general discussion of pain’s utter privacy to a politics and ethics of pain, my
dissertation deals with the ways in which the positive engagement of suffering mediates
between the individual’s own subjectivity and the creation of a public world of symbols
and meanings. In this process, the body in pain is seen as political symbols, as vehicles
102 For the fuller accounts of the notion of ‘homeopathic machismo’ and its strange
relationship with liberalism, see Peters (2005), especially chapter four.
162
and transmitters of political actions and intentions, and as an essential medium to enter
into the realm of appearance.
Political participation by citizens can take many forms other than dialogue: letters
to congressional representatives and presidents, signatures on petitions, vigils in town
centers, voting, advertisements in the media, lobbying legislators, tax refusal, civil
disobedience, mass marches and rallies, strikes, and suicide. One question of the
dissertation is to what degree the dialogue model, though formative for the modern public
and still important in deliberative democracy, might be fatally exclusive. Other
motivations have been to thicken the explanation of how marginalized people participate
in collective world making and political action; how they have made dissident rhetoric
articulate; and how certain aspirations of political action get fruitful while others do not.
Self-immolations resemble the characteristics of the representative public sphere
that Habermas depicts in that it can be read as an embodied performance rather than
critical discussion. It is not heard, but seen; not rational, but emotional; not between
participants, but in front of the audiences. However, self-immolation does not mean the
return to the Middle Ages. Rather, it highlights the expressive dimension of public sphere
and its democratic potentials. Here, the crucial question is, whose body?
In considering the political effects of self-immolations, one might argue that
however noble such gestures, they in fact bring about government through terror. It could
be also argued that they contribute to the development for aestheticized politics, the
hallmark of Fascism, an aesthetic overcrowding of the political, and thereby producing
the compelling gestures of mass mobilization. However, if one keeps the question of
‘whose body?’ in mind, the self-immolations can be interpreted as a refusal to accept the
163
trivialization of the body, implicit in mass terror, and a willingness to appear in front of
others in the public sphere.
Self-immolation enacts the political practices of the Cynics whose teachings
consist in a very performative, embodied, public, visible, spectacular, provocative, and
sometimes scandalous way of life. However, it is not my intention to accentuate the
nature of publics that are constituted by individual heroism. Instead, I emphasize the
importance of commitment, risk taking, embodied performance, and the plurality of
agents as a different or even alternative requirement to the ‘as-if’ that is characteristic of
the pragmatics of deliberation. The politics of suffering, especially its fragile effects, also
highlights the fundamental characteristics of the public realm: unpredictability and
irreversibility.
The politics of suffering shares a lot with rhetoric. In both arts, neither the testing
of propositions, nor the application of general principle, but struggle over appearances
becomes a guiding principle. Both include non-deliberative elements as drama, emotion,
and the body in their critical vocabularies. Both are addressed to the idea of an audience
that will judge appearances in all their particularity with a view toward action. Both are
an agonistic art in the absence of a general principle. Both respect, not subsume,
difference and contingency. Both prove nothing and depend upon performance. Both
require an understanding the values held in a specific community. And finally both need
the space of appearance and depend upon the presence of others.
164
Critical Questions and Future Directions
I have no use for the man who, by easy shedding of his blood, purchases fame; I
value the man who can win praise without death.
Marcus Valerius Martialis
Dealing with the cases of self-immolations that took place in “non-western”
societies can lead to such charges as academic mileage and native informancy. Given the
various historical contexts in which the “barbaric” and “uncivilized” acts in the “other”
societies have been the focus of Western eyes, and thus providing a rationale for their
intervention, this is not an irrelevant concern. Mindful that focus on “case” studies can
reaffirm “historicist or culturalist explanations” in postcolonial intellectual work (Sunder
Rajan 1993 1), my dissertation attempts to find a way that does not necessarily get
trapped into this particular path, while reclaiming questions of theory as integral to
interpretation of the politics of suffering.
I hope my dissertation does not fall into the simple model that opposes the
dominant versus the subaltern. By succumbing to the opposition, and by trying to
distinguish the subaltern ‘counter’ public sphere from the dominant public sphere, one
can easily reduce the scope and the actual heterogeneity of the development of the
“Western” “bourgeois” public sphere. I am not interested in delineating a strain of selfrighteous Puritanism in arguing for the subaltern public sphere as distinguished from the
bourgeois public sphere. The subaltern counter public sphere should be viewed in relation
to, as much as a form of resistance to, a dominant public sphere model.
Against the tendency to romanticize resistance, it should be noticed that selfimmolations are neither always nor essentially resistant. Just as rhetoric is a neutral tool
165
that can be used for good and evil, the body rhetoric of self-immolation can also be used
by various subjects for different political purposes. For example, in 1990, there was a
massive wave of self-immolations by mainly upper-caste students in India as a protest
against a government decision to expand affirmative-action programs for members of
historically disadvantaged castes. The case shows a great variety of motivation involved
in the acts of self-immolation, alerting us against succumbing to the easy temptation to
render self-immolation ‘resistant’ by definition.
As the epigraph of this section insinuates, self-immolation as a form of protest
raises the question of sustainability. Creating a dramatic event for public attention is one
form of political protest. However, one can argue that commitment to resistance should
essentially nondramatic, yet persistant and should resist the impulse to theatricality,
because the deepest transformation can take place through realizing small opportunities
little by little. The progressive political movement often stresses on the importance of
“small steps” rather than that of a single decisive action. Given that how to sustain a
commitment is a serious question that any politics of confrontation must take into
account, self-immolation can be viewed as another kind of “the fetishism of immediate
visible results” (Ryan 1994 28). If the shining light in the realm of appearance is the
reward for self-immolation, persistence is the primary obstacle.
Some might argue that the political use of the body is limited to ‘pre-modern’
society. However, even in the Western states, it is increasingly true that the politics even
of legal protest is characterized by the large-scale use of the human body. Some might
argue that the focus on Korean cases is limiting in terms of its explanatory power of
contemporary democratic culture. I hope that the cases of self-immolation offer an
166
opportunity not only to theorize how marginalized peoples express themselves with their
body when there are no other means to express themselves, but also to rethink the more
general theme on civic acts of looking upon suffering beyond “local” political relevance.
I end the study by suggesting some future directions in thinking about self
immolation. First of all, the politics of suffering can be articulated with Subaltern Studies,
a field that is increasingly defined by death. Both share the importance of interpretation
on bodily dissent as well as of the notion of representation. If the primary task of
subaltern scholars is to listen to the voice that can be heard through the modality of dying
as Spivak (1988a) speculates, the hermeneutics of bodily dissent becomes crucial in both
inquiries. Second, the politics of suffering can be aided and supplemented by other
political genres such as suicide bombing; another urgent topic that invites theoretical,
political, and ethical consideration. Self-immolation is different from a suicidal attack in
that it is not intended to cause physical harm to anyone other than oneself. Nor does it
involve material damage to properties other than one’s own body. However, both are
fundamentally a public, embodied, performative, visible, spectacular, and provocative
political argument.
Third, self-immolation can be found and thus studied widely around the world.
Examining five hundred thirty three individual acts of self-immolation from 1963 to 2002
in three dozen countries, Biggs (2005) estimates that the number of self-immolation cases
would be somewhere between eight hundred and three thousand (177). Before 1963, the
year when Thich Quang Duc immolated himself, self-immolations were a local
phenomenon. It did not travel globally. Its effect remained local, failing to inspire people
elsewhere. The advent of photography and technologies for the rapid transmission and
167
cheap reproduction of images made possible tele-intimacy with distant suffering. In the
age of photo-journalism, what form can commitment take when those called upon to act
are thousands of miles away from the person suffering, comfortably installed in front of
the television set in the shelter of the family living-room? What does it mean to argue
utilizing the body before citizens of multiple cultures? What are the politically and
morally acceptable responses to the sight of suffering as a spectator of cultural others? To
answer these questions, one not only needs to take the cultural and historical context very
seriously, but also needs to inculcate a vigorous hermeneutical imagination.
168
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