Military Culture or Cultural Military

 

For most Korean men, military is a subject of absolute oscillation. They go between abhorrence and sympathy for it. Yet through the 1980s’ military culture in Korea has been mostly accused of implanting insipid uniformity and obstinacy to civilian life. However, is it solely the military itself that is responsible for the lack of culture in it? We should say no, for the civilians have been accomplice to it. Many occurrences tell the truth about it. Most intellectuals, including me, will not be very fond of military culture. However, from time to time I get startled to find myself chanting military songs. Several of them contain sorry lyrics that praise the former military dictator government. Indeed, almost all the military songs are part of propagandistic effort. It was the sheer tide of the society itself that forced me to chant them regardless of my tendency or ideology. In other words, contrary to common belief, the military itself is not powerful enough to push a man chanting their songs long after he has finished his service. The Korean society itself has been a huge military camp. It was apparently so until the late 1980s’. 

Perhaps the military culture might have been the name of the other that we had tried to dispel. We, already potentially a war machine, are conscripted and given a title of military culture. The state utters, “you are no longer a war machine that wildly roam the field. You can only run when the state tells you to, and you can only stop when the state tells you to.” The state utters this so vividly and in detail that reserve army soldier who comes back to school after the service speaks in the manner of a soldier in active duty. The military culture in Korea blurs the line between the military and the civil society. It appears to be related to war but is indeed about discipline that is no longer tied to the war. The active role of the military culture turns the gesture of discipline to the culture of life. However, this life is not full of vital energy. It is about annihilation, in the name of defense and security. The military culture is about this complex of hide and seek. We will try to discover the multiple layers of military culture.

The military culture reminds one of uniformity but is a sum of countless protocols. In order to fire a rifle, one has to go through endless protocols about how to hold it, how to assemble and disassemble it, how to properly aim it, how to perform all kinds of close-order drill and finally how to shoot it. To fire a rifle in the military has nothing to do with the outburst of one’s energy or hidden desire as is seen in the Hollywood movie. There is no room for desire or expression in the military. Stanley Kubrik’s eccentric yet realistic movie about Vietnam War, <Full Metal Jacket> clearly shows this protocol when new Marine conscripts lie on their beds and chant the Rifleman’s Creed: “This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is MINE. My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. My rifle without me is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless….” Here, the voice that chants the creed is a strange interface that connects soldiers’ bodies with the military. However, questions arise. Is there a culture in it? Is there a military culture in this creed and the voice that chants it? What is a culture? If one can define culture as ‘patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activities significance and importance,’ cultures can be “understood as systems of symbols and meanings that even their creators contest, that lack fixed boundaries, that are constantly in flux, and that interact and compete with one another”. (wikipedia) In this quote, ‘flux’ is the key term. An activity of producing meaning in the state of flux is culture. In light of this definition, the military culture is not a culture proper, for it lacks the fluidity and livelihood that is the essence of culture.

The problem with the military culture in Korea is that it has mimicked the culture proper while it resides outside it. In the 1980s, Korean people hated their military culture for they thought it was the origin of fascism. However, the military was not a singular source one can trace back to its originating point. The military culture and fascism in Korea in the 1980s has been a hostile pair whose lives were fed by the civilian. There are many aspects of it.

1. In the 1960s, the police would regulate the long hair on the streets. They had such authoritative power that they could cut anyone’s hair if it is decided to be too long. What was really disgusting about this spectacle is that the onlookers used to laugh at it instead of getting angry at the encroachment of civil right.

2. In the early 1980s the military dictator government hired college students to control the traffic on the streets. Wearing uniform, they were fiercer than the police. While some college students were on demonstration opposing the dictator government, some others played slaves for them.

3. Office workers shouting ‘To!’ in 85db in restaurants for a toast.

4. The memorial tower in the May 18 National Cemetery which commemorates the resistant struggle against the dictatorship has been built in the same style as the memorial tower for the completion of Kyungbu Expressway, the symbol of military dictatorship.

The irony of the military culture is that these fascist tendencies are more apparent in the civil society than in the military. According to the common sense, the military is the place dominated by uniformity. Then, is every soldier identical to their teeth? The truth is the opposite. Although the military tries to impose discipline on the bodies of soldiers, they try their best to differentiate. I see it as a struggle to survive as a man of culture where the lack of culture is the central motto. The most prominent reason why uniformity matters is because people tend to submit to the oppressive order in a quite voluntary manner. It never roams around by itself. It always accompanies spontaneity but always hides behind it. Flag raising ceremony in the 1980s was such a case. Korean people, including even the college students opposing the military dictatorship were accomplice to this rule.

However right now it is almost a decade after the turn of the millennium. It is no longer a time in which the true and the false are fixed and one can only dig the ground in search of the hidden truth. It is time of fluidity and oscillation in which the true and the false are all passengers to this rolling ship of representation. The problem will not be solved in a simple manner of just displacing the oppressive uniformity. What we need is a conceptual turn. Instead of striking the same nail head over and over again to destroy it, we will have to just transfigure the whole mapping of military culture.

 

Right at this moment the exhibition 39(2) marks a drastic turn in our perception of the military culture. The military culture as articulated by five Korean male photographers is no longer stubborn or uniform. Moreover, the sorry rhetoric of typical military bluff is not to be found here. These photographers deconstruct the site in which the military culture has been implanted in our interior being in their own separate ways. In them the military culture comes in so humble a shape: a soldier of vanity who is just interested in a spring flower instead of focusing on the combatant drill of kill and survival (Young Hoon Lee), the sharp noses of fighter jets that are about to pierce into the heads of the spectators instead of protecting them (NOH Suntag), Once a fantasy of young male kids, now monstrous cadaver of plastic miniatures of military weapons (Gyoo Sik Kim), edifices of North Korea that looks so feeble and shabby that they no longer look to be any threat to the national security of South Korea (Seung Woo Back), the history of domination no longer stimulates any hostility to the conqueror but stirs up some melancholy (Jae Hong Jeon). These are the shapes of the military culture that has been unnoticed so far, or disavowed even while being noticed. 

So far the military culture has been super-sonic, super-high, super-large and super-invisible. No civilians could catch its trace. It was the military power that slew Godzilla and King Kong. Now it is the time that we should go under, around or over these supers. So we had to wait for the arrival of photographers whose eyes were so fast as to capture the moment right before the penetration of the fighter jet into the human head, who had such an imagination that could feel the force and strength of military weapon from the parts of a miniature model, who had such a good sense of photographic tone that he could notice how the dark, ominous military colors could match with gay colors of spring flowers. We also had to wait for a tall enough photographer who could look over the fence separating two Koreas.

Now the motto at hand is not ‘out with the military culture!’ but ‘different military culture’. It looks easy but will come as a fairly heavy and difficult task. Indeed, although what the photographers of 39(2) are trying to do is to look at the military culture from a ‘different’ perspective, were it in the 1990s the difference embodied in their vision would have gone unnoticed.

As it is a good time now, or we have a big demand for a different vision, five photographers have made the military culture look quite mellow. Their photographs are the utterances that work in ‘performativity’. Now we can live in the military culture. For the language about it has turned to that of ‘performativity’ that work in our everyday lives. The military culture has been transfigured to the culture of military. Or at least the door to the transfiguration has become wide open. When was the last time photography did a nice job for us?