TJ Shin examines “paranoiac time” (and possibilities for its rupture) in the context of the Cold War and the neoliberal present.
Part of LIKE A FEVER's On Time series, which asks an array of writers and artists about connections between time and the problems we face today.
Deterrence: Two-part Opposition
If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at five o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?
—John von Neumann
Fear, under conditions of complicity, can neither be analyzed nor opposed without at the same time being enacted.
—Sianne Ngai
Image: Still from Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964).
A Pentagon War Room in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, stages a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. Just thirty-five minutes prior, US General Jack D. Ripper had issued a pre-emptive nuclear attack, “Plan R,” on the Soviet Union, bypassing the authority of the Pentagon with a secret three-letter recall code known only to him. When US President Merkin Muffley questions his Joint Chiefs why a nuclear attack was issued without his authorisation, General Buck Turgidson responds that it was Muffley himself who approved the provisional plan as an emergency protocol. The provision allows a senior officer to launch an attack should the President and his superior officers be killed in a Soviet first strike. The failsafe—which sought to boost the credibility of US deterrence, and to discourage the Soviet Union from attacking in the first place—had backfired without Muffley’s knowledge, triggering a full-scale strike.
With 17,000 permutations of the three-letter recall code, President Muffley has no choice but to invite the Soviet Ambassador Alexei de Sadesky into the War Room and telephone the Soviet Premier Dimitri Kissov. Muffley offers to share the targets, flight plans, and defensive systems of the bombers to divert the impending attack. The Ambassador in turn informs the President that the Soviet Union has created a doomsday machine as an ultimate nuclear deterrent, set to detonate automatically should any nuclear attack strike the country. The device can’t be deactivated since it’s programmed to explode if any such attempt is made.
Dr. Strangelove evokes a familiar, if not striking image of the Cold War. A disclaimer at the beginning of the film notifies the audience that the US Air Force would prevent the escalation of such events in real life, but such a claim bears open suspicion. If one creates a weapon as a defensive measure against war, what prevents the other from creating the same weapon under a similar guise of protection? If the enemy has created a weapon of greater power and destruction, what’s left but to create an even larger scale of power and destruction to avoid falling behind?
To avoid escalation, deterrence acts as a defensive strategy to persuade adversaries that the cost of aggression outweighs its benefits, fostering a mutual non-aggression pact. But effective deterrence hinges on establishing a credible image of retaliation, including nuclear reprisals, second-strike capabilities, and a robust alliance system—it requires a convincing act of destructive power as the only safeguard against aggression. Deterrence, therefore, arbitrates upon immanent and prolonged violence.
The film also hints at another problem of deterrence and the projective logic of perception. When Muffley asks Alexei why the Soviet Premier did not alert the US about the doomsday machine, pointing out that the power of the machine is lost if kept a secret, Alexei says it was scheduled to be announced at the Party Congress the following Monday. This prompts the question: If your military strength is only as powerful as it appears from the oppositional gaze, what happens if your adversary is unable to see you? How does your adversary represent you in your absence?
In this interpretive and cognitive act, deterrence becomes a highly formalising activity with divergent aesthetic responses that simultaneously agitate and attend to one another. Viewing oneself as the subject-to-be-seen involves appraising your position and prospective actions through the ascribed model comprehended and anticipated by the other. Viewing oneself as the dominant seeing-subject, one approximates the other based on a previous model that has been projected and communicated by the other. Mirrored by respective asymmetrical presences, deterrence is a two-part operation that consists of oppositional measurements uniquely linked together. The presence of the enemy supplants the interlocking system that measures parity and routinises instability.
Dr. Strangelove plots out Cold War anxieties to reveal how deterrence is a growing and moving contradiction that indexes unease about the future while simultaneously attending to it. How do we understand a hostile power and model our strategy once a threat is perceived? To determine the best strategy for diplomacy, Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher at the RAND Corporation, the first think tank in America, designed a thought experiment called the prisoner’s dilemma in 1950. The game studied two “prisoners" who had two choices: cooperate for mutual benefit for fewer points or defect for an individual, higher reward.
The goal is to score as many points as possible, and there are four different outcomes for prisoners A and B:
- If A and B both cooperate, they both get 3 points.
- If A cooperates but B defects, A gets 0 points and B gets 5 points.
- If B cooperates but A defects, B gets 0 points and A gets 5 points.
- If both A and B defect, they both get 1 point.
Despite the logical deduction to defect for individual benefit, the results of the game found that the best strategy is actually cooperation, which may seem counterintuitive. This is due to the assumed logic that if the opponent is “rational,” they too would opt to defect, leading both parties to the suboptimal outcome of only 1 point. So when both parties act in their self-interest, the most optimal outcome is not achieved, because the experience of anticipation is anticipating the opponent’s anticipations—a convoluted loop of projected actions of a projected double. Game theory demonstrates that rationality is a projective measure that monitors behavioural probabilities and conditions players to follow similar decision-making strategies towards mutually assured goals.
By simulating numerous mathematical models, the prisoner’s dilemma found the best playing strategy was a tit-for-tat (TFT) model. TFT involves cooperating with another player in the first interaction and then mimicking the opponent’s previous action. This playing style of “equivalent retaliation” has been described as clear, nice, forgiving, and as expressing democratic, modern sensibilities. Ultimately, each action is countered with a matching response, competition with competition, and cooperation with cooperation, reproducing the very structural logic of military deterrence—i.e., using the psychology of fear and reprisal to effectively disarm the opponent from retaliating. The TFT strategy would later model behavioural attitudes on a global, real-life scale, including international policy, diplomatic relations, prison sentences, civil riots, and the nuclear arms race, revealing how operations research and behavioural science supply the formal structure of security for national defence.1
However, the game reaches a critical limit: what happens when you don’t want to participate? What if you want to play a different game altogether? Who and what benefits from these parameters and what are the consequences should you decide to withdraw or, in the eyes of the enemy, “defect”?
Similar to the procedural logic of the prisoner’s dilemma, deterrence is an operative structure that estimates victory and losses in quantifiable terms, demanding a certain metric for self-surveillance, behavioural patterning, and psychological policing—a process of standardisation. One assesses social, ethical, cultural, and political positions within a predefined model, and then aligns their behaviour with a standardised template.
Sianne Ngai explains that this aesthetic outcome reveals an “arrangement in which a threatening social reality is realised with the outcome of disclosing the subject’s participation in its formation.”2 The imposed structure becomes a process of paranoiac subjectification, generating a “phobic organisation in which it becomes impossible to separate the interpretations the subject generates from those that generate the subject.”3 This means one colludes in a system in which they are already inscribed. Even an absent or unresponsive subject, without conscious or wilful consent, partakes in the totalising system, which registers the appearance of nonparticipation as “uncooperative,” and therefore “defective” and “irrational.”
Dr. Strangelove depicts nuclear deterrent strategy as an infinitely networked and knotted system, an abstract, intangible, but overpowering logic that governs perception. When a junior officer asks General Ripper why he has gone rogue and initiated Plan R, he responds: “When they realize there is no possibility of recalling the wing, there will be only one course of action open…total commitment.” Fredric Jameson in The Geopolitical Aesthetic describes totality as conspiracy, a failure on the part of the subject to conceptualise a social reality or represent “a potentially infinite network, along with a plausible explanation of its invisibility.”4
Conceptualising the vast, fragmented landscape into a new social order becomes a mode of conspiratorial production itself—the experiencing subject who seeks to create a uniform impression of reality by placing himself in the centre of world systems, producing a meaningful object-world. General Ripper, who fears he cannot “keep up” with the boundless spatial logic of the present, seeks the immediacy and all-encompassing impact of nuclear destruction. A paranoiac’s biggest fear is failing to be on time, alienated from the continuity of the present. General Ripper, suspecting he’s out of time and out of centre, embraces his self-anticipated demise to its fullest outcome: self-destruction.
After all deterrence strategies have failed and the doomsday machine goes off, a lethal cloud of radioactivity is predicted to envelop the Earth for 93 years, ushering in a new atomic age of war. The US government plans for a 99-year survival project, which involves relocating 200,000 people to live in deep underground mines, shielded from the radiation. General Turgidson worries that the Soviets will do the same and fears an impending “mineshaft gap.” Premier Alexei walks out of the War Room with a pinhole camera hidden in a pocket watch that holds dual time zones, suggesting one time signature for the US and the other for the Soviet Union. If the watch signifies a failed syllogism of progressive time, paranoiac time is proleptic. Pushed forward in time, the present is simply an estimating act that will always fall short. The watch announces the here-and-now as already too little and too late.
Neutrality: Confidence Model
If paranoiac gaze circulates upon a “potentially infinite network,” a temporal and visual infrastructure of world-systemic exchange generating the economy of interlocked, coordinated time, one could argue that “neutrality” has historically offered an interventionist model that seeks to manage imminent and escalating state violence. Neutrality functions by purporting to impart to the two parties and their allies the idea of a middle ground, a mutual meeting place, that brokers and trades risk and insurance through impartiality and objective analysis.
So, what does neutrality signify in the context of the Cold War and geopolitical aesthetics? Park Chan Wook’s film Joint Security Area (2000) foregrounds neutrality as a figurative and spatial narrative unfolding in the Joint Security Area (JSA), the only portion of the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) where North and South Korean forces stand face-to-face after the Korean War. The JSA has also been a site for diplomatic engagements and military negotiations, historically used to sign the Korean War Armistice Agreement in 1953 and repatriate prisoners of war (POWs) across the “Bridge of No Return.”
The film follows Swiss Army Major Sophie E. Jean, commissioned by the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission (NNSC), to investigate a shooting at the North-South Korean border two nights prior. A radio broadcast contextualises the shooting amid escalating tensions, North Korean’s nuclear programme, and the advance of US naval vessels in the East Sea, describing how “both Koreas recognise the need to handle the recent conflict calmly and objectively, and to avoid having this trivial matter escalate into war.”
Major General Bruno, from the NNSC Swiss contingent at JSA, debriefs Major Sophie: “Our job is to find out not who, but why. Also, what’s important is not the outcome, but the procedure…Your ultimate goal is to remain perfectly neutral, and not to provoke either the South or the North.” He allegorises the Korean peninsula as a “dry forest,” explaining that “one small spark could burn the whole forest down.” Major Sophie is in a unique position to take on the supposed role of “perfect neutrality.” Born and raised in Geneva, Switzerland, Sophie is the daughter of a Korean father and a Swiss mother and can speak fluent Korean and English. Her mixed heritage qualifies her impartiality, representing one of Switzerland's central foreign policies of perpetual neutrality and inviolability, ensuring “independence from all foreign influences” to generate a “source of peace and stability in Europe and beyond.”
As a member of NNSC, she holds special permission to cross the Bridge of No Return, enabling her to collect testimonies and forensic analysis to reconcile the conflicting depositions from the two survivors of the shooting, North Korean Sergeant Kyeong-pil Oh and South Korean Sergeant Soo-hyuk Lee. Her presence of “neutrality” is evinced through various procedural recording instruments—a camcorder, transcriber, and cassette recorder—generating a visual field of “objectivity” through the perception of clearly defined objects. Despite her supposed neutrality from “foreign influence,” Sophie models a highly affective attachment to a particular ideological position and an object’s status of disinterest that enables the conditions for knowledge and forms of aesthetic judgement.
Sianne Ngai considers how disinterestedness foregrounds emotive or affective qualities that compress “assessments of complex situations…indicating the total web of relations.”5 What allows this web of relations to cohere and unify, Ngai explains, is the tone of “confidence,” a persuasive act that “assembles” and trades emotions as fungible psychic properties and commodities. Neutrality thus becomes the source and production of persuasion—an interest in disinterestedness and judgement on judging—that allows the “affective quality” or “atmosphere” of objective contemplation to become representational and merely formal.
Upon discovering that both the North and South Korean witnesses are concealing another conspirator, and thereby an open secret, Major Sophie attempts to expose what the two parties seek to protect. In a cross-examination room with North and South authorities guarding each side, Sophie details the inconsistencies of the depositions and proposes to start the investigation all over again. Through a sweeping panoramic that circles the room, the camera moves from the first witness through a camera monitor, back to Sophie, and then to the second witness via another monitor. In centrifugal logic, the feeling of procedural objectivity becomes immanent in the procedural tools themselves. The distant spectator, from the camera’s all-perceiving vantage point, presents a uniform, cohesive reality that melds the “middle ground” of discordant, asymmetrical presences into an object of aesthetic contemplation.
Images: Stills from Park Chan Wook’s film Joint Security Area (2000).
Sergeant Lee, unable to reconcile his subjective experience with his objective status, reaches a breaking point. The back-and-forth transition between the mediated recording and his personal gaze signals a polemical confusion between Lee’s subjective reality and his reflected environment. The objective field of vision starts to blur, evoking uncertainty over the formal boundaries between the presence and appearance separating his external and internal worlds. Sergeant Oh, upon his growing awareness of being watched, knocks Lee to the ground and accuses him of being a “capitalist pig” and a “Yankee puppet.” In a bid to shield themselves from confessing, Oh restabilises the field of vision and restores bipolarity and their respective ideologies back to the mediating site of neutrality.
If neutrality is simply a representational frame effectuated by various aesthetic encounters with procedural logic—bureaucracy, diagnosis, deposition, the ticking watch—Sergent Oh reminds us that there are no real safeguards should he and Lee attempt to disclose, and therefore traumatise, the effects and limits of this formal boundary.
Sophie’s aggressive line of questioning eventually leads to the suicide of two witnesses. “Here, the peace is preserved by hiding the truth. What they both really want is that this investigation proves nothing after all.” General Bruno reprimands Sophie, arguing that the NNSC’s peacemaking work lies not in the resolution of conflicts, but in the formalisation of its own representativity—the project of polity unity—that effectuates neutral contemplation and consensus-making.
Neutrality, therefore, is not a site devoid of investment, but an image of confidence that coheres a complex of virtual and diffused representations and realities, forms and structures of agreement, culminating into a total affect or common world of security.
Shortly after, Sophie is dismissed by the NNSC. The Ministry of National Defense Foreign Affairs, alongside the Indian, Brazilian, Argentinian, and Swiss embassies, have discovered that Sophie’s father was a North Korean defector—one of the 76 out of 170,000 POWs who refused to repatriate to either communist North Korean or South Korean capitalist society after the war.
What’s interesting is the marked difference between Sophie and her father: while her father chose exile in his refusal to submit to nationalistic warfare, thereby politicising his dissent, Sophie has lost the confidence of neutrality, politicising her very absence as an object to be perceived. And perhaps this is where the film reveals its biggest secret: neutrality is an act of disguise that must hide its own perceptible reality.
Desynchronisation: Massification
This document is transmitted through, by the same means, the same channel without distinction the content is delivered in the same style: the word. The image. To appeal to the masses to congeal the information to make bland, mundane, no longer able to transcend their own conspirator method, no matter how alluring their presentation. The response is precoded to perform predictably however passively possible. Neutralized to achieve the no-response, to make absorb, to submit to the uni-directional correspondence.
Why resurrect it all now. From the Past. History, the old wound.
—Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
In a passage of Dictee, artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha describes how a “document” is transmitted through the same channels without distinction.6 She explains how “the word” is delivered in the same style when dispersed and distributed into a historical document, and the qualitative feeling or affect of the present is reduced to a mere conceptual generalisation or neutralisation.
How does one relate to information when history spatialises time and temporalises distance into an impersonal record or archive? What centralises a traumatic event if not the generalisation and connection to other traumatic events, massified and erased of its determinative content into formal indifference? History, passing through a “uni-directional correspondence,” shapes our ability to represent time but includes all the ways in which representation takes place. Similar to the various procedural encounters in Joint Security Area, Cha presents historic time as a representational frame that submits and absorbs distinct information into an object of distant, detached contemplation. She asks why we should resurrect or traumatise the formal boundary of the past, the old wound, into the present.
Sunny Xiang writes that historic timelines are usually centred around a chronology of events before and after the war—marked by periods of catastrophe, crisis, and ruptures—because of their capacity to produce “eventfulness.”7 In the context of the Cold War, the prolonged duration of state-sanctioned violence, countered with its enduring peace, pose a unique historiographical problem arising from the difficulty of processing difference. Xiang asks, how do we periodise a war that is protracted rather than punctual, “temperamental” instead of disruptive? How does one approach the historiographic import of the Cold War in the absence of representational difference? And how does this absence supply the object of formalisation, in which national subjects emerge to advance Cold War race-making?
In an online article published in 2017 at the RAND Corporation, “The Rorschach Test of New Nuclear Powers: Analogies for North Korean Command and Control,” Austin Long argues that emergent superpowers like North Korea pose an acute problem for social scientists, historians, and policymakers. Without direct experience or controlled experiments to draw parallels from the past, analysts face a challenge akin to interpreting Rorschach inkblot tests, where visual information is combined with personal experience.
The author, considering the Pakistan–India conflict, opts to compare Pyongyang not with modern Islamabad, as South Asia experts might, but rather to the early Soviet atomic programme and the US during the early Cold War. To resolve this bifurcation, the writer proposes to “look for key differences between the Soviet Union and Pakistan and then assess how North Korea lines up with those differences.”
In his explanation of emergent phenomena and technological power, the author demonstrates the shortfalls of his own thesis: when the interpreter’s experience and knowledge are the only data provided, their own biases are inevitably advanced as a priori. By transforming supposedly distant and a-historic entities into spatial and temporal analogues, the article advances the aestheticising morphology of Cold War Orientalism—i.e., Asian Communist destruction and “Third World” inscrutability—to recruit past models of military control and national command.
Pamela Lee explains how Rorschach tests that compare the formal likeness of two different things draw a structural “isomorphism” that operationalises one’s habits of seeing, reflecting, and interpreting as visual information.8 The projected visual equivalency of various abstract phenomena enables a subject to discern a pattern, and the interpretation of such images brings historically inflected identities—i.e., nationality and race—into present relief.
How does mass synchronisation, Cold War hermeneutics of information, rely on the putative transparency or intelligence of an image perceived and interpreted as coherent and whole across space and time? If intelligence supplants the nationalising aesthetic of race and, obversely, patterns the aestheticising act of racial perception, what can rupture this closed-loop system of power and image circulation, even if momentarily?
Images: Stills from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Permutations (1976). University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Archive.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha offers one aesthetic strategy. In Permutations (1976), a portrait of an Asian woman appears in three different perspectives: facing the camera with her eyes open, facing the camera with her eyes closed, and a rear view of her head. Reminiscent of a passport photo, the top of her head to the bottom of her neck is in central focus. She sits in front of a white background without textures, lines, or objects. Lighting evenly illuminates her face. No descriptive clothing. A neutral expression. Cha combines the three images with long and short exposures to compose a flickering animation. Lacking any experiential action or narrative plot, the subject instead announces the systematicity of a pattern without any ostensible logic.
In Difference & Repetition, Gilles Deleuze describes how memory contracts time into an imaginary synthesis. He uses the example of AB, AB, AB, A… to explain how we would expect B with the qualitative impression of all the preceding AB pairs.9 This passive synthesis of past instances and future sequences is an active contradiction that defines habit retention and the field of memory—a self-contained temporal space where time is founded. In contrast, Permutations lacks a time signature, and so sequences images to pattern a movement without contraction or synthesis. Rather than imparting directional time or a linear temporality, the infinite permutations of the three images particularise every variation, attending to every instance as differentiation, towards the immediate and timeless present.
Without continuous progression, the image simply announces the “place” of the subject, suspended in an insistent redundancy or abstract urgency, evoking the presence of her image as a reference for other stand-ins and proxies. By diminishing causal affect, Permutations widens the temporal gap between the time of transmission and the time of perception, deferring the instantaneity of pattern recognition. It recalls the logic of a feedback lag, or the doubled meaning of parasite: a mimetic “foreign” presence that reproduces the appearance of the host body; or the static, noise, or interference in a communications network that breaks down the governing body, system, or organisation.
If progressive time is the synthesis between the past and future, creating continuity, the structural incoherence of Permutations attends to the contingency of image-making: the immanent operation of intelligibility, and the various registers that produce the coherence of exchange. By occupying a negative aesthetic of neutrality—the redundancy of the repeating subject, and the incessant act of atonality—Cha foregrounds the obligatory elements of image-place, analogy, and pattern that make up the networked circuit of meaning-making and racial perception. Without a synthesis or clear representation of the present, the audience is left with a mix of discursive noise, static, and transmission: the subject as a place of and for seriality, patternation, and massification.
What lies in the insistence of these aesthetic strategies? In Permutations, we do not know what the subject thinks or what she dreams, yet her unintelligibility imparts a different set of politics, one that momentarily deflects, disorients, and desynchronises the usual closed-circuit image to a self-reflexive return. Her strategic withdrawal patterns an image of absenteeism that momentarily delays a bipartite past-and-future, allowing different relations to exist at unrelated times.
Perhaps it’s at this oblique and partial presence, in the subterfuge of mimicry, that the current reality is undercut for something else to emerge in its misrecognition, a collective imaginary or “the dream of the audience.”10 In the deindividuated space created by disclosures of complicity, the mass undergoes a splitting of loss, from unidirectional time towards desynchronic time, and determines what they share together. Momentarily unfixed in its limits, undefined in duration or measurement, massification or the being-in-common, overwhelms the social whole, and draws others into its spatiotemporal dissonance onto emergent time—a new temporal series with its own set of valuations and agreements.
We go back to Cha’s initial question, Why resurrect it all now. From the Past. History, the old wound. In historical time, synthesis delimits the threshold of what we can see and what we know. Though we cannot claim to exist beyond what we can’t see, or see further than what we’re already a part of, perhaps we resurrect because—in believing in the unpredictability of the future—we bring forth something unforeseen. Historicism becomes the effect in the cause of difference, and the recitation of reality in the enactment of the masses. It lives in the chimera of difference, inherently delayed and belated to the determination of the here-and-now. If historical time insists on the negation of difference, as easily as its image doubles, its pattern can easily be displaced again in our massification.
In Permutations, Theresa appears in a single frame in a momentary haze, a flash into her own mnemonic pattern. How we decipher that moment, as to its temporal and spatial breadth and its intensive possibilities—its revolution—is up to us.
TJ Shin is an artist and writer whose multimedia practice spans film, video, sculpture, and installations. Their work considers temporal and spatial analogues of global systems: ecological networks and technological apparatus, alongside their built environments and representations. Shin has exhibited at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Queens Museum, Buffalo Institute of Contemporary Arts, Princeton University, Montclair State University Galleries, Doosan Gallery, Knockdown Center, and more. Their writing has been published in Artforum, Active Cultures, The Brooklyn Rail, Mousse Magazine, and by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. They have been invited as artist-in-residence at Princeton University, Indiana University, University at Buffalo, Recess, Wave Hill, Folly Tree Arboretum, Banff Centre, and more.
Notes
1. For more information about psychological warfare, see Psychological Warfare Reconsidered by Hans Speier, published by the RAND Corporation in 1951.
2. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 328.
3. Ibid.
4. Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), 9.
5. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 42.
6. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee (New York City, NY: Tanam Press, 1982), 33.
7. Sunny Xiang, Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).
8. Pamela Lee, Think Tank Aesthetics: Midcentury Modernism, the Cold War, and the Neoliberal Present (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2020), 93.
9. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France: 1968).
10. “The dream of the audience” also refers to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s body of work from 1951–82, which includes films, video, audio, drawings, and text.
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