The Arrow and the Sun: A Topo-mythanalysis of Pyongyang

Abstract

email of the author: benjaminjoinau@hotmail.com 65 Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies Vol.14 No.1 © 2014 Academy of East Asian Studies. 65-92 “Urbanism is the mode of appropriation of the natural and human environment by capitalism, which, true to its logical development toward absolute domination, can (and now must) refashion the totality of space into its own peculiar decor.” Guy Debord, La societe du spectacle, 1967, para.169 (English translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith) “Urbanism doesn’t exist: it is simply an “ideology”, in Marx’s sense of the word.” Attila Kotanyi, Raoul Vaneigen, “Programme elementaire du bureau d’urbanisme unitaire”, in Internationale situationniste, no. 6, 1961. Benjamin JOINAU Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris) As the capital of the DPRK, Pyongyang fascinates with its socialist architecture and planned urbanism where propaganda and ideology are set as a mise en scene landscape. I propose a reading of this city from a symbolic point of view, trying to find behind the actual topography the ideological myth written by the regime since 1945. This concrete-and-marble-made narrative was built gradually. After a diachronic description of key sites, I locate topologic and symbolic structures that enable a “topo-mythanalysis,” or analysis of the imaginary (“imaginaire” in French) providing the framework for the (re)construction of Pyongyang. We find a historical axis which rotates slowly during the 1970s and 80s around a center corresponding to Mansu Hill and its Grand Monument, becoming eventually a new “axis of destiny,” or arrow, to the glory of Kim Il Sung’s personal myth. The “ideological polygon” found in the center of the city works as a rotating sun in an exclusively diurnal imaginary.