The Democratic Unconscious: The Sewo˘l Special Act

The monumental significance of the Sewŏl disaster lies in its break with the political unconscious of historical progress. The enunciation that “We are all the Sewŏl ferry” registered the rupturing of the country's pride over making a peaceful transition from military dictatorship to democracy. In a media survey, the Sewŏl incident was named as the second most important event in South Korea after the Korean War (Lee Reference Chŏngae2014). Middle school students feared they would be the next victims, given the 1980 Kwangju massacre of college students by the military and the Sewŏl disaster that killed high school students. After the disaster, activists and human rights lawyers rushed to P'aengmok Port in Chindo, the land nearest the sinking site, only to find their expertise irrelevant and end up spending time sweeping the ground in front of their tents.Footnote ⁵ Intellectuals saw South Korea as a shipwrecked society with an inoperative social division of labor from the bottom to the top, so that one could no longer correctly identify anyone, from a ferry's captain or the president of the country to the Republic of Korea itself (Kim Aeran et al. Reference Aeran2014; Ko et al. Reference Ŭn2014). South Korean society's shock over the Sewŏl incident was not that the impossible had occurred, but that the sinking “arrived at its proper time—‘the time was waiting for it’” (Žižek Reference Žižek1989, 69).

After their children's funerals, the Sewŏl families began picketing at their waiting place next to the Official Commemoration Altars in Ansan, holding handwritten signs that said, “I want to know why my child had to die.” With the assistance of several human rights lawyers, they formed the 416 Family Association and signed a memorandum with the Korean Bar Association (KBA) on May 15, 2014, to prepare the legislation known as the Sewŏl Special Act, which would establish an independent investigation panel (later named the 416 Commission). In that same month, more than 850 civil society organizations formed the Sewŏl Ferry Disaster National Counteraction Committee (SNCC) under the leadership of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) and the People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD). The KBA's bill centered on the creation of the 416 Commission, commemoration of the incident, and the victims’ rights to livelihood, whereas the conservative majority party's bill entailed nothing but compensation for the victims. The bill acquired the dual structure of (1) truth finding and (2) the construction of a safe society, following the PSPD's last-minute demand to add the latter and the Sewŏl families’ insistence on prioritizing the former. The PSPD also suggested that the KBA substitute a special counsel probe for the commission's rights to conduct a criminal investigation and prosecution (KBA 2015, 209–62).

This readymade resort to juridical means to uncover the truth of the Sewŏl incident is an allegory of democracy. As the apex of the Sewŏl movement, the Sewŏl Special Act became equated with the success of the truth finding of the incident itself. I asked some of the Sewŏl families, activists, and politicians why they had put all their efforts into this legislation when all sorts of emerging evidence—such as the daily management of the ferry by the National Intelligence Service (NIS), tampering with the ferry's navigation data, disputed timelines of the incident among crew members, survivors, and witnesses, and hundreds of tons of iron beams that the ferry illicitly carried for construction of the new US naval base on Cheju Island—pointed to surreptitious involvement of the state bureaucracy and capital having been at play in the tragedy. They seemed genuinely surprised at my question, as though they entertained no doubts as to the efficacy of the legal pursuit of the truth. Nevertheless, speculation and suspicion that the disaster was anything but a simple accident emerged from the beginning and refused to disappear. From the day after the sinking, newspapers reported that the ferry's captain and crew were escorted by the Coast Guard and suspected of being interrogated by the NIS for days (Kim Chinsŏn Reference Chinsŏn2014). Based on the accounts of witnesses and survivors that they had heard a loud popping sound, some speculated that an explosion inside the ferry must have created a big hole in the hull, causing the ferry to sink in less than two hours (Levs Reference Levs2014). Some added that crew members in orange-colored jumpsuits could have carried out an explosion, while others suspected that the ferry had collided with a US submarine during annual military exercises (Chang Reference Yugŭn2014).

Though speculation over criminality is understandable in response to any accident, attempts were made to quickly conclude that it was a simple accident. The Park government conducted three investigations in 2014, all based primarily on the same disputed navigation data, and ruled that the incident was an accident with three causes: a sharp turn, the consequent sudden shift of the overloaded vessel to the left, and the ferry's rapid sinking because of its structural imbalance. With record-breaking speed, both low and high courts indicted the ferry's captain and crew and the ferry company's executives. The chief of the Coast Guard boat that arrived first but rescued only the captain and crew was the only government employee to be indicted. No official resigned over the incident, although it is routine in South Korea for ministers to resign over disasters.

The all-out legislative effort by the lawyers, activists, and Sewŏl families bears witness to the democratic unconscious that represses reality out of an unspoken presumption of the present as democracy. This democratic unconscious has resulted in incremental legal changes. The legislation of a special law (t’ŭkpyŏlbŏp) as the default option in investigating the Sewŏl incident mirrors the wave of reparations that South Korea carried out as part of democratization. In 1995, the 518 Democracy Movement Special Act was enacted to investigate the 1979 military coup d’état and the 1980 Kwangju massacre, which had galvanized the democracy struggle leading to the 1987 moment. More special laws were ratified in the 2000s to form investigative commissions and appoint special prosecutors to investigate the previous state's civilian massacres and other wrongs and to exonerate the wrongly accused, from the colonial era to the military dictatorship. The “special” in “special law” means that it reigns above the existing legal and political system and has the power to annul any statutes of limitation and investigate the guilty remaining in state institutions or in the power circle. As a mechanism of liberal democracy, however, reparation functions to abstract historical characteristics of the historical wrongs into citizens’ individual suffering, while legitimating the present government as the benevolent protector of citizens’ lives. As part and parcel of the democratic unconscious, special laws and special counsel investigations have become routinized as the means to investigate and close thorny political issues.

As expected, the two rights of the 416 Commission—to investigate and to prosecute—became the vortex of the political contention over the KBA bill, which was submitted to the National Assembly through legislative petition in July 2014. It was called the Sewŏl families’ bill because of their insistence on keeping these rights in the bill. In South Korea, both these rights are monopolized by the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office (SPO), whose prosecutor general is appointed by the president and reports to the minister of justice. A similar system exists in Germany, whereas the US system separates the two, with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in charge of criminal investigation and an elected prosecutor in charge of prosecution. Established in 1949, amid decolonization from the Japanese rule, the SPO was given both rights to circumvent the power of the police overgrown under the colonial apparatus. During the Cold War, the SPO's monopoly of these two rights rendered it a de facto supralegal power that became an expedient tool for silencing political opposition to the regime. (After the failure during the Roh Moo-hyun government of 2003–08, the Moon Jae-in government resumed the reform of the prosecutor's power, though with a dubious outcome.) The ruling party's bill on the Sewŏl disaster only covered medical care and financial compensation for the victims, leaving out truth discovery all together. The majority and minority political parties refused to consider the KBA bill unless the two rights were removed from it.

The political parties agreed to negotiate only after the Sewŏl families mobilized public pressure through their “triathlon struggle” of hunger strikes, cross-country walks, and encampment protests, amassing more than 6.5 million signatures over just a few months. From August to early November 2014, the parties’ three consecutive negotiations mainly revolved around the appointment of commissioners and special counsels in lieu of the demanded rights of the 416 Commission. As the most contentious issue, the number of commissioners and special counsels that the majority conservative party, the largest minority party, the KBA, the Supreme Court, and the Sewŏl families would name or recommend changed arbitrarily over the course of negotiation. To attain the Sewŏl families’ acceptance, the two parties eventually pledged to exclude candidates without political neutrality when proposing members of the special counsel recommendation board, while promising more discussion in the future on how to involve the families in recommending and appointing special counsels.

As the legislation of the bill dragged on for months, the 416 Family Association's leadership was increasingly caught between its members (who adamantly insisted on the commission's two rights) and activists (who were pessimistic from the beginning about realization of the two rights and advised the association's leadership to accept the parties’ deal). The Sewŏl families accepted the third agreement after signing a separate deal stating that the political parties would ensure unlimited special counsel probes; the selection of special counsel candidates with the families’ approval; the families’ participation in the composition of the commission; and an increase in fines and penalties for absences and objections to the commission's subpoenas. The bill was passed by the National Assembly on November 17, 2014.

The Sewŏl families regarded the legislation struggle largely as a defeat because of the failure to endow the 416 Commission with the rights to criminal investigation and indictment. Still, they did not expect that the Park government would further compromise the Sewŏl Special Act. In March 2015, the government announced the enactment ordinance of the Special Act, which restricted the 416 Commission's investigation to the government's own investigations of 2014, while authorizing the secretary of the commission, appointed by the conservative ruling party, to choose researchers, oversee the finances, and approve each investigation. This ordinance was drafted by the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries, which would be the first target of the commission's investigation for its oversight of the rescue and recovery process of the Sewŏl ferry victims. The Park government continued to interfere with the 416 Commission's investigation by delaying the commissioners’ appointments and the release of the budget for six months. The commissioners appointed by the majority party also quit the 416 Commission when it tried to vote to investigate the president's whereabouts for the seven hours after the ferry sank. In September 2016, the government shut down the commission, despite public outcry and a hunger strike by the commission's president, on the grounds that its one-and-a-half-year term and three months preparing a report had been completed—in other words, without taking into account its delayed takeoff.

The process of legislating the Sewŏl Special Act attests to the political nature of the statist-juridical order, from the concerted collaboration of the executive power and the majority party to the arbitrary compromise of the political parties and partisan National Assembly. The dual structure of the Sewŏl Special Act—the truth finding and the construction of a safe society—prefigured these two separate paths taken by the Sewŏl families and activists since the legislation of the Sewŏl Special Act. In the next section, I elaborate on the democratic unconscious by juxtaposing activists’ politics of safety and their narrative of an accident with the families’ politics of life and their narrative of a massacre.

A Safe Future or Continuous Revolution

Safety is the hegemonic language of the Sewŏl movement. The Sewŏl disaster is said to have shifted the attention of South Korean society from national security to individual safety, turning an individualized sense of risk into a collective consciousness through social media (Hong Reference Ch'ansuk and Lee2017). The Park government had pledged safety as its campaign promise; after the Sewol disaster—while furthering economic deregulation by calling industry regulation a cancerous threat to economic growth—it renamed the Ministry of the Interior the Ministry of Public Safety and Security. Activists in the SNCC worked with lawyers and other experts to write bills to regulate industrial safety standards, though these all remain to be legislated. In the spring of 2015, they replaced the SNCC with the 416 Act (416 Yŏndae) to begin a citizens’ movement for safety. They have concentrated on the commemoration and the construction of a safe society, after leaving the investigation to the 416 Commission and other commissions set up later to examine the ferry and further the investigation. After months-long grassroots discussion, they promulgated the 416 Human Rights declaration in May 2016, which defines safety as a basic human right. They also urged the Sewŏl families to return to their usual lives, leaving the investigation to the experts. Presuming the Sewŏl incident to be an avoidable accident, as the government concluded, these activists have sought to build a safe future through expert-led disaster response and legal change.

This perspective of accident channels the heart-rending shock of the Sewŏl incident into the institutional politics of democracy (e.g., law, party politics, and regime change through elections). In this perspective, the disaster would have been averted if the administration of governing had remained rational—that is, if there had been a good manual on rescue, if the captain and crew members and Coast Guard had followed it, and if the president and the National Security Council had issued a timely order to rescue the passengers. In other words, the Sewŏl disaster was a matter of governing to be fixed by rationalization through the rule of law: investigate to identify the responsible individuals, including officials; punish them; and establish safety laws and policies. Such rationalizing measures reduce the ferry disaster to the accountability of individuals (the Coast Guard, the company owner, and officials) or of government bureaucracy and neoliberal deregulation. This perspective ignores the fact that such rationalizing and democratic measures remain too individualized and compartmentalized to address the structure of the current capitalist democratic system.

But how can South Korea build a safe society by learning from the Sewŏl incident when its causes are still unknown? In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the United States, Judith Butler wrote in her book Precarious Life about mourning as an act of reflection leading to social change. What is mourning for, if it is devoid of this critical power? Those participating in the solidarity network on the Sewŏl disaster, including the PSPD, KCTU, and human rights activists, saw that a resolution of this incident could arise only from the understanding that it was the latest tragic instance of the systemic disaster that had occurred repeatedly for years—and that a safe society must be constructed through legal and institutional reforms that both regulate the safety standards of industries and instill the everyday awareness of the people.Footnote ⁶ Here, the narrative of “we” in the movement for a safe society came to take the position of the victims, and vice versa, erasing the boundary between the Sewŏl disaster victims (and their families) and the rest of society. As a result, the suffering and deaths of others are called upon to be taken as one's own, making the whole nation into a common social body. In other words, when the enunciation of “We are all the Sewŏl ferry” marks the present as an epochal crisis, the perspective of accident merely sutures—and thereby risks normalizing—this crisis.

This perspective of accident arises from a historical perspective that posits an irreversible rupture between the military dictatorship and democratization since 1987. According to the 1987 regime thesis (87 ch'ejeron), “an epochal consciousness” in Reinhart Koselleck's (Reference Koselleck1985) term, the 1987 Uprising and the subsequent political liberalization made a historical transition to democracy, heralding a new era in which citizens became new political subjects leading the civil society movement—a movement that concerns not just class exploitation but exclusion based on gender, sexuality, disability, and other forms of discrimination (see Ju Hui Judy Han's essay in this forum). The democratization also released both capital and labor from state regulation, making them competing forces in the market, the thesis argues. This class equilibrium was upended by the 1997 financial crisis, which led progressive governments to advance the neoliberal reforms (e.g., flexible employment and privatization) that had been pursued by capital for years beforehand. According to the 1997 regime thesis (97 ch'ejeron), the impact of the 1997 crisis was far more fundamental than that of 1987, ending the Cold War, developmental state, authoritarianism, and nationalism, all of which had begun in the 1960s (Kim Chongyŏp Reference Chongyŏp2009; Park Reference Park2015, 62–68). Nonetheless, both regime theses agree that the 1987 transition to democracy is irreversible, no matter how seriously democratization has been undermined by neoliberal capitalism. I conceptualize this political unconscious as the democratic unconscious for naturalizing democratization as a historical stage despite continuous and deepening class inequality.

The Sewŏl movement and the Candlelight Protests, under the leadership of the SNCC (and the 416 Act) and the Emergency National Action for the Resignation of President Park Geun-hye (ENA), respectively, are solidarity actions that are built into the unconscious of historical progress. Although a solidarity network to address a national issue is routinely formed by enlisting hundreds or even thousands of organizations, only a few organizations, such as the PSPD and KCTU, divide up leadership positions in each solidarity network, share financial and other material resources, and organize rallies and cultural events. The habitual solidarity network expedites these familiar divisions of labor that enable spectacular gatherings of millions of people to continue, week after week, for months. For instance, during the 2016–17 protest for impeachment, the ENA built the infrastructure of the mass rallies in front of City Hall or in Kwanghwamun Square the night before each Candlelight Protest, laying electric cables, bringing in giant screens, and setting up sound systems that added up to $100,000 per protest. However, this solidarity network renders the organizations’ solidarity action short term, because they not only have their own organizations to run but also move from one issue to another, like “a swarm of fish.”Footnote ⁷ This allows the state or the dominant power to bury an issue by creating another issue—for instance, to use the Sewŏl disaster to distract the public from focusing on the alleged illicit involvement of the NIS in the election that put President Park into office.

Moreover, because they spend little time at the protest sites, the solidarity network's leadership devises slogans and programs that are removed from the actual concerns and diverse interests of the people who spend significant amounts of time at the protest sites.Footnote ⁸ The distribution of power in the movement is inversely proportional to actual participation in grassroots protests and everyday activism. Kim Tonghyŏn, who in his early thirties called himself an hwaltongga, observed that

The term hwaltongga conventionally refers to individual activists, who tend to be members of the young generation involved in activism after democratization, or activists without their own organization, or both. In contrast, the term undonggwŏn denotes members of the generation of activists who began in the democracy struggle against the military dictatorship and labor struggles, and who are now criticized for being too ideological and for becoming part of the political establishment. Many people in the Sewŏl movement and the Candlelight Protests therefore preferred to associate among themselves, chant their own slogans, and hold their own picket signs and banners, and they often deserted the protest sites when activists took the stage to deliver didactic speeches and direct protesters to sing movement songs of the 1980s. Undonggwŏn activists, mistakenly interpreting the people's desire for spontaneity and autonomy as the pursuit of fun, ended up adding performances by pop singers and rock bands to the protests and alienating the people further.Footnote ¹⁰

The antinomies of truth finding and mourning, of massacre and accident, and of organization and spontaneity threaten to steer us back to a binary of activists and the people—a binary from which I would like to escape.Footnote ¹¹ In my observation, two other politics offer alternative temporalities of history and politics: one in the undonggwŏn activists’ circle, and the other in the Sewŏl families’ metamorphosis. During my research, I met undonggwŏn activists in the SNCC and the 416 Act who engaged in the Sewŏl movement as a temporary cover for their more radical leftist politics—that is, to evade police surveillance and other unwanted attention to their organizing of labor and of urban people on the margins. I also met hwaltongga who worked with the Sewŏl families in archiving traces and memorabilia of the Sewŏl incident and organizing public events. Some of these undonggwŏn and hwaltongga began their activism during their university days in the 1990s under the Federation of University Student Councils (Hanch'ongryŏn), which the government cracked down on under the National Security Law, thus closing the era of the democracy struggle that is now regarded as having been ideological. They were hoping to create a new epochal moment comparable to the 1987 Uprising. This continuous struggle is exacerbated by the prevalent collective unconscious about the present as democracy. The object of this struggle is not just neoliberal capitalism or authoritarianism within the activists’ circle per se but individuals’ voluntary submission to power since the 1990s, which makes the fight against the violence of capital and the state even more difficult than in the past. For these undonggwŏn and hwaltongga, the struggle for equality and justice was and must be continuous to organize those at the social margins as political forces. They consider the 1987 Uprising epochal not because it heralded a historical transition to democracy but because it illuminated the people's power and the importance of organizing, which are more important than ever before.

Two Moments “Before the Law”

The existing interpretation of the Sewŏl families’ experience of the loss of their children is split into two opposite essentialisms. Shim Bo-seon (Reference Bo-seon2015), a sociologist of popular culture, asserts that their parental grief is “wailing” (ulbujijŭm) that people can hear only through the mediation of writers. In Please Come Back on Friday (Kim Pot'ong et al. Reference Pot'ong2015), writers, for instance, transformed their interviews with Sewŏl parents into narratives of familial love and suffering. Even when tens of thousands of people bought this best-seller, many found it hard to actually read, making the medium of “book concerts” necessary. In contrast, Hwang P'ilgyu, a progressive human rights lawyer and close advisor to the families, argues that the “life power” (saengmyŏngryŏk) arising from the families’ existential state of losing their children made their initial action unpredictable and thus politically potent, only to be diluted by their association with activists.Footnote ¹² It is true that the Sewŏl families became the best-organized victims in South Korean history, benefiting from the assistance of diverse groups of supporters, from writers and artists to activists, politicians, and human rights lawyers. Yet their relationship with these supporters was far more complex and conflict-ridden than was assumed by Shim and Hwang.

The families began a legislative struggle by appealing to the state to recognize them as deserving citizens, only to emerge from that struggle by disidentifying with the statist-juridical order. In fact, the essentialization of the loss of their children was the families’ own representation, which not only cemented their unity among themselves but sustained them for years to come in their determination to uncover the truth about the tragedy in which their children had perished. It also strengthened their position vis-à-vis others, including activists and volunteers, by presenting their quest to find the truth as an ineluctable parental duty. I define their construction of this parental duty as “primordial” politics whose defining features are pregivenness, ineffability, and affectivity (Eller and Coughlan Reference Eller and Coughlan1993). They framed their pursuit of the truth as being driven by “the hearts of the parents” (pumo ŭi maŭm) who had lost their children, and dubbing truth finding the “homework” that their children had assigned them to complete before joining them in the afterlife. As Yŏngsŏk's father said, “Losing a child this way is too painful for another human being to go through, and that's why we need to know the truth.”Footnote ¹³ From July to November 2014, while pressing the political parties to consider their bill, the families united around these primordial politics to endure the triathlon struggle that they described as “the life lived on the streets” in scorching heat waves and autumn frost. They organized according the school class numbers of their children, while identifying themselves in public, as well as among themselves, simply as the mother or the father of their deceased child. When the rescue operation stalled, they initially asked themselves whether their children were abandoned because they were from a factory town. Their primordial politics helped repress such a language of class and instead win the public support of their fellow citizens across different classes, regions, ages, and political orientations.

There is an uncanny disjuncture between the families’ triathlon struggle on the streets and their subjectivity during their pursuit of the Sewŏl Special Act. Given that their gallant struggle made them the best-organized victims in South Korean history, their subjectivity wrapped in liberal democracy is counterintuitive. They appealed to President Park to personally intervene to pass the bill. They expected her to listen to their appeal within a matter of two or three months if they just kept pressing hard. Even after the families of the Kwangju massacre warned them that it would take twenty or thirty years to determine even some truth, not the whole truth, and that they must stick together against the government's various tactics to break them apart, the Sewŏl families’ hope and optimism were felt at the encampment sites. Their faith in the statist-juridical order is reminiscent of that of a countryman who tries to enter the gate of the law in Franz Kafka's parable “Before the Law” in his novel The Trial (Reference Kafka1925): like the countryman, the Sewŏl families thought the gate of the law was open to them even though it was closed to others. Their conviction was couched in a liberal democratic ethos, which was expressed in their words, “we worked hard, raised our children well, and paid taxes diligently, expecting the state to protect us.”

How can we reconcile this confounding optimism with their outcries at the government's completely botched rescue at P'aengmok Port? Tongsu's father said, “If I go to the Hell after death, it would be the P'aengmok Port.”Footnote ¹⁴ The official in charge of the rescue and the recovery of victims’ bodies turned out to be a chief of the nearby subpolice station. It was the families who suggested various methods of rescue, only to be ignored. Plainclothes police filled nearly half of Chindo Gymnasium, which housed them for weeks and months during the process of recovering the victims’ bodies from the sea. Many parents found that phone records and their precious Kakao talks with their children in the final moments of their lives had been mysteriously erased from their cell phones. By that time, Park Sŏngho's mother already viewed the incident as a massacre and suspected foul play.Footnote ¹⁵ Throughout the legislative struggle, Chunhyŏng's father looked every day at photos of his son and other student victims that he had taken when their bodies were recovered. Though many of the faces were disfigured, he had taken the photos because he was in charge of learning the students’ identities, and he kept the images on a USB stick tied to his keychain to further strengthen his determination to get to the bottom of the truth.Footnote ¹⁶

These excesses of the democratic unconscious were repressed during the legislative struggle. In his reading of Kafka's parable, Žižek (Reference Žižek1989, 69) argues that obedience to the law is not submission to external pressure, coercion, or repression but lies in the positive condition of the law: individuals obey it to escape their own contradictions. The Sewŏl families’ contradiction was that they had built their lives in a state-led industrial development and aspired to realize the middle-class dream that the state had fostered as a policy giving a new life and future to law-abiding citizens. After being displaced from farmlands, fisheries, and mines, the Sewŏl parents had settled in Ansan in the 1990s because of the stable, good-paying jobs in its industrial complexes and the affordable housing in the nation's first planned city.

The families witnessed the state's extralegal power when the Park government announced the enactment ordinance of the Sewŏl Special Act that neutralized the investigative power of the 416 Commission, as discussed earlier. It provided the families with a moment of dialectical reversal in their life politics. Calling on the Park government to rescind the enactment ordinance, the families immediately returned to the streets to protest, which escalated into violent clashes during the May Day Struggle. They remember this as the first time the riot police used force against them; as grieving parents, they had never imagined the police would dare to do so. Riot policemen pushed them against the barricades, pulled them away, twisted their arms, and turned water cannons on them. Thinking that “if some of us were to die, things might change,” several fathers in defiance tied their necks together with a rope so that if the police pushed even one parent, everyone connected to it would be strangled.Footnote ¹⁷

However, the families soon realized that even if they died, the government would not blink an eye. They came to disidentify with the state and liberal democratic institutions. In their critique, everything is done through the political parties’ partisan bickering and compromise, and lawmakers do not serve the people but instead seek to maintain power. As Park Sŏngho's mother put it, “The minority [progressive] party remained quiet like rats before a cat, as if it had forged a political pact with those in power not to dig up the truth about the disaster. Even if the minority party seizes power in the next election, I doubt it would change anything.”Footnote ¹⁸ This subjectification distinguishes the Sewŏl families from both the progressive oppositional party and the activists of the 416 Act (both of which pursue regime change through elections), as well as from the stated goal of the Candlelight Protest movement to impeach President Park one and a half years later. This new subjectification is another moment when, as in Kafka's countryman's final realization, the families see themselves as the sovereign, the “real power,” and thus realize that the gate of the law has been always open to them.

The president's mere expression of regret, the state's announcement of its intention to investigate the disaster and meet all the demands of the victim families, and the legislation of a special law—regardless of their genuineness—seemed enough to quell the ordinary citizen's attention to the disaster. According to Chuhyŏn's mother, “Everything is over without even beginning” (sijak to anhago kkŭnnabŏrinikka) because people just believe what the state says.Footnote ¹⁹ According to Park Sŏngho's mother, “people tend to fall into such deception [uri ka kkok kŏgi e sokchana]. We were deceived about democracy, too. We thought democracy was completed with the popular presidential election, when in fact it was just the beginning. If the government announces the salvaging of the ferry, we must make it actually happen.”Footnote ²⁰

The families have enunciated the Sewŏl incident as “the second Kwangju (massacre),” in contrast with the activists’ perspective of accident. This perspective of massacre contends that the state's violence is being repeated, so that a new democratic struggle comparable to the 1987 Uprising is necessary. This overturns the collective unconscious of historical progress in South Korea that has long been harnessed to the 1987 regime thesis. This new political subjectification has expanded the families’ activities from the political and juridical arena to the social field, though the number of parents active in the struggle for truth finding has shrunk from about 150 parents in the first year to about 50 today. They have regularly performed songs and plays, forming the 416 Choir and the 416 Troupe. They have taken over the operation of the 416 Memory that archives traces and memorabilia of the disaster. They have published books on their experiences, while organizing public lecture series for community residents and public events such as painting the converted shipping-container encampment in Ansan. They have also forged ties with Sŏngju residents against the construction of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile system, and have supported workers on strike to express solidarity, visited the funerals of irregular workers who died of lapsed safety controls at work, and joined protests at any major sites of contention.