What. Comes. After.: an introduction to Lin + Lam's Unidentified Vietnam

Unidentified Vietnam, the umbrella project by the artist team Lin + Lam (Lana Lin and H. Lan Thao Lam), consists of an installation and a thirty-minute film, and works with a displaced archive as its primary material: the Embassy of South Vietnam Collection, transported to the Library of Congress in Washington DC in 1975 following the fall of Saigon. The archive contains 527 propaganda films made with substantial US aid, using American equipment and often processed in the Philippines. Seventeen of these films are marked "unidentified" and numbered from 1 to 17. Lin + Lam's film is what comes after: Unidentified Vietnam No. 18.

At first glance, we see that Lin + Lam offer a personalized recollection of history, a democratization of information that resists conventional structuring and refuses the institutionalization of history. A second, more probing look finds Lin + Lam's project of a critical counterarchive moving toward a creative reworking of the archival impulse itself--the archival impulse as raw affectivity. State propaganda is not simply redeployed as the artists' critical statement (nor, certainly, reviewed nostalgically as kitsch) but used as a way to re-apprehend its affective force. Thus, their work is at once critical and creative, archival and affective, a genealogical project de rigueur.

In this fashion, Lin + Lam offer a deeper engagement with the persistent challenge of postcolonialism: how to get to the "what comes after" of colonialism and imperialism, as Achille Mbembe puts it. In his critical exploration of the postcolony, Mbembe points out that the search for what comes after the colony often involves the production of a "postcolonized subject," rather than an end to processes of racialization. (1) He suggests that the complexity of postcolonial time is linked to a question about life, "raw life," as the place, body, or ontological site for the temporal articulation of the postcolonial. In Unidentified Vietnam, Lin + Lam draw out the affective volatility, the raw life, if you will, lying within the archival impulse.

If a pedagogical drive moves through Unidentified Vietnam, it is not one that aims to do the work of identifying remains or of recovering and reconstructing what is missing from the fragmentary, literally crumbling remnants of history's materials found in the Madison Building of the Library of Congress. The adjectival "unidentified" is not a provocation to identify. Instead, Unidentified Vietnam engages in an experimentation with modes of unidentifying. The artists do not simply embody the position of critically aware ethnographers, who emphasize the limitations and special insights of their own personal experience. Rather, Unidentified Vietnam shifts our attention away from self-reflexivity toward modes of moving and living that unidentify the subject. The empty-fullness of propaganda is not countered with images of violence or abjection that would provoke self-recognition on the part of liberal, protesting Americans, conferring on them their identity vis-a-vis Vietnam and war. "Unidentified" is, then, a mode of challenging a politics based on identity and working to identify its participants. Unidentified Vietnam poses anew the impossibly simple proposal of Michel Foucault: "We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality." (2) What are the modalities of such a refusal?

On the one hand, there is the suspension produced by the state: "South Vietnam Embassy Continues to Carry On in Diplomatic Limbo." (3) The limbo of the abruptly former South Vietnamese government, with the imminent arrival of a reunified Vietnam, is given a half-life by the United States in order to handle the sudden crisis of refugees: "The State Department announced last week that although the United States will not recognize any Saigon government-in-exile, it will continue temporarily to afford diplomatic status to the embassy here for assistance in dealing with refugees." (4) The transfer of films is associated with a political transition that remains in the limbo of "dealing with refugees," which takes the place of actual engagement with what comes after war.

On the other hand, there is the suspension taken up and reworked by Lin + Lam through their installation and film. Rather than the deferrals of the state, the belatedness of trauma, or the allochronic techniques of anthropology, we have here postcolonial suspension. (5) If a critical and political impasse seems paradoxically to follow in the aftermath of the hyperproductivity of discourses on ethnic bodies and subjects, Unidentified Vietnam interrupts it with a different kind of movement in art. The tropes of Unidentified Vietnam--wipe, mop, type, flip--get at this entangled existence of life, time, and politics by posing, visualizing, and mobilizing for us the pernicious postcolonial problematic of what comes after. Wiping suggests ideological indoctrinating; mopping the clearing away, the infrastructure; typing the composing, educating; flipping the viewing, handling, reconstructing. The archival impulse is set into new motion; stilled time itself moves; are we post yet?