Reading Bangkok

Chapter 3. Libidinal Landscapes and the Third Level of Colonisation: Sukhumvit

Libidinal Landscapes and the Third Level of Colonisation 87 Chapter 3 Libidinal Landscapes and the Third Level of Colonisation Sukhumvit “Sukhumvit Road” is the extension of Thanon Rama I and Thanon Phloenchit, initially into the far southeastern reaches of the city, thence to the cities of the eastern seaboard and beyond almost to the Cambodian border. In the following, “Sukhumvit” will be used rather loosely to refer to the whole eastward highway of Rama I, Phloenchit and Sukhumvit itself. In large measure, Sukhumvit is the armature on which the city grew in the 20th century and presents Bangkok at its most diverse, layered, ambiguous, heterotopic. If one penetrates beneath its surface appearances, it is the landscape from which one is to read Thailand’s compromises and erosions of the 20th century. The third level of colonisation is that of the consuming hordes, when the sphere of consumption appears to assume salience over that of production. While commercial and economic colonisation may be nonstate , it will almost always carry some national identity — English trade, American capital — but the tourists and shoppers will usually exhibit no such implied endorsement from foreign powers. For all that, however, they do colonise the city. The chapter will again be presented in a production-reading sequence. So specifically there is first the production of the city of the 20th century, culminating in the glorious boom of the 1990s and then the catastrophic collapse of both economy and city in 1997. The spaces of that city are variously those of the hedonistic pleasure of shoppers, tourists and lechers, together with the less visible spaces of a population left behind in the rush, but also the legitimising screens across the production of such a city. The reading task is to see through the screens to the violence of the city’s social production and the disaster of its consequences. 87 88 Reading Bangkok 1. The Consuming Hordes and the Production of the Libidinal City The five-star hotels, high-rise office towers and condominium blocks, shopping malls and entertainment precincts of Thanon Sukhumvit and similar districts (notably Silom-Sathorn and the riverside) rose on the cheap labour of construction workers, street vendors, street sweepers, prostitutes, tuk-tuk drivers and “the reserve army of the unemployed”. Sukhumvit therefore has its poor obverse in the slums; of these, the most notable is the vast Khlong Toei, to the immediate south of the Sukhumvit precinct. The mirage of Sukhumvit and its imagined opportunities continues to draw population from the underdeveloped Isaan and the north (Bangkok’s erstwhile vassals and colonies), thereby to flood and further depress the slums — the still continuing, first (internal) level of colonisation. Sukhumvit and the slums are mutually constitutive of each other. The increasing spectacle of the city has sharpened the social differences noted in Chapter 2 and, in turn, has ridden on that heightening. Sukhumvit as Sediments of the Royal The first layer of Sukhumvit’s detritus is largely forgotten. It is the pathway for the Chakri return to Thonburi (Rama I), the regicide and the establishment of the dynasty. There is only one, obscure memorial to this epochal event: near the bridge by which Thanon Rama I crosses Khlong Phadung Krung Kasem (the outer moat), there is a plaque declaring that this bridge was built in 1927 on the order of Rama VII, to replace the earlier wooden Yotse bridge and to be named Kasat Suek bridge, “derived from the former rank of King Rama I when he was Somdet Chao Phraya Maha Kasat Suek and using this route on his way from the war against the Khmers back to the capital”. It is the path to the present dynasty. Part of the rationale for Rama I moving the capital from Thonburi to Rattanakosin related to the potential of the latter’s eastern hinterland for rice and other food production. East-west khlong were developed to provide access to the city and these became the locale for agricultural communities. The most important of the hinterland khlong was Khlong San Saeb, running eastwards from Khlong Ong Ang (the second moat), crossing Khlong Kasem (the third and outer moat), then further eastwards for some ten kilometres to what is today Sukhumvit Soi 71 (Sonsun, 1982: 612; Pumin, 2007b: 290). Then it turns northeast, into Libidinal Landscapes and the Third Level of Colonisation 89 the further hinterland of proliferating khlong and rice fields...