In the 1990s one’s ἀrst glimpse of Seoul would typically be from the air, circling to the old Gimpo airport. At night this could be decidedly disorienting: overwhelming the usual twinkling display of the nighttime city would be a forest of giant, illuminated red crosses, seemingly on all manner of sites and buildings, in an incomprehensible display of Christian witness. One would have heard of Korea’s proliferation of sects; however, the realization that proliferation could so transform the fabric of the city would beggar understanding. A second impression, from the ground and in the light of day, would reveal that these crosses were in the main atop the most nondescript of boxes, most frequently also adorned with a bewildering display of advertisement boards for brands and businesses, from the global to the most local. Seoul presents as a city of boxes: even the National Assembly Building, monument to the Fourth Republic and ultimate symbol of the Sixth Republic, reads as a box that would seem to represent nothing, though here without advertisement boards. A further impression would come with the view from the air by day, also from the highway into the city, from the old Gimpo or the new Incheon airport or almost any point in the city: serried arrays of high-rise apartment towers inserted into a disheveled city of boxes and stretching across immense distances. The entry to the city from the new airport can be exceptionally disorienting—it is across seemingly limitless mudflats, alluvial plains, with no clear horizon line, visually bleak and desolate, empty, with distant and disconnected mountains seemingly floating on the mud; there are glimpses of high-rise cities, also disconnected and distanced both from each other and from the traveling observer, presenting as dispersed assemblages of concrete towers. These also arise from a world of mud and motionless water.
Old Seoul is a seemingly disordered city of nondescript boxes; new Seoul presents as a place of regimented, undifferentiated order. It will be argued in what follows that the ambiguity of seemingly opposed urban realms is a consequence of Seoul’s cultural history, most notably of the obliterations of the twentieth century—colonialism, war, xdecolonization, recolonization in the name of liberation, and then ambivalent revolution in the midst of rampant developmentalism. Korea is the paradigm case of both surviving and reconstructed cultural memory intersecting with the imagining—or is it the reality?—of cultural erasure. It is into this ambiguity of perceptions and experiences that there flooded the “economic miracle,” a fury of creativity and invention in an age of electronic fadism but distorted memories, the explosion of Korean video art and the phenomenon of “the Korean Wave” in global pop culture. Whereas Benedict Anderson (1991) has argued that print capitalism was an enabling condition for the rise of the classic nation-state, it became necessary to imagine the new, postrevolutionary (post-1987) Korean nation to ἀll the void of twentieth-century destructions and contested memories in a later age of electronic communication and digital imagery.
The argument to be addressed in this book concerns two sets of dialectical relationships. The ἀrst is between destruction and creativity—disruption, even erasure, as a condition of possibility underlying the explosion of creativity and new invention. It is akin to the argument of creative destruction variously linked to the ideas of Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and Joseph Schumpeter.1 It will be suggested that the imagining of a new form of nation to follow the 1910 Japanese annexation of Korea was always already immanent in the culture and was certainly ἀnding expression by the time of the abortive 1919 anti-Japanese uprising and establishment of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea in Shanghai.
The second dialectic is that of the local and the “hyperspatial,” the stretching of space and time to accommodate the ever-accelerating flows of capital, information, ideas, and desires that characterize the world of “late capitalism.”2 It is the space of undifferentiated jetliners and international airports that are ultimately interchangeable despite all efforts at national or city “identity”; likewise hotel lobbies and shopping malls with their identical sets of franchised outlets marketing identical sets of products—the same logos, imagery, and automobiles, the Cineplex with the same instant-release movies the world over. It is also the space of the mobile phone, the Internet, Facebook, CNN, BBC World, Al Jazeera. Yet the hyperspace also rests on hypertraditionalism—on the exaggeration of the local and its “difference” as each city competes with all others for global tourists, entrepreneurs, and investors. Places frenetically compete for tourist consumption, expertise, and investment by demonstrating their specialness and, they hope, their uniqueness. Local ambience and its alterity constitute the necessary obverse of the hyperspace. xi
It is not difficult to locate Seoul in this dialectic of the local and the hyperspatial. The global intrusions are here all in place, as in other world cities; additionally, Korean brands are also now global, such as Samsung, LG, and Hyundai. Korea’s cultural production has also broken free from the restrictions of nation and language. However, on ἀrst glance, there is something missing in Seoul. It seems all too modern; certainly the erased palaces are being rebuilt, the old rituals restaged, and the production of new antiquity proceeds apace, yet the continuities of history seem more elusive than in other great cities. The pervading, beguiling, physical (architectural, landscapal) sense of difference is more difficult to discern here, although to discern it and reflect upon it is the fundamental task of this book. The tourists are far less evident in Seoul than they are in Beijing, Shanghai, or Tokyo, although this may be illusory, as Seoul’s tourists are more likely to be from China and increasingly from Japan.3
Is it possible, however, that Seoul has leaped ahead of that stage in late capitalism theorized by Fredric Jameson, to a new era of pervading cyberpresence? Has Seoul ἀnally disappeared (self-erased) into a virtual world of an electronic antiquity (the Korea-sourced historical dramas that sweep Asia and beyond, claiming a new form of difference)? Is it now no longer the postmodern hyperspace but a condition in which the hyperspace is in some senses posturban—transiting to a new understanding of the urban—and, more powerfully, postnation?
This book’s argument will unfold as a sequence of four interlinked themes. First there is ancient Seoul, a city of symbols, transgressed and distorted in modern colonization and war but whose memory continues to haunt. Second is the reimagining of the nation and the city after modernity’s obliterations. This is the Seoul of dictatorship, the rush forward of the tiger economy, the “Miracle on the Han,” delayed revolution, and a space of nondescript boxes, advertising boards, and the reimagining of contents. The third theme relates to how history is to be read from a space characterized by such distortions (destruction, erased memories, sense of loss) and in a relative absence of explicit historical referencing—the concern is with obliteration’s heritage. How do we “read” the present Seoul? The fourth theme takes this questioning further: how do we explain the rise of the present city of digital contents, its cyberpolitics and the global spread of its imagery? We enter the age of Hallyu, the Korean Wave and its increasingly global subversive power. It is also an age and a city in which, it seems, identity and its genealogy are reconstructed in the virtual realm of TV drama and digital imagery. The physical and the virtual cities merge. xii
Although these four themes must be seen as intersecting and mutually explanatory, they are prized apart here and explored consecutively, in chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5, respectively. These chapters are framed by two others: chapter 1 introduces the vexed issue of contested Korean historiography, ideas such as forgetting and imagining, authenticity and nostalgia, which, it is argued, are inescapable in any attempt to understand the tortured past of Seoul and its present brilliance. Chapter 6, the ἀnal chapter, seeks to conclude the narrative, albeit in a sense of some speculation: What might be the conditions that have made such a counterintuitive (post-)urbanism possible, and how are we to understand this new urban condition? Even further, do we foresee, in Korea, some replacement of the hitherto treasured dream of the nation-state, albeit in a context of pride in a reconstituted idea of nation?
The casual reader who simply wants to “read about Seoul” will bypass these framing chapters 1 and 6 and simply go to the story of the city told in the “internal” chapters 2 through 5. Any deeper reading of the city, however, will rest on the somewhat more abstract issues and conceptual frameworks introduced in chapter 1, which weave their way variously through the narrative of the succeeding chapters and then are reflected upon in chapter 6. Stated otherwise, the book, like Seoul itself, can be read at multiple levels.
A note on method: the book’s approach is based on an interweaving of themes and ideas—historiography, architecture, urban form, literature, ἀlm, religion, television, and popular culture. The purpose is to invoke reflection on challenging juxtapositions in which diverse ideas mutually interact, are thrown into doubt, and deconstruct, thereby forcing the city and society to be seen anew. As if to reinforce the point that a city’s story inevitably has overlapping—even fragmentary—themes, there is a partial chronology of Seoul’s story as an appendix following the ἀnal chapter.
1. Creative destruction, sometimes termed “Schumpeter’s gale” (the gale of creative destruction), is most commonly associated with the Austrian American economist Joseph Schumpeter. See especially Schumpeter (1950).
2. While the idea of a “postmodern hyperspace” has featured in the writings of a number of historians and cultural critics of recent decades, it is especially linked to the work of Fredric Jameson, notably Jameson (1991). I would avoid the “postmodern” epithet; “late modern” or “late capitalist” would seem to better capture the intent.
3. An increasing phenomenon in Seoul is Japanese tourism. In a study of the complex decision making of Japanese- and English-speaking tourists in Seoul, Lee Hyuk-jin and Joh Chang-Hyeon (2010) have noted that Japanese tourists are mostly women, older and homemakers, with a focus on shopping. They are likely to have visited previously. English-speaking tourists are more likely to be male, younger, often business visitors and students and more interested in aesthetic and cultural touring.