Memory fastens upon sites, whereas history fastens upon events.
— Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory
Pierre Nora’s aphorism might help to clear the mind, yet it simultaneously obfuscates, for memory will also dwell on events, albeit distorted with time, just as historiography will also write of places. The focus of the chapters that follow is the city of Seoul (sites, therefore memory and its consequence in identity); however, no consideration of the spaces of the city can escape from the messages and meanings that might be conveyed by them to a present observer, or therefore from events and the contestations over how they are to be interpreted.
The immediate purpose of the present chapter is to interrogate what might be meant by “memory” in the context of Seoul’s bitter past and the dilemma of its selective memorializing. It will be in four parts: the ἀrst will address the issue of Korea’s often bitterly contested historiography—how is the past presently to be seen? Second, there is the question of memory in the context of such contested historiography—memory itself becomes a ἀeld of contestation, also of manipulation and officially sanctioned distortion, forgetting and imagining. The third part will turn to the city—to Seoul itself—in this context of memory, both lost and reconstructed; the fourth will introduce the place of new media in the distortion of memory and thereby of the city.
First, however, a clariἀcation: this book is not intended to be read as a history. My concern is with memory rather than history, in the sense of Nora’s aphorism, and the intrusions here into the contested 2ἀeld of history are in the search for insights into how the spaces of the city are to be read and how we are to make sense of their uses and of the memories seeming to attach to them. Where have these things come from?
Part 1
KOREA AND HISTORIOGRAPHY
At issue is the question of the place of the 1910–1945 Japanese colonization of Korea in any explanation of the emergence of modern (South) Korea and the brilliance of its emblematic capital: Is it continuity? Or is it instead the radical, enabling break? Or is it rather that the Japanese era is to be seen more as one of suppression, even of erasure, yielding something of a tabula rasa on which a new economy and culture might be written? Or are we to see the convergence of different effusions of modernity, variously rivaling, contradictory, clashing, striking sparks off each other, as it were? What are the historical origins of both nation and city? It is the issue of Korean (and Japanese) historiography.
Seoul space seems to speak more of present consumption than of origins or histories or the past. Where the past does manage to emerge, it seems often a Japanese past—colonial-era buildings for colonial institutions, also a very few precolonial buildings, albeit designed by Japanese architects in the period of precolonial Japanese inἀltration. Certainly there are the old palaces—Changgyeonggung, Changdeokgung, Deoksugung—but the grandest and most prominently displayed, Gyeongbokgung Palace, is a reconstruction from the 2000s of the vast complex obliterated in the Japanese era.1 There are other modern evocations of the past: on the ceremonial axis to approach the reimagined palace there is a monumental statue in honor of Admiral Yi Sun-sin and his confrontation with an earlier Japanese invasion, and another honoring King Sejong the Great as representative of the achievements of a long-distant past.2 King Sejong sits in majesty in front of the US Embassy, to many a neocolonial emblem, his gaze disdainfully averted from it.
While the statue of Admiral Yi might be seen as invoked memory, its provision likely evokes a wished-for forgetting: it was erected by the dictator Park Chung-hee. Incompatible historiographies intersect. The long military dictatorship will commonly be recollected as an era of oppression, violence, and national shame, too recent to be forgotten, 3yet it was also the era of the tiger economy, the “Miracle on the Han,” and the reimagining of the nation.
Colonial historiography
In their introduction to Colonial Modernity in Korea, Shin Gi-Wook and Michael Robinson observe that, at the time of Japan’s insertion into Korea, contradictory historical narratives were being conjured up in support of rival nationalist agendas.3
Concurrently, Korean nationalist historians constructed a nation from the repository of traditional historical narratives and cultural memories in order to have the Korean people think their way toward a new collective identity. After 1910, Japanese colonialist historians countered with elaborate justiἀcations for seeing Korea as a part of Japan in order to legitimate Japanese political, economic, and cultural domination. Both the Korean and the Japanese narratives produced a prodigious amount of information and presented Korea, in effect, to the gaze of the global community. In their ἀdelity to dominating causal theories, however, they also began an equally powerful process of obfuscation. (Shin Gi-Wook and Robinson 1999, 3)
The reductionism of such narratives was characterized by a variety of binaries: failed tradition versus the advances of modernity, national pride erased by alien domination, backwardness overcome by progress, rapacious collaborationists against the impoverished masses, colonial repression and exploitation versus Korean resistance, Korean squalor against Japanese advancements in health and education.4
In 1925 the Japanese Government-General established the Joseonsa Pyeonsuhoe, or Korean History Compilation Committee, charged with the collection of Korean historical materials and the compilation of Korean history. The massive output from this exercise was a historiography from a Japanese colonialist perspective. Henry H. Em (2013, 12–13) has observed that, among Korean historians trained at Japanese universities, many adopted the framework of colonialist historiography, speciἀcally mansenshi, a Manchurian-Korean spatial conception negating Korea’s historical sovereignty, as well as the idea of toyoshi (Oriental history) whereby Japan is seen as uniquely capable, in contrast with moribund societies such as China and Korea. Toyoshi could legitimize Japan’s imperial expansion. Against these schools of historiographic thought, Em sets colonial-era historian Paek Nam-un, who saw Korean society and economy developing in accordance with universal stages of development and as a result of 4socioeconomic forces internal to the society—that Koreans are sovereign subjects of their own history and thus there is a historiography “that does not know despair.”5
Post-1945 Korean historiography then bifurcates: North and South present opposed accounts of both antiquity and the more recent colonial past to justify rival claims to legitimacy as the “true” Korea. Both claims are nationalist and both states resort to force to suppress rival or dissident narratives. Shin Gi-Wook and Robinson (1999, 4) suggest a third master narrative in that post-1945 era, engineered by the United States, that would place Korean history in the context of America’s own Cold War struggle. While this further problematizes the disconnection between North and South accounts, it too is to be seen as politicized, nationalist myth obfuscating history.
Nowhere is historiographic conflict more confronting than over the tragedy of the “comfort women.” Korean accounts of the 1937–1945 war period share a close to universal ἀxation on women coerced into prostitution to service the Japanese military; Japanese history writing and teaching is for the most part silent on the subject, although it will occasionally revert to revisionist denial.6 The division is bitter and continuing, as will be recounted in chapter 2. Challenging irreconcilable histories there is now C. Sarah Soh’s ἀ e Comfort Women (2008), forcing open the sociocultural context within which such a tragedy could occur. It provides an anthropological interpretation of both Japanese and Korean patriarchy as the context of the tragedy: “gendered structural violence” prevailed in both cultures. There is also Yoshimi Yoshiaki’s Comfort Women (2002). Where Soh exposed unreflective, centuries-old patriarchy as a structural condition, Yoshiaki exposed the agency of the Japanese government in the atrocity, effectively redirecting the current Japanese focus on public memory and arguments about the writing and teaching of history. Both reveal the fragility of historiography.7
George Akita and Brandon Palmer, in their ἀe Japanese Colonial Legacy in Korea, 1910–1945 (2015), comment on the polarity of present reductionist arguments: historical remembrance in South Korea unabashedly portrays the colonial era negatively. The Japanese colonial regime is presented as a fascist, authoritarian regime that exploited the innocent Korean people. In some cases, academic circles in Asia and America have taken up positions that mirror this extreme Korean stand. However, Akita and Palmer’s account challenges the pro-Korean nationalist narrative, declaring that a different view emerges when colonialism is considered in the light of Japan’s strong legalist tradition, even more so when the Japanese colonial record is compared with that of European colonizing powers in that era. 5
Colonialism and modernization
Present debates range around the relationships between colonialism and modernization in particular. Brandon Palmer has argued that, since the 1970s, South Korea’s “collective national memory” has been dominated by a nationalist paradigm, also called “internal development theory,” portraying the colonial regime as “a totalitarian and fascist political machine that wrung out the lifeblood and economic vitality of the Korean people, who were powerless victims” (Palmer 2013, 7–8).8
There have been variants on this argument. At something of an extreme is the “ethnocidal” argument, well articulated by Kim Kyu Hyun (2005, 103–104): Japanese colonizers sought to eradicate Korean identity altogether, absorbing it into the ontological category of the Japanese imperial subject. K. Itoi (2005) goes even further, asserting that in the eradication of Korean identity some 80 percent of the historic shrines, palaces, and historic monuments of Korea were destroyed—indeed an erasure; however, no sources are offered for this claim. A more moderate claim of destruction, though from the same historiographical perspective, is Lee Man-hoon (1995). As Peter Duus (2003, 128) has observed, until recently most English-language histories of Korea have seen Japanese colonial rule as a rupture or erasure of the “natural” trajectory of the Korean nation—an erasure creating a blank space in the national narrative whereby Korea’s history was no longer the possession of Koreans. There is also an economic variant of the argument: that capitalism in Korea predates Japanese colonization and is discernible in “sprouts” burgeoning during the Chosun dynasty that would have flowered even without forced colonial modernization.
In Offspring of Empire, Carter Eckert acknowledges that some manufacturing and a market economy were certainly emerging in precolonial Korea; however, he rejects the nationalist argument that these sprouts were nipped by colonial exploitation (Eckert 2014). Cha Myung Soo (2010) argues in a similar vein. Eckert’s work, when ἀrst published in 1991, led to criticism from Korean scholars for its questioning of the then-dominant nationalist paradigm and of its attendant “sprouts theory.” That paradigm still thrives, moreover:
The South Korean government provides ἀnancial support to museums, public monuments, and research centres, such as the Truth Commission on Forced Mobilization under Japanese Imperialism … and Independence Hall of Korea …, to propagate this paradigm [highlighting compulsory labour, the comfort women, and other issues related to the exploitation of Koreans] to the Korean public. 6The perception created by forced mobilization studies is that all Korean men, women, and children, with the exception of a handful of collaborators, suffered during the war. (Palmer 2013, 8)
In his brief review of Korean historiography, Brandon Palmer sees the nationalist paradigm fracturing: whereas “old” history has stressed successive dynasties, great kings, military adventures, and similar events, the nationalist view has more recently drawn on a revisionist history from the perspective of the common people (minjung) that highlights the exploitation of the common people.
Colonial modernity, precolonial modernity
The nationalist paradigm has been challenged in recent decades by Korean and Western scholars who advocate a colonial modernity theory. This would see Japan’s colonization of Korea, including its draconian wartime mobilization, as crucial to the modernization of the peninsula. The task for scholarly endeavor is to explore the ways that Koreans encountered modernity within Japanese colonialism. Among scholars of “colonial modernism,” Palmer (2013, 10) cites Yun Haedong in particular as “one of the best scholars in this ἀeld,” especially in his Another Reckoning of Modern Times (2006, in Korean) and A Rediscovery of History before and since Liberation (2006, in Korean).9 Issues of colonial modernity are also dealt with in particular by a number of authors in Shin Gi-Wook and Robinson (2001): it is broadly argued that the proper topic for scholarly debate is the complexity of relations among colonialism, modernity, and nationalism. It is through such a framework that Chung Chonghwa (2012) views a vibrant colonial-era cinema in Korea from 1923 to the early 1930s, focusing on the cooperation or collaboration between Japanese and Korean ἀlmmakers. Korean and Japanese ἀlmmakers are seen to have been in competition and negotiation with each other within a complex ἀlm sphere launched with Japanese capital and technology.
The colonial modernity theory is itself challenged, however. Colonial modernity would posit that Japanese colonialism was decisive in shaping the modern notion of Korean nationalism, whereby the introduction of a national system of schooling, transportation, and communication, variously mediated through print capitalism, enabled Koreans to imagine themselves as members of a Korean nation, albeit against the colonial intent of their becoming loyal imperial subjects (Lee Hong Yung 2013, 6). The contrary view, which might be seen as a theory of precolonial modernity—perhaps Korean modernity—would assert that Koreans had already developed a sense of national identity 7by the time of the Japanese intrusion, albeit not yet equivalent with modern ideas of nationalism. Lee cites John B. Duncan to the effect that the Korean Peninsula had “an extraordinarily long experience of uniἀed political rule,” from the seventh to the twentieth century. Duncan insists that “not only the traditional elites, but the nonelite social strata had developed a national identity despite their wholehearted subscription to ‘cardinal Confucian social values in the second half of the dynasty’” (Duncan, n.d., in Lee Hong Yung 2013, 7). Andre Schmid concurs with the Duncan argument, rejecting the colonial modernity notion. While not denying the modern element of Korean nationalism, he also stresses the sense of premodern nationalism in Korean history.10 A “subjective awareness” of “a sense of space that transcended any single dynasty,” from at least the seventh century, meant that early nationalist writers did not need to imagine from scratch the nation as a spatial entity (Schmid 2002, 18–19).
Lee Ki-baik’s magisterial history was ἀrst published in 1961, in the era of democratic hope sandwiched between dictatorships; this, too, was mostly within a nationalist framework, albeit modiἀed in later editions and also in Eckert et al. (1990), which built on Lee’s work and which listed him as a coauthor.11 Lee Ki-baik’s monumental work raises the difficult issue of “voice”—the sound or tone of the writing.12 Lee (1924–2004) had as his academic advisor Yi Byeongdo (1896–1989), who had been a member of the Japanese-era Korean History Compilation Committee and is associated with the Japanese colonial view of history. Correspondingly, Lee’s work is also often criticized as an extension of Japanese colonial policy. Yet, in contrast with its genealogy, its voice is unrelentingly anti-Japanese, and its ἀnal chapters are preoccupied with the evils of Japanese annexation and exploitation, leaving the reader to wonder about the bias of its narrative.13
Carter Eckert et al. in large measure base their Korea Old and New: A History (1990) on Lee Ki-baik (1984). Reflecting their source, the account of precolonial Korea again echoes Korean History Compilation Committee perspectives, while the anti-Japanese voice dominates the account of the colonial era. Yet, seemingly contradictorily, Eckert’s Offspring of Empire ([1991] 2014) reads as a far more nuanced analysis of the Japanese era, approaching a colonial modernity perspective. Yet here too Eckert’s questioning of “sprouts theory” has led to criticism of his work as continuing the historiography of the colonialist Korean history committee.
Alternative in both perspective and voice is Hwang Kyung Moon’s A History of Korea (2010), as well as Bruce Cumings’ Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History ([1997] 2005). Cumings’ work, like Lee Ki-baik’s, is monumental in scale and impressive in its scholarship; 8however, it also presents problems. Its voice might be judged to be more evenhanded and its writing more engaging, at times journalistic; however, its interpretation is also revisionist and politically charged—it is not Japan that is to be reproached but America. In his two-volume ἀ e Origins of the Korean War (1981 and 1990), Cumings describes that event as a civil war and US policy for post-1945 Korea as the progenitor; 14 in North Korea: Another Country (2004), that state’s belligerence and unpredictability are sheeted home to America’s unrelenting destruction of Korea in the Korean War. Both the voice and content of Cumings’ works reflect his political commitment.
Especially influential in the critique of the nationalist historiography have been studies laying bare the collaborationist role of the Korean colonial elite. The impact of such studies has been in two, often opposing, directions. First, in making clear that Koreans were complicit in colonial-era suppression and exploitation, they have both redirected and reinforced the nationalist paradigm, albeit in condemnation of the collaborators. Second, and later, hitherto-forbidden Marxist and radical-populist perspectives called into question the structural conditions in which collaboration had emerged, effectively undermining shrill and self-righteous pronouncements-from-afar of both collaborators and outraged nationalists.15 Especially interesting in this unmasking has been Moon Yumi’s Populist Collaborators (2013), on the 1904–1910 Ilchinhoe (Advance in Unity Society).
Modernity
Modernization describes a process; modernity describes a condition. While the idea of colonial modernity has achieved some recent salience in the debates, it is not unproblematic, as the discussion of Lee Hong Yung, Duncan, and Schmid has made clear. So, what do we mean by “modernity”? The idea of modernity ἀrst surfaced in eighteenth-century Western Europe, and was associated with the industrial revolution in England, the social revolution in France, and rationalist Enlightenment thought. Though originating in the West, with its spread to other regions it has assumed different forms, also revealing that there are different paths to modernity, Soviet/Chinese Communist and German/Japanese fascist modernities clearly being among them (Moore 1993).16 Likewise, East Asian scholars have posited an “East Asian modernism” distinct from other manifestations. These “alternative” paths, however, can scarcely be understood outside the context of the trajectory of Western modernity. The East Asian manifestation, as Tu Weiming (1994) has observed, has similarly been largely a response to the challenge of the modern West. 9
Korean thought and life in the early colonial period would therefore seem to have been moving in the interstices of three rival ideas of modernity. First, the images and practices of Western modernity would be present as background, as it were, though it came aggressively to the fore with American and European support for the Japanese colonial enterprise. Second, Japan’s modernity—always in some reaction to the West—came with the colonization and modernization of its perceived geopolitical sphere as its legitimating agenda. Then, third, there were both the memory and the reality of an emerging, precolonial Korean modernity—perhaps a protomodernity, though this too is contested in both colonial and modern historiography.
An especially challenging thought is presented by Everett Taylor Atkins (2010). Here the focus is not on the Koreans but the Japanese and the phenomenon of their fascination with Koreana—Korean architecture, folk theater and songs, dance, shamanism, communal values, and the wider culture. Koreana, Atkins argues, provided the Japanese with a poignant vision of their own migration paths through the peninsula and thereby of their “primitive selves”—indeed, it yielded an uncertainty regarding their own, Japanese modernity. The reader is reminded that the act of gazing and being gazed at fundamentally transforms both the observed and the observer. Both Japan and Korea and their respective cultures were transformed, even enriched—albeit traumatically—by their mutual encounters.17
It is interesting to see Atkins’ work alongside that of Jun Uchida. In Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876–1945, Uchida (2011a) upends the conventional focus on the relationship and tension between the colonial state and Korean society by adding the obscured history of the Japanese settler community and not taking for granted its subservience to the Government-General. Elsewhere, Uchida (2011b) explores the role of affect and sentiment in shaping cross-cultural encounters in late colonial Korea as seen through the eyes of Japanese men and women who grew up in Seoul. A level of complexity is added that is elsewhere mostly ignored—simplistically stated, the underlying tension was not two-way but three-way.18
The Atkins and Uchida arguments offer a perspective from which to view Seoul as a space of mutual engagement with the clashes of modernity. As both Koreans and Japanese negotiated their way through these interstices between incompatible modernities in their everyday colonial lives as well as in scholarly thought, we might identify these constantly evolving negotiations as the reality of colonial modernity and the proper subject of present investigation—in the present book through contemplating the spaces of the present city.19 10
ἀ e dictatorship and historiography
Memory, asserted Maurice Halbwachs (1992), is socially produced. Rarely has it been more strenuously yet restrictively produced than in Korea’s long era of dictatorship. However, ideas of history were far from constant and unchanging in the colonial period, and so too were they in the postcolonial era of renewed repression and resistance. The strident nationalism of the era, in which Japan was demonized and the “true” Korea legitimized against the counterclaim of the North, albeit crosscut by a further, American counternarrative. Korea’s dilemma was in its dependence on an increasingly railed-against United States and its simultaneous emulation of the Japanese post-1945 development model. Any balanced history writing was close to impossible.20
The nationalist historiography of the dictatorship era tended especially to focus on the origins of the Korean resurgence—the “Miracle on the Han.” The miracle would be traced mostly to Korean entrepreneurial genius and to enlightened state guidance, yet here again the story is contested: as Kim Hyung-A (2004) observes, development studies since the late 1970s have tended to interpret the economics of the Korean case in terms of either a market-oriented neoliberal approach or, alternatively, a statist approach in which the state’s role was the key to the politics behind the “economic miracle.” The dictatorship collapsed in 1987 and ἀnally ended in 1992 with the departure of the last military president. There is thus some signiἀcance in the 1991 publication date of Carter Eckert’s Offspring of Empire. Eckert’s work effectively undermined the simplistically nationalist position that colonialism had interrupted the evolution of Korean development, at worst erasing an emerging economy. Eckert argues that a balanced view of the colonial period must take into consideration the Japanese contributions to the construction of infrastructure upon which the postcolonial Korean economic expansion could ride, with investments in schools, public health systems, railways, and hydroelectric projects.
Moreover, Offspring of Empire has been seen as highlighting the unquestioned assumption underlying both the colonial project and the postcolonial “Miracle on the Han,” namely the goodness of growth and of the modernizing project itself (Kim Hyung-A and Sorenson 2011, 4).21 This questioning of history’s implicit extolling of growth had been common in the West in the 1960s, in both popular culture and scholarly discourse; we can note Barrington Moore’s warning, from 1966, against the imagined goodness of modernizing progress: “It is well to recollect that there is no evidence that the mass of the population anywhere has wanted an industrial society, and plenty of evidence that they did not. At bottom all forms of industrialization so 11far have been revolutions from above, the work of a ruthless minority” (Moore 1993, 506).
The task set for Lee Jin-kyung’s Service Economies is to demystify the “Miracle on the Han”—in her analysis it is no miracle at all but a logical outcome of war and market being intrinsic extensions of each other in US global expansionism, all riding on “the proletarianization of sexuality and race” (Lee Jin-kyung 2010, 1–3). She speciἀcally invokes Paul Virilio’s notions of “dromology” (mobilization; the movement of laboring bodies as resources) and continuity between the “production of destruction” and the production of wealth to account for the trajectory onto which postcolonial Seoul was launched (Virilio 1986). The convergence of these forms is seen to underlie the Park Chung-hee fervor for developmentalism (Lee Jin-kyung 2010, 24).
Although the nationalist paradigm has continued to receive official support from successive Korean governments—there is still the overriding agenda of national legitimation vis-à-vis the counterclaims of the North—nevertheless, other narratives emerge. Questioning industrialization and the social and cultural price that Koreans have paid for it, the moral basis of the “miracle” comes into question as well. As observed by diverse authors in South Korean Social Movements, edited by Shin Gi-Wook and Paul Chang (2011), issues of civil society become salient, as do questions of the form and nature of society itself.
Part 2
SITES, MEMORY, IDENTITY
From these considerations of the uncertainties of history, we return to Nora’s distinction between history and memory, now to focus on the latter. Pierre Nora’s magisterial seven-volume collaborative project, Les lieux de mémoire (Realms of Memory), endeavored to deἀne, variously, the French Republic, the French nation, and, ἀnally, France as an idea. Signiἀcantly, the third part (comprising volumes 5 through 7) was titled Les France—plural, not singular. The project assembled 132 articles to explore the construction of the French past. The concern was to conceptualize the relationship between history and memory.
Realms of memory
Lieux de mémoire—“realms of memory,” although lieux may also be translated as “sites”—will cover the range of places, both physical and 12intellectual, wherein the memories of “a nation” might be constructed, contained, and contested. They are not necessarily “sites” in the geographical sense, as they can also include the flag, anthems, celebrations and festivals, a name, an event, and literary monuments. Nora attempts a deἀnition: “[A] lieu de mémoire is any signiἀcant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community” (Nora 1996, xvii). Nora’s project built on the work of Halbwachs (1992) on the social framing of memory; Nora looked at “how social institutions and contexts made possible certain memories, encouraging certain recollections while discouraging others” (Legg 2005, 481–482). Central to Nora’s argument is the idea of sites of memory (heritage?) as compensation for a profound loss. In the modern age most people no longer live in milieux de mémoire, environments of memory, so, Nora argues, “Lieux de memoire exist because there are no longer any milieux de memoire, settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience” (Nora 1996, 1).
Nora deἀnes the project as
a history in multiple voices … less interested in causes than in effects; less interested in actions remembered or even commemorated than in the traces left by those actions and in the interaction of those commemorations; less interested in events themselves than in the construction of events over time, in the disappearance and reemergence of their signiἀcations; less interested in “what actually happened” than in its perpetual re-use and misuse, its influence on successive presents; less interested in traditions than in the way in which traditions are constituted and passed on. (Nora 1996 1:xxiv; also in Hue-Tam Ho Tai 2001)
Maurice Halbwachs (1992) has argued that memory is socially produced: social institutions and contexts make possible certain memories, encouraging certain recollections while discouraging others. There is Ernest Renan’s aphoristic observation on compelled forgetting in the “necessary” construction of “the Nation”:22 “[T]he essence of a nation is that all the individuals have many things in common and also that all [must already] have forgotten a great many things. All French citizens are obliged to have forgotten the Saint Bartholomew [massacre], the massacres of the Midi of the thirteenth century” (Renan 1947–1961, 892). In the case of Korea there have been multiple obligated forgettings as selectively presented historiographies have prevailed. 13
Environments of memory
Lieux de mémoire exist as compensation for a profound loss. As Stephen Legg summarizes, “[T]hese sites are now necessary because most people no longer live in milieux de mémoire [environments of memory]. Nora claimed that, with the rise of modernism and its attendant traits of globalisation, mediatisation, democratisation, and massiἀcation, modern media is substituted for collective memory. What we have now is not lived memory, but reconstructed history. To compensate for this lack, sites of memory have arisen” (Legg 2005, 483–484).
It is this distinction between lieux de mémoire and milieux de mémoire that is most interesting to the present argument. The distinction can be relaxed somewhat from what seems to have been Nora’s intention. There are locales where some continuity with the past is assured even though modern media and technologies intrude and new urban development has transformed the environment that people can vaguely remember from the past, whether their own past or that of others. Typically there will be sites and artifacts (lieux de mémoire) from a diversity of pasts that can indicate the continuum of history. In contrast, there are locales without this suggestion of continuity—new housing estates, for example, where the antiquity of the culture rests indeed on the display of the flag, a memorial, replicas of heritage streetlamps, and such. Seoul mostly tends to fall into this second category. The destructions of the twentieth century were so intense that there are now only isolated relics and museum pieces from a Korean antiquity with very little to indicate evolution from then to now.23
That said, Seoul presents two prevailing space morphologies that could well deἀne the megacity (ἀgure 1.1). The ἀrst is the ordered world of the housing estates—vast realms of identical high-rise housing blocks of the modern, tiger economy. The second is the disordered, typically labyrinthine expanse of poorly constructed two- and threestory, small-scale, multiple-use blocks from the decades of struggle that followed the 1953 stalling of the Korean War but which, nevertheless, suggested some link to an older, disordered world and its history. Both are to be categorized as boxlands, one of order and relative affluence (albeit too often merely pretended, a theme for chapter 5), the other of disorder, small scale, frequently dilapidation and remnants of an earlier age of struggle and poverty and, arguably, environments where memories can still survive, albeit from little more than a generation or so. In the context of the city’s transformations, it will be suggested that this latter, labyrinthine world of alleys, boxes, and small-scale enterprise might present as milieux de mémoire. 14
FIGURE 1.1 Two morphologies, 2012: the eight-lane road is Highway 1; left, a Chamwon-dong (Gangnam) housing estate, one of many; right, an older Seoul, a land of little boxes on which the housing estates depend for their services, markets, and entertainment. Note the bucolic woodland trail between high-rises and highway. Source: Google maps, modified by the author.
Against the regimented towers and the smaller-scale boxlands, it is palaces and the names of ancient dynasties that will be used to conjure up the nation’s antiquity and to construct a national memory—as well as, it must be added, modern media and popular culture, the theme of chapter 5. 15
Part 3
SEOUL
The task of following chapters is to “make sense” of the sites and spaces of Seoul—to understand, interpret, read the city. The Nora distinction between lieux de mémoire and milieux de mémoire is salient here. Consideration of the former will draw attention to the monuments—to Admiral Yi, King Sejong, the palaces (including the reconstructions in both physical- and cyberspace), and the surviving shrines and relics, but also to the emblematic, contradiction-ridden survivals from the Japanese construction of the city. The reading will involve diverse languages—Korean and Japanese, but also body language (what a statue’s pose might convey) and, especially, architectural language.24 Official architecture, as well as that of corporations and institutions, always carries messages, variously explicit and subliminal, sometimes intended and sometimes unintended. A ἀrst question must therefore relate to the trajectory of Korean architecture.
Lieux de mémoire and architecture
An excellent general survey of Seoul architecture is Seoul Architecture and Urbanism (Korean Institute of Architects 2000), by some thirteen academic authors and published by the Seoul Metropolitan Government. There are also various books illustrating Chosun-era palaces, fortiἀcations, shrines, and other survivals under the rubric World Heritage in Korea, and published by the Samsung Foundation of Culture and UNESCO. Other sources on the Chosun monuments include Choi Jong-deok (2006) on Changdeokgung Palace and Hoon Shin Young (2008) on the dynasty’s palaces generally. On the architecture of more recent decades, the most useful sources are the architectural journals. None of these sources, however, provides a consistent, theoretically coherent interpretation of the architecture of Seoul and of Korea more broadly, in the sense of interpretation or reading: To what events does the architecture attach? What are the contested histories that might rage around it? What memories might it trigger?
In following chapters, the architecture and spaces of the city will be interrogated in the context of the historiographical debates of the present age—the nationalism paradigm (indeed, rival nationalisms), the precolonial modernism theory, colonial modernism, and their variants. Kal Hong’s Aesthetic Constructions of Korean Nationalism (2011), 16as its title signals, looks at a diversity of Seoul sites and monuments and how they have been used by various regimes—colonial, dictatorial, and democratic—to support the construction of the idea of nation appropriate to the intention of that regime at that time. It is a transference of classical history—great dynasties, great leaders, great events—to the reading of the present city. The spaces of everyday life are not addressed.
Quite different is Todd Henry’s Assimilating Seoul (2014). Its focus is on the city’s public spaces in the colonial period as “contact zones,” showing how ordinary residents negotiated pressures to become loyal, industrious, and hygienic imperial subjects. In revealing the intersections of Korean and Japanese histories in the spaces and architectural expressions of the city, Henry challenges both Korean and Japanese-colonial nationalisms, thereby providing a frame through which to observe the Namsan Shinto Shrine and the two colonial expositions on the cleared grounds of Gyeongbokgung Palace, as well as neighborhood-scale programs for better hygiene.
There is another architecture, however, that would draw attention to a colonial modernity view of history. Modern architecture came to precolonial Chosun in part through missionaries and their church and institution building, and, more interestingly, through a few modern buildings designed by Japanese architects in a Japanese hybrid styling.25 This styling reached something of a Korean flowering in the ἀrst decades of the colonial era—the architectural referencing was all Japanese, with effectively no allusions to Korean themes. Seoul would be signaled as a city of the empire and its architecture would need to be read through a colonial-modernity lens.
It will be argued in chapter 3 that the key ἀgure in the officially sanctioned, emblematic architecture of the dictatorship era was architect Kim Swoo Geun, effectively the state architect at that time and charged with setting the characteristics of a new, modern, Korean architecture. Kim, however, had received his architectural education and early experience in Japan, and early buildings for the Park Chung-hee regime carried obvious references to the prevailing concrete monumentalism of Japan’s more celebrated architects. As late as 1999, when the emblematic Jongno (Samsung) Tower was completed, though designed by a Uruguayan-US architect, the complaints from Korean architects were to the effect that “it is just another Japanese building.”26 One could argue that colonial modernity persists, at least in the signiἀcation of the city, even to the beginning of the twenty-ἀrst century.
Standing most dramatically against the shadow of colonial modernity is nationalist modernity’s most dramatic intervention into modern 17Seoul. On 15 August 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II and thereby of the Japanese colonial era, a grand ceremony was held to commence the destruction of the Japanese Government-General Building. Then in the 2000s Gyeongbokgung Palace, that greatest monument of Chosun Korea, was rebuilt—more correctly, a vast modern building complex was constructed as a replica of the ancient palace.
Authenticity and nostalgia
The simulacrum of the new-ancient Gyeongbokgung raises issues of authenticity and nostalgia. Are we witnessing, in the present, some nostalgia for an imagined, precolonial past and the abandonment of ideas of authenticity? It is a question that will run through the chapters that follow, particularly chapter 5, where dreamed pasts permeate modern Korean media. One is left to speculate if identity is being sought not in a remembered past but in a dreamed one, founded on a sense of loss and nostalgia. Legg (2005) quotes Susan Steward (1984, 23) on the nature of the nostalgic: “The nostalgic dreams of a moment before knowledge and self-consciousness that itself lives only in the self-consciousness of the nostalgic narrative. Nostalgia is the repetition that mourns the inauthenticity of all repetition and denies repetition’s capacity to form identity.”
Nostalgia is almost the dialectic opposite of authenticity. It signals a temporal distancing or disconnection and can be seen as a surface over the loss of older understandings (authenticity) and of memory. One can usefully note Lionel Trilling’s advice that “authenticity,” a term central to the deliberations of the existentialist philosophers, is best not totally deἀned; however, Trilling does use such a simple understanding as “to stay true to oneself” (Trilling 1972; also Taylor 1991). A broader understanding of authenticity would refer to the attempt to live one’s life according to the needs of one’s inner being, rather than the demands of society or one’s early conditioning. The conscious self is seen as coming to terms with being in a material world and with encountering external forces and influences that are very different from itself; authenticity is one way in which the self acts and changes in response to these pressures (Kaufmann 1975). Nostalgia, however, is an escape from this demand.
One element of the Korean Wave, that modern explosion of a new Korean culture, has been an abandonment of oneself to imagined pasts and imagined ideas of “family” and “family values.” This is scarcely nostalgic; it is simply entertainment. Or is there far more to it than that? A subject for chapter 5. 18
Milieux de mémoire and a Seoul vernacular
There is a still celebrated vernacular architecture and urbanism of the past in the hanok or traditional houses of Korea—sited for climate, using natural materials, with thatch or tile roofs, and the heated ondol floor system—and, in urban areas, the narrow and labyrinthine alleyways in which the houses would be found.27 In a ἀne review of the “urban” hanok—where the emphasis is plainly on “urban”—Jung Inha (2013, 29–35) sees this as a form of housing that ἀrst appeared in the 1920s as the primary type of urban housing in Korea, especially in large cities. The urban hanok were a translation of older housing forms by new housing companies based on small artisan groups adapting to the new conditions of rapid urbanization, housing shortage, and increasing density.28 Smaller allotments and the commercial pressures to make a proἀt led these new companies to develop a dwelling form in which the previously multiple courtyards would be aggregated into a single, internal courtyard. While Japanese settler housing mostly followed Japanese models, the urban hanok predominated in Korean areas, continuing as the model for the Seoul housing companies into the 1960s.
The hanok have mostly gone, a legacy of war, however, the “empty space” of the courtyard will be a recurring theme in later architecture, and the unplanned alleys persist—the right-side boxland morphology of ἀgure 1.1 being a case in point. The boxlands of the post-1953 struggle and the unmanaged boom that followed are to be seen as a new but mostly unstudied vernacular, uncontrolled, operating in an unregulated, informal economy, presumably the product of house-building companies that were descendants of those of the earlier decades. Valérie Gelézeau (1997) has written briefly on life in these neighborhoods, although it is represented in an architecture that, unlike the urban hanok, remains mostly untheorized but is clearly to be seen as another, later vernacular.
Jordan Sand (2013) has looked at similar vernaculars in Tokyo, Seoul’s unacknowledged (denied?) alter ego—Tokyo was obliterated through US ἀrebombing in 1945, Seoul in 1951–1953; both were rebuilt, mostly badly and chaotically, in the few years thereafter. Yet in both cases that rebuilding was according to old practices and old conceptions of neighborhood space, as well as to each city’s cultural and political traits. Sand describes the outcome: “Every city has its own vernacular: a language of form, space, and sensation shaped by the local history of habitation. Newcomers encounter a city’s vernacular in a torrent of signals demanding interpretation. Occupants, by contrast, apprehend the city’s vernacular intuitively, navigating it without needing to bring it to consciousness. The landscape of the vernacular city 19is a fabric continually being woven” (Sand 2013, 2–3). Sand describes lands of small lots, local street grids but no uniform overall street plan, construction in wood (more brick and concrete in Seoul), low-rise buildings, dense shopkeeping, and petty manufacturing neighborhoods. All this is also to be found in Seoul—witness the right side of ἀgure 1.1. There is constant change in these areas, as small buildings are modiἀed, added to, demolished, replaced, and adapted to new uses; typically, a building will acquire a small prayer room, be designated a church (while retaining its previous uses), and thereby acquire a conical spire topped by a red, illuminated cross.
A task for chapter 4 is to seek some understanding of the production and present lives of these areas—how they ἀt in to a culture in which the regimented towers also ἀnd a place.
Part 4
SEOUL AND NEW MEDIA
In the seminal Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson grappled with the question of how, in modern times, polities variously centered around dynasts of varying (and typically shifting) degrees of power and prestige metamorphosed into “nations.” The nation, for Anderson, is essentially abstract and socially constructed—it is “imagined.” As he deἀnes it, “[I]t is an imagined political community—and imagined as both internally limited and sovereign” (Anderson 1991, 6). It is internally limited in that it is to be deἀned by boundaries, in contrast with ancient deἀnitions in terms of centers of power where “borders were porous and indistinct, and sovereignties faded imperceptibly into one another” (19); it is sovereign in itself, in contrast to previous notions of the personal sovereignty of some dynast at the center of power. So, how has this metamorphosis occurred? How has this imagining come about?
The applicability of Anderson’s ideas to Korea would be questionable—as noted above, a Korean nationalist historiography would insist that an understanding of a Korean nation had spanned a millennium and more, preceding any of the “nations” on which Anderson’s work rests (Duncan, n.d., in Lee Hong Yung 2013, 6; Schmid 2002).29 Yet Anderson’s key argument is persuasive, that people can work and struggle for a particular form of nation only if that form can ἀrst be imagined: “What, in a positive sense, made the new communities imaginable was a half-fortuitous, but explosive, interaction 20between a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of communications (print), and the fatality of human linguistic diversity” (Anderson 1991, 42–43).30 These conditions might have been met for the emergence of Japan as a modern nation, and they would presumably have needed to be counteracted (by Japan) if Korea was not to become such a nation—a question for the historiography debates and for chapter 2. What is especially interesting is the applicability of these ideas to the continually emerging and reforming Korean nation (nation, not the Republic) of the present. While the economic miracle of the 1960s and 1970s made Korea “great” and met the requirements of Anderson’s ἀrst condition, the irony was that it was based on a Japanese model and dependent on favored access to the US market—that is, it rested on economic neocolonialism. Yet, for all that, the Anderson condition was fulἀlled, albeit somewhat bitterly and in need of further “imagining away.”
It is the second condition, media of communication, that presents the real difference in the Korean case. Not only did the post-1953 (post–Korean War) reimagining of Korea occur in the new age of constantly evolving and transforming electronic modes of communication (television, computers, the Internet, the mobile phone, the blog, and social networking); it also arose in a society that seized the vanguard role in the development of such technologies and their potential for use.
The media and their attendant smothering, saturating advertising transform both public and private realms. “[A]dvertising in its new dimension invades everything, as public space (the street, monument, market, scene) disappears…. It is the same for private space. In a subtle way, this loss of public space occurs simultaneously with the loss of private space. The one is no longer a spectacle, the other no longer a secret” (Baudrillard 1985, 129–130). Perhaps the ultimate expression of retreat from the exposure of both public and private space is the Korean bang (literally “room,” “song box”), the enclosing cubicle to which the assailed individual can retreat for electronic games, karaoke, the Internet, video—the offerings proliferate with the genius of human invention and entrepreneurial wizardry. It is a theme for chapter 4.
Private space is transformed by television—the endless soapies that mimic domestic life, to be mimicked in turn by everyday life (the global reach and transforming effect of the Korean Wave and the generation of a new historiography to see Korea as countercolonizer, as it will be argued following). Population simulates the media, which, in turn, hypersimulate the population until there is no original but only a world of simulacra—everything a copy. So everyday life implodes into the hyperreality of the spectacle, a world without depth or meaning. 21
New media and the city
Jean Baudrillard’s has been a notable voice in speculating on these issues of the media revolution and its transformation of urban space. While many would dismiss his pronouncements as hyperbole, they have value in focusing the mind on where urban space might be heading in a new media age. In the 1970s Baudrillard argued that, in the age of “consumer capitalism,” domination is no longer effected through capital (as means of production and as commodities produced) but increasingly through appearances and images. We no longer consume products but signs—of television, of advertising. The material objects of consumption have value for us precisely as signs—of identity, of status, of culture, of achievement and so on (Baudrillard 1972). In Korea in the present, some four decades later, it is a world that is called into question in the parodied “Gangnam Style,” an issue for chapter 5.
Baudrillard’s later writings emphasized consumption in terms of signs. In the discourse of consumption, Baudrillard asserts, “there is an anti-discourse: the exalted discourse of abundance is everywhere duplicated by a critique of consumer society—even to the point where advertising often intentionally parodies advertising” (Lechte 1994, 234–235). The critique of consumer society is close to the revisionist view of Korean nationalist historiography consequent on Eckert’s 1991 undermining of it (Eckert 2014). The extent to which the disordered profusions of Korean advertising—to be confronted in following chapters—are to be seen as intentional or, alternatively, as unconsciously herdlike (in either case an assemblage) is contentious.31 It is Baudrillard’s argument that the task of domination in consumer capitalism shifts to the signiἀer (the sign) rather than the signiἀed (the thing or idea or commodity represented by the sign) and thereby to the media—either through a decoupling from meaning (the world is reduced to spectacle, unreadable, structures of domination thus rendered opaque) or through the arbitrary assignment of meaning to signiἀers (most notably in the transformation of products, although Baudrillard also adds that, in the transformation of relations of production, class is communicated away). So is this the Korea of the Park Chung-hee dictatorship and the violent “disappearance” of class? Or is it to be seen as the reemergence and reinterpretation of Confucian discipline—order?
Given the increasingly necessary dependence of capitalism on endlessly expanding consumption, these transformations have had to become ever more frenetic: assignment and then devaluation of exchange values to trigger yet a new round of consumption, dependent on ever more frequent assignment and devaluation of sign 22values—meanings.32 Social integration thus rests increasingly on communication—sign value, therefore ideology and the sphere of culture—rather than on simple consumption.33 We will see, in following chapters, the wild riot of such communication in the “back streets” of modern Seoul—also in the frenetic Christian witness of Seoul’s religious proliferation.
Baudrillard’s boldest assertion is that the code supplants the sign, that the era of the code supersedes the era of the sign (Baudrillard 1993). The code, here, is easily understood: it is the binary code of computer technology, the DNA code in biology, the digital code in information technology. Does the biblical text in Korean Christianity also become a code—phrases to be endlessly broken down and paraded, the ubiquitous banner carrier, the quiet distributor of printed snatches of text, the screaming proselytizer in the subway carriage?
The extreme position of the Baudrillard argument is far from universally accepted—originality and creativity still reign supreme—and it might be judged not especially helpful in the present instance. However, it does succeed in drawing attention to the phenomenon of production according to a code—to reproduction—and to its salience in presently emerging Seoul. Those reproduced antique monuments (the reconstructed Gyeongbokgung Palace being the paradigm case) are now likewise reproductions according to the rules of a code—an assembly of copybook Chosun elements and emblems. They follow modern rules derived from ancient images. The seemingly endless parades of identical residential towers would also seem to support Baudrillard’s argument: they, too, are built to a code with no distinction between original and copy. Only the number painted on the top of each tower distinguishes it from its neighbors.
Baudrillard’s somewhat hyperbolic utterances on the city in “the era of late capitalism”—“reality” as a depthless screen, surface brilliance, and indifference but across nothing, the end of both public and private realms, the beginning of the age of simulacra—might say something about the city in the present metamorphosis of the age. For now, they will be seen more as a question whose exploration it is the task of the narrative to follow.
NOTES
Epigraph: Pierre Nora 1996, 18.
1. In representing Korean words in the roman alphabet, the Revised Romanization system will mostly be used except where a cited source uses the McCune-Reischauer or some other system.
2. Andre Schmid (2002) draws attention to a much earlier monument to celebrate ancient royal achievement: in 1905, Korean intellectuals greeted the discovery of a stele celebrating the territorial conquests of a Koguryo dynasty king, Kwanggaet’o (375–415). These intellectuals are often grouped together by historians as the Patriotic Enlightenment Movement. Subsequently, these debates were increasingly constrained by the colonial regime with its goal of making Koreans loyal imperial subjects.
3. On the writing of history in the Goryeo dynasty and the early stages of the Chosun dynasty, see Lee Ki-baik (1984, 166–167). This writing took an annals form and “employed the perspective of Confucian moralism to view history didactically as a mirror for government.” In the thirteenth century more general accounts began to emerge, to describe ancient folkways and institutions. A more modern form of historiography arose with the silhak (“practical learning”) movement of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (Lee Ki-baik 1984, 232–233; Eckert et al. 1990, 164–169).
4. Important in this tradition was Fukuda Tokuzo, especially his 1904 essay on Korean backwardness, “Kankoku no keizai soshiki to keizai tani” [The Economic 266Organization and Economic Units of Korea], based on Karl Bucher’s “economic stages” theory of economic development, and advocating “stagnation theory” to explain Korea. See Miller (2010, 4–5).
5. Em especially refers to Paek Nam-un (1933; 1937). On Paek Nam-un, also see Pang Kie-chung (2005). Lee Namhee (2013, 150–155) provides a ἀne critical review of Em.
6. For example, Auslander and Chong Eun Ahn (2015) report a case of comfort woman denial, proclaimed at Central Washington University to coincide with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to Washington and the 114th birthday of the Showa emperor (Hirohito).
7. Yoshimi Yoshiaki is especially important for having investigated the Japanese government’s responsibility for the comfort women tragedy, following a 1991 event in which three Korean women ἀled a suit in a Tokyo district court stating that they had been forced into sexual servitude and demanding compensation. See O’Brien (1999).
8. Palmer especially cites Pak Kyong-sik (1965) as a seminal work in this tradition: Pak studied the forced mobilization of Koreans during Japan’s 1937–1945 war.
9. Also, in English, attention is drawn to Eckert’s Offspring of Empire (1991), referred to above, as well as Park Soon-won, Colonial Industrialization and Labor in Korea (1999) and Theodore Jun Yoo, ἀ e Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea (2008).
10. In this context of understanding Korean nationalism, Keith Pratt (2006, 20–24) distinguishes among political nationalism, minjin nationalism, and cultural nationalism.
11. It is worth noting Lee Ki-baik’s recognition of the monumental achievement of An Chang-bok (1712–1791) in the Tongsa kangmok [Annotated Account of Korean History], written from an orthodox Confucian point of view, also of Han Ch’i-yun’s (1765–1814) Haedong yoksa [History of Korea] in an annals-treatises format (Lee Ki-baik 1984, 237). Korean historiography has a long lineage.
12. On “voice,” see Mikhail Bakhtin (1986, 99); on Bakhtin’s argument, in turn, see Holquist and Emerson (1981, 434); and Wertsch (1991, 51).
13. Whereas chapters 1 through 13 might be identiἀed as acknowledging Japanese colonial historiography, chapters 14 through 16 turn to unrelenting condemnation of the Japanese insertion. See, for example, the critique by Slantchev (2001).
14. Although Cumings’ assessment of the Korean War as a civil war would now be widely accepted, recent research would question his attribution of causes. A strong critique of Cumings (2011) and its failings is by William Stueck in the Washington Post, 12 September 2010. The core of Stueck’s criticism is that Cumings had ignored more recent research and scholarship published since his earlier books on the Korean War (1981; 1990); see William Stueck, “Bruce Cumings’s ‘The Korean War,’” Washington Post, 12 September 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com, accessed 18 September 2015.
15. On these arguments, see De Ceunster (2001); Ahn Byung-ook (2002); and Kim Kyu Hyun (2004; 2005).
16. One must acknowledge the immense body of critical literature following the original 1966 publication of Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. For a critical review of responses to Moore’s argument in its ἀrst decade, see Jonathan Weiner (1976).
17. There has been criticism of the Atkins argument. See Aso (2012).
18. A ἀnely researched account of the Japanese settler community and its various relations with the Government-General and with indigenous Koreans is Todd Henry (2014).
19. Kwon Nayoung Aimee (2015) would argue that there is also a “reality” of postcolonial modernity, wherein a studied amnesia would attempt to eliminate the memory of the colonial era from both Japanese and Korean memories. 267
20. Ryu Youngju (2015) recounts the struggle of different interpretations of the times to be heard in the dictatorship era of the “Winter Republic”—a term from a subversive poem of 1975.
21. Kim Hyung-A and Sorenson (2011, 9) summarize the present divide thus: “[A]lmost three decades after the end of the Park era. Public debate on this era and Park’s role in contemporary South Korean history continues to rage between two camps—those who approve of Park-style modernization and now promote the ‘advancement’ (sonjinhwa) of South Korea, and others who insist that Park-style ‘compressed’ economic development inherently delayed South Korea’s democratization and now promote social justice and economic equality.”
22. Renan’s seminal essay was a lecture delivered in 1882. Benedict Anderson (1991, 199–201) has elaborated on the consequences of this Renan utterance.
23. Ignoring the modern reconstructions, Seoul does possess fragments from its Chosun past. There are the remnants of Changdeokgung, Changgyeonggung, and Deoksugung Palaces, the Chongmyo Ancestral Shrine, the Bell Tower, remnant gates and parts of the encircling city wall, and the Bukchon hanok village, the last albeit mostly from the 1920s. There are royal tombs beyond the city. Arguably most signiἀcant are the surviving city walls of Suwon, the Hwaseong Fortress (c. 1796), some thirty kilometers south of Seoul and arguably grandest of all Korean monuments but also largely reconstructions (from the 1970s). The point of the present comment is that the destructions, whether by the Japanese or during the Korean War, far outweigh the survivals.
24. Meaning is conveyed by words (language) but also by “the voice” in which an utterance is delivered, as insisted upon by Mikhail Bakhtin. See especially Bakhtin (1986, 99); for a review, see King (1996, 72).
25. On the Japanese Meiji-sanctioned architectural styling, see Coaldrake (1996).
26. From conversations with academic architects in Seoul, 1999 and 2000.
27. On the hanok and its ondol floor system, see Clark (2000, 93–96).
28. Jung Inha (2013) cites Kim Ranky and Yoon Do-Geun (1989, 232).
29. On the idea of a “contra-Anderson” argument, see especially Duncan (n.d.) in Lee Hong Yung (2013, 6); and Schmid (2002). Controversially, Anderson argues that the idea of the modern nation arose not in political emergences in Enlightenment-era Europe but in the creole communities of the Americas subsequently to be translated into “old world” polities.
30. Anderson adds a footnote here to the effect that the events of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that enabled the bourgeois revolutions in Europe and the creole revolutions in the Americas were not the ἀrst such incident. He quotes Febvre and Martin (1976): while a visible bourgeoisie existed in Europe by the late thirteenth century, paper did not come into use until the late fourteenth—the necessary conditions were not met for the formation of a new, shared, bourgeois identity.
31. The problematic notion of assemblage as a logic and “new social theory” underlying Korean space will be addressed in chapter 4.
32. It will be clear from Baudrillard’s focus on the question of value (exchange value, sign value) that he is working in a Marxian framework. Important is his extension of Marx’s argument: “Marx set forth and denounced the obscenity of the commodity, and this obscenity was linked to its equivalence, to the object principle of free circulation, beyond all use value of the object…. One has only to prolong this Marxist analysis, or push it to the second or third power, to grasp the transparency and obscenity of the universe of communication, which leaves far behind it those relative analyses of the universe of the commodity. All functions abolished in a single dimension, that of communication” (Baudrillard 1985, 131).
33. We will note in chapter 3 the signally important transformation in Korean society—later than in many other affluent societies—whereby economic 268progress shifted from dependence on export-oriented production to dependence on a consumer economy. On this transformation, see Hart (2001).