Arecurring theme of this book has been the dialectic of erasure and reinvention—the historical manifestation of the idea of “creative destruction” that ran through the writings of Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Schumpeter. Consequent on the distortion of Korean identity and memory in the Japanese colonial era and subsequent wartime destruction, Seoul had to be constructed as national capital in the absence of continuity in its represented past. Seemingly contingent on the absence of continuity has been an absence of epistemic constraints, albeit far from total, especially as new constraints on the construction of knowledge (thereby on the construction of the built environment) have swept in to ἀll the void. Thus we witness the power of erasure: Protestantism becomes indigenized and, additionally, hybridizes with old beliefs and traditions; American corporate capitalism, Japanese zaibatsu economy, and Korean traditions of family hybridize, thereby conditioning the economic imagination; there is that crossroads of old values (a half-remembered past) and external novelty from which the Korean Wave emerges.
It is in this context of absence and new invention that one observes not just the explosion of the tiger economy—the “Miracle of the Han”—but also the reality that the “miracle” rode on new communications technology. Furthermore, that technology is in a seemingly endless cycle of accelerating new invention and replacement, beyond anticipation or prediction. High-speed Internet is everywhere; free Wi-Fi becomes ubiquitous in the space of the city; with the universal mobile phone, interconnection is total. As interconnection becomes universal, the population paradoxically withdraws into the private space of the small apartment and the bang. In the Deleuzian sense of lines that segment and stratify (chapter 5), entirely new dimensions have been added to the communicative power of space in what is one of the most total of urban transformations—Seoul emerges as a radically new sort of city. 248
The mind returns to the arguments of Jean Baudrillard (1983; 1985) rehearsed in chapter 1. Writing in the age of television—pre-Seoul, as it were—Baudrillard sees private space transformed by that medium: the endless soapies that mimic domestic life are, in turn, mimicked by everyday life. Population simulates the media, which, in turn, hypersimulate the population, until there is no original but only a world of simulacra, everything a copy—the replicated palaces and shrines of Seoul as simulacra. Everyday life implodes into the hyperreality of the spectacle, a world without depth or meaning. Seoul is preeminently a site where one observes yet further technologies and media inserted, successively and at accelerating speed, into the “old” media of which Baudrillard writes and which Paik Nam June invokes in the deconstruction of an earlier era; it is accordingly a site in which to observe further transformations. We can turn again to Rosenau’s (1990) argument on the two interactive worlds that constitute a “postinternational politics”: a state-centric world, in which the primary actors are national, and a multicentric world of diverse actors, such as corporations, international agencies, ethnic groups, and religions. The political sphere, as observed earlier, implodes from the ἀrst (state-centric) world to the second (beyond the control of the state though still within its borders); the sphere of culture and ideas explodes into the households / Internet cafés / social networking media, beyond the control of the state, whether Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, and so on. The cultural life and ideas of Seoul—or at least their hypersimulation—become ubiquitous.
Chapter 5 reported anecdotes on the Internet’s effect on the 2002 Korean presidential election—a transformative event. A decade later attention had shifted from the openness of the media to new critiques (its resistance to appropriation) to its openness to emptiness—to K-pop glitz. For the 2012 National Assembly elections, candidates were reported to have sought links to pop stars, Hallyu identities, and beauty contest winners.1 Fourth estate media still manages to retain some power over contents.
The explosion of media triggers the explosion of creativity—of contents to ἀll those media. There is never an exact parallelism between cultural spheres—in the present case between cinema and television, on the one hand, and architecture and the design of urban space, on the other. Yet to read one against the other can provoke new uncertainties. We return to the provocative argument of Moon Jae-cheol (2006, 44), that the Korean New Wave cinema viewed history through a melodramatic imagination, seeking meaning in a world of destroyed values, “through the lens of nostalgia, thereby emphasising a sense of loss in the present.” However, Moon suggests, there is now a post–New 249Wave cinema, in which melodrama is supplanted by an ironic imagination—rather than look for hidden meaning in history, ambiguity is accepted, as is the impossibility of any positive truth. One might look at the city of ruthless progress and modernism as a manifestation of a Korean dread of the past—will the erasures of recent history recur? What of the North? Then the compensating turn to nostalgia (the replicated palaces and shrines, simulacra in place of authenticity) parallels that of the media. Irony in the media, in turn, can be seen as foreshadowed in the art of Paik Nam June; however, is this Korean or European? Paik spent much of his time in Germany, where the prevailing national sentiment, except in its right-wing, retro-Nazi fringe, has been powerfully antinostalgic and most determinedly ironic—no “true” explanation or meaning for a horrendous past can ever be found. Whereas in Germany a savage irony has ultimately been translated, uncompromisingly, into the urban design of the capital, Berlin, we look with difficulty for a similar confrontation in the urban design of Seoul—the seated girl fronting the Japanese Embassy is an exception, as is the image of Chun T’ae-il on the bridge over the Chonggyecheon; another (though possibly unintended) exception is a seemingly disdainful King Sejong alongside the US Embassy.
That said, there is a “softening” in Seoul space. There is a mission to make it more amenable and “human.” To pursue Seoul space further in this sense of what might be emerging, it is necessary to consider what, so far, has made this extraordinary city possible. In the realm of ideas, where has Seoul come from?
Immanuel Kant wrote of “conditions of possibility” underlying our concepts and experience (Gutting 2005, 36). While Michel Foucault adopted Kantian language, he insisted that such conditions (constraints on discourse and the formation of knowledge) are always contingent on the particular historical situation, varying over times and domains of knowledge. In considering how conditions of possibility might underlie the social production of the space of the city, a starting point is the historical task of imagining the (Korean) nation.
To repeat from chapter 1, Benedict Anderson invokes Ernest Renan’s observation of the obligation always already to have forgotten many things and to have remembered (imagined?) many things in the construction of the nation and national identity—a “characteristic device in the later construction of national genealogies” (Anderson 1991, 199–201, citing Renan [1882] 1947–1961). Furthermore, it is suggested, a selectively remembered and selectively forgotten 250antiquity may be a necessary condition for the possibility of “novelty” (Anderson 1991, xiv).
The question for present historiography is the extent to which Japanese colonization provided an “enabling violation” (Spivak 1996, 19), with its potential of freeing or enriching the “conditions of possibility” for the discourse of culture and indeed of nation. What was the nexus between the distortion and the emancipation of culture in the Japanese era—the forever contested question for chapter 1 above? The sources consulted in the writing of chapter 2, on the Japanese colonization, conveyed an almost smothering negativity toward that time. Yet, as we have seen, life continued, the sun shone, the rain fell, and writers and other artists responded to the new manifestations of modernity being experienced. More recent historiography, albeit now from the comfort of distance, is increasingly reassessing that time.
The long, subsequent half century of “erasing the erasure” implied both selective forgetting and reimagining the past while simultaneously emulating the erstwhile mutilators of that dreamed, lost past. I suggest that the present conditions of these gymnastics of the memory and the imagination can be posed in four forms. First is the obliteration, only ever partial, of a bitter bequest. Second is the reimagining, always disablingly nostalgic, of the past—a dreamed history. Third is the syncretizing and indigenizing power of the Korean “mind,” the ability to draw in, “assemble,” and appropriate other ideas and other cultures, or what I would call the “naturalizing of material culture.” Fourth is the transposing of reality—the compression of time. Each will be considered following.
While the Japanese era represented loss and humiliation, more recent histories will locate the real eradication of urban culture in the 1950–1953 Korean (Civil) War and then the ultimate national humiliation in the dictatorship and its suppression of the Korean spirit. Korea’s was a serial colonization, passing through stages of tributary “semicolonialism” under the long sway of China, to national elimination under the Japanese, to colonization in the name of liberation under American self-interest and its dictatorship clientele. The signiἀcance of the shift from Japan to America, and then to what Anderson (1991, 160) describes elsewhere as a postcolonial, postrevolutionary state, is that Korea’s revolution had to wait until 1987—the transition from colonialism to dictatorship might be seen as seamless. Any sense of revolution came later and was as much against liberator America as against America’s client, the dictatorship with its peculiar idea of “official 251nationalism” (“nationalistic democracy”). Both Japanese and American oppressors presented as paradigms for resented but inescapable emulation—undoubtedly hated as much for the inability to escape (from both Japan and American modernity and their seductive dream) as for the remembered oppression.
Kang Jung In has written of the damage that Eurocentrism (Americanization?) has done to Korean academia, alleging that Koreans have Westernized their consciousnesses in dealing with issues, interpreting and thereby marginalizing Korean reality according to Western theoretical perspectives.2 The consequent effect has been to reinforce Korean academia’s dependence on the West (Kang Jung In 2004). The role of language cannot be underestimated here: English, as the language of global academic discourse, condemns Korea to a new Western subservience in the realm of ideas.3
In the sphere of ideas, it is the Euro-American colonization that has now to be forgotten. In a broader cultural sense, the Japanese colonization has to be selectively forgotten, for at one level the historic hatred of the Japanese stands against the material emulation of the Japanese “developmental state,” and of the electronic modernity on which that state seems to stand.4 Emancipation will be sought by pushing that modernist dream and its electric fantasy to its frenetic conclusion (the New Songdo mirage, though only for the brief moment until it, too, is bypassed by the next wave—most likely in the realms of content, creativity, and imagination—the extraordinarily creative volatility of the “Korean way”).
In this realm of remembering and forgetting, there is an important realization that is brought to the fore in a variety of essays in Shin Gi-Wook’s (2006) Rethinking Historical Injustice and Reconciliation in Northeast Asia: ἀ e Korean Experience. In all the countries in the northeast region of Asia coping with historical injustice, the Republic of Korea has the rare distinction of confronting internal and external injustices simultaneously, both as victim and as perpetrator, albeit still very tentatively. Contrast the savage confrontations of Berlin.
The difficulty, in the Korean case, is that this confrontation might indeed arise in the rareἀed discourse of academia and the political discourse of newfound democracy, yet the space of the city—the historic theater of the repressions and erasures—remains empty. For the most part it persists as blank space (despite that suspected shift from a melodramatic, nostalgic imagination to an ironic imagination hinted at above—“Gangnam Style” as an extraordinary manifestation). There are other models, where the city itself is the surface on which is written both the glory and the ignominy of the society—Berlin, surely, being the paradigm. There is a need for memorials—to the Japanese 252Government-General Building and the compromises and accommodations it represented to Seoul Shrine, to Seoul Station and the 1980 uprising, and the speciἀc sites of the repressions of the dictatorship. (There are exceptions, though all too isolated: a signboard at Tapgol Park announces its role in the March First uprising.)
Yet there are signs of change, from the melodramatic to the ironic and the challenging of otherwise unquestioned “understandings.” The bronze monument of the girl on the chair facing the Japanese Embassy referred to above and installed in December 2011 would be worthy of Berlin; earlier, in 2002, the cemetery of the massacred victims from the 1980 Gwangju uprising was declared a National Cemetery. This latter is especially signiἀcant, as it memorializes an atrocity by Koreans rather than by outsiders.
In the discussion of “the meaning of newness” in Korean cinema, cited in chapter 5 and again more immediately above, Moon Jaecheol refers to Korea as “a culture that esteemed letters over images,” accounting for ἀlm’s difficulty in achieving a position in high culture (Moon Jae-cheol 2006, 37). Moon qualiἀes this ἀrst assertion with a further assertion: “Traditionally, Korean ἀlm criticism valued narrative or theme over image. Today, image and spectacle have become the staples of Korean ἀlm” (52). No evidence is presented to support the assertion of “letters over images”; nevertheless, the comment provokes thought: might some such cultural trait lie behind what is clearly an absence of representational intent in the architectural image? At the risk of essentializing, one is tempted to see architectural discourse as preoccupied with images and meanings in the Malay world (Indonesia, Malaysia) and even in Thailand (King 2008; 2011); much less so in Korea, however.
Korea faces its monsters increasingly through cinema—where, inevitably, image and narrative come together. The confrontation has yet to be translated into the built environment. Michel de Certeau and Luce Giard (1994, 204) wrote that they wanted planners to awaken “the ghosts of the city” by working with the narratives of everyday lives. The tragedy of Seoul is that so many of those narratives will be dark.
Benedict Anderson has observed that, for the ἀrst generation of nationalisms (those of the Americas of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries), it was newness and the break with the past that took on potency. However, for what he terms the second generation, “it was no longer possible to ‘recapture / The ἀrst ἀne careless rapture’ of their revolutionary predecessors” (Anderson 1991, 195). So identity and 253authenticity are sought elsewhere, in the past, and every new nationalism has to imagine itself ancient. But Korea’s forgetting of its double colonization had to include forgetting the American client state of the dictator Park, with its own embrace of a crudely imagined past (Admiral Yi Sun-sin, the Blue House, the curved roofs—and is this the subliminal reason behind the King Sejong image now inserted between Admiral Yi and the Park-sponsoring US Embassy?). Accordingly the imagined past would now be represented most “authentically” in the simulacra of the reimagined and reconstructed Chosun palaces. It is necessary to travel back, in the imagination and in reinventions, across the gap of the colonial obliteration to that dreamed, desired fantasy-past.
We can return to Pierre Nora’s argument on lieux de mémoire, from chapter 1, and to that range of spaces, physical and intellectual, wherein the memories of “the nation” might be constructed, contained, and contested. Admiral Yi Sun-sin, the Blue House, King Sejong, and similar installations are exercises in the artiἀcial production of lieux de mémoire, which, in turn, must be reimagined to free them from associations with military dictatorships and the American semicolonization. The newly emerged simulacrum of the Gyeongbokgung with other restorations are yet further, constructed lieux de mémoire. More real, one must argue, is that cemetery in Gwangju.
These are mostly conscious, official-nationalist attempts to (re) imagine the culture (in the dreamed palaces and shrines, as well as the vast proliferation of museums that bestrew Seoul, contra the Japanese).5 The ecological lessons of shrine and palace, however, and the worldview in which they were based in the past, are to be forgotten. The new parklands—ironic indeed in their aesthetic—are sculptural rather than ecologically restorative. The claim on antiquity is purely visual, not aesthetic in the Kantian sense of an expression of truthfulness.6
There had long been a dichotomy between the (Buddhist) contemplative spiritual and the (Confucian) discipline of family, learning, duty, and tradition. The Japanizing of Korean Buddhism (Cho Sungtaek 2005), together with the ambivalent Confucian responses to the shock of Western culture (albeit largely via Japan), saw an increasingly materialist shift in Korean culture. Most notably, the strong, traditional family focus translated into ways of doing business in the peculiar forms of emerging Korean capitalism (Kim Hyuk-Rae 1998). One is left to wonder: are “family values,” in turn, a reaction against the corporate world subversion, in part via the institution of the chaebol and the linked idea of the family? 254
As ever, the “spirit of capitalism” could be reinforced via the ethics of Protestantism, more so, it might be argued, than via Confucianism. Moreover, a material culture is to replace one founded on ideas of the (Buddhist) spiritual. The chaebol are the family, exploded to the scale of the absurd; Seoul is a city of exaggerated (exploded) Christian witness; the skyline is one of logos and the innumerable neon-red crosses atop red cones glowing in the night. At the same time, however, the ecological basis of Buddhism is sublimated. “Old” nature must be forgotten:
“The city is lines.” Roads were built through mountains, over rivers, and across the sea to show off modern technological progress, while subjugating nature as a plastic thing…. Instead of being treated as an object of reverence, nature becomes something to overcome, control, and even exploit on behalf of people.
Nature has lost its spontaneous autonomy and degenerated into a visually manipulated plastic thing that requires management. (Ryu Jeh-hong 2004, 10)
One should not, however, despair: the same point was made previously in chapter 5, though from a more positive viewpoint, regarding “new” nature. The world that Ryu Jeh-hong decries is simply that of “now-possible relationships and responsibilities” to external nature and to technologies that Walter Benjamin identiἀed as new nature—opportunities. Likewise the spatial and visual muddle of Seoul “back streets” might be decried as loss, yet, in reality, it is the space of everyday life (trade, leisure, entertainment, creativity) and, as argued above, the formation of a new urban vernacular. Both the city as lines and the city of decorated boxes are now naturalized—part of “the nature of the city.”
There remains the extraordinary power of Korean syncretism and indigenizing. Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, shamanism—all thrive in a strange, undifferentiable state of indeterminacy. To repeat from earlier, if there is such a thing as “Asian values,” it is likely to do with this acceptance of noncontradiction, the ability to believe diversely, and the immense pool of resources that such an episteme bestows—including the ability to survive in a partitioned world (the national family divided) of ever-present, dark, foreboding threat (the North, the DMZ, tunnels, the Han River—that dreadful image of ἀe Host).
The distinguishing character of Korea has to be the recentness and suddenness of its modernization and transformation: three centuries 255(for Europe) had to be compressed into thirty years—and with a fractured past—with the profound disorientation that such a dizzying metamorphosis must impose. More than anything else, it is this compression that enables Seoul space: “Korean society sped up modernity, such that it needs to make use and disuse of modern spectacles to rotate fast” (Ryu Jeh-hong 2004, 18).
The compression of time is matched by an explosion of space—from the Hermit Kingdom to a global diaspora. Sonia Ryang has traced the Korean presence in Japan, long assumed to be the most homogeneous of societies and both the envied and abhorred demon of modern Korean history.7 Her Koreans in Japan (2000) is subtitled Critical Voices from the Margin, alluding to a minority that is scarcely known in either Japan or the West or, for that matter, in Korea itself. Many are victims of the displacements of (Japanese) colonization and of the subsequent postcolonial division of Korea in the Cold War. Ryang’s North Koreans in Japan (1997) addresses an even more surprising insertion: because she was raised in this community, she brings her own knowledge to bear on this closed society, offering a rare glimpse into North Korean culture and the transmission of tradition and ideology within it. Through Chongryun, its umbrella organization, the community directs its commercial, political, social, and educational affairs, including running its own schools and teaching children about North Korea as their homeland, and Kim Il-sung and his beloved son (and subsequently, no doubt, his revered grandson) as their wonderful leaders. Although highly insulated within their community’s boundaries, many in the younger generations are well integrated into Japanese society. Yet, apparently, they remain serious in their commitment to North Korea while simultaneously dedicated to their lives in Japan.
Sonia Ryang, however, is an “American” scholar, as are so many of the Korean authors cited above. They are part of the Americanization of Korea. The diaspora is expressed in American academia, as much as in the communities and culinary colonization of North America more widely. So much of North America is Korean.8
Whereas the populations of Asia may jump at the “cool” of Korea, the culturally invaded nation-states of those populations mount their resistance. Already by 2005 there was a backlash. The Vietnam government threatened to ban the broadcast of Korean programs if local shows were not given more time on Vietnamese television; Taiwan considered placing limits on Korean and other foreign content; China considered the relative merits of boycotts and limits on Korean 256material. Most interestingly, in Japan a comic book with a title usually translated as “Hating the Korean Wave” was launched to popular acclaim but also to charges of promoting racial hatred and proclaiming historical inaccuracies (Sakamoto and Allen, 2007)—the ultimate proof, surely, of the movement’s simultaneously disintegrative and hybridizing power.
One is left to suspect that it is the nation-state (China, Vietnam, Japan, and so on) that is now “in the interstices,” that the processes (though not yet the institutions) of the postnation are now hegemonic, and that the view along Seoul’s Taepyeongno (Sejongno) is that of the present age, revealing the unsustainable compromises underlying the increasingly discredited claims of the nation-state.
Gianni Vattimo (1985) has argued that new technology for the collection, transmission, and global diffusion of information vastly expands the locations where a picture (history) of human activity can be constructed. By 2016, live streaming of police shootings, murders, terrorism, and natural disasters had displaced the Fourth Estate and rendered everyone the historian-of-the-moment. Historiography breaks free. At the same time, the multiplicity of images of such activity, at the very moment of its occurrence, shifts attention from a past-to-present linear progression to a multifaceted, ever-changing, ungeneralizable present. The effect of these processes is a “dehistoricizing of experience.” So the new era is characterized by the experience of the “end of history”—a new experience of time itself.9
The idea of the end of history arises differently in the writings of Jean Baudrillard. In the 1980s and 1990s, a common theme in Baudrillard’s writings was historicity or, more speciἀcally, how present societies utilize notions of progress and modernity in their political choices. History, he argued, had ended, or “vanished,” with the collapse of the very idea of historical progress. The end of the Cold War was not caused by one ideology’s triumph over the other but by the disappearance of the utopian visions that the political Right and Left shared—the ends that they had both hoped for had always been illusions. Indeed, the idea of an “end,” itself, was nothing but a misguided dream (Baudrillard 1994a). Within a society subject to and ruled by fast-paced electronic communication and global information networks, he argued, the collapse of the façade of history’s progress was always going to be inevitable.
If “the nation” is part of this historical imagining of ends, then does the nation as a desired end also wither to the status of a collapsed 257illusion—a delusion of that brief age of nationalism recounted by Anderson? Does Korean culture (not Korean nation) sow the seeds that erode the (Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese, and so on) nation? Is this the entry, if not of the end of history, then of the end of the age of the nation?
We return to those questions that arose from the introduction to this chapter. Is Seoul urban space able to address an ironic, antinostalgic view of its own history? The answer is, still, in the depressing negative. It seems that the nostalgic (the dream of the reconstructed palaces, happy family excursions to mountain shrines, reimagined Chosun) and its obverse in unreflective modernism (the endlessly repeated tower blocks of everyday life) still prevail. Yet, for all that, a more positive view must be argued: in the interstices between these dichotomous urban worlds (the nostalgic vis-à-vis the modernist), one can identify destabilizing insertions that call held certainties into question—the city of lines, that new vernacular of information-adorned boxes, cones, and crosses. There is also the discordant architecture of Paju Book City (a happy theme park, yet also holding up a mirror to the culture—fun vis-à-vis the DMZ); the unsettling and disordered practices of Hongdae; the almost untraceable proliferation of art districts, museums, and galleries; the discordant discourse provoked by Cheonggyecheon and its non-nostalgic return to a Chosun past, and, at a more microscopic scale, the bronze sculpture of the little girl confronting the Japanese Embassy. There is another reason for a more positive view: although other societies may be as brilliantly creative and resilient as Korea’s, none would seem more so. The ironic imagination of Paik and of post–New Wave cinema will inevitably inform the design of the city of the twenty-ἀrst century.
Modern Seoul can be understood only in the context of bitterly contested memory and the creative fragmentation (reinvention) represented most startlingly in the Korean Wave. 258
1. Park Si-soo, “Stars Spice Up Campaigns,” Korea Times, 3 April 2012. While the political recruitment of “celebrities” might be seen as a global phenomenon, its scale in Korea’s case (and its link to “family”—to actual relationships with the celebrities) would seem exceptional.
2. I have written on the same phenomenon in the case of Thailand; see King (2011, chap. 5). 291
3. It is instructive to observe that, in the brave new world of New Songdo, English is to be the lingua franca. Even more symbolically charged is the use of English in the new “administrative capital” of Sejong.
4. On the broader issues of the Japanese–South Korean relationship and why it matters, a useful source is the work of Marie Söderberg of the European Institute of Japanese Studies. Although Japan and South Korea are seen as natural partners, there is much distrust and suspicion between them (Söderberg 2011).
5. On the museums and their symbolic intent, see Kal Hong (2011).
6. The reference here is to the Kantian notion of the three critiques: of Pure Reason, of Practical Reason, and of Judgment. The last constitutes the critique of aesthetic judgment; Kant ([1790] 2007).
7. The assumption of Japanese homogeneity is problematic. As observed previously, Japan was always a collection of ethnicities.
8. I must add a counterobservation: in Shenyang, in China’s Northeastern Liaoning Province, I have often observed the impressive presence of “Korea town,” a district of expatriate (mostly North) Korean communities. Its genealogy can be traced back to the Japanese colonization of Manchuria, with its contingent Korean settlement there, as well as to the displacements of the Korean War and then refugees from Kim dynasty North Korea. So, both North America and China have their vigorous Korean diaspora communities.
9. On “the end of history” more widely, see Bellamy (1987). 292