Lately I’ve been reading a book called “Cultural Images of the 20th Century.” I happened to pick it up at a used bookstore for just 2,000 won. It was written by the late Lee Sung-wook, whom the preface describes as a “cultural engineer.” The short pieces collected in the book feel like an extension of that label. Most of them were written in the late 1990s and gathered into a book in 2004, and they offer vivid, often entertaining descriptions of the everyday life, culture, and social mood of that era from the author’s point of view. What makes the book even more interesting is the fact that I’m reading it now, in 2020. Reading a contemporary writer’s account of society from one generation ago more than twenty years later gives the book an entirely new flavor.
It’s been a while since I’ve found a book this interesting, so here are a few excerpts.
This is where the diagnosis of capitalist society as mass-producing a “performing self” is spot on.
… The essence of “princess syndrome” is narcissism, or in other words, a lack of reflection, a failure to reflect on anything objective. A being that lacks reflection on the self and society inevitably turns all of its attention and understanding back toward itself. Beginnings and endings, causes and effects, all start from and close within the self. As a result, any consideration of the many different relationships between oneself, other people, and society becomes thin and impoverished.
… The pathogenesis of the syndrome I’m talking about today is a serious social problem. The pathogenesis is a neurotic, obsessive-compulsive condition, as I mentioned before, which is a secondary symptom of consumerism.
The first thing that comes to mind when I hear the phrase “performing self” is Instagram and social media in general. As time has passed and it has become easier to stage ourselves, perhaps our symptoms have only grown worse.
That is what I mean by the “realism of ppongjjak.” A highly educated music theorist in his thirties may be able to dissect “ppongjjak” in terms of form and aesthetics. But he would still have no real idea why an old man from the northwest, still making a living as a vendor in Busan’s International Market, suddenly breaks down when he hears “Be Strong, Geum-sun.” The reason is simple: at a young age, you cannot break into the lived reality fused into that one so-called vulgar song. A life full of upheaval, broader and deeper than art, lies embedded in it. If “ppongjjak” is connected to realism because such songs have claimed their own place in the history of modern Korea, then the same is true of “Barbershop Picture.”
The acceleration of the modern metropolis produced the personalization of timekeeping. In premodern small communities, people could check the time by looking at the large clock standing in the middle of the town square. That was no longer possible in the big city, whose defining feature was chaos. What turned that chaos into order was the personal watch, which allowed someone to check the time even when the town clock was out of sight. The pocket watch emerged out of precisely that social background. But the pocket watch meant more than a simple device for checking the time. The ability to manage and control time was seen as one of the most advanced marks of modernity, so the pocket watch also became a sign of social status. That habit continued into our own history. In the modernization period, when the tide of the times turned toward “modernization,” everyone wanted to present themselves as a modernizer, and short hair, Western suits, and pocket watches became symbols proving just that. Those whose thinking and values had not changed, and who merely dipped a toe into modernization or treated it like a fad, were called poseurs, fake modernizers. The more they loved their pocket watches, the more those watches served as alibis proving they were part of the new age. For such people, a watch mattered less as a tool for telling time than as an index of symbolic value. That was true of many objects whose symbolic value outweighed their practical use, but the watch was one of the most important molds of symbolic value in Korea’s twentieth century.
For us, the clearest example of imagining watches as proxies for status and class may be Rolex and Omega. Just as every kind of product had its premium brand, certain trademarks came to be seen as guarantees of top-tier quality. Parker for fountain pens, “Naibang” for sunglasses, and so on. Within that stereotyped imagination, Rolex stood out above the rest. Even if a newlywed couple began life in a tiny one-room home, the wedding gift still had to be a Rolex. The number of slots in the upper class was limited, but everyone wanted to experience a symbolic version of upper-class life through a Rolex, so of course demand outstripped supply. That is why Rolex and Omega became the stars of the smuggling trade.
In that old fantasy of rising in class, if only symbolically, through the symbolic value of objects, watches no longer occupy the same role. In their place came engine displacement in cars. But even cars are slowly losing that power. What will take their place in the next century? Or will we finally become a decent society in which such empty fantasies no longer need a designated object at all?
It’s a fascinating perspective, tracing the history of our obsession with social ranking all the way back to the modernization period. At the end of the piece, the author allows himself a small hope for the next century, but as someone actually living in that next century, I find myself with very little to say.