Recently, I’ve been reading a book called “Cultural Images of the 20th Century”. I picked it up for 2,000 won at a used bookstore I happened to stop by. The book was written by the now deceased writer Lee Sung-wook, and the preface calls him a “cultural engineer”. The essays in this book are an extension of that title. Most of the articles were written in the late 90s and published in 2004, and they are mostly interesting descriptions of the life, culture, and society of the time from the author’s point of view. What makes this book even more interesting part is that I’m reading it in 2020. It’s also quite interesting to read the descriptions of the society of a generation ago by a writer of that time 20 years later.
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 disease is narcissism, or in other words, unreflection, or the absence of reflection on objective things. A being who lacks reflection on the self and society inevitably turns all attention and understanding to the self. Beginning and end, cause and effect, begin and end with the “self,” and consideration of the diversity of relationships between the self and other people and society becomes very unnecessary.
… 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 “projected self” is Instagram and other social media. As times have changed and it’s become easier to present ourselves, we may have gotten worse.
That’s what I mean by “realism of the 뽕짝”. A highly educated music theorist in his 30s may be able to analyze “뽕짝” formally and aesthetically. But for him, it’s easy to see why an old man in the northwest, who remains a vendor at the Busan International Market, would fall apart at “굳세어라 금순아”. The reason is simple, the young age is firmly bound to that one “vulgar” song, and in short, no work higher or wider than art can penetrate the reality of a lifetime’s many colorful lives. If realism is connected to “뽕짝” because the song has taken a place in our modern history as its own, so has “Barbershop Picture”.
The acceleration of the metropolis, a sign of modernity, led to the personalization of the clock. The pre-modern practice of small communities of checking the time on a large clock standing tall in the town square was no longer possible in the metropolis, which was characterized by great chaos. What was needed to transform that chaos into order was a personal watch that could check the time even when the town clock was out of sight. It was in this social context that the pocket watch emerged. But the meaning of the pocket watch was more than just a timekeeping device. Managing and controlling time was considered the most advanced form of modernity, and in short, pocket watches were a symbol of a certain social status. The habit has been passed on to us. In the flowering period, when the tide of time turned in favor of flowering, you and I declared ourselves to be flower people, and short haircuts, suits, and pocket watches were the symbols of our status. Those who only dipped their toes into the waters of flowering or those who thought of flowering as a fad were called “early flowerers” (early flowerers), and the more they wore pocket watches, the more they loved them. The pocket watch was an alibi that guaranteed that they were flower people. For him, the watch was more an indicator of symbolic value than a timekeeping device. This is true of other things, too, where the symbolic value of an object is valued more highly than its usefulness, but the watch was a crucial part of our 20th-century symbolism. So was the scene in elementary school in the 70s. For a kid with a cartoon watch emblazoned with Disneyland characters like Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck, it was a way of identifying with the other kids. In middle and high school, when kids first wore watches on their forearms, they would compare them to see if they were 17 or 21, manual or automatic, and the comparison went beyond watches to class and status.
For us, the Rolex or Omega trademarks are perhaps the most revealing of the context in which we imagine watches as proxies for status and class. Just as there are high-end brands for all goods, some trademarks were seen as guarantees of excellence. Parker for fountain pens, “Naibang” for sunglasses (that’s what a certain brand of Ray-Ban was called), and so on. In this stylized imagination, Rolex stood out. Even if a newlywed started out in a single room, a Rolex was a must-have wedding gift. The upper class had a finite number of watches, and since everyone wanted to live a (symbolic) upper class life with a Rolex, it’s no wonder they were in short supply. That’s why Rolex and Omega became the national symbols of contraband.
In the context of dreaming of virtual upward mobility through the symbolic value of objects, the watch is no longer worn. In its place is the displacement of a car. But cars are also becoming less and less ‘powerful’. What will take its place in the next century, or will it be a decent society that no longer has a place for such vain imaginings?
It’s quite an interesting perspective, tracing the history of the so-called classification behavior to its flowering. At the end of the article, the author offers some hope for the next century, but as someone who lives in the next century, I have nothing to say.