The Capitalist Unconscious

From Korean Unification to Transnational Korea

Hyun Ok Park

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231540513
• Subtopic: Korean History
• Index: History

The unification of North and South Korea is widely considered an unresolved and volatile matter for the global order, but this book argues capital has already unified Korea in a transnational form. As Hyun Ok Park demonstrates, rather than territorial integration and family union, the capitalist unconscious drives the current unification, imagining the capitalist integration of the Korean peninsula and the Korean diaspora as a new democratic moment.

Based on extensive archival and ethnographic research in South Korea and China, The Capitalist Unconscious shows how the hegemonic democratic politics of the post-Cold War era (reparation, peace, and human rights) have consigned the rights of migrant laborers—protagonists of transnational Korea—to identity politics, constitutionalism, and cosmopolitanism. Park reveals the riveting capitalist logic of these politics, which underpins legal and policy debates, social activism, and media spectacle.

While rethinking the historical trajectory of Cold War industrialism and its subsequent liberal path, this book also probes memories of such key events as the North Korean and Chinese revolutions, which are integral to migrants' reckoning with capitalist allures and communal possibilities. Casting capitalist democracy within an innovative framework of historical repetition, Park elucidates the form and content of the capitalist unconscious at different historical moments and dissolves the modern opposition among socialism, democracy, and dictatorship. The Capitalist Unconscious astutely explores the neoliberal present's past and introduces a compelling approach to the question of history and contemporaneity.

PART I

CRISIS

1

THE CAPITALIST UNCONSCIOUS:

THE KOREA QUESTION

Korean unification is the quintessential problematic of the Cold War order in East Asia and concerns the national quest for decolonization. This book presents a new conceptual approach to Korean unification that observes a metamorphosis from a rapprochement between the two Koreas to the formation of a transnational community that includes Korean diasporic communities as major participants. Routine questions on Korean unification ask whether and when the two Koreas will be unified. The book’s thesis is that capital has already unified Korea in a transnational form. This form of unification is not shaped by the long-awaited form of territorial integration and family union but rather is driven by the exchange of capital, labor, and ideas across the borders of Korean communities, including the Korean diaspora. The national division of Korea and the superpowers’ rivalry over it was the bedrock of the Cold War. Since the 1990s, the transnational Korean migration across the two Koreas and China constitutes a privileged venue of Korean unification, a new capitalist democratic order in East Asia, and an immanent link between them. The colonial migration from Korea to northeast China (Manchuria) in the first half of the twentieth century becomes an ur-history that Koreans in North Korea, South Korea, and China draw on to reinforce and challenge the terms of their capitalist integration.

Transnational Korea does not involve a convergence of Korean communities on the modular form of neoliberal capitalism despite the hegemonic role of capital. Instead, local meanings for transnational Korea are constituted by asynchronous constellations of old and new socioeconomic and emancipatory projects within each community. The rise of transnational Korea does not result from South Korea’s victory in its rivalry with North Korea. It ensues from each involved Korean community’s simultaneous experiences of socioeconomic crisis and crisis resolution by means of privatization, deregulation, and border-crossing labor migration. Transnational Korea is formed under the specific historical conditions of crisis in industrial development in Korean communities. A new capitalist network among Korean communities is transforming their inimical relations of the Cold War era into socioeconomic exchanges aimed at resolving the crisis. This book focuses particular attention on the cascading labor migration of Korean Chinese and North Koreans that integrates radically different economies: Korean Chinese migrate to South Korean cities to work in the expanding service economy, and North Koreans migrate to China for agricultural work formerly performed by Korean Chinese and for work in cities in burgeoning small businesses made possible by their remittances from South Korea.

I theorize capitalist experience as an unconscious that consists of the sociopolitical and historical unconscious. Market utopia is the sociopolitical unconscious that represents the capitalist experience in narrative, corporeal, and sensorial practices in quotidian life. The experience of expropriation, exploitation, inequality, and border crossing becomes the basis for a social construction of democracy that I conceptualize as market utopia. Whether in socialism or welfare capitalism, the vision of democracy during the industrial era concerned the power of the masses attesting to their critical role in consolidating mass production, mass consumption, and the dream of collective sovereignty. Market utopia is an alternative democratic practice that corresponds to the hegemonic domination of neoliberal and financial capitalism. Notwithstanding their importance, narrative constructions neither exhaust their experience nor entirely integrate with other experiences of socioeconomics, such as everyday routines, predicaments, and contradictions that Korean migrants register through bodily expression involving work, protest, emotion, and illness. Market utopia entails three repertoires of democratic politics—reparation, peace and reconciliation, and human rights—whose shared capitalist logic is explicated in this book.

The historical unconscious concerns the memory form of history and the temporal structure of subjectivity. When one is preoccupied with discerning new capitalist and democratic logics, such attention to the new may inadvertently foster a historicism that projects a rupture or a transition as if the old disappears. I examine how this historicism is authorized by the problematic concept of epochal transition and bring history to the forefront of the inquiry. Different economic sectors have undergone disparate changes in the putative era of financial capital. For example, the industrial sector shrank, but not all factories moved overseas or closed down. Instead of proclaiming the demise of the industrial sector, we need to delve into the new nexus between industrial capital and financial capital that is forged with the changed vision about the state. Furthermore, earlier utopian ideals have not vanished but returned as unscheduled revenants, haunting the hegemonic neoliberal democracy. Thus, the issue is about not only how to create a new politics but also how to recognize it when it emerges. History takes up philosophical status, since history is a matter not of aggregating events but of understanding and experiencing time through narrative, corporeality, and memory. I place the capitalist unconscious within the framework of historical repetition to examine the form and content in which the capitalist unconscious appeared at different historical moments.

FROM KOREAN UNIFICATION TO TRANSNATIONAL KOREA

Since the 1990s, capital has spearheaded the transnational form of Korean unification. This new form eludes even watchful eyes because of the fixation on the unification of territorial nation-states as envisaged during the Cold War. Unification discourses and practices offer few clues for recognizing the new transnational form of Korean unity. Old and new tropes of Korean unification transpose the trauma of national division into a substance for reestablishing an organic national whole. The Cold War notion of returning to an undivided past through territorial union continues to inform unification politics in the aftermath of the Cold War. The imposition of national division by foreign superpowers against Koreans’ will was a powerful Cold War narrative. Accordingly, the dissolution of the global Cold War is commonly understood as removing foreign opposition to Korean reunification. Thus the collapse of North Korea is considered imminent, with Korean unification only a matter of time. The German experience is held up as the model for assessing the economic capacity needed by South Korea for the peaceful integration of North Korea. Brief and tearful reunions of families separated since the Korean War have galvanized moral calls for reunification and fortified their normative imperative. Given the post–Cold War allure of the imminent realization of national union, cultural differences between the two Koreas resulting from decades-long separation rather than military enmity are perceived as creating barriers to genuine reunion and threatening reunification—even if territorial integration is achieved. These forays into the return to an undivided whole obfuscate the fact that Korean ethnic sovereignty assumes a new form of transnational community that eschews belabored forms of family reunion and the singular nation-state.

In my approach, the current form of Korean unification is not merely a matter of national and familial reconciliation. Rather, it is constitutive of a new capitalist and democratic order in post–Cold War Asia. During the Cold War, the Korean national division was paradoxically consolidated by diametrically opposed states that elevated unification to the sublime objective of national independence and used it to consolidate military dictatorship (Cumings 1981; Koo 1994; Bleiker 2005). Each state participated in an intensified race for military armament and state-led industrialization. If the Cold War is to be understood not just as a military rivalry between superpowers but also as an American project of establishing capitalist hegemony, then the post–Cold War does not negate the Cold War order but reconfigures a global capitalist order marked by porous borders and neoliberal democracy. Paik Nak-chung (1998), a renowned literary critic in South Korea, has offered a rare account of the role of capital in transforming the Korean division in the post–Cold War era. Writing soon after the 1997 financial crisis, Paik observed that investment and trade with North Korea by South Korean conglomerates riled but fell short of annihilating the national division. This resilience of the Korean division, he argued, underscores that the national division has become “the system” (ch’eje) with its own mechanisms of reproduction, which in this case are military and political forces within and beyond the Korean peninsula that sustain the Korean division. In my view, Paik has underestimated the unruly changes in the post–Cold War capitalist system that are accompanied by changes in national and global politics of sovereignty.

Capital-driven transnational Korea offers a missing link between the normalized task of Korean unification and the prevalent disenchantment with unification in South Korea. Democratized public space in South Korea is marked by indifference and skepticism over the viability of Korean unification, as well as by defeatism among activists whose roles in unification efforts no longer gave them prominence. Scientific surveys and opinion polls on unification conducted by the government and research institutes affirm the demise of the wish for unification, which seems to be interrupted only by intermittent family unions hosted by the two states. Without a prospect of meeting again, family unions turn the decades-long awaited moment into a spectacle of human tragedy. The public’s disaffection with unification in South Korea is often attributed to concern over its economic cost. Accordingly, the economics of unification needs to be seriously interrogated. I consider this economic disenchantment with unification to be a phenomenological index of the global capitalist integration of the two Koreas and the Korean diaspora. Even then, global capitalist integration repeats sentiments of a necessary yet impossible union in the future. The exchange of capital and labor satisfies long-standing aspirations for reconciliation among Koreans while taming the urgency of Korean unification into regularized enactments of market exchange. The missing link is that Korea is already unified in a transnational form by capital. Transnational Korea coheres under the act of commodity exchange across Korean communities. This material substance is conceived, enacted, and reproduced as the new everyday reality of the post–Cold War era. The border crossings of people, goods, and money bear with them fantastic desires for wealth, security, and the primordial belonging. Capital occupies the transnational space of Korean interactions through the affective politics of the ethnic nation.

Transnational Korea locates a new form of Korean ethnic sovereignty within capitalist crisis and its historically specific response to the crisis and discerns within it a new cultural-political register of democracy. Buck-Morss (2002:39) argues that “if the era of the Cold War is over, it is perhaps less because one side has won than because the legitimation of each political discourse found itself fundamentally challenged by material developments themselves.” Similarly, the Korean Cold War has subsided since the 1990s despite perennial military tension between the two Koreas. This is less because South Korea won the Cold War than because the two Koreas simultaneously faced crises that were bound up with a global capitalist crisis. An analysis of the capitalist crisis and its attempted resolution in each place is necessary to make legible the emergent transnational Korea. As much as the global capitalist crisis at the end of World War II laid the political economic foundation of the Cold War and the Korean division, a new global crisis of industrial accumulation provided the momentum for the waning of the Cold War. This means that Korean unification is a problematic of global capitalism and its corollary regime of democracy rather than an a priori question of ethnic sovereignty.

Led by South Korean capital, transnational Korea signifies a distinctively uneven integration of East Asia in the post–Cold War era, which belies both the prevalent imaginaries of regional unity and the persistent strength of nation-states. South Korea grants Korean Americans de facto dual citizenship while constraining the rights of Korean Chinese to visit and work in South Korea. Inequality between the two Korean diasporic communities has become the most contentious issue together with the status of North Korea in the formation of the deterritorialized Korea. Devoid of capitalist exchanges with South Korea, Koreans in Japan and Russia remain invisible in transnational Korea. A hierarchical transnational community is anomalous with the ethnic principle of citizenship and the dichotomy of home and diaspora.

Postcoloniality

Conceptualizing the national question as a postcolonial question is key to understanding the shift in the imagined Korean community from Korean unification to transnational Korea. The two Koreas’ Cold War rivalry for territorial integration of the nation has a postcolonial character. The division of Korea after liberation from Japanese rule was not simply the result of intervention by the superpowers. It was also the result of the domestic struggle over social reforms to address the inequalities exacerbated by colonization. The Cold War fixed the decolonization struggle as a competition between state socialism and military capitalism. Under the banner of permanent revolution, the North proceeded with a socialist form of decolonization, conducting land reform, purging colonial collaborators, and consecrating the memory of anticolonial struggle as the basis of its Juche (self-reliance) ideology. The South developed a military state that delayed land reform and reinstated collaborators with Japanese power in key administrative and military positions. The interlocking relationship in South Korea of military dictatorship, American influence, and capitalist development formed the central question in the social formation debate of the 1980s. Postcolonial politics in the Korean peninsula, with its fixation on the Cold War division of the nation, is similar to the politics in postwar Japan, where defeat and US occupation led to Japan’s becoming engrossed with its relationship with the United States. In Young’s (2012) observation, the postimperialist history of Japan was reduced to postwar history, mainly determining responsibility for the war. In building a Cold War bloc in Asia, the United States in the early 1960s led the South Korean state to agree to Japan’s offer of a one-time monetary settlement in order to bury the issue of colonization and compensation.

The post–Cold War era has reconfigured postcolonial desire, constructing the Korean nation in transnational form. The issue of reparation of colonial wrongs has been reopened in South Korea in the post–Cold War context, most notably in conjunction with reparation for women who were mobilized by the Japanese state as sex-workers for its military during the colonial era. Marx’s observation that history repeats itself the first time as tragedy and the next time as farce is apropos of the Korean context. If Koreans in China and North Korea enjoyed amicable relations as communist brothers in the past, their uneven capitalist integration since the 1990s has produced hierarchical relations defined by the market exchange of money and labor. Their hierarchical relations with South Koreans are mapped onto new repertoires of democratic politics in hegemonic South Korea, namely, reparation, peacemaking, and humanitarianism. In this conjuncture, the colonial history of migration to Manchuria becomes the ur-history of transnational Korea. Memories of Japanese colonization provide Korean Chinese and North Koreans with a discourse for articulating quotidian experiences and actions (see Park 2005). The repeated migration of Koreans in these two historical moments does not mean that the pattern of Korean migration then and now is similar. Instead, it discloses the repeated paradoxical tension of territorializing and deterritorializing forces that arises from the interplay between global capitalist expansion and the state’s role in it.

Historical repetition is more than resemblance and memory. Recognition of repetition interrupts the linear historical temporality that frames neoliberal democracy, at the same time pointing to the very logic of capitalist expansion that triggers repetition. Buck-Morss (2002:31) notes that “unlike Hegelian or Marxist philosophies of history, the conception of the ur-form presumes no continuum of historical development and no deterministic necessity as to the outcome.” Similarly, the colonial history of migration as the ur-form of transnational Korea requires an approach beyond the thesis of colonial modernity. The latter locates the origin of capitalist development in the colonial era, implicating the origin of Korean modernity in what was called Western modernity, which Japan simultaneously sought to imitate and overcome in its metropole and colonies (e.g., Shin and Robinson 2001). My analysis reveals instead that the colonial history of migration to Manchuria provides a basis for identification and disidentification with the neoliberal democratic order. The book examines the present, in which emerging global capitalist and democratic regimes rupture the lives of border-crossing Koreans. Memories of colonial migration configure experiences of capitalist and democratic changes. Koreans across borders comprehend and contest the hierarchy among their communities through their articulations of new memories.

Transnationalism

Transnational Korea reveals its instability as soon as it is explored substantively. Conflicts and contradictions arise from practices and narratives over Koreans’ border-crossing interactions. Ethnicity, nation, cosmopolitanism, peace, and human rights are key spatial sites of political economic and cultural exchanges of Koreans across borders. Neither here nor there, these spatial sites are liminal zones whose principal function is to offer the time and place for capitalist transactions. With its inherent contradictions, transnational Korea rests on cosmopolitanism and nationalism, both of which provide crucial, though not always functional, services for capitalist expansion. Nongovernmental organizations in South Korea, for instance, espouse cosmopolitanism in defining migrants’ rights as human rights while bringing nationalism in through the back door. Nation-states and migrants also appeal to transnational as well as national ties.

Transnational Korea exceeds the framework of diaspora studies and transnational migration studies, which take the nation-state as the unit of analysis by regarding diaspora as the extension or transcendence of the nation-state. Theories of transnationalism revolve around ethnic and global homogeneity, such as Appadurai’s (1996) “ethnoscape” and the global human rights regime, and local differentiation such as diasporic culture (Clifford 1992; Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Braziel 2003). However, neither pole of this theoretical polemic explains the hierarchical structure of the Korean transnational community. This hierarchy also challenges the principle of ethnic citizenship, which postulates symmetrical inclusion of all members of the same putative ethnic group regardless of differences in social status, residence, or citizenship (Brubaker 1998). The notion of long-distance nationalism conceptualizes overseas members as an extension of the home nation-state (Anderson 1992). However, studies of diaspora and transnational migrants present them as others of nation-states, who disperse across borders, live in interstitial spaces of states, and make no fixed commitment to either home or host states, but instead develop multiple, hybrid identities (Schiller, Basch, and Blanc 1995; Soysal 1995). Thus, an important concern in these studies of diasporic and transnational migration is the status of the nation-state and its membership system within contemporary globalization. As a result, the studies present a dyadic analysis of home/host nation-state and diasporic migrants, which regards the latter as a whole and the others of the nation-state. This dyadic framework is adopted in the proliferating studies of foreign migrant workers in South Korea, the Korean Chinese diaspora, and North Korean migrants for investigating discrimination in South Korea, diasporic networks, ethnic and national membership, and multiple belongingness (Sŏl 1999; Cho 2008; Pak Kyŏngt’ae 2008; Ryang 2008; Jaeeun Kim 2011).

Current studies of citizenship and transnational migration do not adequately address the complexity associated with these hierarchical relationships across transnational Korea. Different positions, rights, and bargaining powers of Korean diasporic communities as compared with South Korea, as well as in relation to one another, demand an analytic framework that goes beyond the conventional dyadic analysis of the home state and diaspora and instead takes the home/host nation-states, non-Korean migrants, and different diasporic Korean communities together. When one observes diasporic communities one by one, the position of Korean Americans in transnational Korea resembl...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Crisis
• Part II: Reparation
• Part III: Peace and Human Rights
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index