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| Courtest of Jr Korpa |
By David A. Tizzard
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Rather than join in the agreement, my mind raced to the Billboard charts, the Netflix data, the webtoons, the smartphone market, the mobile gaming industry, cosmetics, YouTube views and TikTok algorithms. All of them often dominated by Koreans, young and old. It is easy to be disparaging of the success Korea has achieved and attribute it to something other than skill. But such claims often reveal a tinge of ethnocentrism while at the same time conveniently ignore the devastating poverty and authoritarianism from which the country has risen in the past few decades.
Imitation and reinterpretation
While seeking to counter such narratives and instead acknowledge Korea's creativity, a phrase I have created/adopted in attempting to describe such cultural achievements of late is, "imitation and reinterpretation." With the country's development and modernization stagnated by imperialism, colonization and war, it entered the current era far later than its counterparts. It was thus forced to imitate much of what it saw in the world, from music to political systems. Yet, as it imitated, it slowly reinterpreted. Providing new variations of existing models. Creating things at once wholly familiar but at the very same time, somehow new. Hybrids. Cultural chimeras.
Korea, for example, did not invent democracy, pop music, smartphones or healthcare. Yet it now does these arguably better than many of those who lay claim to such origins. It first imitated and then reinterpreted, and thus a version 2.0 of all of these things was created. And if you think such a feat is easy or deserving of little credit or respect, try it for yourself and see how far you get.
Deleuze and Guattari
In 1972, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari published "Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia," a difficult and revolutionary text that sought to dismantle the throne of Freud, psychoanalysis and the tendency for everything in the human to be about sex or our mums. Instead, it said the only way to be politically effective, to create new forms of thought, was to be schizophrenic. How is this achieved?
The world is said to be fragmented into zones and regimes of authority. Consider five distinct areas: we have: 1) the physical autonomous being, 2) the mind, 3) the social world, 4) the political world, and 5) the historical world. Each area is incorporated into the subsequent one, so your body is in your mind, which is in society, which is in the political world, which is then in the historical world.
Let's start from the end. The historical world is the realm of facts, material conditions and capital. These are things beyond ideology. They simply do not care what people believe or do not believe. Capitalism, for example, has no opinion of your identity or whatever community you identify with. Capitalism transcends borders and nations, cultures and religions. It decodes and deconstructs ethics, traditions and values. It would be incredibly creative and transformative if it weren't always slave to the profit margin which drives it.
And if each of Deleuze and Guattari's worlds is distinct and circumscribed by the larger one, anyone trying to affect the social or political world is doing nothing to alter the historical world. So while people might argue about pronouns or representation or cultural appropriation in the social and political field, and in doing so believe they are making a fundamental difference, they are not having any impact on material conditions. Though they may sleep peacefully at night believing they have achieved something worthwhile, Deleuze and Guttari argue that capital still flows and the world continues to turn. This is why they were so against the form of identity politics that dominates much of modern discourse. Because to be focused on identity is to be constrained and codified by the labels that the capitalist world has given you. Everyone is stuck in their own zone and only ever speaking for their group.
It's not enough to have one culture, one identity, one group. That is to be a slave to the system of thought and control. So if you only ever speak for a certain community or nation, be it sexual, racial, or ethnic, you are forever trapped and will never make a change in the world's material conditions. Instead, the world and capital will create and decode YOU. Providing black deodorant, Korean soup, gay cereal, punk fashion, female comedy and Christian pop music. One subsumes the other, not vice-versa. Yet wealth still begets wealth.
Be schizophrenic
The only way to be free, Delueze and Guattari say is to be schizophrenic. To cross boundaries and never stay inside finely demarcated lines. Importantly, it is a process not a goal (super important point!). It is a how, not a what.
The reason their book is difficult to read at first is because it is written in the style of schizophrenia rather than laying out a clear logical process. The examples they provide are literary, philosophical, historical, biological, social, political, and so on. The analogies and metaphors are constantly jumping from one area to the next, unable to be pinned down by one zone of interest. Those five distinct realms described earlier are constantly traversed and transgressed. Ideology and material conditions are taken creatively in the same breath. Historical facts become biological and the mind becomes political. The inside becomes outside. Boundaries are crossed and, through this repeated process, broken down.
Beautiful K-pop
There are a great many articles and video essays out there that document the influence hip-hop and black culture has had on K-pop. They are right to point out the direct absorption Korean music has embraced while, sometimes, also neglecting to understand and respect the people from whence it came. But at the same time, K-pop is funk music. It is French house. It is a ballad. It is J-pop. It is European trance. The dance styles are Indian and Southeast Asian. The aesthetic is British.
One of the strong arguments for why K-pop is not a music genre is because it cannot be identified by ear. You can identify country, rock, disco, techno, and Swedish death metal by listening to the musical forms and structures. K-pop however can sound like anything. K-pop is not restricted by genres or corporate forms. It transgresses cultures, boundaries, race, and style. It cares little for whatever labels musical corporations have created in order to sell records and host award shoes. It constantly forgets what it is and is reborn a new. Artists will embrace an incredibly stylized form in one song and then the next will be a complete reversal. Some, like Aespa or Le Sserafim, will have three or 4 different songs and styles in a single track. The verse will be pop, the chorus will be Latin, the middle 8 will be Afro beats, and the outro will be classical. It will use a variety of different languages and cultural allusions. The visual content will also be a smorgasbord of references and nations, trends and styles. Aespa's and Le Sserafim's music is schizophrenic. So is much else of K-pop as well as the industry itself.
s-Kizophrenia
But it's not just Korean music that is schizophrenic. Korean culture and society more broadly shares similar patterns. You will find hotdogs next to hanboks, Taiwanese bubble tea, English cafes, French bakeries with far too much redbean and sugar, crop tops and kawaii fashion. Democracy and cold war politics. The future and far too much of the past. Hyper-individualism and specters of Marx. Some of the coolest and sexiest people on the planet and then everyone else.
Some look on this as lacking authenticity or the creative spark. Some think everything should stay inside the little boxes that make us feel comfortable and give us a place of authority from which to speak. Korea, however, cares little for such boundaries. And that is why it is successfully imitating, reinterpreting, and through its schizophrenia, producing things that are at once familiar, strange, old, and revolutionary.
Dr. David A. Tizzard (datizzard@swu.ac.kr) has a Ph.D. in Korean Studies and lectures at Seoul Women's University and Hanyang University. He is a social/cultural commentator and musician who has lived in Korea for nearly two decades. He is also the host of the Korea Deconstructed podcast, which can be found online.
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