3 - Modernity in Suspense: The Logic of Fetishism in Korean Cinema

Summary

Abstract

To examine local film in a situation at once peripheral and colonial but presently in a global capitalist state, I employed theoretical concepts such as translation as a cultural practice that could illuminate a set of predicaments in a cinema and a culture of a manic mode of condensed capitalist development, not to mention seemingly semi-perpetual partition. The essay unfolds the translation of the word “fetish,” revealing its complexity through the layers of meaning attached to it in its vicissitude of translation into Korean.

Keywords: translation as cultural practice, IMF crisis

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) stalks South Korea as I write. The problem, as always it seems, is foreign debt and unemployment. The president of the IMF speaks, from an interview room, words full of reason and reasonableness, telling the national television audience about layoffs. Yet an image – or rather, a series of them – disturbs the rationality of his address: the oversized American dollars that are papered over the walls of the room. The US dollar speaks a language of magic as well as reason. And although it is the gold charms which Korean citizens sell to bail out the country that apparently play out the traditional role of fetish, the very size and number of the American dollars also recalls the role of fetish, demanding a kind of passionate submission to them. This is what the shifts in exchange rate also seem to have done: confronted with the stability of the American currency's value, South Korea can only adopt an attitude of passionate submission. The highly touted role announced for South Korea, as a new and active member of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), is ultimately only a passive one – finally not globalizing but globalized.

In the imaginary of South Koreans, the triumph of finance capital over industrial capital (signalled by the IMF) is understood against the familiar backdrop of imperialism and colonialism. It is even expected that the most “advanced” mode – as announced by the global order – should triumph. As finance capital appears to triumph, the recurrent image is that of the late nineteenth century, when imperialist forces took control of the Joseon dynasty that reigned on the Korean Peninsula.