Seoul,Conditions of Possibility,and the Postnational Hyperspace

Korean ‘official nationalism’ (as Anderson calls it) arose late, in a context of partition and its inevitable ambiguities, Confucian self-discipline but wildly violent politics, rapid economic growth, and then Korea's pivotal role in the electronics and e-economy booms of the 1980s and 1990s. Seoul had to be constructed as the national capital in the absence of continuity in its represented past, consequent on the attempted total obliteration of Korean identity by the Japanese colonialist regime and subsequent wartime destruction. Its ‘monuments’ are virtually empty of cultural referencing; even the National Assembly is a ‘painted shed’; new cultural production is overwhelmingly either pastiche or electronic; political activity slips from the Third Estate of popular democracy to an emerging Fifth Estate of the Internet and the weblog. While print capitalism may have been a necessary enabling condition for the rise of nationalism in Europe, the Americas, and beyond, as Anderson asserts, in Korea's case we may have the paradox of the weakly defined nation slipping away, into a wider imagined community, even as the dream of Korean distinctiveness cuts ever deeper.