Severed in neoliberal South Korea: Cho˘ngdŭnilt’o˘ and the dis/assembly of industrial bodies

Introduction

During an interview with a group of six middle-aged laid-off Daewoo Motors autoworkers, the conversation turned toward their physical condition. Each described in various fashion stomach and intestinal ailments, weakened and pained arms and legs, and aching backs. They appeared to struggle for explanation. They commented on the ubiquity of physical ailments among the other 400 or so laid-off men, but offered strident reassurances that their bodily afflictions were merely personal problems that could be addressed by individual physical discipline and habits, such as regular meals and exercise. ¹ The more fundamental issues, they seemed to emphasize, were fraying familial and social relations, economic hardship, and uncertainty about their futures, which led to intense mental and emotional anguish and consequent physical pain. As they suggested throughout, they would be fine if they returned to the factory.

Neither their experiences of physical suffering nor their interpretations should surprise. Popular and academic accounts suggest subtle but disturbing connections between job loss and deteriorating physical health. The involuntarily unemployed (i.e., laid off) commonly complain of the kinds of ailments that afflicted Daewoo autoworkers (also reporting ear and nasal infections and severe flu-like symptoms). Unemployment may even be fatal. Recent epidemiological research conducted in the US indicates increased risks of heart attack, stroke, diabetes, and arthritis associated with unemployment. Life expectancy, according to some studies, is measurably shortened by unemployment, even after reemployment (e.g., Kessler, 1998; Strully, 2009). And some unemployed people themselves have described the experience as a sickness, not unlike cancer and chronic pain syndromes (Cottle, 2003: 19).

Ironically, while the unemployed may hurt, their bodies are often obscured or missing in social scientific accounts. Despite broad advances in the study of the body and increased attention to unemployment across a range of disciplines, their intimate connection has yet to be fully theorized. Like the explanations given by the laid-off Daewoo workers, unemployment’s afflictions are often relegated to psychosomatic effects: either the psychological trauma of unemployment, the bodily reflex of chronic anxiety, depression, anger, and other kinds of mental distress (an approach dominant in social psychology and folk-popular representations (e.g., Jahoda, 1982; Uchitelle, 2007) or the cultural trauma of social disorientation and shattered expectations. Most anthropological research, for example, document the shattered coherence of the complex cultural scaffolding sustaining identities and social locations, including gender (e.g., Dunk, 2003; Pappas, 1989), social status, and class (e.g., Dudley, 1994), and most recently, temporality (e.g., Mains, 2011). The unemployed are interpreting subjects, adjusting to changed (as well as chronic) circumstances and refiguring forms of meaning and value. Notwithstanding the evident exchange between mind, body, and self, it is clear that ideational forms (i.e., mind) are privileged, exposing the tenacity of Cartesian dualism. There is indeed pain, but the body remains mute and unintelligible.

This article recenters the body in our understanding of physical suffering among involuntary unemployed. My contention is that the bodily experience of unemployment is intimately related to particular constructions of workers’ bodies during employment. Near the end of this part of the interview, one of the men offered a provocative speculation about the origins of his bodily dysfunction. After a litany of physical complaints, he commented, not without embarrassment, that he had begun to worry about his recent lack of sexual desire. His current physical condition, he lamented, affected intimate relations with his wife, aggravating an already strained marriage. He remarked that before he was laid off, he was healthy. His body may have been tired from the assembly line but he felt healthy. Now, he felt something was wrong with his body. Still apparently self-conscious, he stated haltingly, “But it isn’t just me. When I talk with my friends of similar age, they all say the same […] as we joke around,” he equivocated. He then reasoned, “When you do something 70 percent, your body is also 70 percent. When you’re laid off, your body is also laid off … your bodily condition.” To be laid off, he seemed to suggest, was to not merely become unemployed (in the formal economic sense) but also to be deprived of the full use and usefulness of his laboring body. Left unused, his body had begun to deteriorate. Factory labor, according to him and to many others, was a productive and health sustaining activity. In fact, as I will argue, factory labor was a process of assembly—of their bodies as much as it was of automobiles.

My fieldwork (2000–2002) was with approximately 400 laid-off autoworkers who participated in the Daewoo Motor Union’s Struggle (t’ujaeng) against Mass Redundancy Dismissals (hereafter Struggle). I joined their ranks at labor demonstrations, standing against riot police and company security, and frequently shared shots of soju (a common clear spirit) after union events (dwi puri), listening to their often-brusque comments about family breakdown, social alienation, worsening health, and diminishing prospects of returning to their jobs. ² At the Catholic Church, union yard, and protest tent (places of daily congregation for the laid-off men), I witnessed the deterioration of men’s bodies and listened to their remarks about their physical suffering. ³ During interviews and impromptu conversations, I solicited work histories, which revealed deep and abiding bodily attachments to the factory and laboring process. Like many who work with their bodies to make a living, the men spoke of a way of understanding and evaluating themselves and their bodies that came from years of demanding physical labor on the assembly line, disclosing a corporeal epistemology (Zandy, 2004: 3–4; see also Scheper-Hughes, 1992: 185).

They referred to the factory as cho˘ngdŭn ilt’o˘, which may be roughly translated as “workplace of attachment.” I at first took the idiom as simply describing sentimental affection, indexing, in their usage as laid-off autoworkers, loss, and longing. Discussions of the factory were certainly saturated by nostalgia and yearning, but the affective connections dug deeper into their flesh than expected. They spoke of the factory as being a part of their corporeal selves. The factory and their bodies were experienced as porous, mutually affecting, and affected. By their daily labor, they had incorporated the factory as part of their bodily selves, even as the tools, machines, and car chassis on the assembly line absorbed their sweat, scent, and toil. They also described being laid off as being severed (charŭta). The men used the term frequently, and in my initial estimation, idiomatically, much like “fired” in American vernacular. They did not fully thematize their understanding and experience of being severed, but they were not wholly unaware of the violent bodily connotation. They were wracked by pain that they could not entirely articulate.

It is their corporeal relationship with the factory and their experience of being severed that I want to take seriously—that they were indeed cut off from a vital part of themselves. Their physical suffering was not simply symptomatic of mental and emotional disorders related to downward mobility, status loss, or social–economic alienation—the common diagnoses of the plight of the unemployed. “Severed” was not merely idiomatic phrasing, but also embodied metaphor: not merely the linking of thought and image but also the disclosing of the mutual bond between meaning, body, and lifeworld (Kirmayer, 1992). The connective tissue of my analysis is cho˘ngduŭn ilt’o˘, the link between specific embodiments of labor with the particular suffering of the laid-off men.

Cho˘ngdŭn ilt’o˘ was a product of the Fordist, developmental state period. ⁴ Scholars working on post-Fordist affect convincingly argue that Fordism is productively understood less as a bygone era “than as a locus of sensibility and yearning that leaves crucial traces in the neoliberal present” (Muehlebach, 2011: 62; see Allison, 2012; Berlant, 2011; Molé, 2012, Muehlebach and Shoshan, 2012). Drawing from Gramsci’s writing on “Americanism and Fordism” (Gramsci, 1971), they remind us that Fordism was not simply a highly regimented mode of industrial production but a wide ranging and affectively penetrating social–cultural project, constituting a “psycho-physical nexus […] to create a new type of worker and a new type of man” (Muehlebach and Shoshan, 2012: 320). The relatively stable social, spatial, and temporal structures of Fordism (e.g., secure employment; division between home and work; relationship between production and consumption) formed sites of affective investment, aspiration, and attachment that have endured across generations. While Fordist affects may “hover at the ‘very edge of semantic availability,’” they continue to exert considerable force (Muehlebach, 2011: 63) Scholars have tracked the emergence of senses and sensitivities, such as longing for worker solidarity (Molé, 2012), intimate belonging (Allison, 2012), public recognition (Muehlebach, 2011), desperate approximations of the “good life” (Berlant, 2011), in the wake of the dissolution of the Fordist social contract, as “expressing the modes in which Fordist affect continues to haunt the rhythms, trajectories, and sensibilities of the present” (Muehlebach and Shoshan, 2012: 335–336).

The theorizing of post-Fordist affect helps us to appreciate the intense attachment and longing for Fordist labor. My analysis aims to push deeper the proposition that “Fordism had insinuated itself into workers’ lives on levels where the psychic and the visceral intersect” (p. 321). In the research by Muehlebach and others, industrial labor, the iconic form of Fordist production, remains a site of ambivalent attachment. While it may inspire awe, symbolize individual and collective progress, promise middle-class lifestyles and respectability, the labor process itself is characterized by boredom, pain, and monotony. Their analyses focus on the bodily regulation and rhythms that extend from regimented labor, including the socialities and temporalities of leisure, consumption, and public life. Little, in fact, is discussed about actual industrial labor. I propose that labor on the assembly line is not necessarily alienating, but may be a form of occupation.

My ethnographic examination of cho˘ngdŭn ilt’o˘ suggests a rethinking of our understanding of occupation from merely a person’s job or abstract space to earn a wage. Occupation gestures toward that other dimension of meaning—to inhabit place. Here, I define occupation as embodied habitation, but emphasize the mutual constitution of bodily self and place, whereby self and place are materially conjoined. Occupation is a process of articulating with, attaching to, and thereby inhabiting and being inhabited by particular places and practices (i.e., bodily labor). My analysis builds upon recent thinking on affects and relational bodies (Blackman, 2008; Latour, 2004; Seigworth and Gregg, 2010). From this perspective, bodies are not stable, inert entities but processes that articulate human and nonhuman “things” into complex assemblages (Blackman, 2012: 1). Daewoo workers’ laboring bodies—Daewoo bodies—were an assemblage of the meaning-rich and meaning-making materiality of their labor and workplace.

Daewoo workers’ attachments to the factory were not metaphorical but deeply affective, insinuating into the nervous system, sinews, bones, and musculature of the men. To be laid off, therefore, was to be forcibly dislocated not simply from a distinct space but, in their words, to have become “severed”—cut off from the means of their own assembly (cho˘ngdŭn ilt’o˘) and ultimately from a part of their own bodily selves. Their physical pains and dysfunctions may be understood as a process of bodily disassembly, resulting in a state of disrepair.

This analysis of cho˘ngdŭn ilt’o˘ and the Fordist assembly of men’s bodies underscore the structural violence immanent to neoliberal restructuring. Neoliberalism is commonly understood as a form of governmentality centrally concerned with biopower—the productive capacities, well-being, and security of individuals and populations (Rose, 1999). ⁵ Much of the literature on neoliberalism has focused on the emergence of new forms of personhood constituted through the production and dissemination of “technologies of self.” In the wake of the Asian financial crisis (1997–2001), for example, scholars of Korea have begun to ethnographically identify the propagation of neoliberal rationalities and affects into a range of social fields, including: social welfare (Song, 2009); education (Abelmann et al., 2009); and the burgeoning self-help industry (Seo, 2011). They describe widespread adherence to, if not obsession with, “self-development” (chagi kyebal) and “self-management” (chagi kwalli). Distinguished from the normative personhood of the developmental period, the individual self (subjectivity, affect, and body), rather than the company or nation, has emerged as both the means and object of improvement. The projects of self-improvement, they demonstrate, have emerged in a context of heightened precarity. Here, I emphasize the condition of the immanent destruction of Fordist forms of personhood, specifically, bodily selves.

Layoffs may be understood as a biopolitical technology to resolve the problem of labor (institutional, political, cultural, and bodily limits to productivity and growth associated with Fordist production). The change to a post-Fordist neoliberal economy involves the production of “new” (liberated) labor. But, its production, as noted by Bauman (1998: 112), necessarily entails the dismantling of the “habits of permanent, round-the-clock, steady and regular work.” Habits cannot be dismissed as mere routines, meaningless repetition. They are deeply embodied and meaningful practices, constituting, and constitutive of workers’ occupation. As labor remains a crucial site of social- and self-reproduction, layoffs extend beyond the enumeration of the unemployed and occasion violent disruption of local life ways, including capacities for bodily reproduction. If we take bodies as accumulation strategies integral to social reproduction, as suggested by Harvey and Haraway (1995), and consider that bodies are complex assemblages of social, cultural, and material infrastructures, layoffs, and others forms of social–economic displacement may be understood as forms of bodily violence. If the valorized neoliberal self is the entrepreneurial individual, unattached to permanent employment and workplaces, it is also, then, a product of detachment, or, as I have argued, disassembly. The specific experience of laid-off Daewoo autoworkers suggests that this process is a form of structural violence, severing their bodies from their occupation, or cho˘ngdŭn ilt’o˘.

The laid-off Daewoo men feared that they had become, as they stated in their own words, byo˘ngshin, or “cripple.” Byo˘ngshin is a stigmatizing label of physical and mental abnormality. When applied to men, it is also associated with dependence and lack of social standing and sexual potency. The men’s use of the term evinced not only their own valuation of their lost autonomy and social–economic productivity after being laid-off, but it also indexed their damaged bodies. Not only did they not labor in the factory anymore, they also began to question whether their bodies could work as they once did. Byo˘ngshin was both a social–moral and an embodied condition. It somatically indexed their severed Fordist bodies and their obsolescence in neoliberal South Korea.

Neoliberal dispossession in South Korea

On 16 February 2001, at the behest of the state, which was the primary creditor, management laid off 1750 production workers, nearly one-half the work force, against vehement union opposition. Of those laid off, approximately 400 men and a small number of their wives participated in the union’s Struggle. They were core workers in the strategic heavy industries (chemical, steel, shipbuilding, automobile). They had been employed by South Korea’s second largest carmaker and one of the flagship companies of the Daewoo Group, a top-five conglomerate (chaebo˘l). They had enjoyed considerable privileges: relatively high wages, relative social prestige for manual workers, generous benefits, and crucially, job security. Nearly all of the men had worked at least one decade at the factory, some nearly 30 years, and all had expected the factory to be their lifelong workplace (pyo˘ngsaeng chikjang). They had embodied the value of core manufacturing labor in the Fordist, developmental state regime of industrial capitalism. The Daewoo Struggle marked its dismantling. The massive job cuts at Daewoo Motors were the first and largest executed at a historically powerful union stronghold since the state’s failed attempt to do so at Hyundai Motors in 1998. ⁶

The crisis spectacularly dramatized the definitive failure of the developmental model. The Korean economy had faced a crisis of corporate profitability and global competitiveness since the 1980s. Confronted with a deep currency crisis in late 1996, the Kim Young Sam administration was forced to solicit what was then a record $58 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund. The specter of national insolvency provided political opportunity for reformist elites to restructure key regulatory policies and institutional structures of accumulation along neoliberal principles (e.g., banking, monetary policy, controls on foreign investment, autonomy of financial bodies), in compliance with global free market “best practices” (Pirie, 2008). Obtaining intellectual hegemony (at state agencies, corporate bodies, and nongovernmental organizations) during the crisis, neoliberal reformers accelerated the shift from mass production manufacturing to finance, information technology, and service-related employment, commonly associated with post-Fordism. The restructured labor market facilitated an enduring redistribution of wealth from labor to capital and depreciation of industrial labor (Pirie, 2008). ⁷

Labor reforms abrogated the core labor-capital compact established in the aftermath of 1987–1989’s wave of strikes. Core workers—skilled male employees in permanent positions at large manufacturing firms—had obtained strong legal protections against dismissals, corporate welfare benefits (e.g., health care, subsidized housing, and educational subsidies for children), and significant wage premiums relative to their small firm counterparts in return for relative labor peace. ⁸ Historically, the state’s regulation of labor was indeed harsh and authoritarian, routinely employing tactics of violence, intimidation, and terror; ironically, extant labor laws had protected jobs, restricting employers’ rights to dismiss and dispatch workers (Koo, 2000). The state managed to revise labor laws in 1998, at the height of the crisis, extracting heretofore-inconceivable concessions from organized labor: the legalization of layoffs, expanded use of subcontracted labor, and institutionalization of short-term contracted workers at large firms. Daewoo autoworkers, as core workers, experienced nearly unthinkable job loss, and faced a dim future of irregular and nonstandard employment.

The Asian financial crisis, according to David Harvey, was an exemplary moment of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey, 2003: 150–151). The concept is his development of Marx’s proposition of the “original sin” of capitalism—“primitive accumulation.” Primitive accumulation is the prehistory of capitalism: the violent separation of people from their means of production that created the preconditions for the commodification of labor and thereby capitalist accumulation. Harvey suggests that the phenomenon is not historically confined to a putative origin, but a continual process necessitated by recurrent accumulation crises. The kinds of violence and legal machinations of enclosure associated with primitive accumulation are evident in the history of colonial plunder as well as in the more recent acts of forceful privatization of “commons” (e.g., land, water, genetic codes of indigenous flora) and public enterprises (e.g., national industries like energy and transportation), and devaluation of existing assets (e.g., private corporations), including labor power, related to neoliberal globalization (Harvey, 2003).

Dispossession, however, entails not only the deprivation of labor rights, benefits, and job security, among other kinds of “protective covering” (Collins, 2012); it also tears away the means of social reproduction. Social reproduction refers to what Polanyi called “habitation” (Collins, 2012: 17; Kasmir and Carbonella, 2008: 14) and includes what I have termed occupation. It concerns the biopower of populations and consists of the political, social, cultural, and material infrastructures that enable individuals to reproduce and replenish their bodily and other productive capacities from day to day and across generations (Collins, 2012: 17). Social reproduction, moreover, necessarily involves the body, and the body, as trenchantly pointed out by Harvey and Haraway (1995: 510), is an accumulation strategy. From the perspective of the Daewoo factory worker, his body is the very means by which he procures the wages to sustain his bodily and social capacities. ⁹ But more than mere “instrument” or source of labor power, his body is constitutive of and constituted by the materiality of factory work, including the assembly line, tools, and coworkers’ bodies. When laid off, or “severed,” they were dispossessed of their embodied connection to the factory, which afflicted their corporeal selves.

Disassembled bodies

Pained and dysfunctional bodily states and confusions about them were not uncommon among laid-off men. A large majority spoke of deteriorating health and bodily dysfunction. Many of the workers had sought the counsel of doctors, both Western and traditional Korean. They reported that diagnoses were uncertain and treatments only partially alleviated symptoms. Their pains had little clinical certainty. Physical pain and dysfunction had become part of their daily lives, deeply entwined with the anxieties and anguish of unemployment. While the men generally subordinated their bodily ailments to the mental and emotional distress of unemployment, they remained perplexed.

Pain is an intrinsically ambiguous notion. It is an aversive sensation surely, as medical anthropologist Jean Jackson (2011: 333) explained, but its precise physiological location is elusive, for it is not the back, for example, that hurts; rather, the sensation materializes in neurological processes, which in themselves are pliable and subject to environmental, social, and cultural influences. Furthermore, because pain is an experience that cannot be directly measured, unseen/invisible, it is subject to considerable skepticism: is it real (in the body) or is it imagined (in the mind)? Pain destabilizes the dichotomy structuring much of biomedicine.

Pain, in fact, may best be understood as a cultural experience, legible within the context of local lifeworlds (Jackson, 2011: 371; Kleinman and Kleinman, 1994: 712). Anthropological approaches to structural violence “resocialize” affliction, locating it at the intersection of social structure, history, political economy, and biological processes (Farmer, 2004). While the framework suggests correspondence between the structural, writ large, and the corporeal, the processes of their transaction remain largely unexamined. As both proponents and critics of structural violence have responded, analyses must be attuned to local lifeworlds, the perceiving and making of everyday experience and meaning, including manifold practices and discourses of violence, ranging from the most mundane sort to spectacular forms of political violence (Farmer, et al., 2004: 318). Otherwise, structural violence remains a “black box,” unable to capture how social and economic structures become bodily experienced. My analysis of chŏngdŭn ilt’ŏ opens the black box to reveal the formation and deformation of their lifeworlds and bodies—that is, chŏngdŭn ilt’ŏ. The meanings and experiences of their ordinary pain and the embodied metaphor of being severed emerge from a specific constitution (or assemblage) of embodied labor.

One worker, smallish in stature, and in his middle 30s, for example, surmised that his chronic back and hip pain were the result of an injury incurred while on the line, but his narrative revealed a perplexing twist. He recounted,

Since I don’t have any desire [will, motivation, purpose – ŭiyok], my body’s form has changed, become crooked. My back hurts, my body aches here and there. I go to a traditional Korean doctor, and the source […] of my pains is the work that I once did. My job was putting on car doors. I placed the doors and hammered them in. I crawled into the car, the upper half of my body inside and the lower half-hanging outside. They x-rayed by body, and the origin of my problem is there, from the work. My health, it’s not good, not normal. You look at it this way; it’s like being hurt on the job. Now, I don’t have any desire, and my condition, I don’t know if I can work [anymore]. (Emphases added)

Perhaps more provocatively, the loss of his labor affected his desire, his motivation, and the loss of desire was associated with the painful deformation of his body. While his affective state could be attributed to depression and other common psychological pathologies related to loss, I want to suggest another perspective. As proposed by recent theorizing of affect, desire is not autonomous, originating within an isolated individual, but produced by connection with other bodies in an assemblage (Clough, 2007). His desire emerged with his bodily articulation with the machines and cars. His desire expressed his immanent bodily capacity: to labor, to affect the cars on the assembly line (hammering in the doors) and in return be affected by the labor process (half-hanging from the chassis) shaping his posture and comportment. Disarticulated from the line, his body was felt as misshapen, and his lost bodily capacity felt as the loss of desire. When he stated he does not know if he could work, he questioned not only his physical body but also his very desire to labor—the kind of affective articulation that made Daewoo bodies.

Other symptoms of workers’ afflictions disclosed the bodily consequence of being severed from the rhythms and tempos of factory work. Two of the more common ailments were stomach and intestinal pain and bouts of vertigo. Both were powerful embodied metaphors for their sense of abrupt dislocation. For example, one worker reported, “Since I was laid-off, when I get up after sitting for awhile, my head flashes, as if struck by the sun. My head spins.”

Another stated, matter-of-factly, “I feel vertigo; I am dizzy.” These symptoms were not merely expressions of a mental state, but revealed the interdependence of mind, body, and space, capturing the felt experience of being severed from chŏngdŭn ilt’ŏ (Jackson, 1996: 9). They did not think their dislocation but actually felt it, as if spinning, untethered from the factory.

Gastrointestinal problems, similarly, indexed the felt disorientation of unemployment. During a lull at the union office after another unsatisfying lunch of instant noodles supplied by the union, I queried a small gathering of men about their physical condition. One of the workers remarked, “Among those who come to the Struggle, there probably isn’t one person who doesn’t have stomach problems.” Another, one of a small minority of men who had a history of union participation, speculated during an interview that only a few could claim health. Many did complain of searing sensations in their bellies, dull aches in the sides, troubling loss of appetite combined with weight gain. The diagnoses became readily apparent. They contrasted their current state as unemployed men with the stable rhythms afforded by factory labor, the recurring physical exertions on the line and resulting hunger and fatigue complemented by regular breaks and meals. Another explained, “When I was going to work, I ate three square meals, and when I worked overtime, I ate another at the factory cafeteria, went home and ate one more. But now, I don’t eat lunch, or miss other meals. Living like this you get stomach problems.” The depletion and replenishment of their bodily energies had followed an expectant rhythm. Now severed, separated from physical work, their bodies felt confused, lacking appetite or desire.

In fact, their bodies lost their familiarity, taking on weight and losing particular faculties and facilities. In more lighthearted contexts, many joked about their expanding waistlines, commenting, as they rubbed their stomachs, “That’s an unemployed man’s gut.” It was an indication of their lack of fitness for riding the line. In more serious moments, some of the men confided that they were plagued by anxious dreams in which they no longer “fit” into the factory. An older worker, in his late 40s, described it as being unable to put on his work clothes. In his dream, he was in his locker room, readying for his shift. No matter how he struggled to put on his uniform, the one he had worn for years, the one still stained with his sweat, it did not fit. He was no longer able to embody his working self, fit into his working body. In casual conversations around the union offices, I often heard men question whether they could physically do their labor. They worried that their tools would not fit their hands, that they could not manipulate the machines like they once did, and that they could no longer endure the long hours and pace of the assembly line. They wondered if they could again ride the line.

Although many workers complied with their doctors’ diagnoses of having been hurt on the job, the emergence of their symptoms after their severing suggested a different interpretation. Their actual labors did not cause them pain. As many of the workers stated in interviews and conversations, while their bodies may have been sore and fatigued from riding the line, they were nevertheless “happy,” and did not experience this kind of crippling of their laboring bodies. Their labors assembled their bodies. From their articulation with the line, their felt attachment with the machines, coworkers, and cars, emerged their bodily capacity to act, engage, and connect to their chŏngdŭn ilt’ŏ, in other words, to feel alive, vital, healthy (Clough, 2007: 2).

Crippled bodies

Byŏngshin is a Korean term for cripple. It is derived from the two Sino-Korean characters “sick” and “body.” It is imbued with a sense of shame and social disgrace and is commonly used as a curse (Choi, 2001: 435–436). In vernacular usage, it has come to refer to people marked by disability and dysfunction. The laid-off men used byŏngshin to refer to themselves. For example, in the following, one of the older of the laid-off workers (in his late 50s), who had spent his entire working life at this one factory, commented on the degradation that befalls the unemployed.

The six-month unemployment compensation, that system makes a man into a byŏngshin. Why? Nowadays, wherever you go, no one will give one million wŏn for a month of work (approximately one thousand dollars at the time). Then, rather than going somewhere else to get a job for seven, eight hundred thousand wŏn, it is better to just not work and receive unemployment. But after six months of not working, of getting used to that kind of life, you become a byŏngshin.

While byŏngshin may not function as a common folk scheme or “master illness” describing the relations among individual and social bodies, it constituted an undeveloped but emerging category indexing their social and moral status (Scheper-Hughes, 1992). Elaborating upon the concept of nervos, Scheper-Hughes (1992: 175) wrote, “Rather than a torrent of indiscriminate sensations and symptoms, nervos is a somewhat inchoate, oblique, but nonetheless critical reflection by the poor on their bodies and on the work that has sapped their force and their vitality, leaving them dizzy, unbalanced, and, as it were, without a ‘leg to stand.’” Likewise byŏngshin condensed in one symbol the experiences of their sickened bodies and their morally degraded state. Byŏngshin was a social illness, and it commented upon how unemployment ruined their bodies and consequently their social–moral standing. When calling themselves cripple, they always emphasized that they had been hardworking men, but then were made into byŏngshin. They were not born sick, or felled by accident; they were made useless and disposable in an economic regime that no longer valued industrial bodies.

The workers were highly cognizant of the (former) value of their bodies. At one of the daily noon meetings, “container demonstrations” at which the men congregated at the foot of the freight boxes barricading the factory grounds, for example, one of the union leaders reminded the gathering men, “You have to be healthy to work.” From the head of the forming ranks, he held the mic and pointed at several of the men to grab chairs for the workers whose backs and hips prevented them from sitting comfortably on the ground. They were but a few of the many who complained of chronic pain. Their bodies were commonly public topics at demonstrations. I often heard union leaders proclaim, “Laborers (nodongja) have nothing but their bodies.” In other instances, apart from the rallies and protests, I heard rank-and-file men often repeat that claim, also adding, “Our bodies are our fortune, our wealth (chaesan).”

Seeking clarification and elaboration, I sought out a union leader, whose fiery demeanor, commanding voice, and symbolically shaved head (signifying labor militancy) drew my attention. I had asked for interviews many times before. During a lull on an uneventful day, he finally acquiesced. We sat on blue mats in a side room. His right leg, encased in a brace, was splayed out; the ligaments of his knee had been torn by the sharpened edge of a riot police shield during a confrontation. I pointed to his knee, but he deflected my silent query. He appeared to have more urgency about my initial question. He answered

You have watched us all the way through, right? “Laborers have nothing but their bodies.” This is … as I said before … we don’t have college degrees, we don’t have high level technical skills. In Korea, education level … we graduated from high school and learned our skills at the factory. That is our level, and at that level there is no higher or lower. With that skill we eat and live. Also, we take care of our families. With our bodies, we labor and earn wages, to feed our families, live … really … to live; this is what it means to have nothing but our bodies.

Workers understood, as only as their ailing bodies could communicate, “what [they] sold at the point of production [was] a pair of hands, a back, a set of muscles” (Donaldson, 1991: 17). Their bodies were their wealth, as they said; or, in more abstract terms, their bodies were their accumulation strategy. As one of the union leaders stated, you have to be healthy to labor; but the men’s experience of being severed from chŏngdŭn ilt’ŏ also demonstrated you have to labor in order to be healthy, to be “whole” in the figurative and actual sense. Laid off, they had become byŏngshin.

“Cripple” is a powerful social stigma. It is a marker of social uselessness and dependency. And, as Harvey (2000: 106) asserted, under capitalism, the inability to work is equated with sickness and pathology. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Korea’s economic might and progress were symbolized by the giant smokestacks of heavy industry and its regimented industrial army, an apt metaphor for a labor force under authoritarian governments. The Daewoo men were “industrial soldiers” of the Fordist, developmental regime of capitalism, “patriots” as some of the older workers recalled, necessary to the nation’s progress. Although under harsh state surveillance and discipline, their jobs were secure, and their sacrifices rewarded with relatively high status and income. With the Asian financial crisis and decisive move toward a postindustrial, neoliberal accumulation regime, their bodies were made redundant. Redundancy, as Bauman (2004: 12) noted, is drastically different from unemployment. While unemployment implies a temporary condition of serving in the industrial reserve army, to be potentially called back into service, to be redundant is to be disposable, unnecessary—wholly unproductive in the new economy. Illness and pain are contextual experiences; the laid-off Daewoo men had not been crippled under the Fordist regime, but rather with the advent of neoliberal restructuring.

Conclusion: Neoliberal violence

Daewoo workers’ bodily suffering and dysfunctions, I argued, could not be fully understood without appreciating that their laboring bodies—their Daewoo bodies—were assemblages of the assembly line, tools, and other human and nonhuman things that composed chŏngdŭn ilt’ŏ. My analysis suggested a reexamination of the Cartesian body, which implicitly frames much of the thinking on working bodies. They were a part of the chŏngdŭn ilt’ŏ, but not as mere appendage to an alienating labor process, but as occupation—meaning-filled and meaning-producing process of mutual constitution. For the laid-off workers, then, to be laid off was to be severed from not only the factory, as a site of employment, but in fact from a vital part of themselves. Wracked with pain and disturbed by bodily dysfunction, Daewoo men felt that they were becoming byŏngshin. Workers’ bodily pain and their understanding of themselves as byŏngshin were poignant testaments to their devaluation and disposability in the new post-Fordist economy.

The purpose of this article is not to look back nostalgically at the Fordist factory, but to think critically about the contemporary phase of capitalism in its neoliberal guise. Ideologically buttressing neoliberalism is the promise of “emancipation”—the setting free of individual initiative and talent, entrepreneurial spirit, and the laboring body from the “iron cage” of bureaucracy and regimented industrial production. Set free, individuals are said to govern themselves. There is considerable ethnographic evidence that neoliberal technologies and expansive public cultures of consumption produce newly “liberated” economic and political subjects. The production of new subjectivities and bodies under the current “flexible” iteration of capitalist accumulation, however, is structurally linked to forceful social–economic rearrangements and deprivations. Following recent Marxist contributions to our understanding of neoliberal biopolitics, accumulation necessarily entails the constitution of the “outside” of capital’s sphere of circulation, such as racialized bodies, criminal poor, undeserving welfare recipients, and unemployed (as reserve labor) (Kasmir and Carbonella, 2008: 7). Social suffering therefore is not merely an effect of neoliberal restructuring, an external, if unfortunate consequence necessary for economic progress. Rather, it is intrinsic to neoliberal capitalism’s functioning and logic—accumulation by dispossession.

We tend to conceive of flexible labor, that lauded form of contemporary employment, in abstract, economic terms—replaceable labor power. We also tend to be drawn toward emergent cultural practices, the “new” identities and technologies that seem to define the so-called epochal shift to neoliberalism. By doing so, we ignore how “flexibility” and the creation of the new require the dismantling of bodily rhythms and habits and affective orientations. Scholars of post-Fordist affect demonstrate that Fordist social–cultural structures prove to be remarkably durable, enduring as objects of deep attachment, aspiration, and approximation. My analysis furthers this insight, detailing that Fordist productions of new men entailed the shaping of bone, muscle, and sinew. The assembly of industrial bodies, moreover, is not easily undone. The dismantling of occupation severed Daewoo bodies. The creation of neoliberal forms of life is structurally linked to the disassembly of particular kinds of persons and bodies.

The Daewoo Struggle marked a last gasp of the Fordist, developmental state regime of industrial capitalism. Neoliberalism did not free the men from the factory, but severed from a part of themselves. Abandoned from the post-Fordist economy, which values “immaterial” productivity (technological knowledge and affective labor), they were the relics of Korea’s industrial past and cast as the new primitives of contemporary Korea (Kwon, 2014). If there is any kind of freedom under a capitalist system of accumulation, it is to be free in that ironic sense described by Marx: compelled to freely sell one’s labor power. Under neoliberalism, laid-off autoworkers were free to sell their labor in a market that devalues their industrial bodies. Workers’ bodily pain and their understanding of themselves as byŏngshin were poignant testaments to their devaluation. Their crippled bodies had become, to borrow again from Zygmunt Bauman, “industrial waste” (Bauman, 2004).