Avengers in Seoul

Children's day (어린이날) is upon us, so the family was off to the neighborhood CGV at 군자역 to see "Avengers: The Age of Ultron."  I'm not a fan, but I consoled myself with the thought that the movie would somehow work into my research on Seoul and science fiction.  And, indeed, it's certainly gratifying to see Avengers battling it out in front of "Kimbap Heaven."  However: without the still, I would have missed it.  For all of the money spent (and for all of the incentives the city of Seoul dished out), there's barely five minutes of Seoul in this film, and that--beside a couple of signs in Korean and an 옥상 텃밭--is of a generic "any city," bits and pieces of Seoul strung together into a non-place.

And I was not the only one disappointed.  As Gang Yu-jeong argued in 경향신문:

A masterpiece of atmospheric kitsch, the back alleys where the action takes place in the Avengers don't really look that different from the back alleys of Hong Kong or Beijing.  When the Avengers talk to Su-hyun (who plays Helen Cho in the film) about the situation, it's not different.  Nothing really sticks out.
The way Avengers 2 portrays Seoul isn't that far off from the way we see it.  Like when you run into your family on the street, the Avengers makes a familiar Korea seem strange.  [ . . .] But this is not the Seoul that we had hoped to see.  The Seoul represented in the film is not a place where I'd want to go.  In Avengers, that hoped-for place is nowhere to be found.   (강유정의 영화로 세상읽기]2015년 어벤져스 서울, translation mine)

Well, given the shallow treatment Seoul gets in the film, one would have to expect disappointment.  On the other hand, the Avengers (in its comic form), is not exactly a superhero version of Baudelaire's flaneur.  Sure--there's lots of urban background, but that's all it is: background.

That is to say, it's just a scene to stage the action.  On another level, if we look at the film as the expression of a conquering and colonizing film apparatus, then Seoul can be incorporated into the action as well as any other place.  Here's where the film even engages in some self-referential dialogue with parallels to both U.S. foreign policy and U.S.-supported "free trade" policies.  As Tony Stark intones, "In a world this vulnerable, we need something more powerful than any of us."  There's equal measures of arrogance and lack of imagination in this line of thinking, and we don't need to move too far afield to see the corporation itself as this unifying power.  And what is cultural difference to a global corporation?  Ultimately, the cities of the world are only a proscenium to stage corporate power, and for that, Seoul will do just fine.  

The Future is a Foreign Country: locating tomorrow’s world in the world of the Other

It has been almost thirty years since Johannes Fabian published Time and the Other (1983), a scathing critique of the ways anthropologists have slotted the Other into “other” times—the “savages” or “primitives” said to resemble the West’s history.  In many ways, his critique is still relevant today; the same kinds of discourse are used to explain contemporary politics in the Middle East with reference to supposedly ancient ethnic conflicts.  But there are other temporal machinations at work these days as well.  A fairly typical, recent example: a February 22 New York Times article on South Korea’s ubiquitous computing (“ For South Korea, Internet at Blazing Speeds is Still Not Fast Enough”)—years ahead of the United States.  Instead of being slotted into the past, here Korea appears as the future—underscoring US fears of being overtaken by Asian economies.  In this way, US futures are invoked in comparisons with the demographics, educational institutions, health care and environmental concerns of other nations, and there are other axes of comparison as well, with people in South Korea looking to Singapore or Japan (rather than the United States) for clues to its own future.               

In an era of globalization, these “future states” proliferate, part of a perpetual state of crisis that constantly compares self to others, agitating for restructuring, free-market reforms, retraining, mobility.  Comparisons and rankings regularly contrast multiple indexes of neo-liberal development.  Conditions at home are critiqued, and the warning is clear: we may be overtaken by global futures that continue without us.  But unlike other forms of allochronism, these future states are multidirectional and stochastic.  While the West represented a privileged modernity at one time, now a diffuse, unsettled capitalism locates the ”the future” in several places simultaneously, along networked lines of flight that link, for example, Asia and the West together at different points.  In an age of neo-liberal globalization, images of the future travel along flows of capital, migrants and media, generating representations and desires that are at once diffuse and ecumenical, simultaneously critical and complicit with the present.

Of course, thinking of Iran, South Korea or Singapore as the “the future” is no more credible than looking to other places as representative of the past.  Here, we’re just reversing the gaze, while leaving the orientalist architecture in place—fear of “yellow hordes” updated for the age of the smart phone.  But there more positive possibilities here as well—call it a “cultural arbitrage” that highlights gaps between people’s expectations for modernity and its unequal realities; that gap can open a window onto contradictory experiences and force us to question the course of our futures.  Ultimately, we might question inevitability of neo-liberal globalization itself.   

I’m planning to compare discourses on “future states” in the United States, South Korea and Singapore.  Through anthropological research on state reports , media, future-oriented events and expos, together with interviews with informants (parents, educators, employers, state technocrats), I plan to explore moments when the future is displaced onto the Other, with particular emphasis on technology, education, multicultural policy and health.

Ultimately, I believe my findings will tell us much about how a relentlessly networked globalization works to colonize future imaginaries.  But I also hope it will open up the possibility for alternative futures.  That is, in the gap created by what is perceived to be the present and the future purportedly located in another place may constitute what Ernst Bloch called a “utopian surplus”: the possibility for a different global future altogether.