Foucault, Buttler and me

Fall/08 8150
Hyunkyoung Shin

Foucault, Butler and me as a Korean Feminist art educator
1. Introduction
Reading Foucault and Butler deepened not only my knowledge in postmodernism, feminism but also my inner sphere. I might have intuitively approached Foucault’s ideas of the self, identity, and power within my cognitive perspective. His conceptual frame of the power relationship between the subject/power and the other/powerless can be interpreted as a metaphor and implied to Euro white-male-centered culture/America in terms of the foreign power and Korean culture. He showed the power of the center, which is distant from my perspective. The relationship between the power and the powerless induced my awareness of the relationship between white males and Asian females. Under this condition, my knowledge was quite superficial; indeed, the notion of the Other is not the other from my point of view before I read Butler’s book Gender Trouble. It became my procedure to recognize the other in me.
My chaotic conceptual knowledge of culture, language and power elucidate the notions in terms of the identity. And the notion of otherness has embodied my way of thinking and extended to the politic and economic concern by Butler’s keen description.
My awareness of the self-identity as a Korean woman reminds me that my life has oppressed because of the Korean male-dominated and family-centered society. Therefore, I have lived by blaming the male-centered world, because the family centered system has forced Korean women to sacrifice for their family.
I was aware the Subject and the Other are produced by western dichotomy. Related to this issue, I have to summarize western culture’s social and educational problems and the relationship with Korea. Since the Industrial Revolution launched the beginning of Western culture, modern society has become materialistic. Its problem is materialization, fragmentization because of its dichotomy.
In traditional Asian ways of cognition, there was no such modern conceptual dichotomy. However, since Korean modernization has proceeded, people have lived by compiling their images constructed by a European perspective, which is a concept of otherness excluded from the center but our reality is that it already internalized into our naturalized knowledge.
These kinds of awareness integrate into my personal journey how I have constructed my inner demanding desire in Korean society and how it has caused my personal conflict in my everyday living, especially the relationship between my families. Related to this I have to draw out my personal and family stories. To raise it, I have to begin with a brief introduction of Korean history in socio-cultural contexts. In particular, Korea and Japan have constructed unhappy relations throughout our entire history. I cannot avoid mentioning those complex relationships.
2. A Brief Introduction of the Korean Socio-cultural History
In Japan, Toyotomi Hideyoshi opened to the west and built national strength by weapon power. He contributed to unifying the nation by invading Korea (1592- 1598, the Japanese Invasion of Korea), so he became a hero in Japan. Korea was in philosophical debate at that period. After the war, the Korean population was reduced in half, instead Japan’s population became larger than Korea for the first time and Korea declined in its strength and power, which were superior to that of Japan. Our nation's resources exhausted by years of warfare and most artisans were captured by Japan. Since then Japan tried to invade Korea and even occupied Korea for 36 years (1910~1945).
During the Japanese colonial period, they destroyed Korean culture, language, history and Korean living, and tried to disguise Korean history. In particular, they made Korean ancient history a myth, which was Japanese intention to liquidate Korean spirits. A funny example is that the Japanese drove big iron nails on the top of most mountains to destroy the Korean mountain spirits which Korean people believed in as their gods.
We have Korean written language, which King Sejong created (1446) according to the mouth’s shape of the Korean spoken language for consonants and by modeling the shape of the sky and earth for vowels. During the Japanese colonial period, they prohibited Korean language. Koreans had to change even their last names to Japanese names. It is natural that the traditional customs was totally destroyed under the name of modernization.
However, even after liberation, Korean tradition had to be discarded by the insiders of the Korean ruling class who had the power during the colonial period and the outsider Americans, indeed, Christian intervention in South Korea. Our modernization was enforced by Japan and America to control Korea, so Korean cultural values of the dominant classes have sustained their power in South Korea.
After liberation, most Korean intellectuals who exiled to resist Japan’s occupation of Korea returned, but they had to be divided into two ideals--communism and democracy, because the Soviet Union took over the northern part and America took over the southern part of Korea. Many of them chose North Korea but they were executed by the Kim government there.
However, the worst incident is Kim Gu’s assassination by American order (He was the leader of the Korea’s provisional government in Manchuria), because American government wanted a Korean leader to be sided on them. They set up Seungman Lee, who lived in America for 50 years, to be the Korean first president. However, the Soviet Union did not want America to intervene in Korea. This was the international situation, which caused the Korean War (1950~53).
After the Korean War, people were divided into two countries, especially men who lived in the northern area came down to seek the possibility of settling in South Korea, on the other hand, many intellectuals in the south went to the north following their beliefs, so their family parted and never met each other except one occasion through the TV program channel for people who are searching for their families within South Korea.
American culture has become more powerful and a symbol of better living that all Korean people strive for. In the midst of change, the American system legitimized Korean politics and education. The most serious problem is that we lost tradition, which was part of our identity. As a result, peoples’ ways of living has seriously deteriorated and they suffer more from being isolated than in the past and mental depression has become a serious problem in Korean modern society.
Before westernization, Korea was a community-based agricultural society. Most Koreans celebrated their agricultural rituals with gratitude toward nature through the entire year. 70% of Koreans were farmers, even though those populations have been reduced to 10% along with the social change and the Korean peoples’ way of living.
Besides the demolition of the agricultural society, tremendous problems have emerged due to centralization of the capital, Seoul. Korean farmers discarded their land and gathered to the city to follow their fantasy for the elegant city living as being shown by mass-media. Yet, the gap between the poor and the rich has increased seriously. Farmers fell into the poor class in the city and they lost their self-respect, which they kept as farmers for over 5000 years.
Our tradition collapsed along with Korea lost its power. This is not just the case of Korean farmers; indeed, the entire society is in crisis. For example, Dangun’s (he is a spiritual leader and national founder in ancient Korean history) statues were built at every elementary school in Korea to teach students about our history and tradition. However, Christians destroyed all of Danguns’ heads. This is a serious conflict between Korean Christians and Shamanism in Korea, but it is hard and complicated to disclose this issue in public because most of the ruling classes are Christians who believe there is only one God.
In spite of our histories being distorted by the Japanese, we have kept teaching such history in the Korean school. We have to not only recovered our traditional belief but also our spirits. Recently, some progressive scholars started recovering our history. Christians do not want to hear about what they did in Korea. I have learned how to keep silent in my family. Most of my families are Christians except me because I believe all things have spirits, but I respect their god. They do not want to hear me or even hate me when I tell them what I believe.
How can I raise my opinion, which would be controversial from each other’s point of view in public? How brave is Foucault to raise those issues? This would be the reason, which has made him admirable.
3. Foucault: double-marginalized culture, power and education in Korea
Foucault’s writing provides a significant discourse in the cultural marginalization of the power relationaship between gender, language and culture. Regarding this, I recalled a debate about the term ‘Orientalism’ in the Oriental Arts Association in Korea. I raised the notion of ‘Orientalism’, which was the way of seeing Asia from a western-centered perspective, and the concept has been constructed as an exotic, decorative object, and then became a womanly-objectified notion. It was typical characteristics of the gendered Asia, especially, Japanese image. However, it was hard to find a proper alternative to naming the notion, because it has already been constructed in the Korean language within the culture.
Beside the western perspective in the notion of the Orientalism, it cannot represent the three countries of East Asia, which are very different. Even though we share many similar cultural traditions, such as philosophy and materials, specifically the brush and ink on paper, a symbolic image of the three countries has not existed. According to a Korean Scholar, Shin, Younghoon the three countries’ typical characteristics is represented by the line of the roofs. The roof shape of the Chinese architecture is round and Japan’ is straight and Korea’ is not only round but also strait, which is a natural shape. His observation can be applied everywhere. The round shape shows Chinese’ significant dimensional character, the straight line shows Japanese’ artificial cleaness and the natural shape show a similarity with nature.
The problems of these social conditions have been reflected to the educational system. The modern language-centered and text-based education has emphasized students’ development of the brain’s left-hemisphere which plays a role of rational and logical way of thinking. Even though it has contributed to improving people’s literacy, uncritical acceptance and enforced westernization in Korea has enlarged marginalization of Korean Education.
Since human’s cognitive ways of thinking have been constructed by the modern educational system, Korean identity has been exempted from the center of the western culture, so students lost their identities. Moreover, the educational system has enforced the left-brain’s lateralization, which imposes Koreans to be competitive. Under this situation, Korean community-centered society changed into a family-centered society along with their cognitive change of egocentric individualism.
4. Butler: triple-marginalized ‘otherness’ of the Korean women
Reading Butler helped me understand ideas from modern to post-modern period, which were fragmented in me, and my way of thinking started seeing the gender issue and my reality. Reading even her title, “the Traffic in Women” immediately emerges into my personal conflicts and colleagues’ falsified notion as a form of naturalized knowledge. My eyes stopped at one of her points that women’s life are, “to show that the naturalized knowledge of gender operates as a preemptive and violent circumscription of reality. (p. XXIV)
How bright Butler’s integrative perspective, her critical gaze, and the concept of the cognitive awareness of ‘I’ were! Butler notes that the vacillation between the categories itself constitutes the experience of the body in question, “But how can an epistemic/ontological regime be brought into question? What best way to trouble the gender categories that support gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality?...A thing takes on the characterization of ‘being’ and becomes mobilized by that ontological gesture only within a structure of signification that, as the Symbolic, is itself pre-ontological.”(p.59)
Butler points out “the law produces and then conceals the notion of ‘a subject before the law’ in order to invoke that discursive formation as a naturalized foundational premise that subsequently legitimates that law’s own regulatory hegemony.”(p. 3)
Korean husbands have had to work for outer matters because of the national dimension such as the Korean War following the colonial period. They have not learned how to take care of their families, so family matter has been Korean women’s job, indeed, most wives have attached to their children. It is natural Korean men lost their position in family matters; indeed, their social behavior is avoidance in the name of economic reconstruction after the Korean War.
The problem of attachment of Korean mothers and avoidance of Korean fathers evokes more serious problems, especially in education. In the case of the people who are living in Kangnam where the richest people are living, they send their children to study abroad, and soon their mothers follow them to take care of their children. Many waiting fathers, so-called wild goose fathers, left alone to earn money. In fact, their relationships exist as display couples. Sometimes many families migrate for their educational purpose along with the American dream. If they have money, the problem would be better. Most Korean migrants are living in Korean Christian communities with little choice, but the problem is they are living in their self-centered world. This situation is the same in Korea. We cannot solve our problematic situations by escaping/avoidance, because it is situated inside of us.
Their cathexis turns toward their husband or their children, but when they come to face the cathexis in their life, such as their life’s change of the case that their children grown up. According to Freud, their children repudiate the mother and adopt an ambivalent attitude toward father. (p.80) 40 % of the mid-life wives living in Kangnam are diagnosed with the melancholia according to a presentation of the Korean Psychoanalysis Association. Its ratio is the highest in the world. Its cause is their self-respect deficiency and competitive way of living. They have to live better than the others and their children have to study better than the other children. They have to fight endlessly with others for their family, but finally they become competitive within themselves.
According to her, Freud’s melancholia is how one’s love becomes the other, again becomes part of the ego through the permanent internalization of the other’s attributes (p.78). The morning status is analyzed to the ‘internalizing strategy of melancholia’ gender foundation.
Kangnam women’s fetish desire turning toward the outside are like puppets to be visible in terms of Faucault’s Panopticon. Such women’s way of living is a comic masquerade in Lacan‘s theory of the language between the centered notion of the power and powerless. Irigray remarks in such a vein that “the masquerade… is what women do… in order to participate in man’s desire, but at the cost of giving up their own.”(p.64)
Butler cites Lacan: “it is for what she is not that she expects to be desired as well as loved. But she finds the signifier of her own desire in the body of the one to whom she addresses her demand for love. Certainly we should not forget that the organ invested with this signifying function takes on the value of a fetish. (p. 84)
I am lamenting for me and my colleagues by facing Butler’s inevitable reality of our inverted and falsified causality of the ‘self’. Self-respect is different from one’s narcissistic egoism. The problem of human’s subjectivity which is an essential element of identity is human’s ego-centrism, and it is supposed to be controversial from each other’s perspective because everybody is ego-centric. Therefore, humans are supposed to face their conflicts between not only the inside of themselves but also each other.
This is the notion of the other in my own inner self which is internalized by others. Butler’s bright gaze is conversant with how the Other (female) becomes self-defeated by the subject/male. Their falsified identity for men-centered desire has been constructed by their suppressed unconsciousness, which has been inherited several generations from mother to mother in Korean male-centered tradition. They reiterate the structure attachment and being hurt again. As a result, their emotional immatureness has kept reinforcing in women’s life.
Those unsolved problems transcend to the next generation, indeed in the name of the parental caring. There has been little role model within the Korean family-centered structure within a new clear family. Therefore, growing up is a matter of how to overcome people’s self-centered condition, so an assignment remained. For my further study I would like to focus on Foucault’s caring of the self. For the final paper I would like to focus on culture, education and me as a Korean feminist artist and art educator through my visual discourse focused on my works. Because education is my art works as an extended notion to share my procedure how I came to face my conflict and then overcome in terms of the otherness and identity, and I believe the Visual literacy, the way of seeing, is the way to induce change.