This essay is taken from Slavoj Žižek’s latest book Against Progress, part of the new Žižek’s Essays series, which published on October 31st by Bloomsbury.
Images of the end of the world, imagined and otherwise, pervade our media. Alenka Zupančič noted ironically that one should not expect too much from the end of the world – it may disappoint us. I offer a similar sentiment, only phrased slightly differently: don’t worry, sooner or later the end will come. This reassurance addresses the underlying belief that, if we talk and worry enough about the end of the world, it may not happen. This leads naturally enough to the question: What if the true end of time is not a mega-catastrophe but the endless repetition of the same endless deferred, and endlessly deferred, moment? A moment epitomized by the standard coda to an episode of a TV show, asking us to wait until next week (or in streaming life, simply the next episode) for the narrative to be continued – to quote Alessandro Sbordoni: ‘As the end gets nearer, more is yet to come.’ So maybe we already live (in) the end of the world. An end which stretches on endlessly, with no possible resolution.
Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojève, the great interpreter of Hegel in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, saw the ‘end of history’, the highest form of social order, take place first in Stalinist Russia and then in contemporary Japan. A Korean friend, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, told me that, if Kojève were alive today, he would have chosen South Korea as an example of a place where history had ended, too. Why? It’s impossible to answer this question without considering North Korea as well as South Korea, such is the nature of their hopeless entanglement.
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It’s not South Korea alone which stands for the end of history but the two Koreas together in their entanglement.
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Entanglement is at the heart of quantum physics and future quantum technologies. Like other aspects of quantum science, the phenomenon of entanglement reveals itself at very tiny, subatomic scales. When two particles, such as a pair of photons or electrons become entangled, they remain connected even when separated by vast distances: if one gives to one particle, say, an upwards spin, the other will enact a downward spin. Are South and North Korea not entangled in a similar way, do they not function like a couple of entangled particles, embodying the poles of our global world, the two directions in which history could be said to have been trending, developed to their most extreme extent? Kojève should thus be supplemented here: it’s not South Korea alone which stands for the end of history but the two Koreas together in their entanglement. The end of history is thus not a global peace but the point of an extreme and potentially self-destructive tension.
South Korea could be painted as the country of free choice – not politically, but in the sense of daily life, especially among the younger depoliticized generation. The choice we are talking about is the indifferent choice of moderate daily pleasures, the choice among options which don’t really matter: what to wear that day, where to eat that evening, how to spend a lazy weekend. One could argue that the emerging generation mostly doesn’t care about big issues like human rights and freedoms or the threat of war – while the world still pays attention to the aggressive pronouncements of the North Korean regime accompanied by nuclear threats, the large majority in South Korea simply ignore these threats. Since the standard of living of the large majority is relatively high, one can comfortably live in a bubble. The ritualistic consistency and slow, predictable rhythms of such a post-political, disengaged individual, ensconced in complacency that tomorrow will be much like today, were perfectly depicted by a recent Wim Wenders film, Perfect Days (incidentally a Japanese-German co-production). The protagonist, Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho), works as a toilet cleaner in Tokyo, fully content with the simplicity of his life. He follows a ritualized daily rhythm at work, listening to music in his free time, reading before bed every night. Japanese history and culture contains much about the benefits of slowness and peacefulness. Even the immensely popular Japanese eco-Marxist Kohei Saito (who is discussed in more detail elsewhere in this book) advocates slowing down (indeed his last book was called Slow Down).
The explosion in popularity of the so-called ‘web soseol’ (웹소설 ) over the past couple of decades speaks volumes about the depoliticized lifestyle and outlook of the younger generations in South Korea. These ‘novels on the web’ are all produced, distributed and consumed online, which has completely changed the existing publishing industry. The traditional protracted process of producing, distributing and consuming books now occurs almost simultaneously. Web novels are dominated by genre fiction – romances, detective novels, science-fiction and fantasy – and operate on a serialized model, with a new chapter released weekly. The popularity of this form of literature is gradually spreading outside South Korea, especially in China and the USA.
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The directness of this interaction between author and reader problematizes traditional notions of authorship – who, in the end, is really writing this material?
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Web novels generate huge profits; bigger than Samsung, the largest South Korean corporation. As digital payment is easy and immediate, readers can enjoy web novels at a very low price (around 100 won – 0.07 Euros – per ‘episode’), and since around ten companies are sharing the field, competition prevents centralized control. This is not the only way in which they are decentralized. Authors routinely engage directly with readers in the comments section. In this way, the ‘web novel’ has more in common with a traditional TV production model than the constant promise that the story is ‘to be continued’; like network executives obsessively monitoring focus groups and ratings and tweaking the following week’s episode to try to more precisely satisfy the capricious audience, authors can shape their texts in response to their audience. The directness of this interaction between author and reader problematizes traditional notions of authorship – who, in the end, is really writing this material?
‘Web soseol’ is often dismissed, if not actively deplored, as the end of ‘proper culture’, which probably has a great deal to do with the fact that by far the most popular genre of ‘web soseol’ (64 per cent of overall output) is romantic fiction and that 95 per cent of readers are women. Forms of popular culture which are generally consumed by women are usually the target of much handwringing and contempt, and romance as a genre generally dismissed as apolitical (as if marriage, the formation of family units, the negotiation of partnerships and relationships between the genders are not political!) and pure ‘wish fulfilment’ – a criticism which, in the case of ‘web soseol’, gains force from the direct interaction between producers and consumers under the auspices of big corporations. One could ask whether consuming ‘web soseol’ is so different, or so much less ‘properly cultural’ or ‘political’, from the types of cultural consumption common among younger generations in the West – or is it simply that we expect more political awareness, for political engagement to have more weight and urgency, in South Korea than in the UK or Western Europe?
A more interesting question is whether web novels produced and consumed in this way contain an unexpected emancipatory potential. Is destabilizing the relationship between author and reader not opening up spaces for new forms of creativity? Do many of the features of web novels not point to them as a new communist art form? A mostly anonymous crowd form spontaneous networks in which readers and writers engage directly and the production process is potentially collectivized – the figure of individual genius creator disappears, art loses its elitism and becomes a popular and collective process.
Ultimately one comes back to how ‘web soseol’ is being used, and to my eyes, it lacks the politicizing impact of some social media forms (see how Palestinians have used media to share videos of the atrocities in Gaza). What we see with ‘web novels’ in South Korea are depoliticized communities; while they are ostensibly more ‘open’ and agile, some very fundamental political aspects are missing from the form. And the form, certainly in its South Korean manifestation, is one which seems of a piece with the stability and weightless variety of choice which characterizes life as a younger person in South Korea.
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The basic opposition between the North and the South, of course, remains intact: mobilization against the Enemy versus relaxed indifference. However, both extremes exist inside their own bubble: what they both exclude is a genuine politicization, an engagement and commitment to cope with global factors that threaten our survival.
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North Korea is the precise opposite of this stability and weightless variety: permanent mobilization, a constant state of emergency, no free choice, life focused on how to confront the Enemy. One should note here that despite their seeming polarization, on a different level North Korea is nonetheless now moving in the same direction as the South: the regime has publicly announced that it is renouncing the goal of reunification with the South which was the very pillar of its politics for decades. South Korea was considered a part of the country occupied by a foreign country – the US – and the goal was to ‘liberate’ it. Now the North Korean elite is openly admitting that it is interested only in its own survival as the ruling clique. The basic opposition between the North and the South, of course, remains intact: mobilization against the Enemy versus relaxed indifference. However, both extremes exist inside their own bubble: what they both exclude is a genuine politicization, an engagement and commitment to cope with global factors that threaten our survival.
Lol Zizek is still full of bullshit even get wrong on both quantum physics and Korean