Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (22 page)

In the previous year, Kŭn had described his own convictions, not unlike Min’s, to live differently. Dismissing conventional marriage and family, he had said, “
Why
should I live like that?” Now, however, as Kŭn spoke about the unparalleled benefits (for example, retirement pension) of civil service jobs, he seemed to be sketching a much more “conventional” life course. But, if a civil service career smacked of something conventional, Kŭn nonetheless reserved his after hours and the promise of Saturdays into the future of a transformed South Korean work life. It stood in for that refuge that he had once sought—if only half realized—through travel in his earlier college days. Even as he discovered how, indeed, “life is hard,” Kŭn was holding firmly to his ideals of self-expression and self-development.

Conclusions

The university students discussed in this chapter all aspire to human development, and they all accept the “burden” of managing their personal formation. These “new” students mark a break from the past with their aspirations to realize values of democracy, individualism, and cosmopolitanism. We have described how a small number of students across three campuses inhabit new discourses of human development and how in turn they manage their education and chart the course of their future lives. We have paid particular attention to differences according to university prestige as well as family background to argue both that the “burden” of human development was borne variously across these campuses and that it is powerfully gendered. Heejin occupied a privileged position in which her campus conferred a brand of subjectivity itself. In her vision of becoming a cosmopolitan events maker, she narrated her self-formation as a vital person to be a matter of personal responsibility and choice, largely unfettered by structure or circumstance. Similarly, in her case, we saw how English, as a powerful sign of the global, is a project for personal endeavor and transcendence.

Although Sori equally embraced the project of vitality as a student in a nonelite institution, she assigned herself the task of managing it on her own, independent of her university whose brand capital she found to be lacking. Her cosmopolitan vision of the future, in which she secured her “item,” was a gendered burden that she needed to shoulder alone, unlike a son who would have been able to take over his father’s item. Against the backdrop of Heejin’s triumphant projects of personal development, we register Sori’s as more fraught, raw, and even pained.

Finally, Min and Kŭn like Sori, pursued their project of human development beyond the bounds of college. These two young men, however, emerge as distinctive cases: Min, not unlike Heejin, offered an empowered narrative of choice, cosmopolitan belonging, and gendered freedom (all of this achieved, he stressed, in spite of his campus). Kŭn on the other hand, spoke of a vital future and the riches of domestic travel but at many points returned to the limits of his own particular circumstances, as the son of a humble family and a student at a nonelite college outside Seoul.

Across these conversations there
were
mentions of circumstance, indeed by all of the students featured here except for Heejin. But, as we have noted at many points, the discourse of human development in the neoliberal era
seems
to obscure structural differences by foisting the burden on the self, a burden that people necessarily come to carry differently.

We are well aware of the irony that, through the embrace of the discourse of self-development, these college students appear to be blind to their structural differences and positions. This is all the more ironic in an era when young people face a record low rate of employment and high rates of underemployment. With these cases, we document with others how young people’s embrace of a new and very individuated discourse of subjecthood works as a “political rationality” (Foucault 1991; Gordon 1991; Lemke 2002; Seo 2008). As many scholars argue, in the Foucauldian sense, the shifting techniques and technologies of regulation in neoliberalism focus on the technologies of the self and the self-management of citizens (Gordon 1991; Lemke 2002; Rose 1999; Walkerdine 2003). By rendering individual subjects responsible for themselves, neoliberal governing technology passes the responsibility for social risks or problems, such as poverty and unemployment, onto the shoulders of individuals. We also note that the individualistic character of neo-liberal subjectivity precludes collective alliance both in South Korea, and as importantly, across Asia where so many youth face similar circumstances and technologies.
19
This individualistic character of neoliberal subjectivity tends to prevent these students from seeking out any form of collective alliance. In the logic of neoliberal political rationality, the political subject is less a collective or social citizen than an individual citizen who obsessively pursues personal fulfillment (Seo 2008: 3).

Under these new forms of regulation, neoliberal subjects are elected to understand their positions in personal terms, even as they are located in a complex web of structural positions, as articulated for example by class and gender. This is why Valerie Walkerdine (2003: 243) calls for the necessity of exploring the ways in which social inequality “is differently lived” in the era of neoliberal transformation. The ethnographic interlocutors we have introduced here have allowed us to consider the ways in which vectors of social inequality such as college rank, class, and gender are now differently lived in South Korea’s neoliberal transformation. In her discussion of British class politics in the neoliberal era, Walkerdine (2003: 239) notes that, in the new mode of self-management technologies, “class differences are taken to have melted away” because diverse people, including low-paid manual and service workers, are constantly “enjoined to improve and remake themselves as the freed consumer, as the ‘entrepreneur of themselves.’
” Indeed, despite intensified
social inequality in the context of neoliberalism, she argues that people’s sense of the possibility of upward mobility seems to have flourished as they celebrate individual freedom to self-regulate and improve themselves. In a similar way, the robust discourse of self-development of the South Korean college students we introduce here can work as if their education and future are the outcomes of individual choices free from any structural constraints.

Furthermore, for South Korea and other recently democratized states, including many Asian countries, the discourse of self-development is all the more easily celebrated because of the ironic historical conjuncture between neoliberal and postauthoritarian/collective liberal transformations. This conjuncture helps to explain how and why the college students introduced here all aspire so eagerly to an individualized project of human development.

Notes

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are grateful for the helpful feedback from the editors of this volume, as well as Amy Borovoy, Ed Bruner, Bong Gun Chung, Noriko Muraki, Myung-gyu Pak, Cathy Prendergast, Jesook Song, and anonymous reviewers for both Stanford University Press and
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies
, where an earlier version appeared as “College Rank and Neoliberal Subjectivity in South Korea: The Burden of Self-Development” in
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies
(2009) 10(2): 229–247. Portions of the original article are here reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd.; available at
www.tandfonline.com
. Comments by Fred Carriere, Greg Brazinsky, and Kirk W. Larsen at George Washington University were very helpful. We are also indebted for feedback from seminars at Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford Universities, and at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. We thank Jinheon Jung, who assisted with research during the summer of 2004. We are also grateful to Byungho Chung, Hye-young Jo, Jin-Heon Jung, Donghu Lee, Deok-hee Seo, and Keehyeung Lee for facilitating introductions to interlocutors.

1
. Special-purpose high schools, which originally started in the late 1970s only for art and athletics, expanded during the mid-1990s in accordance with educational reforms that emphasized the “diversification, specialization, and autonomy” of schools. These schools have special purposes to nurture talents for the new
economy,
including technical, science, and foreign-language skills. These high schools run against the grain of decades of high school equalization measures, a history that is reviewed later in this chapter (Kim Young-Chol 2003; Lee 1998).

2
. In South Korea, top-rated women’s schools are easier to enter because of the decreasing popularity of women’s schools generally.

3
. Critically important is that the state has effected recent higher education transformations in a centralized manner, concentrating on the country’s top-tier universities and thus intensifying the already enormous stratification of South Korean education with neoliberal reforms (J. H. Lee 2004). Although our focus is on structural correlates of college rank, the correlation between college and class capital seems to be increasing as contemporary education in South Korea offers consumers with economic means many new arenas for investment, foremost the option of study abroad prior to college. A $550 million venture in the first quarter of 2004, doubling the figures from 2002, the so-called early study abroad (
chogi yuhak
) is an escalating market (
Hankook Ilbo
2004). Parents struggle as to how to best educate their children for a transformed South Korea in a transforming world (Park 2006). A not uncommon discussion is the one that asks, “Which will be more valuable into the future, a degree from Harvard or from Seoul National [South Korea’s premier university]?” These options present new, and sometimes risky, human capital development strategies. In the self-development narratives of the students featured in this chapter, we will see that they enthusiastically embrace these risks. However, such a struggle—even just with second- or third-tier schools in both countries—is not separable from the student’s class resources.

4
. While we observe the interaction between patriarchal family forms and neo-liberal subjectivity—particularly the ways in which gender and patriarchal norms mediate family investment in children and human development ideals—this chapter does not further larger discussions of the articulation of gender and neoliberal subjectivity, a still theoretically and empirically underdeveloped topic in the literature (see Walkerdine 2003; Anagnost 2000). Further, while we highlight persistent gender norms, it is important to note that South Korean families are among the smallest in the world, that son-preference has declined significantly, and that South Korean families make enormous economic and emotional investments in the next generation, investments that are arguably ever greater in the face of today’s considerable class reproduction anxiety.

5
. This chapter is based on conversations with students in the summers of 2003, 2004, and 2005. We usually met students in groups on or near college campuses, and in some cases we followed up with solo interviews. In most cases the groups were comprised of departmental or college club cohorts that followed the snowball networks of our recruitment. In total we spoke with about twenty students.

6
. As neoliberal logics have spread worldwide, they take on specific trajectories in different places. See Anagnost 2004; Apple 2001; Borovoy 2004; Comaroff and Comaroff 2000; Du Gay 1996: 182; Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Fong 2004; Gee
1999;
Kingfisher 2002; Rose 1990; Song 2003; Walkerdine 2003; Wallulis 1998; Yan 2003.

7
. Comaroff and Comaroff (2000: 305) similarly describe the term: “Neoliberalism aspires, in its ideology and practice, to intensify the abstractions inherent in capitalism itself: to separate labor power from its human context, to replace society with the market, to build a universe out of aggregated transactions.”

8
. See Borovoy (2004) for a study of the ambivalence of Japanese young people as they struggle to meet the requirements of Japan’s “new competitiveness.” In parallel with the South Korean case in this chapter, these Japanese young people are asked to become a new generation of individualized and creative workers. Borovoy analyses both how class works, such that some youth are not afforded the opportunity to develop these new subjectivities, and how for elite youth these new requirements challenge deeply held values as well as ambivalences about American-style capitalism.

9
. The complex political colors of the current education policy climate are easily observed through a recent
JoongAng Ilbo
editorial that denounced South Korean education as an “outdated steam engine” that hampers the “nation’s competitiveness.” The editorial continued, “Korea is still mired in the age of democratization, in which remnants of previous authoritarian regimes continue to linger. As such, the influence of ideology remains evident” (D. Lee 2004: 39–40).

10
. Mok, Yoon, and Welch 2003: 61) summarizes South Korea’s education transformation in terms of several key shifts: from standardization to autonomy, diversification, and specialization; from provider to consumer; and from classroom education to open and lifelong learning.

11
. As Mok, Yoon, and Welch (2003: 62–63) characterize, “The Korean government openly acknowledges that the existing system has failed to equip the society with autonomous capacity” to solve the problems presented by the new knowledge economy. Former President Kim Dae Jung was committed to education reform that nurtured “autonomous” and “creative” human capital (Mok, Yoon, and Welch 2003; Song 2003).

12
. English has long been a class marker in South Korea; that is, knowledge of, and comfort with, English has been a sign of educational opportunity, especially study abroad, and of social success, including successful jobs and career promotion in South Korea (see Park and Abelmann 2004). Several universities now have English course and examination requirements for graduation.

13
. This refers to the list produced by
The Times
of London, a list that is well known in South Korea.