The Developmental Unconscious: Labour and Enjoyment in Korea's Developmental Era

This thesis offers an innovative reinterpretation of Korea’s developmental era (1961-1987) that questions the subject-object epistemology that currently permeates the literature on the topic. It does so by criticising both empiricist approaches, such as the developmental state theory, as well as poststructuralist explanations such as Foucauldian discourse analysis. Both epistemological standpoints, the thesis argues, cannot adequately explain the rapid pace of Korean developmentalism and the profound social costs associated with it. Drawing on Karl Marx’s critique of political economy and Jacques Lacan’s theory of the unconscious, this thesis departs from stable and “rational” theoretical frameworks to instead understand developmental acceleration through the notions of contradiction and excess. In this way, it asks what are the often concealed historical dynamics that effected such acceleration in the first place. For this purpose, the thesis first analyses the speeches and other texts of Park Chung Hee, the architect of Korea’s developmental project, to arrive at a definition of the most abstract historical determinations of the period under investigation. This gives rise to the argument that the “miracle” of Korean development rests ultimately on the sublimation of “hard work”, a peculiar form of social compulsion that works in conjunction with processes of profit maximisation. Second, the thesis demonstrates the materialisation of the absolutisation of Korean labour by analysing the narratives of yŏgong (“factory women”) and the state-appointed leaders of the Saemaul Undong. Crucially, these narratives reflect the specific symbolic practices, or, in Lacanian terms, unconscious enjoyment, through which Korean workers reasserted the alienated structure that exploited them. The thesis shows that what the literature understands as a conscious statist deviation from the liberal path to development can be better grasped as a developmental unconscious—namely, a dynamic structure constituted both by the intentional activity of Korean people and the unintentional reproduction of the logic of capitalism, which remains covert, impersonal, and in permanent contradiction with Korean people’s will