Severed in neoliberal South Korea: Cho˘ngdŭnilt’o˘ and the dis/assembly of industrial bodies

Abstract

Unemployment hurts. Based on fieldwork with laid-off Daewoo autoworkers in South Korea in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis (1997–2001), a tumultuous transitional period from the developmental state to post-Fordist neoliberal economy, I explore their experience and interpretation of bodily pain and suffering. The term they used is severed which while idiomatic, suggests actual corporeal violence. Pivoting around the analysis of cho˘ngdŭn ilt’o˘, which roughly translates as workplace of attachment, I argue that their laboring bodies were an assemblage of Korea’s authoritarian Fordist, developmental regime. They had experienced their bodies and factory (including the assembly line and other human and nonhuman bodies) as mutually permeable: their bodies incorporated the factory while the assembly line, machines, and tools absorbed their sweat, scent, and toil. With the advent of post-Fordist, neoliberal regime of accumulation, they were deemed redundant and laid off. Severed from the factory, they were consequently cut off from a vital part of themselves. My analysis challenges conventional understandings of industrial labor as mere employment (a formal exchange of labor power for a wage) and source of suffering and alienation. Rather, factory work was a form of occupation, a fully embodied habitation and process of self and bodily reproduction. When workers’ bodies are understood to be assemblages of the Fordist factory, we may then appreciate that their bodily pains index what may be understood as bodily dispossession, structural violence related to the disassembly of their body-selves in neoliberal Korea.