Dogs versus people
Yesterday I had a little adventure around 선정릉 in Gangnam that has got my thoughts all in a flurry. I was on my way to a meeting of the City Knowledge Unit (CKU), which is an academic, business, and government group organized to promote Korea's model of urban development overseas. It has grown out of a similar group that concentrated on developing a strategy for expanding Korean construction overseas. On my way to the meeting I was reading the war machines chapter in A Thousand Plateaus, so perhaps I was just overly sensitive.
On the train (분당선), the first cognitive disjuncture was passing through Apgujong Rodeo Station (압구정로데오역), which explicitly evokes Rodeo Drive in LA. To me, this just seems like slavish mimicry and empty aspirations for conspicuous consumption. I increasingly fail to understand how anyone can fetishize the absurdly priced, supposedly fashionable objects offered for sale in the stores that populate such neighborhoods. Of course, the purchase of such goods is really to evoke the envy of one's peers and to assert one's equivalence or superiority over them. In short, conspicuous consumption is an external sign of power (generally). But I fail to understand why someone can believe that such competition can make them happy. (Perhaps it's just because I'm not wealthy!)*
This notion of hollow, wasteful consumption was amplified once I emerged from the underground. My first site on exiting the train station was a Daerim construction site that advertising how it was bringing Gangnam Style to neighborhood. I don't know if the marketing folks are oblivious to the fact that the song critiques such aspirations, or if those who have such aspirations have reabsorbed the values tongue-in-cheek.
Either way, my emotions became even more raw when I passed by Petit Bijou, a "luxury pet grooming" salon. (You can see the interior on this blog.) It is a single, two-storey building on a (maybe) 15x20m lot with a nice yard for pets and their owners to relax. Though I overexaggerated it in my head, I was suddenly struck by the thought that there are some dogs in Korea that must live better than some humans. And that is disgusting. My wife reminded me that some people choose not to get married and invest instead in their pets and that others may have other reasons to dote on their pets. I don't really blame any particular individual for doing so, but it turns my stomache to think that society would allow such an inequity. We have people buying their lap dogs $100 dresses while elderly women prowl the streets for cardboard all day in order to eat a little more than rice and kimchi.
And this is urban model Korea wants to spread to other countries?
[*UPDATE: I'm rethinking the idea that the competition over conspicuous consumption has to be so destructive. On an environmental level, competition to waste the most is surely negative. And to the extent that any struggle for power and status (as opposed to recognition) produces negative social outcomes, such behavior is bad. But I'm no longer certain that it is limited to the wealthy nor that it cannot lead to social bonding. In the same way that kids can get excited about someone who has the new video game and come together around that game, I'm sure folks with money can do the same over a $5,000 hamburger. This points to the problem being more systemic than individual.]
