“과거는 낯선 나라다”

The Past is a Foreign Country - Desire of Representation and Representation of Desire -

Representation of the past in the discipline of history has heretofore consisted of historiography, with letters as its medium. The genre of history came into being with the appearance of histories in letters. Herodotus is referred to as the father of Occidental history because he was the first writer of history in letters for people to read, as opposed to oral history for listeners. However, in the postmodern age, in which people gain information via the internet rather than the book, the age of history in letters is increasingly giving way to the age of history on the screen. The medium of letters and that of the screen, or 'hot media' and 'cool media' according to the categorization of Marshall McLuhan, each has its strengths and weaknesses. If the medium of the screen is emotional language, easily understood without in-depth thinking, the medium of letters is intellectual language, requiring complex reasoning. In the postmodern age, which devotes itself to the pursuit of politics of desire rather than the project of enlightenment, people are increasingly becoming fascinated by the latter rather than the former. Accordingly, we can talk of a "Medium Turn" of historiography by “historiophoty”. Related to this Medium Turn, this article will first take a look at <Radio Days> and <Once Upon a Time>, two cinematic representations of modernity under colonization. The recent Kyeongseong syndrome, initiated with books and expanded to television and the screen, shows a tendency to seek a “Disneyland” in history by discussing history of small letters rather than capital letters. In history's Disneyland, there is a world of dreams absent from reality. People project this world of dreams into the past, immersing in its nostalgia. This turns the past into an object of longing, like a home left long ago. When people egin to have the desire to represent the past in this way, desire for such representation is inclusive of desire to project losses of the present into the past. We may discuss the past hundred years of modernity in Korea as a process of seeking modernization and democratization. Depending on which of the two is stressed, there may be different ways of representation. The second focus of this article is a film historicizing the democratization movements in Korea, The Past is a Foreign Country. The present is derived from the past, but the two are different countries. The historian attempting representation of the past has to endeavor not only to reflect the continuity of the past and the present, but also the discontinuity. From the understanding of this discontinuity stems the conception of the past as a foreign country, and the historian feels “desire of representation”. The historian, awakened to the idea of history according to which the past exists not as history prior to the present, but as the “past future” unrealized by the present, and this leads to “representation of desire”. The dialectics of “desire of representation” and “representation of desire” becomes the dynamics of newly created history and the rewriting of history.