Dislocation and Surplus in Dictée's Sites of Recording

Abstract

In its examination of the popular critical deployment of "postmodernism" in analyses of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's final and most widely read text, Dictée, this essay aligns Cha's work with the modernist documentary. Readers have often suggested that Cha's postmodernist innovations highlight Dictée's radical break from a larger cultural timeline. This essay proposes, instead, that the text updates, rather than turns away from, documentary techniques of a prior era. It does so specifically, this essay argues, within the context of global economic transformations wrought by late capitalism. By mapping some of the contradictory relations of late capitalist history onto a formal intersection between the limits of historical documentation and the technics of mediation, Cha demonstrates how changes in the structure of capitalism prompt changing concepts of what it means to document history.