The political subjectivization of Korean creative workers: working and living as urban precariat in creative city Seoul

Abstract

This study aims to reconsider and re-evaluate the rapid circulation of global creative city policy from the viewpoint of its creative workforce by focusing on the case of Seoul, South Korea. By locating creative workers’ experiences in Korea within the growing scholarship on the precariat, this research not only attempts to fully understand the complexity of labor subjectivities of creative workers but further explores how creative workers can actually become political subjects who can resist their given precarious working and living conditions. By using Jacques Rancière’s concept of ‘political subjectivation’, it attempts to show how creative workers can empower themselves as ‘political subjects’ who strategically disavow their given self-identities as ‘individualized creators’, and through this language they are able to recall the often neglected subjectivity of ‘solidified labor’. In doing so, this research contributes to theoretical insights so that we can better understand what leads to political formation of creative workers.