The fantasy of authenticity: understanding the paradox of retail gentrification in Seoul from a Lacanian perspective

Abstract

Gentrification studies have well-documented how gentrifiers’ alternative consumption practices of seeking ‘authenticity’ lead to retail gentrification. However, they pay scant attention to the paradoxical subjects of gentrification who continue to take part in gentrification by consuming authenticity, even as they criticize the gentrification-driven loss of authenticity. Drawing upon Lacanian psychoanalysis and ethnographic research in one of the gentrifying neighborhoods in Seoul, South Korea, this article demonstrates how the fantasy of authenticity sustains this paradox while facilitating the continuing retail gentrification. As part of the process, various subjects of gentrification name the neighborhood differently – Seochon and Sejong Village – and claim that their own name is more authentic than the other. In and beyond this toponym debate, the fantasy of authenticity allows the subjects to constantly cross the borders of authentic/inauthentic and gentrifier/gentrified, and thus, reinvest their endless desire for ‘something more authentic’. Ultimately, by bridging psychoanalysis and gentrification studies, I argue that we, as the subjects of gentrification, should bear responsibility for our compelling desire for and fantasy of authenticity to challenge the cycle of the ongoing retail gentrification.

Displacement beyond dislocation: Aversive racism in gentrification studies

“…Davidson (2009), Davidson and Lees (2005), and Marcuse (1985) were particularly influential in loosening the grip of Cartesian understandings of space on critical gentrification studies, and their work has ushered in a wide range of research that takes seriously the experiential, emotional, and otherwise more-than-material dimensions of displacement. For example, geographers have shown via case studies of gentrification in places like the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Greenpoint (Stabrowski, 2014) and Bushwick (Valli, 2015), the London borough of Hackney (Butcher and Dickens, 2016), Mexico City (Linz, 2021), and elsewhere, that in addition to processes of spatial dislocation for ethnic minorities, the elderly, and working-class residents, gentrification occurs in psychic (Fullilove, 1996; Ji, 2021; Meyer, 2021; Seitz, 2022; Westin, 2021) and affective registers (Addie and Fraser, 2019; Frank, 2021; Jones and Evans, 2012; Linz, 2017; Pain, 2019; Wilhelm-Solomon, 2021) through the everyday loss of “agency, freedom, and security to ‘make place’” (Stabrowski, 2014: 795). Throughout this work we find recognition that in many instances of gentrification, “it is the relationship to a place that is displaced, rather than an individual being physically removed” (Wynne and Rogers, 2021: 397).…”

Consuming ‘authenticity’? Reinterpreting the ‘new middle class’ in China through the lens of retailing changes

“…Under this call, its newly built historic commercial districts have been imbued with an aura of authenticity based on the history of an ordinary historic neighbourhood. However, this way of re-making a historic neighbourhood’s ‘authenticity’ instead promoted new consumption styles (Hubbard, 2018; Ji, 2021), with coffee shops and Western dining becoming the consumption focus in the retail spaces of these redeveloped/rehabilitated historic commercial districts.…”