한국영상문화학회

By critically analyzing the recent proliferation of studies on K-culture, this study aims to criticize the studies that claim that K-culture is only a fictional empty sign created by the media because a common and unified Koreanness cannot be found in the cultural phenomena called K-culture. The absence of a single common entity does not mean that the phenomenon of K-culture, which has a real impact, should be considered fictitious, but it is necessary to ask how it is possible for K-culture to be a socially existent phenomenon despite its ambiguous way of existence without a single entity, and to seek a new realistic epistemological attitude toward K-culture. In this study, we propose a new fuzzy set of K-culture called ‘imagined K-culture’ by relying on Benedict Anderson's concept of imagined community. Anderson's ‘imagined’ does not mean fictitious, but rather that we cannot directly identify all of its members, but the material process through which their culture is imagined is important. Similarly, K-Culture is a fuzzy set of all the components that relate to the vague criterion of ‘Koreanness’, and all the fields and characteristics that make up K-Culture cannot be specifically and directly identified. Therefore, in order to understand K-culture, a dualistic attitude that includes both convergence and divergence is actually necessary.