Introduction
In the mid 2000s, studying abroad was seen by many South Koreans as a key means of obtaining valuable capital thought to be unavailable domestically. In recent years, however, the enthusiasm for study abroad has cooled, with steep declines in both the tertiary and primary sectors.Footnote 1 What accounts for this shift? While the shrinking number of high school graduates and the expansion of domestic education options are factors, mediatized portrayals—‘institutional practices that reflexively link processes of communication to processes of commoditization’ (Agha Reference Agha2011:163)—of South Korean returnees from study abroad also shape the market.
In memoirs and newspaper articles, figures like the ‘bad apple’ returnee—a morally dissolute, academically weak spoiled rich kid—serve as cautionary tales of how investment in study abroad can go awry (Kang & Abelmann Reference Kang and Abelmann2011). Yet many still leave, in the hopes that they will be read instead upon their return as elite cosmopolitans, as promised in complimentary depictions (Hong Reference Hong1993; Keum Reference Keum2004; Cho Reference Cho2012). These dichotomizing figures of mobility, who are associated with national betrayal and national development respectively, are the latest incarnations of ambivalent portrayals of migrants, as modernist and colonial discourses about South Korea's relationships with China, Japan, and the United States get projected onto the moral qualities of persons (Abelmann & Lie Reference Abelmann and Lie1995; Schmid Reference Schmid2002; Robinson Reference Robinson2007).
But how, exactly, can you tell whether someone should be read as an exemplar of the successful or the failed returnee? South Koreans who study abroad subject themselves to the discerning gaze of the ‘listening subject’ (Inoue Reference Inoue2006) upon their return, as the tenuous process of recognition depends upon the willingness of others to ratify and legitimate one's capital (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu and Richardson1986). Research on the ‘listening subject’ (Inoue Reference Inoue2006) argues that speech does not emanate from sovereign bodies, but can be attributed to speakers by listening others, whose presence is often invisibilized. Focusing the ways that listening subjects regiment and project signs upon others can contribute to theories of semiosis that decenter the agentive speaking subject (Blommaert, Collins, & Slembrouck Reference Blommaert, Collins and Slembrouck2005; Bucholtz Reference Bucholtz2011; Flores & Rosa Reference Flores and Rosa2015).
This process has accelerated in the digital age, in which semiotic communities can be constituted across time and space. In such sites, South Koreans grapple with the value of mobility, as listening subjects, who are in this case primarily nonmobile, exercise power over those who have the resources to move. Contemporary discourses of mobility in South Korea center on two interrelated facets: (i) geographic mobility, in which movement to the capital or to a desirable foreign country is seen as necessary for securing linguistic and cultural capital, and (ii) class mobility (Gao & Park Reference Gao and Sung-Yul Park2015). In a climate in which class mobility is positioned as a fading hope, and study abroad is seen as just another vehicle for social reproduction, exposés of fraudulent returnees serve as an outlet for the nonelite to contest class privilege. This contestation, we argue, centers on metasemiotic regimentation.
Specifically, we look at a case in which South Koreans mounted a campaign on the internet to discredit the hip-hop star Tablo and the BA and MA in English he earned from Stanford. Tablo doubters offered Stanford graduates $10,000 payments to sign statements that they did not know him, stood on street corners holding placards denouncing him, and alleged that he had stolen his identity from some other person named ‘Dan Lee’ (Davis Reference Davis2012). The story made front-page news in South Korea; at its height, the anti-Tablo internet group Tajinyo (‘We demand the truth from Tablo’) registered over 180,000 members. In a documentary on the controversy that aired on national television, Tablo remarked in despair, “It is not that they can't believe me; they just won't” (Sung Reference Sung2010a).Footnote 2
How did this case of cyberbullying gain traction, and how does it help us understand the ways that listening subjects mediate understandings of mobility? We trace the pathways (Wortham & Reyes Reference Wortham and Reyes2015) through which Tablo doubters framed various signs that testified to his presence on campus as ‘fake’—including his transcript, letters from the registrar, and photos, videos, and interviews with faculty, friends, and staff. At the same time, we consider how other signs came to be understood by his detractors as ‘real’—Tablo's braggadocio style, stylishly unkempt hair, and hip-hop fashion; the fact that he came off as a ‘cocky jerk’; and his supposedly ‘bad English’. We analyze how this process involved the fluid refashioning of different kinds of signs as emblems—‘a thing to which a social persona is attached’ (Agha Reference Agha2007:235)—and their associated figures.
Tablo doubters selectively attended to particular signs (Irvine & Gal Reference Irvine, Gal and Kroskrity2000) as they entextualized them (Briggs & Bauman Reference Briggs and Richard Bauman1992), positioning some signs as indexical icons, naturalized indexes of Tablo's life trajectory, while constructing others as ‘fronts’, susceptible to falsification (Goffman Reference Goffman1959). This process involved taking up signs associated with educational credentials, citizenship, demeanor, and language and situating these as different forms of capital (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu and Richardson1986). By looking more closely at the means through which even a real degree from Stanford can come to be understood as fake, this article argues that analyses of mobility should pay greater attention to the power of listening subjects in regimenting sign readings.
Tablo and his detractors
Tablo (b. 1980) is the stage name of Lee Seon-Woong, the frontman of the hip-hop trio Epik High. With four number-one albums in South Korea over the past decade, Epik High cultivates an image as a cool, socially conscious, and edgy band, unlike groups produced by entertainment conglomerates. Like many South Korean celebrities, Tablo has appeared frequently on television—in commercials for investment brokerages, Powerade, and Sunchips; on variety shows, talk shows, and reality shows; and on a low budget sitcom, in the role of an awkward university student named ‘Tablo’ (Jeon Reference Jeon2004).
Tablo is a popular guest on prime time variety shows, where as a yeonyein ‘entertainer’, he often takes on the persona of a fun-loving, easy-going, unrefined jokester. For example, he dressed up as a green bug to pop balloons (Lee Reference Lee2005) and donned a Darth Vader costume for a light-saber battle (Jang Reference Jang2007). His willingness to engage in broad physical humor or slapstick is not common among ‘serious’ performers who make their living from projecting elite cosmopolitanism, like the actors Lee Byung Hyun, Kim Tae Hee, or Daniel Henney. Reality shows early in his career showed Tablo waking up, disheveled in boxers and a pink t-shirt (Lee Reference Lee2005; Jeong Reference Jeong2007). Such shows did not display him in the guise of public intellectual, thoughtful artist, or glamorous pop star, but as a young and endearingly goofy regular guy.
Tablo's formal education in Korean appears to have ended in the second grade, as he was raised in Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Switzerland before age six, and then left Seoul for Canada at age eight. He attended an English-medium high school in Seoul, and went to college in the US. Nevertheless, he presents himself and is understood by most South Koreans as a native speaker of Korean, demonstrating extremely high competencies in English and Korean across registers. He is able to give formal interviews, play word games, banter, throw down in rap battles, and joke in Korean. He published a best-selling volume of literary short stories that he wrote in English (Tablo Reference Tablo2009), along with a Korean translation (Tablo Reference Tablo2008), which he reportedly did himself.
In internet forums, Tablo detractors contexualized their campaign within a tradition of citizens taking to the streets to hold government, corporations, and foreign powers accountable. They identified themselves as ‘ordinary people’ in their 30s, 40s, and 50s and their tirades against Tablo often included denunciations of migrants—foreign laborers who had stolen their jobs, Korean American male celebrities who had it easy in South Korea, and elite South Korean men who had shirked their military service by obtaining American citizenship. While Tablo supporters pointed to their own mobility and first-hand knowledge of elite foreign institutions, skeptics did not. As they validated one another's authority to differentiate failed vs. successful returnees on the interactional plane, these listening subjects constituted themselves as a public through shared semiotic framings.
Signs, emblems, temporality
Bourdieu's (Reference Bourdieu and Richardson1986:47) theory of cultural capital differentiates between capital that is embodied, or linked to ‘long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body’; objectified, in cultural goods like books or pictures; or institutionalized, as in the case of educational qualifications. The idea that some forms of capital ‘are placed beyond the grasp of consciousness, and hence cannot be touched by voluntary, deliberate transformation’ (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1972/1977:94) is key to the differentiation of types, as it is precisely those forms of capital, inculcated in the family, which undergird institutionalized capital like elite academic degrees ‘behind the impeccable appearance of equity and meritocracy’ (Bourdieu & Passeron Reference Bourdieu and Passeron1990:xi). His theory of social reproduction centers around the idea that most people read one kind of capital as independent from another without grasping the links between them.
It is possible to think about Bourdieu's theory as a metasemiotic one—about what kinds of signs are not merely indexical, but iconic. That is, some signs become naturalized ‘as if they were merely expressing something (such as character) that already exists’ (Keane Reference Keane2003:417). As Bourdieu put it, ‘Nothing is more misleading than the illusion created by hindsight in which all of the traces of a life, such as the works of an artist or the events at a biography, appear as the realization of an essence that seems to pre-exist them’ (Reference Bourdieu1990:55). Certain signs, like one's bearing or manner, get understood as indexical of a lifetime of inculcation; while other signs are instead understood as easily acquired and not pointing to a sustained period of acquisition. While Bourdieu's theory tends to fix instances of capital to one or the other type, we found that Tablo doubters framed emblems in different ways as they grappled with this ‘historicity implicit in semiotics’ (Keane Reference Keane2003:420). We look next at the ways in which they took up four different kinds of emblems over the course of the controversy: educational credentials, citizenship, demeanor, and displays of language.
Educational credentials
For Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu and Richardson1986), education was a key means by which the cultural capital that accrued to the elite at home was transmuted into a different form: a ‘certificate of cultural competence which confers on its holder a conventional, constant, legally guaranteed value with respect to power’ (248). Through this ‘social alchemy’, educational capital was understood in terms of ‘relative autonomy vis-à-vis its bearer’ and also vis-à-vis other forms of capital (248); unlike ordinary cultural capital, it did not have to ‘constantly prove itself’ because of its institutionalized ability to ‘impose recognition’ (248). In other words, whereas other forms of cultural capital required their bearers to constantly engage in attempts to elicit recognition from others, as capital only has value insofar as that value is ratified and validated by others, educational capital was different.
Tablo doubters did not endow educational capital with such qualities. In discussion boards, videos, and blogs, they steadfastly discredited any supporting evidence of his time at Stanford, including transcripts, letters from the registrar, interviews with faculty, videos of his student days, or testimonials from his friends. For example, his detractors contexualized Tablo's transcript as a highly contestable emblem, evidently fake because supposedly the seal was in the wrong place, the university logo was off, and the printing was suspect.Footnote 3 They argued that it did not present a normal course of study at an elite university, and that Tablo could not have possibly completed a BA and MA in 3.5 years. By making nomic statements about what transcripts were supposed to look like, doubters established their own authority as experts who knew better: “As shown in the [Stanford] guidelines, reversing the color of the seals is a regulatory violation”; “So as a first year student, he took a course meant for 4th year engineering students? And he was an English major to boot. It just totally doesn't make sense”.Footnote 4 In casting the transcript as a sign that required expertise to read, Tablo doubters located themselves as people who had the discernment to distinguish the real from the fake. Like wine or art connoisseurs (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1984; Silverstein Reference Silverstein2003), they constituted themselves as a public of cosmopolitans by validating one another's knowledge about elite US institutions.
In casting his overseas degrees as a falsifiable form of capital, Tablo detractors attempted to align him with the figure of the failed returnee. For the successful returnee, the elite overseas degree is an indexical icon that points to the qualities of diligence, hard work, and intelligence that inhere in the student, but are produced by the family (Kang & Abelmann Reference Kang and Abelmann2014). Because academic success is seen as the product of self-discipline inculcated over a lifetime of good parenting (Seth Reference Seth2002), it points temporally to a long-lasting disposition when associated with the figure of the successful returnee.
For the figure of the failed ‘escapee’ returnee, however, the overseas degree is more akin to Bourdieu's notion of objectified cultural capital. In this framework, an overseas degree is a commodity, like a book or a painting—able to be purchased by anyone with the right amount of money. It is also understood as iconic, but of precisely the opposite qualities than in the case of the successful returnee. Escapees are portrayed as people who leave South Korea because they lack the discipline to succeed in the rigorous South Korean system. Instead, they use their wealth to attempt to pass as successful returnees. Tablo doubters produced this reading when they presented the various names that Tablo had been associated with over his lifetime as iconic of his shifty moral nature.Footnote 5 They also made him commensurable to Shin Jeong Ah, an art history professor who was prosecuted in 2007 for having faked degrees from the University of Kansas and Yale, and whose case was taken up as an illustration of the corruption of the academic, political, and business elite.Footnote 6
Although the Tablo case was portrayed in the mainstream press as being primarily about one sign—his Stanford degrees—Tablo doubters in fact marshalled a number of different signs to present him as someone who could not possibly be a successful returnee. This process of likening him to some figures while differentiating him from others (Bucholtz & Hall Reference Bucholtz and Hall2004) involved the formulation of signs as emblems, the delineation of figures, and the consideration of ensembles of signs in relation to one another. In this process, Tablo doubters treated institutionalized capital not as an autonomous sign, but in relation to signs of citizenship, demeanor, and language.
Citizenship
The first anti-Tablo post written by the ringleader of the anti-Tablo forum Tajinyo, 왓비컴즈 ‘Whatbecomes’, appeared on August 3, 2009 in a forum devoted to comments on news articles on Naver, a popular portal site.Footnote 7
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(1) He didn't go to school, he didn't do his military service, he plagiarized and when he earns money, he spends it abroad.
Some random Canadian guy named Tablo or something like that is bullshitting about having gotten a masters degree from an American university.
They are all the same fakers. Tsk tsk.
Hwang Woo Suk, Shin Jeong Ah, all of these jerks. They're all pathetic.Footnote 8
In this post, Tablo is made commensurable with figures who are infamous in South Korea for violations of academic integrity. This commensuration is mediated through widely circulating emblems that link him to various discredited figures of mobility. Plagiarizing, free spending, and study abroad, for example, are often associated with the bad apple escapee; shirking one's military service is understood as a privilege of those who have the means to obtain citizenship in another country. In posts that summer and fall, Whatbecomes pointed to other signs: being expelled from high school in Canada, having a checkered academic record, and getting in trouble in high school in Seoul. Here, the indexical icons that are selectively formulated as emanating from Tablo cumulatively testify to an enduring disposition across the time-scale of his lifetime—a portrait sharply at odds with the conventionalized bundle of signs associated with the successful elite student. In these accusations, educational capital is not independent from both its bearer and from other signs as predicted by Bourdieu.
Tablo's Canadian citizenship was taken up as a prominent emblem in these early days, both in Whatbecomes’ references to “the jerk who immigrated to Canada” as well as in comments by others, who linked him to Yoo Seung Joon, a rapper who grew up in South Korea and California and became a megastar in South Korea in the 90s. In making Tablo commensurable with Yoo, Tablo skeptics likened the fact that Tablo moved to Canada at age eight with his family, eventually becoming a Canadian citizen, to Yoo's infamous decision in 2002 to obtain US citizenship just before he was about to be drafted into the Korean military, which led to his banishment (Kim Reference Kim2010; Shim Reference Shim2014). In these analyses, the emblem of foreign citizenship is portrayed as a form of capital that is acquired for nefarious motives, as the movements of the migrant get mapped iconically onto their stance towards the nation of Korea. Mobility is formulated as an icon of national betrayal at one scale, and a lifetime of shifty morals at another.
Demeanor
In Bourdieu's analysis, bearing, manner, and deportment are naturalized signs that unerringly divulge whether they have been inculcated ineffably from a young age or whether they were consciously acquired, resulting in double-voiced awkwardness or arrogance (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1984:252). According to this theory, demeanor is thus a highly reliable temporal marker that differentiates embodied from objectified capital, as it points reflexively to manner of acquisition.
Signs of demeanor (Goffman Reference Goffman1956) were mobilized as key emblems of Tablo's incompatibility with the persona of the academically successful returnee. In anti-Tablo forums, two practices were highlighted: Tablo's ‘boasting’ and his bodily hexis. In anti-Tablo websites, he was repeatedly characterized as a ‘cocky jerk’ and ‘braggart’. One talk-show clip that was entextualized across sites as an example of his unseemly gloating showed Tablo being interviewed about college admissions (Choi Reference Choi2007). Detractors argued that he made it all seem too easy.
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(2) I don't know much about Stanford. It's a well-known college. Tablo says that he graduated in only 3½ years. Well, it's hard to believe that. If I said “I graduated from Harvard in only 3½ years” wouldn't that be kind of like that? I don't know. It's like “Well, I graduated from Seoul National University in just one year.” It's kind of like that, you know? (Sung Reference Sung2010b)
In entextualizing Tablo's statements about having graduated from Stanford within a series of escalating declarations (“I graduated from Harvard in only 3½ years”, “I graduated from Seoul National University in just one year”), this observation locates his rather matter-of-fact declaration within a poetic structure of one-upmanship, invoking the figure of the empty blowhard. This metalinguistic commentary points to the idea that unmitigated positive assessments of self are strongly dispreferred and that elites are expected to actively demonstrate modesty, by self-deprecating, deflecting compliments, and acknowledging the support of others. Downplaying privilege through discourses of neoliberal diligence is a common practice for elites (Park Reference Park2010), and celebrities who are graduates of elite universities like actress Kim Tae Hee routinely produce such demurrals in their public appearances.
Although Tablo did produce conventionalized narratives of modesty and hard work, these instances were erased by his doubters. In this way, entextualizations of interview snippets as examples of cocky avowals of genius and class standing work as upscaling moves (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2007), typifying Tablo and positioning the campaign to discredit him as a form of social protest. As Whatbecomes put it, “By proving Tablo's fraud this time, the deep-rooted symbiotic relationship [between the media and the rich] can be cut off” (Davis Reference Davis2012).
In addition to his ‘bragging’, Tablo doubters pointed to other cases where he displayed a demeanor at odds with the deportment ordinarily expected of elites. For example, a split screen shot on a television documentary featured Tablo on one side, gesticulating broadly while dancing across the stage, screaming and waving his arms with his mouth open wide. On the other side, a critic remarked, “People spend a lot of money to study abroad, having sleepless nights and studying so hard that they get nosebleeds. But Tablo was always goofing around, um…uh ((laughing)) doing hip hop or whatever. And then he came to Korea and became famous.” (Sung Reference Sung2010b). Here the commentary contextualizes Tablo's body as ‘the site of incorporated history’ (Thompson Reference Thompson1991), a collection of emblems of essential character incompatible with the emblems associated with the figure of the successful returnee. For Tablo doubters, performances on the hip-hop stage or on variety shows were naturalized indexes of his ‘true self’. That is, while displays of toughness, braggadocio, fronting, dissing, and nonaccommodation to others are common public behavior among hip-hop performers, these were not understood by his doubters as projections of a persona (cf. Wirtz Reference Wirtz2014).
These metasemiotic reckonings drew upon Korean ethnotheories of the self. For example, expressions of anger, displays of affect, and bragging are seen as naturalized traits that need to be tamed, as evidenced by their preponderance among lower-class individuals and children. Politeness, refinement, affective restraint, displays of impassive unflappability, and modesty, however, are thought of as traits that must be assiduously cultivated. Thus polite behavior towards others is often understood as a ‘front’ (Goffman Reference Goffman1959) that may not necessarily reveal one's true feelings, while the same is not true for impolite behavior. In applying these cultural ontologies of the sign, Tablo doubters presumed that he would present himself consistently in the guise of an elite if he were capable of it, as the ability to maintain a constant front was itself taken up as an emblem of elite status.
The recognition of signs understood as demeanor indexicals worked differently than other emblems; Tablo detractors did not point to their own specialized expertise when discussing such signs, as they did in the case of educational credentials or displays of multilingualism. Instead, signs of the body were positioned as transparently readable anchoring emblems of Tablo's ‘true self’ that located other signs consistent with the figure of the ‘good’ migrant as double-voiced and deceptive.
Displays of multilingualism
Discussions of Tablo's language abilities did not emerge, for the most part, until later in the controversy, after a series of television appearances in summer 2010 in which Tablo managed to garner the sympathy of many. At this point, although the general public seemed inclined to accept that Tablo was in fact a Stanford graduate, Tablo skeptics persisted in their denunciations. Drawing upon the ideology that demonstrations of English can serve as emblems ‘standing for, or even explaining, aspects of their social world and history’ (Harkness Reference Harkness, Brown and Yeon2015:493), they positioned these as reliable and definitive emblems that could truly distinguish whether he was a true cosmopolitan or a pretender (Reyes Reference Reyes2017).
According to Bourdieu, linguistic capital, like demeanor, points reflexively to its own temporality and manner of acquisition. The ‘confident relaxation’ and ‘ease’ (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1991:63) the elite speaker embodies when deploying the standard vs. the nonelite speaker's ‘borrowed and clumsy’ performance (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1991:83) maps onto contrasts in time-scales of acquisition. South Korean ideologies of language follow this iconizing logic. The successful returnee's smooth codeswitching between high registers of English and Korean in interactions with foreigners is iconically linked to their cosmopolitan border crossing, while the failed returnee's linguistic production is heard instead as double voiced—filled with unintentional slips into vernacular forms of English, or with pretentious insertions of American phonology into Korean. These attributions of intentionality and voicing naturalize modernist discourses of standard language ideology as characteristics of persons, as the perceived double voicing of the escapee gets iconically linked to their supposedly deceptive nature.
In their regimenting of linguistic signs, Tablo doubters did not highlight institutionalized capital that attested to his multilingual proficiency like TOEIC scores, SAT scores, or college grades. They also ignored Tablo's participation in activities that South Koreans understand as difficult linguistic tasks, such as interviews with foreign journalists. Instead, they made Tablo legible to South Koreans without extensive knowledge of English by associating him with familiar shibboleths of institutionalized linguistic capital. These emblems were associated with discredited vernacular varieties (e.g ‘Itaewon English’), familiar mediatized figures (e.g. the hapless Korean who falters when talking to foreigners), and figures that were produced in the moment, like ‘middle school student’ or ‘Junior Hernandez’. Through this proliferation of types, Tablo doubters were able to reground the controversy around multiple, competing emblems, thus intensifying their power to produce recognition.
Talking to foreigners: Hotel Moowol
For example, Tablo detractors rendered him in familiar tropes in their presentations of a clip from a recurring skit called ‘Hotel Moowol’ on the variety show Radio star (Choi Reference Choi2007) in the fall of 2010.Footnote 9 On the show, Tablo participates in a series of language games in which he and the White Australian Sam Hammington together inhabit a familiar set of figures—the White English expert and the funny South Korean English incompetent (Park Reference Park2009). Tablo good-naturedly enacts this character, as he becomes the butt of raucous laughter when Sam cannot guess words that he is describing in English. When Sam is asked to evaluate Tablo's proficiency, he proclaims in Korean “An Itaewon native could say this too”. The implication here is that Tablo's level of English is not that of an elite American university graduate, but of a poor South Korean without a college degree, as presented in media depictions of Itaewon, an area of Seoul associated with failed mobility (Choi & Lo Reference Choi and Lo2016). The subtitles present this evaluation of his linguistic skills as a sign that casts doubt on his claims to educational capital: ‘Tablo is destroying himself—even he is doubtful about his experience studying abroad.’
When Tablo doubters entextualized this clip, they stripped away the performance frame, presenting it as an evaluation of Tablo's actual abilities in English, a sign that in turn undermined his claims to having studied at Stanford. Framing this interaction as ‘real’ rather than as the enactment of a role involved regimenting linguistic capital as predicted by Bourdieu, as an indexical icon of personhood that points to a recognizable life-story. Tablo was domesticated as a local (and not as an ‘overseas Korean’), through the association with Itaewon, which is presented in media portrayals as a place where South Koreans who are too poor to go abroad attempt to replicate the experience of studying abroad, but succeed in acquiring only a restricted vernacular form of English rather than a global standard (Choi & Lo Reference Choi and Lo2016). This regimentation of capital also framed Tablo as someone who was intentionally deceptive, rather than as a good sport who went along with his assigned role in television skits. In this way, metalinguistic evaluations made Tablo's linguistic capital understandable by media consumers without any particular knowledge of English, through the formulation of his linguistic capital as an emblem of the discredited figure of the Itaewon native.
Spelling and grammar: Tajinyo on Tablo's English
In other instances, Tablo detractors created links between instances of text attributed to him and a range of devalued figures of mobility—‘people who do not know English well’, ‘those without formal education’, ‘returnee frauds who have only lived abroad for a short while’, and ‘Junior Hernandez’. We note that these types are not tightly associated with particular linguistic shibboleths, thus licensing the local production of emblems supposedly associated with these personas by self-appointed linguistic experts.
For example, a post by Whatbecomes on the Tajinyo website in October 2010 evaluated Tablo's English as characteristic of the “screwed up”, “cheap street English” spoken by “returnee frauds who have only lived abroad for a short time”.Footnote 10 The metalinguistic evaluation of “cheap street English” replicates familiar idioms of standard language ideology without specifying what particular features might make Tablo's English nonstandard. Later in this post, Whatbecomes presents the name of Tablo's group, Epik High, as an emblem of “those without formal education” who “always spell ‘EPIK’ ending in a ‘k’”. He racializes this emblem by recounting an episode where someone from the US named ‘Junior Hernandez’ also substituted ‘k’ for ‘c’. The presumption that those who are not White speak a nonstandard form of English is quite widespread in South Korea, although there are few, if any, specific linguistic shibboleths associated with the English of Latinos. In this case, Whatbecomes is able to link Tablo and Junior through the creation of a shibboleth that points to a form of familiar institutionalized linguistic capital, as spelling according to a single standard is a common task in grade-school English instruction.
In the same post, Whatbecomes associates Tablo with another deficiency in institutionalized linguistic capital—struggling with English prepositions. Drawing upon a shibboleth found in books on common mistakes that Koreans make in English, he claims that the name of Tablo's record label, ‘Map the soul’, is ungrammatical because it lacks the preposition of.
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(3) People who do not know English well claim that they delete some English verbs on purpose when they are caught by other people playing around with English words, condensing English words, and removing some parts. But there are rules. There are certain English words you can remove and others you cannot.Footnote 11
In this excerpt, claims of artistic license or intentional language play get emblematized as typical of “people who do not know English well”, while Whatbecomes’ own idiosyncratic interpretations of English grammar are given the status of universal ‘rules’; assignments of intentionality and voicing structure recognition. Poetic phrasing and register variation are recast as unintentional error, as Tablo's perfectly grammatical phrase map the soul gets framed as a failed attempt to produce the supposedly standard English map of the soul. Whatbecomes’ linguistic pronouncements were ratified by those who took as legitimate his use of the voice of the grammarian and the encounters he described with American native speakers. By pointing to shibboleths of institutionalized linguistic capital familiar to South Koreans, like spelling and prepositions, and then linking them to a panoply of types, Whatbecomes was able to discursively associate Tablo with a variety of discredited vernacular speakers.
Translation skill: Pieces of you
Our last example examines how his detractors were able to cast doubt on Tablo's written English through discussions about a best-selling collection of short stories that Tablo wrote at Stanford. The stories were published first in a Korean translation that Tablo reportedly did himself (2008) and then in the original English (2009). The tone is literary; Korean bloggers described the book as ‘deep’, ‘depressing’, ‘soothing’, and ‘poetic’. A clip that appeared on several anti-Tablo sites in October 2010 presented an excerpt from a 2007 variety show in which Tablo is asked to read sentences in Korean that had been written ahead of time on pieces of paper (Seo Reference Seo2007). These sentences appear underneath English sentences from Pieces of you. It is not clear who is responsible for the Korean sentences, but Tablo doubters entextualized them as his own on the spot translations.
The discussion focused on the sentences My memories were canned goods; their only refuge a small grocery. Bach was playing as we picked out toilet paper. The last sentence appears in the Korean version of the book, given below in (4).Footnote 12
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(4) 어머니가 두루마리 휴지를 집어 카트에 담았을때
mother-nom roll toilet paper-acc pick-conn cart-in putinto-attr-time
마트에는 바흐의 음악이 흐르고있었다
market-at-top Bach-poss music-top play-prog-pst-dc
‘Bach was playing as we picked out toilet paper.’
On the variety show, Tablo reads the following sentence aloud:
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(5) 바흐는 우리가 화장실용 화장지를 뽑아낼때
Bach-top we-nom bathroom-utilize-toilet paper-acc choose-attr-time
연주하고 있었다
play-prog-pst-dc
‘Bach was performing while we were pulling out toilet paper (from the roll).’
While the translation in the book is a well-crafted rendition of the English sentence, the version that Tablo reads on the show is maladroit—more akin to ‘Bach was performing while we were pulling out toilet paper (from the roll)’. Specifically, Bach appears as the topic, the verb for ‘play’ is an action verb, not a stative verb, and the word for ‘toilet paper’ is an awkward variant.
Tablo doubters framed this event as Tablo's own spontaneous English-Korean translation, and made videos that juxtaposed the version of the sentence that had been printed in the Korean edition of his book, and the one from the variety show.Footnote 13 The metacommentary they produced located the gap between the two as casting doubt on his academic credentials.
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(6) 11: He can't even translate the book he wrote himself LOL
M: NFW! LOL LOL And he graduated at the top of his class in English literature?!
Pam Home: Gee, you can really tell this guy graduated from Stanford. Let me bow down in awe.
(…)
What: I used to believe that he graduated [from Stanford] but [after seeing this], I started having serious doubts about his having graduated with a masters in English literature.Footnote 14
Note here that no one is addressing the original English sentence that Tablo is associated with: Bach was playing as we picked out toilet paper. That is ratified as acceptable. Instead, Tablo's supposed awkwardness in the Korean translation of this sentence gets read as pointing to his English ability; if his translation skills are this maladroit, then certainly his grasp of English must be poor. And if his English is poor, then someone else must have written the English book and done the Korean translation, and he must not have graduated from Stanford as an English major. What is interesting is that Tablo's supposed competency in English is not assessed with regard to his actual literary production in English (which in fact earned him a departmental prize at Stanford), but instead is read through an interdiscursive link between the television show and the activity of being called upon to translate sentences in English class.
Specifically, his detractors framed the second translation as awkward for its framing of Bach as an agent: “Was Bach resurrected like Jesus?” one wrote. “The translation makes it sound like Bach went on a live nationwide tour,” wrote another.Footnote 15 As they denounced a commentator who had come to Tablo's defense, they associated this shibboleth with the figure of a middle-school student of English
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(7) Nawon: -O-… hey..you idiot..Even a middle school student could interpret this without difficulty. If you argue that this isn't logical evidence, it only proves the fact that you're a brainless idiot
Uhm: -O- If you look at the CNN interview instead of this, would you say that that interview was done by a genius in English literature? Anyone with a score above 400 on the TOEIC would be able to figure that out.Footnote 16
Here Tablo's participation in the scripted event on the television show was put into an interdiscursive relationship with the common middle-school activity of being called upon during English class to provide a spontaneous translation of a tricky sentence. In making him the author, and not just the animator of the awkwardly composed Korean sentence, this cross-chronotopic framing locates Tablo in relation to the figure of the anxious student, where the failure to differentiate between the stative vs. active verb ‘play’ is a classroom emblem that differentiates good from bad students of English. Putting Tablo, who has an MA in English from Stanford, into the frame of the struggling middle school student becomes a way to discredit him without having to point to any particular flaws in the quality of his English prose. In likening Tablo and -O- to someone who was worse than a “middle-school student” or someone without “a score above 400 on the TOEIC”, Tablo doubters crafted figures that most Korean adults with some experience of formal English education could scoff at. Such figures became the vehicles through which Tablo and those who supported him were rendered into readily disparaged figures of scorn on both the interactional and the discursive planes.
Conclusion
In this article, we have demonstrated the importance of listening subjects in shaping understandings of mobility. Skeptical South Koreans have become increasingly vocal about the ways that geographical mobility helps the rich to cement their privilege. Yet nonmobile listening subjects, who often lack the resources to go abroad, can still wield power over those who are mobile through their ability to bestow or withhold recognition. In this case, listening subjects were able to constitute themselves in cyberspace as a public of skeptics through the ratification of one another's sign readings. As Tablo doubters regimented signs relating to educational credentials, language, citizenship, and demeanor into forms of institutionalized, embodied, or objectified capital, they crafted emblems that associated Tablo with various figures of failed mobility—the poor South Korean who lacks access to standard English; the anxious middle-school student who is bad at English translation; the racialized American who can't spell; the blowhard escapee returnee. By locating certain signs as icons that pointed to Tablo's ‘true’ character, and others as fronts, they were able to cast aspersions upon Tablo's grasp of English grammar, spelling, and interaction, and his character and educational credentials. Although Tablo doubters did not come from South Korea's ruling or business elite, they were nonetheless able to successfully contest institutional capital that is often portrayed by local media as the ultimate golden ticket—a degree from an elite American university. Their cybercampaign against the wealthy transnational Tablo, who attended elite private schools throughout his peripatetic youth in Indonesia, Hong Kong, Switzerland, South Korea, Canada, and the US, demonstrates how even the seemingly most unassailable signs of capital are vulnerable to resignification through metasemiotic discourses.
