Divination is a ubiquitous feature of everyday life in South Korea. Under the backdrop of economic liberalization, it proliferates as a medium for patrons and diviners alike to explore their anxieties and desires, as they attempt to negotiate the unpredictable currents of the market economy. Beyond this, it is also an attempt to grasp the heterological—the radical alterity that resides just outside the borders of discourse and representation. Divination conjures explanations for things that happen in the past, present, and future; and in this sense, it is explicitly tied to the theorization of knowledge as it reveals itself via character and fate. A person's character, and in turn his or her destiny, is interpreted by the diviner using simple tools of conjuration, bringing matter, people, and ghostly spirits into convergence on the surface of the diviner's table.

This dissertation explores various forms of divination ranging from shamanism to horoscopic divination and the growing hodge-podge in between as driven by consumer demand. Situated in Seoul and its surroundings, it projects the peripatetic quality of wandering through the city, revealing the experience of everydayness as it interacts with this most peculiar of commodities. I examine divination as a mirror of the everyday and a medium that channels desire itself as a pleasurable form of expenditure, despite the doom and gloom a reading may portend. I posit that through divination, subjects are made aware of the mechanics of their construction and enter into a “moment of play.” In this moment the subject is revealed as a thing, and unwittingly thrown into a configuration of power, which potentially destabilizes the epistemological order of things. In this agonistic setting, or arena of contest with its own boundaries and regulations, the specter of chance haunts the game, which reveals the infinite possibilities of becoming and self-fashioning. Past, present, and future potentially emerge, as even the smallest of things can bring the contingencies of the world into a different focus and physiognomic arrangement as they are projected by the mirror of divination. Ultimately, this dissertation asks the question if this moment opens up a space for micro-politics, and perhaps even the possible emergence of repressed energies in the form of material history, or if it always risks falling back into the patterns of conspicuous consumption that define the petite-bourgeoisie in South Korea.