Language as Pure Potential

Abstract

This chapter outlines how a desire for English provides a particular articulation to neoliberal ideologies of language, serving as a foundation for the Korean English fever. Considering desire not as a primal urge that naturally emerges from our inner psyche but as a socially constituted force, this chapter considers how English was conceptualized as an object of desire through the English fever, and what implications this had for Koreans’ affective positioning in relation to English. It explains how the ideology of language as pure potential—a view of language as a completely neutral tool for conveying messages in an unadulterated way, a pure medium of potentiality that enables a speaker to achieve anything she wishes to—facilitates this process, allowing the desire for English to be mobilized for the neoliberal logic of human capital development in the context of globalization.