포스트헤게모니 시대의 문화정치: 쾌락, 권력관계 그리고 대중문화

조종흡 문학과영상학회 2010 문학과영상 Vol.11 No.1

In this article, I attempt to theorize the role of pleasure in popular culture. To do so, I first offer some of the pitfalls in Gramscian and Althusserian pleasures in ideology as arguments which suggest that the dominant ideology is adequate for making sense of the world, and therefore of our subjectivities. It is the pleasure of familiarity that confirms and validates dominant practice and produces the willing consent of the subject to the system of domination. However, a Foucaudian approach has revealed many problems with this ideological notion of pleasure. The most obvious is that it disempowers people. The theory of ideology assumes that the more enthusiastically people embrace the subjectivities constructed for them by the dominant ideology, the greater their pleasure is. Although there may be a pleasure in conforming to ideology, I suggest that it cannot explain popular resistances as in the case of some of the audience who have refused to align themselves with dominant meanings after watching, for example, Yu-na Kim's performance at the Olympics. To theorize pleasure properly I, then, propose to focus on popular pleasures as opposed to hegemonic ones, which are socially located and are found either in evasion or in resistance, but cannot exist outside the forces of power and social discipline. The pleasures of popular culture, then, are the pleasures in the production of knowledge and ones that involve opposing lines of forces.

장르, 헤게모니 그리고 관객

조종흡 한국영화학회 2002 영화연구 Vol.- No.20

Studying films generically requires us to prioritize the similarities between texts rather than their individual differences. The conventions shared between different films in a genre are often disparaged by being referred to as 'a formula', and popular films are then labeled 'formula art' by critics. I suggest that this distinction is not just between the spectrums of conventions, but between highbrow and lowbrow art with all the value judgments that those metaphors imply. I, therefore, attribute some of the distaste for action heroines in two of recent Korean films. 'Sassy Girl' and 'My Wife is a Gangster' to a class-based, high-cultural attitude toward the popular cinema. The problem with this purely textual definition of genre, however, is that it tends to miss other important elements in film. Thus, I propose to extend the concept of genre to include not only other texts in the genre, but also between text and audiences, text and producers, and producers and audiences. What emerges in this new conception of genre is the link between economy and culture. That is, genre serves the dual needs of a commodity: On the one hand standardization and familiarity, and on the other, product differentiation. But genre is more than economic. It is cultural as well. In this study, I invoke 'hegemony' in order to investigate this dual concern of economy and culture. Far from endless mere repetition, the film industry is always on the look-out for a new angle, making genre categories quite flexible. This is because the conventions of genre are under constant pressure for change as social practices and newly emerging audiences put pressure on representation. The final conclusion I make in this paper is, then, the changing social context determines that genre cannot exist by mere repetition, but has to engage with difference and change, in a process of negotiation and contest over representation, meaning and pleasure.

<감시자들>과 통제시대의 문화정치

조종흡 문학과영상학회 2014 문학과영상 Vol.15 No.4

This article uses a discussion of the film Cold Eyes to explore a significant change of both content and form in contemporary film. I suggest that film is now oriented more toward a moment-by-moment manipulation of the audience’s affective state than toward the production of meanings as filmmaking has been transformed from an analogue process to a digitized one. That is, any concern for a broader continuity, whether on the shot-by-shot level, or on that of the overall narrative, is subordinated to a preoccupation with producing a maximum audience response. I then relate the process of filmmaking to the topic of Deleuze’s societies of control and suggest that it exemplifies modulation and flexibility as the central mechanism of the emerging control society. I also set out in this paper to map the culture of control and to do so by analyzing film’s content. I use examples from the film to highlight the differences between Foucault’s disciplinary societies and Deleuze’s control societies. I suggest that although there are some symptoms of the control society, they shouldn’t be viewed as its concrete evidences. Rather, the emergence of the control society is coextensive with the paradigm of disciplinary regime. I finally conclude that after disciplinary society, what might come next is societies of control and freedom in a mixture that only political action can decide.

한류와 이미지 공간의 정치: 비판적 리저널리즘을 위한 문화지리의 재구성

조종흡 문학과영상학회 2011 문학과영상 Vol.12 No.3

This paper concerns the cultural exchange of Hallyu or the Korean Wave of entertainment among different national cultures in East Asia. I argue that the emergence of Hallyu has not been a matter of the purely endogenous evolution of Korean popular culture, but rather a response to the forces of globalization. I thus locate Hallyu in the global-local nexus and pose some key questions regarding its relationship between economic and cultural aspects to explore how the issues of Hallyu converge with the politics of space and place. What emerges in this cultural space has been a world of false nationalism and of uncontrollable global transnationalism. I, then, introduce the importance of identity politics as it is crucial if we are to transcend such national and nationalistic ideas and to establish, instead, a new and more egalitarian alternative cultural geography. For this task, I finally propose to use the concept of diaspora and cosmopolitanism to confront the challenge of global space and suggest that it is in the experience of diaspora and cosmopolitanism that we may begin to understand the way beyond the cultural empire.

장르 혼합현상에 나타난 산업과 관객의 상호텍스트적 관계

조종흡,정재우,서경혜,박순영 영화진흥위원회 2004 KOFIC 연구 Vol.- No.-

문화적 공론장으로서 <도가니>: 인식론적 커뮤니케이션에서 감성 커뮤니케이션으로

조종흡,오승현 문학과영상학회 2012 문학과영상 Vol.13 No.4

In this article, we propose to update Habermas’ original concept of the literary public sphere into an expanded concept of the cultural public sphere in order to accommodate the whole range of popular culture and entertainment. The necessity of modifying the theoretical concept stems from the fact that in the late-modern world, the cultural public sphere, unlike the 18th century’s literary public sphere, is not limited to literary works. TV dramas and films have now become the most reliable documents of our era but they tend to be not so much cognitive but emotional. We thus use the example of Silenced to investigate how it has become the cultural public sphere and how it has functioned as a contested terrain through affective modes of communication. The audience experiences the pains vicariously by identifying with the characters and their problems and arguing with friends on internet forums about the unjust judicial system. The film, as such, performs not only an entertainment but also an educational function, but the educational lessons are taught through affective and emotional modes of communication. The film as the cultural public sphere, therefore, provides vehicles for thought and feeling, for imagination and disputatious argument. We then conclude that Silenced as an affective communication helps the audience think reflexively about their own lifeworld conditions and how to negotiate their way in systems that may seem beyond their own control in everyday life.

장르 혼합현상에 나타난 산업과 관객의 상호텍스트적 관계

조종흡,정재우,서경혜,박순영 영화진흥위원회 2004 KOFIC 연구 Vol.2004 No.5

디지털 기술과 감성 패러다임 시대의 영화산업

조종흡 한양대학교 현대영화연구소 2012 현대영화연구 Vol.8 No.2

In this article I compare Korean popular films to those of Hollywood's, especially its blockbusters in terms of digital technologies and affects. As filmmaking has been transformed from an analogue process to a heavily digitized one, film theorists have been concerned about the lack of investment in narrative construction and the general tendency toward increasing pace in order to generate audience excitement. I argue that while this may be true to Hollywood blockbusters, the Korean commercial films still value accurate continuity, for the Korean audience prefers believability and internal consistency to the spectacle of images that have no sense of meaningfulness and coherency. Consequently, there are also formal differences in editing in such a way that instead of rejecting classical continuity, the Korean films seem to follow what Bordwell called 'intensified continuity' in order to meet the demand of audience thrills. I, take this contextual difference to suggest that it would be a mistake if we apply directly to the Korean films the theory of affect that assumes the radical new form of power characterized not by disciplinary institutions, but by free-floating control through cybernetic systems., namely 'control society'. I argue that as the theory constructs a direct relationship of causality between affect and the control of the body, it tends to ignore the importance of mediation and thus contextual differences between the Korean film and Hollywood blockbusters. I finally turn to the importance of narrative in Korean films to support the idea that, unlike Hollywood blockbusters that no longer signify and focus only on producing affect, they may be better explained by the concept of emotion, that is signifying practices articulated through meaning effects and power relations. The task facing Korean film studies is, then, to identify the strategies and sites where emotional investments make transformation possible. To do so, I propose to make use of both cognitive and affective mapping.

문화교류와 범아시아 정체성

조종흡 동국대학교 영상미디어센터 2008 동국대학교 영상미디어센터 학술대회 Vol.2008 No.12

텍스트의 변화 : 산업과 관객의 상호텍스트적 관계

조종흡(Cho Chong Heup) 한국영화학회 2004 영화연구 Vol.0 No.23

In this paper, I have attempted to assess changes in the texts produced by the Korean film industry. Film texts in recent years increasingly feature female characters who resist conventional gender roles. That is, alternative and even subversive images of women's desires have become more widespread recently, with the writings on the films 〈sassy girl〉 and 〈my wife is a gangster〉 generating perhaps the most attention. I ask how and why images of feminine power and desire become marketable products in the increasingly competitive field of film industry. In this study, I show how the changing structure of the film industry accommodate, nurture, and even benefit from the circulation of transgressive images of feminine desire. I also ask in what ways textual change has then had reciprocal effects on the film industry and the audience. These questions have Jed me to investigate the actual forces at work in the film industry and their intertextual relations to symbol creators and the audience. The overall conclusion I make from this paper is that the ownership of the film industry does not necessarily guarantees its control of text. 111is is because cultural conditions are always shifting and unstable. Consequently, the film industry has to meet the needs of the audience in order to secure its profit. The condition, in tum, creates space in which film can serve as a site for reimagining social relations during periods of cultural and political change. It also leads us to rethink the assumptions about its homogenizing power, making us instead explore this terrain as a site of contest, and a productive space within civil society.