컬러TV의 시대와 정동의 정치학

Two events in 1980 dramatically show the way in which the new military authority governed. If the killings in Gwangju in May 1980 were a tragedy that exposed the violence of the new military authority in the same year, the domestic sale of color TV was allowed in the same year and the launch of color broadcasting promoted political indifference through the spread of consumer culture, and it was a choice to practice the ideological propaganda of the military authority at a micro level. Throughout the 1980s, various media, including color TV, penetrated deep into the daily lives of the public under the media control of the new military authority and secretly practiced the disciplines and controls embedded in the regime. In order to understand the process more precisely, it is the task of this study to adopt a recent research methodology focusing on affect rather than the methodology of culture criticism based on conventional ideological theory and to verify its effectiveness. The theory of affect attempts to explain what kind of political change the affecting and affected body can experience and how its potential is suppressed/liberated. As an introductory discussion to understand how Korean society experienced the 1980s in the perspective of affective layer, this study focuses on Park Wan seo"s short story, Silence and Aphasia, published in December 1980. This story shows that the three forms that the language can take in the era of the suppression of truth are the ‘eloquence’, ‘silence’ and ‘aphasia’. ‘Silence’ evokes the suppressed truth, but the ‘eloquence’ by pouring out lies can cause the oblivion of repression, which causes a state of ‘aphasia’, where eventually the language itself is lost. This story sharply points out that ‘silence’ and ‘aphasia’ resemble each other on the surface, but in the deep sense, the ‘eloquence’ has the politics which is not different from ‘aphasia’, which is the excellence of this story that the form of existence of media including contemporary TV in the 1980s is grasped from the perspective of the politics of the ‘eloquence’. Park Wan-seo reveals that it is the nature of the media to make the truth ‘silent’ with a false ‘eloquence’. In this passage we can see the nature of the ‘politics of affect’ that speakers call the “artifice” or “conspiracy” of the media. First, the media transforms the non-homogeneous and non-discursive ‘affect’ into an image of ‘emotion’ and processes it as being easy to govern. This story shows a model of how the media use themselves to categorize dominance power into emotions that can be perceived and controlled by the people. Second, in the hierarchical relationship of power, the ruler suppresses the affect of the subjects, but the affect as the physical force remains and seeks an escapist exit. In this story, the hero"s path and its driving force arise not from rational and conscious choice but from the change of the previous conscious body. Thus, this story sees the way in which the politics of affect works through the media in the 1980s, capturing the flow of emancipatory affect of its time, which was not fully captured.