Affective Visual Techniques to Shape Citizens: Rethinking Notions of the Democratic Citizen in the 1970s South Korea

• In Event: Visual Technologies as Narrativizing Making Kinds of People in Education

Proposal

Objectives
The study historicizes the Korean curriculum and visual culture from the Cold War era with a Foucauldian perspective to discover the affect of visual techniques that continuously perform in a digital society. Visual culture contains visuality as a system of reasoning that shapes Man. The audiovisual techniques from 1970’s Korean animation affect people to inscribe cultural practices of Korean and U.S. regimes to make “democratic citizens.” This research elaborates the discourse of shaping democratic citizens with a post-colonial approach to envision continuing epistemological colonialism in digital education.

Theoretical framework
The study uses Sylvia Wynter’s concept of Man, who is the one overrepresenting themselves as if they are human and trying to secure the well-being of the present dominant status. The study expands the idea of Man to shape the ideal human who has the dominant social status in society. Also, there is another theoretical concept, “Affect” from Lauren Berlant to show how visual culture is used to produce an “infantile citizen,” who is encouraged to love the nation the way they do their families, which makes democracies become a special form of tyranny that makes citizens like children, infantilized, passive, and overdependent on the “immense and tutelary power” of the state (Berlant, 1997, p. 27). Media like TV, photos, or audio can affect people as an art of government, making people infantile citizens.

Data and Methods
The study mainly explores visual culture materials from Korean anti-communism animation ‘General Ttoli’ (1978) used in extracurricular activities. National curriculum documents, textbooks, and related educational resources are also used as data to investigate the historical discourses. Data is analyzed by two methodological approaches: One is ‘Visuality’ (Bal, 2003a) and ‘History of the Present’(Foucault, 1977). Visual culture is an affective multi-sensory object containing the social/cultural practices of power and resistance. In this way, visuality is the possibility of performing acts of seeing, not the materiality of the object seen (Bal, 2003a, p. 11), which means visuality is a system of reasoning, not only created on physical visibility but also historically shaped by ways of perceiving the object. Also, the research applies to ‘History of the Present,’ which destabilizes pre-existing norms and uncovers hidden intentions of power-knowledge relations.

Findings and Scholarly Significance
The study shows the affect of audiovisual techniques on shaping Korean-Man, who is depicted as a democratic citizen and anticommunist. After the Korean War, anti-communism animation, heavily influenced by the U.S., was produced as political propaganda. The audiovisual techniques such as red images and ominous sounds arousing horror, antipathy, and hostility affect people to become patriotic to the Korean nation and rely on U.S. protection, perpetuating U.S. supremacy. This anti-communism narrative constructs Korean-Man as an idealized figure having U.S. supremacy and submission to the Korean dictatorship. These affective techniques are still prevalent in political propaganda and have evolved to become sophisticated in the digital society. This study contributes to disclosing the affect of audiovisual techniques in making docile citizens.

Author

• Younsun Choi, The University of Wisconsin-Madison