A Pervert’s Guide to Critical Postmedia Studies in Korea
China Media Research Special Section
This special section of China Media Research invites scholars from a broad range of disciplines and methodologies to submit manuscripts on the theme of A Pervert’s Guide to Critical Postmedia Studies in Korea.
In this special issue on critical postmedia studies in Korea, playfully entitled A Pervert’s Guide to Korea, our intention is to theorize the “eruption” or flooding of media which has recently emerged in the Korean context. From a postmedia perspective, our special issue aims to comprehensively diagnose and understand social and psychical phenomena that occur in the flooding media situation across Korea. It is clear that the archipelago has witnessed rapid societal change due to the development of new technologies and the transformation of the industrial base but the psychic changes are in some ways difficult to fathom and find in other countries. The psychical effects of this need to be understood as the changes and effects are fundamental to the crisis of desire in the schizzed archipelago. Of course, as the social demand for convergence is high, it cannot be said that there are no studies on the relationship between technology and the humanities with a view to postmedia in Korea but as the theoretical investigation to synthesize these studies is relatively insufficient our critical postmedia special issue will comprehensively analyse the aspects of informatization that are taking place in Korea as a major aspect of “media flooding”.
We are concerned with the question of contact and the plight of the hikikomori or social recluse (引きこもりhikikomori – [eundoonhyeong oiteollie - 은둔형 외톨이]・[히키코모리・hikikomoli] - in the Korean context and are thinking about the idea of contact as a kind of skin, an epidermis between sense and nonsense, contact and contactlessness. Is the hikikomori the expression of a kind of contactlessness or what one might call a deadly ipseity of desire? If so, what has happened to desire? Do we abide in an indeterminate paralysed contact zone of mediatic social rules where former rules no longer make sense? If so, the contact zone becomes a kind of non-place, atopia, a state of contactlessness. Where is the desire for contact in Korea and what does it mean to resist contact, to be without contact, to be without desire? What does it mean to risk contact, to risk being tactile with the other, to risk affirming one’s desires? We are making the case for a chaosmosis of skin and contact and shall use several concepts to think about the phenomenological experience of crisis as a zone of indeterminacy between contact and contactlessness. We desperately want to know what has happened to desire, to its promise and possibility and why it is so difficult to anticipate or forecast what is to come. How can we account for the contemporary vibrations, flows, schizzes, and, importantly, knots of desire? Why so much perversion of pleasure and desire? How can we write a schizoanalysis and ecosophy of Korea focused on the critical postmedia analysis of Korea’s media terrain? Where is the revolutionary potential of madness in Korea when the schizo has become an “autistic rag” - separated from the real and cut off from life? What has caused the drop in intensity to the BwO of the autistic? Is autism the “exceptional, marginal reaction to the acceleration of the info-sphere”? Our intention is to critical contest the psychopathologic litany of semiocapitalism - exhaustion, burnout, anxiety, ADHD, panic, depression, and in extremis suicide – to look beyond the prevalent sense of mental implosion and “chaosmic spasms” which loom on the horizon of Korea.
What is the “psychic tourniquet” acting upon the Korean socius and what form of “existential gangrene” infests the Korean BwO? What is the nature of the “truly immanent dimension” of the Korean unconscious?” Contra Han Byung-Chul, what explosive and unusual concepts are available to us to rethink the question of desire in Korean society? What interrupts the process of schizophrenic desire in Korea and what is the mass psychopolitics of Korean capitalism?
We shall address concepts such as flooding, eruption, flow, streaming, inhibition, vegetative stasis, to understand the hikikomori problem. Why is there such a specific shutting off from the world which we find in many Asian countries such as Korea and Japan. If there is such a thing, what is the nature of the Korean unconscious and how is it connected with “ontological security,” with violence, with the loss of eros? Is the unconscious structured like the Internet, like the smartphone? If so, how has the smartphone become a new body part in the Korean context? How does desire continue to desire its own repression? How is desire tied to the flows of capitalism? What is the specific nature of Korean capitalism? How is pleasure and desire imperiled by burnout, fatigue, addiction, intoxication with technology, stress, anxiety as well as shame and guilt? What is the BwO of Korean youth? What therapeutic practices are available to the social recluse? To what extent does the sedentary territory of the hikikomori grant us exemplary access to the fundamental shifts in affectivity and corporeal organization produced and commanded by technology and semiocapitalism in the Korean context?
CMR invites scholars to submit their original manuscripts that investigate the above provocations. In addition to philosophical and theoretical manuscripts, this special section also welcomes rigorous media-related case studies that report on Korea. Emerging and experimental research approaches from film studies, aesthetics, medical humanities and the social sciences are strongly encouraged.
Submissions must not have been previously published nor be under consideration by another publication. An extended abstract (up to 1000 words) must be received by June 8, 2022, or a complete paper received by October 8, 2022.
Manuscripts should be prepared in accordance with the APA publication manual (6th edition) and should not exceed 8,000 words including charts, figures, references, and tables. All manuscripts will undergo the standard blind review, and the authors will be notified of the final acceptance/rejection decision within three months of the submission. CMR is a quarterly journal, which publishes both print and online versions.
Sample styleguide is here.
Send your questions and submissions to the CMR special section guest editors, Prof Dr Joff P. N Bradley, Prof Dr Woosung Kang, Prof Dr Alex Taek-Gwang Lee.
Contact Joff P. N Bradley in the first instance joff@main.teikyo-u.ac.jp
Contact Info:
Bradley Joff P.N. Professor
192-0395 359 Otsuka, Hachioji-shi, Tokyo
Office: + 81-42-678-3493
Email: joff@main.teikyo-u.ac.jp
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