Korea s blacklist scandal governmentality culture and creativity.pdf
Summary
This essay explores the relationship between culture and governance in Korea, focusing on the Park Geun-Hye regime's use of culture to boost the national economy and its subsequent abuse of authority in censoring critical artists. The paper analyzes how governmentality, culture, and creativity have been negotiated in the process of regime change and how the Korean Wave phenomenon has reshaped society's perception of the governor-governed relationship within the cultural sphere. The essay argues that the neoliberalism of globalization and governmentality has promoted government intervention in the Korean culture industries, and the discourse of the Korean Wave has focused more on the state-driven strategy of enriching cultural activities. The blacklist scandal highlights the power of government against cultural practitioners and the failure to implement cultural enrichment, which ruined the formation of new subjectivities essential in the creation of different and alternative ideas and practices.
Abstract
This essay focuses on the relationship between culture and governance, exploring how the practice of government has invoked conflicts and crises in the Korean culture industries. The Park Geun-Hye regime used culture as a central engine to boost Korea’s national economy by adopting the new slogan, ‘Creative Korea’, to embody the country’s national values within the international community. However, the regime’s constant emphasis on creative economies came under attack when it was discovered that the Ministry of Culture and Tourism abused its authority by censuring 9,473 artists who were critical of the regime. Through an analysis of journalistic interviews with artists, critics and cultural practitioners, this paper examines how the relationships of governmentality, culture and creativity have been negotiated in the process of regime change. In addition, this paper explores how the Korean Wave phenomenon – the transnational expansion of Korean popular culture – during the past two decades has reshaped the society’s perception of the governor–governed relationship within the cultural sphere.
Conclusion
Neoliberalism, under the new forms of globalisation and governmentality, has promoted the intervention of government in the Korean culture industries. Hence, since the 1990s, the expansion of the Korean Wave has become one of the major objectives in the policymaking process. In this context, policy studies have spotlighted the Korean government’s financial and diplomatic support in the production and distribution of cultural content (H. Lee 2013; Jin 2016; Kwon and Kim 2014). Relatedly, Korean journalism has aggressively provided major coverage of Korean pop music, television dramas, online gaming, and reality television which have penetrated multiple cities throughout the world (K. Lee 2008). The discourse of the Korean Wave has thus focused more on the state-driven strategy of enriching cultural activities. As a result, the salience of cultural policy in enhancing the national economy by boosting the culture industries has dominated the national discourse (H. Lee 2013; Jin 2016; Kwon and Kim 2014). This societal environment deeply affected the beginning and end of the Park, Geun-Hye regime. Former president Park declared her devotion to cultural enrichment and a creative economy in her inauguration speech to legitimise the expansion of political intervention within the culture industries. She promised to support creative activities to ‘foster a new cultural renaissance and a culture that transcends ethnicity and languages, overcomes ideologies and customs, and contributes to the peaceful development of humanity’ (Park 2013). However, when it was publicised that her support had excluded left-wing artists and cultural practitioners, Korean citizens considered such action as an unacceptable threat to the nation’s political system and removed the regime from power with street demonstrations. The blacklist scandal highlights some assumptions regarding the power of government against cultural practitioners implicit in the fields of the arts and culture in Korean society. First, mutual trust between government officials and creative actors concerning fairness and inclusiveness in policy enforcement is deeply involved in the practice of creativity. Second, state surveillance crystallised fundamental changes in the country’s cultural policy, which failed to implement cultural enrichment. The political exploitation of cultural production had ruined ‘the formation of new subjectivities’ (Mitcheson 2012: 59) 90 J. O. KIM which were essential in the creation of different and alternative ideas and practices. Finally, my claim that the Korean Wave is not merely a transfer of Korean cultural values and ideas to other societies but also a product of Korean cultural practitioners’ collective creativity provides a different approach to understanding the corruption scandal. As mentioned in the earlier section, the renewed understanding of self can be applied not only to cultural actors but also to Korean citizens; they have thus considered the blacklist as an anachronistic and regressive action of government in the era of the Korean Wave.
푸코의 정부의 통치성을 통해 한국문화산업 변화를 기술하고 있음
The Foucaudian approach is somewhat useful for comprehending how neoliberalism has influenced Korean regimes to reshape the rationality of government in managing the culture industries during the past decades.
By the end of the 1980s, popular culture was an object of state control, which the government employed to disseminate the authoritative regime's ideologies (Kim and Jin 2016; Lee 2013).
These authoritarian regimes traded the culture industries as an apparatus of national modernization and onstrumentalized cultural content to inspire the national public (L. Lee 2017b).