• Cross-Cultural Studies
• /
• v.49
• /
• pp.59-93
• /
• 2017

This paper provides an in-depth examination of the relationship between cinema and Giorgio Agamben's aesthetics and philosophy. Intersecting Agamben's key concepts including gesture, mediality, biopolitics, historicity, and profanation with historical and aesthetic dimensions of cinema, I argue for his ambivalent view on cinema and visual media. On the one hand, Agamben linked cinema and visual media to his discussion on biopolitics and spectacle as he considered them as apparatus for capturing and controlling gestures. On the other hand, he also argued that cinema could restore the image with capacity to preserve and recuperate gestures based on his consideration of montage as cinema's key aesthetic and technical component (an operation of profanation) and his Benjaminian thought on the ways in which montage suspended linear flow of images and activated an alternative memory of them. Drawing on history of cinema and optical devices in the 19th and early 20th centuries as well as examples of found footages of filmmaking predicated upon stoppage and repetition of images, I argue that Agamben's concept of potentialities can be extended into his thought on cinema and visual media apparatuses in general.

• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
• /
• v.14 no.1
• /
• pp.35-57
• /
• 2014

This study examines how biopolitics, constructed in the West, has been accepted in the Korean peninsula, by focusing on the discourses of "sanitation" and "OTC (Over-the-Counter) medicine" perpetuated in the late Joseon Dynasty and the colonial period. There are two meanings of sanitation in Korea before and after the opening of her ports. The pre-modern sanitation attends to the strong vitality of one's body and mind, while the modern sanitation emphasizes a healthy environment. What is observed between the two meanings of sanitation is a transition of viewpoints from the first-person to the third-person. This transformation has constructed passive bodies that allow the intervention of biopolitics. OTC medicine has reinforced this viewpoint of a third-person and combined it with commodification. The discourses of sanitation and OTC medicine continue, for example, in the strong discourse of regular medical examinations in contemporary Korean society.

• Safety and Health at Work
• /
• v.8 no.4
• /
• pp.347-355
• /
• 2017

Background: The objective of this article is to make some analysis on the process of work and accidents occurring in slaughterhouses, evidenced in the Brazilian documentary film called Flesh and Bone. As such, it was necessary to discuss an alternative theoretical concept in relation to theories about health and safety at work. This alternative discussion focuses on the concepts of biopower and biopolitics. Methods: The use of audiovisual elements in research is not new, and there is already a branch of studies with methodological and epistemological variations. The Brazilian documentary Flesh and Bone was the basis for the research. The analysis of this documentary will be carried out from two complementary perspectives: "textual analysis" and "discourse analysis." Results: Flesh and Bone presents problems related to health and safety at work in slaughterhouses because of the constant exposure of workers to knives, saws, and other sharp instruments in the workplace. The results show that in favor of higher production levels, increased overseas market sales, and stricter quality controls, some manufacturers resort to various practices that often result in serious injuries, disposal, and health damages to workers. Conclusion: Flesh and Bone, by itself, makes this explicit in the form of denunciation based on the situation of these workers. What it does not make clear is that, in the context of biopolitics, the actions aimed at solving these problems or even reducing the negative impacts for this group of workers, are not efficient enough to change such practices.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
• /
• v.26 no.1
• /
• pp.103-132
• /
• 2020

By analyzing the characteristics and meaning of dystopia in Korean juvenile science fiction, this study aims to search for the principles of juvenile literature responding to the contradictions of scientific technologism in collusion with state capitalism, and to consider its limitations and significance. This study focuses on the juvenile science fiction in which children or teenagers fight against system dystopia functioning as a setting of the story. System dystopia consists of 'fake utopia' and 'concentration camps' holding those excluded from this 'fake utopia'. Young people whose right to life are violated under the system dystopia escape from concentration camps and fight against political power. We don't have many novels that have focused on environmental dystopia, but a nomadic subject is found in works set on Earth after environmental pollution or nuclear explosion. In short, juvenile dystopia science fiction deepens the contradictions of the hierarchical society based on scientific technologism, criticizing the repressive, material-oriented and differential educational realities of our society. They hope that children or teenagers will act as a resistance that sees through the deception and hypocrisy of the social system. These works are significant in that they expose the biopolitics strategy of political power in collusion with industrial capitalism and induce us to reflect on it. However, it seems to be the limit of humanism to equate human life with nature and to warn of dangers of technology, machinery, and material civilization as the counterpart. This paper has the significance of taking a general survey of juvenile dystopia science fiction since the 2000s, and revealing the writers' perception of scientific technologism and its limitations.

• The Journal of Korean Medical History
• /
• v.28 no.1
• /
• pp.1-10
• /
• 2015

This study examines the meaning of medical-text publication in the Joseon Dynasty by applying anthropological notions of "health care system" and "popular health care sector" to the social and political contexts of the pre-modern state. The present study focuses on the social network of senders and receivers in which medical knowledge is communicated and shared. Exploring the multi-layered structure of the network among the state, the author-practitioners, and populace, this study argues that the network of knowledge sharing system by publication of medical texts itself is a core structure in the health care system of the Joseon Dynasty. This pre-modern health care system aimed to vitalize and reinforce the "popular health care sector" by sharing medical knowledge with populace through the book-publication system. Foucault's notion of "biopolitics" provides a comparative window between the modern health care system and the health care system of the Joseon period, articulating the particularity of the pre-modern health care system.

• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
• /
• v.14 no.1
• /
• pp.87-116
• /
• 2014

This article focuses on synthetic hormone consumption that illegal act of heterogeneous forms of pharmaceuticalization. Athletes are not unfamiliar with the use of synthetic hormones that contain anabolic steroids. Synthetic hormones are used to increase muscle mass and strength. This drug use practice cannot simply be viewed as illegal. Athletes accumulate knowledge on these hormones that conflicts with the knowledge proffered by physicians and they consume drugs responsibly. Physicians' knowledge of these hormones is limited to their use in the treatment of abnormalities. Athletes, however, are expanding the role of these hormones to include their potential for enhancement. Thereby, a new value is assigned to synthetic hormones, and an informal market is formed. Previous studies in the fields of biopolitics and biomedicalization have mainly focused on the formal connection between biomedical science and the institutional network. This article, therefore, analyzes the informal and the various aspects of biomedicalization.

• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
• /
• v.14 no.1
• /
• pp.3-33
• /
• 2014

Over the last forty years, the dominant perspective of social science on medicine has been the medicalization theory. It indicates the social process of expanding power of medical professionals by (re)defining the problems which were treated as non-medical phenomena(e.g. homosexuality, alcoholism, obesity, etc.) into "diseases" and thus the spheres of medical intervention. Meanwhile, rapid technoscientific changes in the medical field owing to the diffusion of biological sciences and information technologies since the mid-1980s and the accompanying emergence of new social arrangements such as bioeconomy and biological citizenship have led to the rise of a new social scientific perspective called the biomedicalization theory. This paper attempts to compare the two theories and assess their merits and demerits as a basic work to deepen the understandings of sociology and STS on contemporary medicine. And it also attempts to analyze their relative relevance through the case of mental disorder. The analysis on the case of mental disorder clearly shows that the medicalization in that area seems to have continuously proceeded since the early 19th centiry to the present. Furthermore, it also seems true that the five central processes of biomedicalization(except for risk surveillance technologies of mental disorder) have been observed and realized since the late 20th century. These results indicate that although medicalization has consistently proceeded, it has not been limited to the quantitative expansion of the medical field but been extended to the qualitative transformation asserted by the biomedicalization theory. Therefore, while the concept of medicalization is valid and significant even today, we can recognize that the concept of biomedicalization allow us to capture the new phenomena which cannot be properly and sufficiently captured by that of medicalization.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
• /
• v.50
• /
• pp.1-29
• /
• 2018

In the contemporary American cinematic landscape, there is a distinctive tendency to depict the disturbing ways in which characters with brain damages perceive, remember, and think about the world. Despite its attempts to examine the socio-political implications of these characters' subjectivities, the previous scholarship on this trend of film was limited in being either too pessimistically deterministic or too euphorically optimistic. Critically reading neuroscientific discourses on the brain-damaged subject from the perspective of Giorgio Agamben's critique of biopolitics, this paper explores how the contemporary American cinema of the impaired brain attempts to mediate the neurologically inexplicable affects of those subjects who are in the neurological state of exception and to express their experiences of a becoming-nonhuman. By closely reading Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan and Alejandro $Gonz{\acute{a}}lez$ $I{\tilde{n}}{\acute{a}}rritu^{\prime}s$ Birdman in this regard, I show how the two films, by employing different sets of cinematic free indirect techniques, express the neurologically impaired subject's affective experience of a becoming-nonhuman animal in different ways, and thereby to a more or less extent act as 'profaned' neuro-biopolitical apparatuses.