Not Yet Post-Cold War Era: A Genealogical Search for the Cold War Discursive Infrastructure in Counter-Jongbuk Surveillance Politics

Abstract

This study explains how apparatuses of the state-society network have played a significant role in the discursive infrastructure of Cold War politics in South Korea. It argues that the nationwide Candlelight Protests in winter 2016-2017 were not only popular struggles to restore representative democracy, but also calls for critical reflection on the sustained, complex entwinement of voices manufactured from, and negotiated with, the discursive infrastructure of Cold War politics. Sustaining the Cold War discursive infrastructure does not mean the mere revival or re-production of the Cold War mentality, but rather intensifying the hegemonic discourse through a particularly reminiscent set of apparatuses (e.g., pseudo-civic organizations, policy) deployed in the present. From this perspective, I propose that understanding South Korean right-wing groups as a patriotic Korean collective protecting Park Geun-hye from the threat of jongbuk helps us critically engage with the discursive conditions that operate the Cold War mentality of post-Cold War South Korea.