트랜지언트 사회의 정동지리 : 히라타 오리자의 <서울시민> 연작 다시 읽기

Abstract

This article examines Hirata Oriza's Seoul Citizens series to demonstrate how the condition of non-settlement functions as an affective dispositif that organizes the inclusion and exclusion of citizenship, and systematizes this through the analytical category of the “transient society.” Rather than reducing the experience of colonial and postcolonial cities to a nationalist framework, the study highlights how mobility and instability intersect within affective geographies to reconfigure lived experience. The transient society, in this sense, is not an exceptional situation of particular groups but a fundamental affective condition of urban life, revealing the possibility of new forms of solidarity that exceed established orders. Seoul Citizens offers a theatrical instantiation of concretizing this affective geography of the transient society: it unsettles the hierarchies of settlement and migration, and experiments on stage with the affective capacities that emerge from encounters among heterogeneous bodies under conditions of mobility and temporariness, reconfiguring them within the spectators' sensorial field. Building on this problematic, the article reinterprets Hirata’s theory of contemporary colloquial theatre from the perspective of affective geography and analyzes the series through a tripartite framework of stage (dramatic timespace), theatre (performance venue), and city (translocal affective geography). Hirata's study in Korea provided a decisive moment for recognizing the relativity of language and perception, and for conceptualizing a transient ontology―an awareness that crystallized in the conception of Seoul Citizens. The series stages the reception room of the Shinazaki family, Japanese settlers in colonial Seoul, as a hybrid domestic space where settlement and mobility, sameness and difference, the everyday and the alien continually intersect to generate communal affects. The plays articulate, through the rhythms and densities of colloquial speech, the affective orders of the transient society, thereby reconfiguring theatre as a medium of affect. Moreover, these theatrical practices remain inseparably linked to the external environments of venues and cities: from the opening and closing of Komaba Agora Theatre, to relocations to Toyooka, and to performances in Tokyo, Seoul, Busan, and Paris. These iterations reveal how Seoul Citizens engages with divergent affective geographies, transforming performance venues into performative sites. In so doing, the series demonstrates that transient affective practices are deeply entangled with the very mode of existence of theatre as a medium, while opening up political possibilities for the reconfiguration of bodies and communities.