장치(dispositif)로서의 연좌제

Abstract

The novels of Lee, Munyeol are highly useful texts for us to distinguish ‘corrupt’ middle class of 1970s from healthy one of 1980s, and more importantly, his books are entirely suitable to represent social identities of middle class. The term ‘middle class’ actually refers to a class restructured by the discourse of middle class which was fully discussed in the early of 1980s rather than a reality which is precisely definable. Lee’s works contributed to imagining this non-specific class as a historical reality and to structuralizing its unique sensibility. In this sense, it might be more reasonable to think that he shapes the image of middle class in his books than to say that people of middle class read Lee’s works avidly and eagerly. The remarkable characteristic of his early short novels in which a character of middle class appears is the motif of ‘the implicative system.’ This implicative system serves a ‘dispositif’ which makes subjectivation possible. In other words, this system, as an ideological device of anticommunism, imposes the consciousness of original sin on the self of an individual, and, at the same time, as an important agent, creates a subject who means middle class.