Eating as a transgression: Multisensorial performativity in the carnal videos of mukbang (eating shows)

Abstract

In analysing the issues of body and affect involved in the contemporary online culture including mukbang (eating shows), I propose the term ‘carnal videos’. Carnal videos are a constitutive part of the society of control in the digital environment. Through the operation of multisensorial significations in carnal videos, human networked affect is excessively expressed and experienced, along with its politico-ethical potentials of perseverance and differentiation. By exploiting and colonizing such potentials, however, human networked affect contributes to the platform companies’ ever growing capitalist drives towards the maximization of economic values. Several conflicting layers of transgression operate within mukbang. One layer involves transgression as an affective force of resistance and pleasure, the other layer involves transgression, or the control of transgression, in terms of accelerating and capturing human faculties as biolabour. These two contrasting aspects of transgression are characterized by the ambiguity, complexity, and dynamics embedded in the practice of carnal videos.

Keywords

affect biolabour carnal videos sense transgression

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Abidin

(2018) Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online. Bingley, UK: Emerald.

Choi

(2016) Characteristics of the viewing community in personal web-casting. Korean Journal of Broadcasting and Telecommunication Studies 30(2): 5–53.

Andrejevic

(2004) Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Attwood

(2002) A very British carnival. European Journal of Cultural Studies 5(1): 91–105.

Banks

Humphreys

(2008) The labour of user co-creators: Emergent social network markets? Convergence 14(4): 401–418.

Barthes

(1975) The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill and Wang.

Bertelsen

Murphie

(2010) The ethics of everyday infinities and powers: Felix Guattari on affect and the refrain. In: Gregg

Seigworth

(eds) The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 130–160.

Bollmer

(2014) Pathologies of affect. Cultural Studies 28(2): 298–326.

Bourdieu

(1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

10.

Butler

(2006) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso.

11.

Campos

(2012) Graffiti writer as superhero. European Journal of Cultural Studies 16(2): 155–170.

12.

Cha

(2014) South Korea’s online trend: Paying to watch a pretty girl eat. CNN (3 February 2014). Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/29/world/asia/korea-eating-room/index.html (accessed 30 March 2019).

13.

Chung

(2015) ‘House and car’, the symbol of middle class: Are the castrated dreams explored in appetites? Shin-dong-Ah. Available at: http://news.donga.com/List/3/all/20150419/70785884/1 (accessed 30 August 2017).

14.

Couldry

(2001) The umbrella man: Crossing a landscape of speech and silence. European Journal of Cultural Studies 4(2): 131–152.

15.

Couldry

Mejias

(2019) The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

16.

Creeber

(2011) It’s not TV, it’s online drama: The return of the intimate screen. International Journal of Cultural Studies 14(6): 591–606.

17.

Dean

(2010) Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive. Cambridge: Polity.

18.

Dean

(2015) Affect and drive. In: Hillis

Paasonen

Petit

(eds) Networked Affect. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 89–102.

19.

Deleuze

(1983) Nietzsche and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press.

20.

Deleuze

(1988) Foucault, trans. Hand

. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

21.

Deleuze

(1997) Negotiations 1972–1990. New York: Columbia University Press.

22.

Deleuze

Guattari

(1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum.

23.

Deleuze

Guattari

(1994) What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press.

24.

Economist (2017) The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data. Available at: https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21721656-data-economy-demands-new-approach-antitrust-rules-worlds-most-valuable-resource (accessed 28 August 2017).

25.

Foucault

(2008) The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. New York: Picador.

26.

Fuchs

(2015) Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media. London: Routledge.

27.

Gilbert

(2015) Neoliberal Culture. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

28.

Goldhaber

(1997) The attention economy and the net. First Monday, 2(4). Available at: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/519/440 (accessed 17 January 2020).

29.

Hardt

Negri

(2004) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. London: Penguin.

30.

Hillis

Paasonen

Petit

(eds) (2015) Networked Affect. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

31.

Hirdman

(2016) The passion of mediated shame: Affective reactivity and classed otherness in reality TV. European Journal of Cultural Studies 19(3): 283–296.

32.

Jang

Kim

(2016) Need for interactions or pursuit of information and entertainment? Korean Journal of Broadcasting and Telecommunication Studies 30(4): 152–185.

33.

Jewitt

(2016) The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis. London: Routledge.

34.

Joo

(2013) Famine Society (in Korean). Kyunggi: Geulhangari.

35.

Kim

(2015) Survival, survivalism, young generation from the viewpoint of the sociology of the heart. Korean Sociology 49(1): 179–212.

36.

Kim

(2014) Visages of Words (in Korean). Seoul: Muk Hak Gua Ji Sung Sa.

37.

Kim

(2015) Globalization of the privatized self-image. In: Hjorth

Khoo

(eds) Routledge Handbook of New Media in Asia. London: Routledge, pp. 333–342.

38.

Kim

(2016) Doing nothing as a digital creative labour: Multi-sensorial capitalism in network society of South Korea. Paper presented at the IAMCR conference, UK.

39.

Lazzarato

(1996) Immaterial labor. In: Virno

Hardt

(eds) Radical Thought in Italy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 133–147.

40.

Lee

(2015) Do you know Korea’s first mukbang? Hankook il bo, 13 May. Available at: http://www.hankookilbo.com/v/46f6ed0fa3e14bd8920443a542920e4d (accessed 28 August 2017).

41.

Marwick

(2013) Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age. Newhaven, CT: Yale University Press.

42.

Maddison

(2015) ‘Make love not porn’: Entrepreneurial voyeurism, agency, and affect. In: Hillis

Paasonen

Petit

(eds) Networked Affect. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 151–168.

43.

Morini

Fumagalli

(2010) Life put to work. Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organizations 10(3/4): 234–252.

44.

Ngai

(2005) Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

45.

Paasonen

(2011) Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

46.

Potter

Westall

(2016) Neoliberal Britain’s austerity foodscape: Home economics, veg patch capitalism and culinary temporality. In: Gilbert

(ed.) Neoliberal Culture. London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 215–247.

47.

Probyn

(1999) Beyond food/sex: Eating and an ethics of existence. Theory, Culture & Society 16(2): 215–228.

48.

Raun

(2018) Capitalizing intimacy: New subcultural forms of micro-celebrity strategies and affective labour on YouTube. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 24(1): 99–113.

49.

Rheingold

(1993) The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier the Edge. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

50.

Scholz

(2012) Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory. London: Routledge.

51.

Senft

(2013) Microcelebrity and the branded self. In: Hartley

Burgess

Bruns

(eds) A Companion to New Media Dynamics. Chichester: Wiley- Blackwell, pp. 346–354.

52.

Sobchack

(2004) Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. University of California Press.

53.

Stiegler

(2017) Automatic Society: The Future of Work. London: Polity.

54.

Terranova

(2004) Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London: Pluto.

55.

van Dijck

Poell

Waal

(2018) The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World. Oxford University Press.

56.

Yang

(2018) Regulating mukbang? Rather regulating loneliness! JoongAng Ilbo, 9 August. Available at: https://news.joins.com/article/22871168 (accessed 30 March 2019).

57.

Zuboff

(2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: Public Affairs.