Exemplary Affect: Corruption and Transparency in Popular Cultures

Abstract

This paper identifies a critical reflection on a corruption vs. transparency discourse, and its attendant structures of feeling, in contemporary East Asian cultural texts. These texts illustrate how such a discourse can be deployed to assert exemplary status for accomplished individuals or members of privileged groups-a status, however, particularly vulnerable to scandal. Feeling exemplary in this sense is a paradox of progressive ethics. I analyze a video made in support of the Sunflower Movement that effectively uses kawaii, meaning cute or lovable, as a political term to strategically posit (and perhaps subtly question) an open, exuberant happiness as a designator of a democratic people, and Satoshi Kon`s anime film Paprika, based on the science fiction novel of the same name. The latter explores the nightmarish dream of interpersonal transparency made literal in institutional contexts, while refusing a neat opposition between transparency and corruption. Because of their detailed illustration of and commentary on exemplary affect, I argue that contemporary East Asian cultural texts are an important resource for developing a critical understanding of neoliberal and postdevelopmental discourses of transparency and corruption.