The Logic of Compressed Modernity. Chang Kyung-Sup

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СКАЧАТЬ the extremely antagonistic conflict between indigenous cultures and institutions and foreign ones as have been vividly illustrated in the sectors of cultural production and medicine in South Korea.³ Chronic bitterness characterizes the atmosphere among scholars of humanities (Korean history, philosophy, literature, etc.), specialists in traditional music and dance, and practitioners of indigenous medicine when their professional counterparts of Western specialties dominate society. However, thanks to the very historical context that Korean society was appropriated as a colony of industrial capitalism by an external force (Japan) and that, even after independence, South Koreans were pressurized to accept the political and economic order of Western standards by another external force (the United States), the remaining indigenous culture has sometimes claimed a significant historical and existential legitimacy regardless of its practical utility. The duality of South Koreans who have trodden, in practice, a highly extroverted developmental path and still show no hint of shedding their unreserved (ethno)nationalist pretense presents an easy clue that the modernity they have pursued is chronically afflicted with space-wise compression of dissimilar civilizations.

The social phenomena and cultural elements generated in the above four dimensions of compressed modernity are often put in intense competition, collision, disjuncture, articulation, and compounding among themselves, so that still more types of social phenomena and cultural elements are engendered. These can be considered the fifth, or all-encompassing dimension of compressed modernity. In fact, most social phenomena and cultural elements in South Korea involve this dimension. Given that the co-existence of past, present, Asia (Korea), and the West is a rather common trait of social phenomena and cultural elements engendered under compressed modernity, every civilizational component must have come into existence through various processes of hybridization. If anyone who lives in this type of society fails to develop and maintain a fairly complex mindset for incorporating such complicated social phenomena and cultural elements, he/she has constantly to risk the possibility of becoming a social dropout.

      While understanding and responding to social phenomena that arise through condensed time and space is already a formidable task, comprehending and coordinating the complex interaction of such abruptly new social phenomena with traditional and indigenous ones constitutes an even more challenging undertaking. Such difficulties are particularly manifest in the complexities of social values and ideology systems. Family, firm, university, civil society, and even government exist as panoramic displays of diverse values and ideologies. These institutions, in which the values and ideologies from past, present, Asia (Korea), and the West do not simply coexist but keep generating new elements through constant interactions with one another, are “too dynamic” and too complex.⁴

2.3 Manifesting Units

      There are various different units/levels of manifestation of compressed modernity in South Korea and elsewhere. Societal units (nation, state, civil society, national economy), city and community, secondary organizations, family, and personhood are all observable units of compressed modernity. These plural units/levels can take on compressed modernity in highly diverse configurations, ramifying what may be called internal multiple (compressed) modernities. Also, the primacy of certain units/levels over other units/levels in manifesting a society’s compressed modernity constitutes a critical structural characteristic of the concerned society. On the other hand, different units/levels can exert mutually escalating (or obstructive) effects in compressed modernity. Let us discuss this issue in the historical and social contexts of South Korea and/or East Asia.

Societal units Societal units are most commonly discussed in regard to compressed modernity in South Korea (and East Asia). Economic catching-up and swift social and political modernization have been common national agendas in postcolonial contexts. Indeed, condensed economic, social, and political changes have commonly been experienced under the rubric of national development or revitalization. The nation is to flourish through economic, political, and social modernization, but its historical foundations need to be constantly reaffirmed through traditional/indigenous values, symbols, and memories. Besides, whether successful or not in such courses of (West-oriented) modernization, traditional and/or indigenous components of social, economic, and political orders will not vanish overnight. In this context, compression of traditional/modern(/postmodern) and indigenous/Western(/global) components of social, economic, and political orders almost inevitably ensue. It should be noted that, because of the internationally dependent and politically selective process of liberation (Cumings 1981), South Korea’s modernization as a postcolonial national(ist) project has been a historically contested affair to date between the state and civil society. A sort of domestic Cold War has led civil society to assume an independent or rival status in South Korea’s otherwise state-centered modernization and to actively pursue various progressive agendas ranging from labor rights to ecological justice (Chang, K. 1999, 2012a).

Regional (urban and rural) places East Asian countries not only boast of many historic cities of traditional governance, culture, and commerce but also have undergone explosively rapid (or condensed) urbanization in the course of sequential industrializations (from Japan to Taiwan to North and South Korea to China). In mega-size urban places, dense blocks of modern (if not altogether Western) life are juxtaposed with museum-like pockets of traditional/indigenous culture and politics. Overnight creation of huge bed towns and industrial cities is all too usual; so is overnight spread of modern and/or Western lifestyles. On the other hand, refined versions of middle-class consciousness and/or neotraditional forms of authoritarian political rule often help to both resurrect traditional/indigenous facades and incorporate cosmopolitan values and desires in private and public life (despite radically fast urbanization) (Koo, H. 2016). Condensed urbanization and compressive urban life, however, do not themselves constitute an honorable civilizational alternative, so that constant reconstruction of urban spaces becomes a built-in feature of East Asian urbanism. Urbanism here is not only “phantasmagoric” but also structurally ephemeral.⁵ It should be noted that the urban-centered nature of East Asia’s (compressed) modernity does not necessarily imply that rural areas have been left unchanged or frozen in their traditional characteristics and conditions. In a great historical paradox, South Korea’s acutely urban-biased development has recently led villages and peasants to spearhead sociocultural globalization in the form of an abrupt increase in rural “forced” bachelors’ transnational marriage with foreign brides from across Asia (Chang, K. 2018, ch. 6). There are a host of sociocultural and other affairs in which rural areas have turned out or functioned as central arenas of compressed modernity.

      Secondary organizations Secondary organizations such as schools and business firms have been hastily set up in massive numbers as instruments for modernization and development, but their organizational structure and culture are far from simple replication of those of Western societies. Traditional teacher–pupil relations still reverberate in authoritarian class rooms where cramming (condensed absorption) of modern/Western knowledge and technology is considered as an uncompromisable goal of education in the process of national economic and civilizational catch-up (Han, J. 1996). In South Korean sweatshop factories where the “economic miracle” was initiated from the late 1960s, work-line supervisors and company managers demanded that yeogong (women industrial workers) subserviently yet faithfully serve them as if they were elder kinsmen in a village (Koo, H. 2001). Modern industrial workplaces have often been reinvented as arenas for arguably communal interactions associated with paternalistic cultural traditions (Dore 1973; Walder 1986).

Families Korean/East Asian familialism (or, broadly, family-centeredness) both as personal orientation and societal order is as much modern as traditional. Families function, on the one hand, like social battalions in which confusing and contradicting goals of societal processes (modern economy, polity, and civic life) are reorganized into strategic targets of everyday life and, on the other hand, like cultural reservoirs in which values and norms of diverse historical and social origins are absorbed and reproduced as guiding poles for personal life (Chang, K. 2010a). Family life in East Asia both appears as microcosmic of condensed and compressive societal processes, and buttresses such societal processes by tightly regimenting family members accordingly. In fact, most of South СКАЧАТЬ