The Logic of Compressed Modernity. Chang Kyung-Sup

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СКАЧАТЬ as an epistemological property began to avail and even necessitate itself wherever its embodying nations reached “pre-modern” or “non-modern” peoples/societies with existentially threatening impacts. It even began to assume the status of a meta-value in the postcolonial world. This process was no exception to the now ex-European dominant nations in the “new” continents of Americas and Oceania. Although they would ultimately be able to actively add their own characteristics in deepening and expanding modern systems of politics, economy, and society, they, as migrant settler communities, initially had to encounter Western Europe as superior forces of motherly modernity. Such sentiment is not entirely absent even now.

If the concept of modernization should remain as it has conventionally been, we need an additional concept or theory to highlight the importance of the historical processes and structural conditions of supposedly modernizing nations’ relationalization with the modernity of Western Europe (hereafter the West, considering the subsequently critical role of the United States in shaping modernity) as manifested politico-militarily, economically, and/or socioculturally. Under the epistemological condition or dilemma that modernity was already given as an inescapable historical necessity (with the implicit status of a meta-value) in the context of transnational relations of domination, modernization could not remain a natural (or indigenously realizing) social process, but became an end-determining-cause project with strong political elements. It is not so much modernity itself as the suppositionally proposed causes, whether relevantly effective (in achieving modernity) or not, that have decisively shaped the political, economic, social, and cultural conditions of a variety of postcolonial nations. Such suppositions about causes of modernity have been presented practically by all individuals, groups, and institutions with any scientific, technological, political, social, journalistic, cultural, or even religious influences in the nation. Even when the question, if certain nations have actually been modernized, remains fundamentally ambiguous, it is crucially important to find and comprehend that they have been relationalizing themselves with modernity and its embodying forces in terms of predeterminedly organizing and managing basically all elements of nationhood according to variously understood, or asserted, conditions of modernity. Let me call this process modernitization, as differentiated from modernization. This concept/theory will critically help to analyze trans-social relations of modernity in the world order, comparable to social relations of production in Marxist class analysis. Modernitization can be seen when (West-derived) modernity is appropriated, simulated, adapted, reformulated, resisted, or rescaled by peoples and societies outside its originator region of Europe.¹⁰ It will enable a proper emphasis on the significance of concrete historical agencies (as opposed to abstract structural conditions) in analyzing wide varieties of political, sociocultural, and economic transformations under the global order of modernity.¹¹

Some historical varieties of modernitization on the national level may be identified as follows: (1) European settler colonies in the “new” continents that would become independent nations through civilizational appropriation and adaptation of European modernity; (2) proactive instrumentalist appropriation of European modernity by non-European nations such as Japan since the Meiji revolution and a majority of postcolonial nations; (3) intra-European spread and consolidation of modernity through mutual and interactive appropriation of national and local modernities; (4) “internal conversion” (Geertz 1973) in non-European societies and peoples in terms of inventive reappropriation of indigenous or traditional civilizations for (Western-)modern tasks and purposes, for instance, as argued in the Confucian modernity thesis; (5) socialist revolution, conversion, or alliance as a national development path alternative to capitalism or capitalist modernity; (6) dialectical self-reinvention of colonized peoples and societies as counterforce elements of colonial modern systems, for instance, (ethno)nationalist civil society and proletariat confronting the colonial(ist) state and capital (see Chapter 4); (7) internal colonialist unification/subordination of minor nations and ethnicities by Europe-modeled new modern states, such as Ryukyu under Meiji Japan and Tibet under communist China. In all these instances, modernitization is a fundamentally compressed experience of modernity in the epistemological, civilizational, and/or political economic dimensions.¹² Compressed modernity has been a universal mode of modernitization across the postcolonial world.

      Modernitization inherently involves compressed modernity. Above all, knowing, or being forced to know, modernity – as opposed to unconsciously growing into it – is an epistemological quantum leap. But the knowing process often involves unprecedented sufferings and sacrifices imposed by the initial modernizers on the rest of the world, often through invasion, colonization, or exploitation. Thus, achieving modernity as rapidly as possible and as greatly as possible became a historical exigency in order to minimize or remove such externally originated sufferings and sacrifices in the coming years. However, once political sovereignties and/or socioeconomic autonomies were lost under colonialism, the concerned nations often lost their status as a unit of modernity and, instead, incurred instantaneous incorporation into the transnationally reorganized modernity of invader nations. In all these simple occasions of modernitization, whether self-promoted or involuntarily coerced, modernity has been reasoned, pursued, or imposed in compressed manners. More complicated occasions of modernitization do not differ, as shown in the subsequent chapters in Part II of this book as to South Korean experiences.

NOTES

      1 1. In this regard, David Harvey’s (1980) observation on the (global) time–space compression under the accumulation crisis of late modern capitalism should be differentiated from the national, regional, organizational, familial, and personal condensation of time and space under postcolonial compressed modernity.

      2 2. See Ernst Bloch ([1935]1991), Heritage of Our Times. As Germany was behind England and France in industrialization, and in modernization in general, Bloch perceived the German social situation as wedged between backward culture and modern industrialism.

      3 3. See Kim, J. (2019) for a lucid account of Korean traditional medicine’s arduous struggle in the contemporary health sector under the hegemonic dominance of Western medicine.

      4 4. “Too dynamic” once became a thematic phrase for South Korea among many foreign media correspondents in Seoul during the Roh Moo-Hyun presidency. “Dynamic Korea” was an official catchphrase for attracting international tourism to the country, but these foreign journalists seem to have felt that it was too dynamic.

      5 5. Giddens (1990: 18–19) argues, perhaps inspired by Walter Benjamin’s critical assessment of modern cities (Gilloch 1997), “In conditions of modernity, place becomes increasingly phantasmagoric: that is to say, locales are thoroughly penetrated by and shaped in terms of social influences quite distant from them.”

      6 6. Interestingly, this familial(istic) nature of South Korean modernity seems to have been more persuasively revealed and more effectively communicated in Korean cultural products (that is, dramas, cinemas, and novels that address family relationships and affairs thematically) than in academic social sciences (whose Western dependency chronically inhibits autonomous systematic exploration of the local essential features of social issues and phenomena). See Kim, Y. (2013) for Korean dramas in this regard.

      7 7. See Orta (1999) for an ethnographic discussion of complex personhood. See Abelmann (2003) for a discussion on the South Korean case.

      8 8. Internal multiple (compressed) modernities can be seen as complex local instances of Appadurai’s (1990) global “scapes” in postcolonial modernization.

      9 9. See Dirlik (2003, 2004) on “global modernity,” and Pieterse (1994) on “globalization as hybridization.”

      10 10. In this respect, “provincializing Europe” (Chakrabarty 2000) is a necessary, but not sufficient strategy for analyzing postcoloniality or postcolonial modernity/modernization.

      11 11. Bruno Latour’s (1993, 2005) view on social (dis)order in his “practical СКАЧАТЬ