The Logic of Compressed Modernity. Chang Kyung-Sup

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1 INTRODUCTION Purpose, Debates, and Subjects

       1.1 Purpose

South Korean society is marked by quite a curious mix of extreme social traits and tendencies.¹ With a per capita GDP of more than thirty thousand U.S. dollars, many of the world’s leading industries, and the world’s highest level of tertiary education completion, South Koreans may certainly boast, to both foreigners and themselves, of their “miracle” economic and social achievements, which were built upon the debris from a total civil war, besides decades of colonial exploitation. By contrast, a long series of social problems at internationally scandalous levels keep afflicting and embarrassing South Koreans, such as household indebtedness, elderly poverty, suicide, and even tuberculosis infection at some of the worst levels among all industrialized nations. On the other hand, South Korean workers still work more than two thousand hours annually along with just a few other countries, South Korean students study far more hours than all their foreign counterparts in the world, and South Korean elderly keep extending their laboring years beyond any known level in the world. Demographically, South Korea’s fertility, which is at the world’s lowest level (e.g. a total fertility rate of 0.84 in 2020), and its life expectancy, which is rising at the world’s fastest pace, are predicted to make its population to age more rapidly than that of any other society.² What I have viewed for many years as the country’s compressed modernity is full of extreme social traits and tendencies that often appear mutually contradictory. Given contemporary South Korea’s seemingly incomparable intensities, velocities, complexities, and contradictions in all aspects of social order and personal life, it is hard to imagine that this society used to be called a “hermit kingdom” after it was first exposed to Westerners.

      How can social sciences deal with this miraculous yet simultaneously obstinate and hystericalized society? South Korea’s global prominence in developmental, sociopolitical, and cultural affairs has not only impressed overseas media and public but also motivated numerous internationally respectable scholars to analyze its experiences as a potential basis of new patterns or possibilities in postcolonial modernization and development.³ Despite their persuasive accounts of diverse aspects of South Korean modernity, its general social scientific implications and influences have been relatively limited. Their findings and interpretations, despite various substantive contributions, have failed to develop into an inclusive disciplinary paradigm. This is not necessarily because South Korean experiences have been largely idiosyncratic and thus difficult to apply to other societies and/or to distill generalizable theoretical implications. Some of them have scientifically constrained themselves by attempting to explain South Korea’s performances in modernization and development according to somewhat ideologically or normatively fused perspectives, respectively underlining Confucian values, colonial modernization, state interventionism, global liberal order, and so on. More crucially, most of them have failed to predict repeatedly degenerative tendencies in South Korea’s industrial capitalism, democracy, grassroots livelihood, and even demographic reproduction. Their scientific and intellectual influence has fluctuated in accordance with South Korea’s built-in instabilities in nearly all domains.

More conventional social sciences, whether at the international or domestic level, do not appear to have been more successful in systematically and effectively elucidating what genuinely constitutes universally appreciable Koreanness. In the so-called mainstream social sciences in Europe and North America, South Korea has largely been subjected to disciplinary indifference, if not ignorance. Paradoxically, South Korean universities have mostly relied on such lines of social sciences for education and even research. Social sciences in general have been imported from the West (especially, the United States) mainly through South Korean PhDs from major Western universities and dispatched to South Korean realities throughout the post-liberation era (Kim, J. 2015). Educational institutional modernization has thereby been achieved quite rapidly and even intensely, but their scientific contributions in systematically probing and theorizing South Korean realities have remained largely ambiguous (Park and Chang 1999). In certain disciplines, there is even a tendency for internationally established scholars to avoid South Korea as their research subject. Borrowed Western social sciences in the South Korean context, no matter how much adapted locally, have critically added to the complicated nature of South Korean modernity by inundating this society with hasty speculative prescriptions under the assumption of Westernization-as-modernization. Many domestically trained scholars have responded to this dilemma by proposing the construction of “indigenous social sciences” or “Korean-style social sciences.”⁴ However, South Korean society’s distinctiveness since the last century seems to have consisted much more critically in its explosive and complex digestion (and indigestion) of Western modernity than in some isolated characteristics inherited from its own past.

      In a stark contrast to the virtually intended inefficacy of conventional social sciences in analyzing South Korean realities, there are abundant cultural creations and productions that have most brilliantly СКАЧАТЬ