The Logic of Compressed Modernity. Chang Kyung-Sup
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on all fronts – beginning with the political departure in 1948 as a highly advanced democracy in form and spanning to the “miracle-paced” capitalist industrialization and economic growth since the mid 1960s and the global cultural ascendance of Korean popular culture (dubbed “the Korean wave”) in the twenty first century – has been substantially derived from the radically extensive and unprecedentedly condensed process of simulating, materializing, and utilizing the modern (reads Western or American) systems of political, economic, and sociocultural life. In finding and justifying the rationale of such compressed Westernization-cum-modernization, professional social sciences, as mechanically partitioned from humanities, have often taken the place of public sociopolitical debates and intellectual philosophical deliberations. However, the overwhelming materiality of “successful” modernization and development – usually measured in terms of the degree of temporal and substantive compression – has sided with social scientists in social influence and technocratic utilities, who thus keep intensifying their self-partitioned practice in research, education, and public advice.
Three decades of work as a social scientist at a South Korean university have induced me to think that local social sciences are no less quite a unique social phenomenon to be explained themselves than an academic task of explaining the supposed real-world social phenomena. This thought is inseparable from a judgment that the extremely compressed nature of South Korea’s modernization and development and its actual conditions, processes, and risks constitute a highly essential scientific subject. Another decisive judgment is that compression in modernization and development has been as much global historical necessitation (or sometimes coercion) as purposive national achievement. In still another related judgment, compressed modernization and development, while South Korea is indeed an exemplary case, have been universal across the postcolonial world whether in reality or aspiration. Given these interrelated thoughts and judgments, reflecting on locally practiced social sciences, including my own scholarship, becomes a very interesting and productive experience, even leading to a wide array of crucial clues in understanding the (real?) social world as well. Every day at work has thus been an interestingly productive experience, and part of its outcome is the current book.
Apparently, this self-reflective sociology of knowledge has long been experienced by numerous scholars around me. In particular, many of my Korean teachers in sociology – including Kim Il-Chul, Kim Kyong-Dong, Han Wan-Sang, Kim Jin-Kyun, Shin Yong-Ha, Kwon Tai-Hwan, Han Sang-Jin, Lim Hyun-Chin, and Hong Doo-Seung – have endeavored to offer earnest realizations about the contested utilities of locally practiced sociology and its desirable innovations in coming to effective grips with South Korea’s historico-social realities. Such valuable realizations, along with their substantive contributions about various social phenomena, have crucially benefitted me in developing many key questions on compressed modernity discussed in this book. In particular, my thesis on internal multiple modernities (presented in Chapter 4) is decisively owing to abundant rich observations and intuitive thoughts available in their scholarship.
In analyzing compressed modernity since the 1990s, I have been engaged in quite close exchanges and collaborations with many of the world’s leading authorities in studying comparative modernities – in particular, Ulrich Beck, Bryan S. Turner, and Göran Therborn. The outcomes of such relationships are fully incorporated in this book as follows: Chapter 3 (“Compressed Modernity in the Universalist Perspective”) drawing on the concurrence between Beck and me on “reflexive cosmopolitization”; Chapter 4 (“Internal Multiple Modernities”) sharing Therborn’s global structuralist perspective on modernities; and Chapter 5 (“Transformative Contributory Rights”) extending Turner’s conception of citizenship to South Korea’s transformative politics. Besides these chapters, a section in Chapter 1 (“Compressed Modernity in Critical Modernity Debates”) discusses details of these scholars’ arguments and their systematic implications for compressed modernity.
Aside from the current book, I have produced numerous other collaborative publications with them. In particular, my association with Bryan S. Turner reached a totally unexpected level of coediting with him a gigantic five-volume set of a social theory encyclopedia in 2017 (The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory), in which I directed the two sections on modernity/coloniality/development and Asian social theory, respectively. I tried to organize both sections in a globally balanced and inclusive way. For the Asian social theory section, I tried very zealously to organize numerous key Asian scholars into selecting and writing many entries on Asian (and Eurasian) theories and realities from properly positioned Asian perspectives. These entries represent various essential components and aspects of Asian modernities, so the current book also reflects them carefully. Besides, I was invited by Ulrich Beck to contribute my work on compressed modernity to the special issues of British Journal of Sociology (2010) and Soziale Welt (2010) that he edited as guest editor. In these contributions, as discussed in this book as well, I tried to explain the common theoretical and analytical ground between compressed modernity and Beck’s “second modernity” and “reflexive modernization.”
On the other hand, a group of highly respectable scholars has awakened me about the potential relevance of compressed modernity in explaining a wide variety of social phenomena beyond my immediate attention. Above all, I feel greatly indebted to many investigators of various genres of Korean popular culture (now often dubbed “the Korean wave”), including Nancy Abelmann and David Martin-Jones in particular. Frankly speaking, until I came to read their analyses of Korean popular culture in terms of compressed modernity, I had not been quite conscious of the reflective analytical potentials of any type of social scientific research as to such deep yet nuanced cultural representations of South Koreans’ life experiences and trajectories. In this regard, those domestic and overseas audiences who eagerly subscribe to the sociocultural forces of masterpiece films, dramas, songs, novels, and other genres from South Korea seem to constitute both a very interesting subject for sociological enquiry and an analytical community themselves engaged in a critical cultural reflection on complicated and contradictory social realities that I have tried to explain as compressed modernity. This awakening has even led me to think that popular culture could be an effective form of reflection on the personal and social conditions of compressed modernity.
A special research program of Chonbuk National University, South Korea, on “Personal Documents and Compressed Modernity” (2001–2017), led by Yi Jeong-Duk, investigated South Koreans’ life trajectories and family relations under condensed societal transformations by examining personal diaries and other valuable forms of private documents. While I was once invited to speak on compressed modernity at an international conference of this research program, I mostly ended up learning greatly from their highly systematic investigation into the private world’s radical transformations in the twentieth century. I am also indebted to Emiko Ochiai as well as Stevi Jackson for awakening me about multifarious manifestations of compressed modernity in the demographic change, family life, and gender relations of many Asian societies. While my inquisition about compressed modernity, from the beginning, has presumed that South Korea is its exemplary, not unique, case, a lack of reallife ethnomethodological acumen to other societies has detained me from internationally extending it as my own research. It was actually Emiko Ochiai at Kyoto University who offered me a decisive impetus by kindly inviting me for a series of collaborations in a major global research and education program on “Reconstruction of the Intimate and Public Spheres in 21st Century Asia” (2008–2012). As this program adopted compressed modernity as a heuristic analytical framework for comparing the temporal trajectories of social and demographic transformations in various Asian countries vis-à-vis Europe and North America, I came to learn critically from Ochiai and her co-investigators, Zsombor Rajkai in particular, on compressed modernity’s global realities and patterns.
Given the experience as an early analyst of post-socialism in the Chinese context, I have increasingly been attracted to recent social changes in the so-called “transition societies” in East Asia and elsewhere.