Читать книгу The Logic of Compressed Modernity - Chang Kyung-Sup - Страница 9

This book consists of three parts, respectively entitled: “Part I. Compressed Modernity in Perspective”; “Part II. Structural Properties of Compressed Modernity”; and “Part III. After Compressed Modernity.” Part I offers, besides the current introduction chapter, two chapters that respectively explain the definitional and universal aspects of compressed modernity. Part II includes six chapters that respectively deal with the internal multiplicity of modernities, the particular mode of citizenship under compressed modernity, the complexity of the cultural configuration of compressed modernity, the productionist bias and reproductive crisis in development, the social institutional deficits and infrastructural familialism, and the demographic configuration of compressed modernity. Part III concludes the current book with a chapter discussing South Korea’s post-compressed modern condition loaded with the dual burdens arising from, on the one hand, the earlier risky schemes of compressed modernization and development and, on the other hand, the common dilemmas accompanying social and economic maturation (or saturation). Although these diverse topics already constitute a sizable monograph, there are numerous other theoretical and empirical issues that need to be covered in order to provide a reasonably self-contained scientific account of compressed modernity. Nonetheless, this book is presented as a tentative general treatise on compressed modernity. Each of the above-mentioned chapters is briefly summarized as follows.

In Chapter 2, “Compressed Modernity: Constitutive Dimensions and Manifesting Units,” I intend to present a formal definition and core theoretical/historical components of compressed modernity. Compressed modernity consists of multiple dimensions constructed by all possible combinations of temporal (historical) and spatial (civilizational) manifestations of human social activities, relationships, and assets – namely, temporal condensation of historical change, spatial condensation of civilizational compass, compressed mixing of diverse temporalities (eras), compressed mixing of diverse spaces (civilizations), and interactions among the above. Compressed modernity can be manifested at various levels of human existence and experience – that is, personhood, family, secondary organizations, urban/rural localities, societal units (including civil society, nation, etc.), and, not least importantly, the global society. At each of these levels, people’s lives need to be managed intensely, intricately, and flexibly in order to remain normally integrated with the rest of society. Compressed modernity is a critical theory of postcolonial social change, aspiring to join and learn from the main self-critical intellectual reactions of the late twentieth century as to complex and murky social realities in the late modern world, including postmodernism, postcolonialism, reflexive modernization, and multiple modernities.

In today’s rapidly and intricately globalizing world, as shown in Chapter 3, “Compressed Modernity in the Universalist Perspective,” the driving forces of radical scientific-technical-cultural inputs and monopolistic political economic interests operate across national boundaries without serious obstacles. The liberal system transition of former state-socialist countries has intensified the globalizing nature of such inputs and interests. However, the ecological, material, and sociocultural risks accompanying the latest capitalist offense are not unidirectional (from developed to less developed nations) any more. Even developed nations cannot pass up the cosmopolit(an)ized hazards and pressures generated in the very process of their global economic and political domination over less developed nations. Managing these challenges, as well as exploiting the associated opportunities, by individual nations implies that internalization of cosmopolit(an)ized reflexivity takes place both in developed and less developed (capitalist and post-socialist) nations. Through this process, societies (or their civilizational conditions) are being internalized into each other, thereby making compressed modernity become a universal feature of national societies in the late modern world. In fact, the same is also true of individual communities, organizations, families, and persons.

As explained in Chapter 4, “Internal Multiple Modernities: South Korea as Multiplex Theatre Society,” modernity – and the process of modernization – can be plural not only across different national societies, as persuasively indicated in Eisenstadt’s “multiple modernities” thesis, but also within each national society. Korea has been particularly distinct in such internal multiplicity of modernities, including colonial dialectical modernity, postcolonial reflexive institutional(ist) modernization, postcolonial neotraditionalist modernity, free world modernity under the Cold War, state-capitalist modernity, cosmopolitan modernity under neoliberal economic globalism, and associative subaltern liberal modernity. These internally diverse modernities reflect a series of overpowering international influences and related local upheavals and confrontations to which Korean society and its people have been subjected since the late nineteenth century. Each of these modernities is not uniquely or exclusively Korean because they have been embedded in the global structures and processes of modern social change. Nevertheless, South Korea is certainly remarkable in the volume of multiplicities of modernities, the dramatic and intense realization of each modernity, the protracted operation of each modernity, and the extremely complex interactions among such multiple modernities. With all such impetuses and forms of modernities permanently extending their lifespan as variously embodied in the identites and interests of different generations, genders, classes, sectors, and/or regions, South Korea has been socially configured and reconfigured as a multiplex theater society in which all possible claims of modernities are aggressively and loudly staged side by side and/or one after another, however, without a clear clue to civilizational or sociopolitical reconciliation among them.

As detailed in Chapter 5, “Transformative Contributory Rights: Citizen(ship) in Compressed Modernity,” the life histories of most South Koreans since the mid twentieth century have been replete with dramatic institutional, developmental, sociopolitical, and ethnonational transformations and crises through which their nation and society have emerged with fully blown (compressed) modernity. In each of these drastic and fundamental transitions, South Koreans have had to confront not only the difficulties inherent in such radical transitions but, more critically, the troubles ensuing from the crude institutional conditions for managing them. While both the state and civil society were unstable, with their own survival remaining in question, the internal conditions and international environments required them to embark on, among other changes, rapid institutional and techno-scientific modernization and aggressive economic development. In fact, such transformations were often pursued in order to strategically trounce the sociopolitical dilemmas stemming from the inchoate, dependent, and even illegitimate nature of the state machinery and dominant social order. There have arisen transformation-oriented state, society, and population for which each transformation becomes an ultimate purpose in itself, the processes and means of the transformations constitute the main sociopolitical order, and the transformation-embedded interests form the core social identity. In this milieu, a distinct mode of citizenship has been engendered in terms of transformative contributory rights. Citizenship as transformative contributory rights can be defined as effective and/or legitimate claims to national and social resources, opportunities, and/or respects that accrue to each citizen’s contributions to the nation’s or society’s transformative purposes. As South Korea has been aggressively and precipitously engaged in institutional and techno-scientific modernization, economic development, political democratization, economic and sociocultural globalization, and, mostly recently, ethnonational reformation, its citizens have been exhorted or have exhorted themselves to engage intensely in each of these transformations, and their citizenship, constituted by identities, duties, and rights, have been very much framed and substantiated by the conditions, processes, and outcomes of such transformative engagements.

As explained in Chapter 6, “Complex-Culturalism vs. Multiculturalism,” the literally explosive growth of transnational marriages between Korean men and mostly Asian women from the beginning years of the twenty-first century seemingly signals that South Korea has entered a genuinely new epoch of cosmopolitan existence and change. This unprecedented phenomenon has drastically reconfigured diverse corners and peripheries of South Korea into manifestly multi-ethnic entities. The national and local governments have been quick in initiating a comprehensive policy of “multicultural family support,” whereas various civil groups, media, and even business corporations have echoed the governmental drive with their own multiculturalism initiatives. On the other hand, as agencies of what I define here as complex culturalism, South Korean institutions and citizens have instrumentally, selectively, and flexibly incorporated into themselves various historical and civilizational sources of culture in order to expediently consolidate the postcolonial sociopolitical order and then to maximize socioeconomic development. In this vein, neither the legal acceptance and physical integration of rapidly increasing numbers of foreign brides into South Korean society, nor the accompanying governmental and civil drive for multiculturalism, implies that this society used to be culturally isolated, or that it only now wishes to convert into a multicultural or cosmopolitan entity. The mass presence of “multicultural brides” seems to have further reinforced complex culturalism by enabling South Korean citizens and institutions to conveniently interpret that their open accommodation and active support for the marriage migrants help make their cultural complexity a more self-contained civilizational property. However, the more their multiculturalism as part of their self-centered globalism is framed through arbitrarily staged experiences, the more the Asian marriage migrants will remain differentiated, if not discriminated, from native Koreans. What remains to be seen is if these foreign brides would permanently be asked or forced to preserve and display their home-country cultural characteristics as an indispensable condition for native South Koreans’ still elementary multicultural experiences and feelings.

In South Korea (and other East Asian societies), as indicated in Chapter 7, “Productive Maximization, Reproductive Meltdown,” compressed modernity is to a critical extent the process and outcome of the developmental(ist) political economy that has been forcefully initiated from above (i.e. by the state), yet actively accommodated from below (i.e. by ordinary citizens). Modernity was conceived in a fundamentally developmentalist or productionist manner, so modernization principally became the politico-social project of achieving time-condensed economic development and thereby joining the world rank of “advanced nations.” Such purposeful approach to modernity in terms of condensed national development has been substantiated by various policies, actions, and attitudes that are designed to maximize economic production and, not coincidentally, to systematically sacrifice the conditions and resources of social reproduction. After decades of successful economic development, such asymmetrical approach to production and reproduction seems to have critically lost its instrumentality. In spite of their enviable façade, covered with hyper-advanced industries, physical infrastructures, services, and lifestyles, the civilizational and even economic progress of South Korean society is now crucially impeded by the disenfranchisement and demise of those classes, generations, communities, cultures, and wisdoms that have been treated practically as disposables, unworthy of social reproduction support, under the narrowly focused developmental political economy.

In a fundamentally family-dependent way, as emphasized in Chapter 8, “Social Institutional Deficits and Infrastructural Familialism,” South Koreans have managed their modern history and made various internationally envious achievements. The compressed nature of their modernity is structurally enmeshed with various social infrastructural utilities of families. This feature of South Korean society has been derived not just from its traditional – say, neo-Confucian – heritage of family-centered life but, more critically, from the processes and manners by which South Koreans have coped with various modern sociocultural, political, and economic forces. Even after the state managed effectively to govern national economic development and social institutional modernization, South Koreans’ reliance on familial norms, relations, and resources have remained unabated. In fact, the familialized nature of South Korean modernity has kept intensifying, albeit in continually refashioning modes, as the state and its allied social actors have found and consciously tapped various strategic utilities from ordinary people’s eager effort to sustain their family-centered/devoted lives. This has been evident concerning nearly all major features and conditions of South Korean development and modernization, such as early Lewisian industrialization based upon stable supplies of rural migrant labor, universalization of high-level public education enabling constant improvements in human capital, and sustained common ethic for familial support and care buffering chronically defective public welfare. The state’s own practically driven familialist stance is not reducible to sheer private family values, but represents a distinct line of technocratic deliberation, conceptualized here as infrastructural familialism. Conversely, the state’s such utilitarian familialism has made individual citizens realize that their developmental and sociopolitical participation in national life is systematically facilitated through familial allegiance and cooperation. Infrastructural familialism has been upheld both from above and from below.

Since the early 1960s, as detailed in Chapter 9, “The Demographic Configuration of Compressed Modernity,” South Korea has undergone extremely rapid and fundamental transformation in both demographic and developmental dimensions. The rates of migration/urbanization, fertility, and mortality all kept changing at such unprecedented and incomparable paces that also characterized those of economic growth, industrialization, proletarianization (occupational change from agricultural to industrial sectors), and so forth. This dual transformation was no coincidence, as the country’s developmental experiences directly involved critical demographic conditions, processes, and consequences. South Korean development, though dominated by state-business network, relied on human resources in extraordinary scopes and degrees; whereas South Korean citizens – quite often through demographically flexible familial endeavors – rendered their human resources a strategic platform for active developmental participation and gain. Conversely, South Korea’s recent economic crisis and restructuring – namely, its post-developmental transition – have both required and caused drastic reformulation of human resources, family relations, and reproductive behaviors, so that earlier demographic trends have been further accelerated in some aspects (e.g. fertility, population aging, etc.) and suddenly slowed down or reversed in other aspects (e.g. natal sex imbalances, divorce, suicide, etc.). Through half a century of radical sociodemographic changes, the country has dramatically turned from a society known for very high fertility, universal marriage, rare divorce, etc., into one of “lowest-low” fertility, widespread singlehood, rampant divorce, etc. As these demographic transformations tend to fundamentally undermine the hitherto taken-for-granted material and cultural conditions for socioeconomic sustainability, the country has aggressively explored strategic measures for reversing or relieving demographic deficits and imbalances.

As pointed out in Chapter 10, “The Post-Compressed Modern Condition,” South Korea’s “miraculous” achievement of modernization and development has not exempted the country from what Ulrich Beck explained as the risks of “second modernity” – namely, the inherent dysfunctions and increasing failures of modern institutions such as capitalist industry, labor market, education system, science and technology, national government, middle-class family, and so forth. While these onerous risks are only now recognized, South Koreans are struggling with additional predicaments derived from the particular measures and processes of their compressed modernization and development. Conversely, at the very historical moment that South Korean society should embark on fundamentally redressing the costs of such risky measures of compressed social and economic transformations, its people are confronted with the globally common prices to be paid at the supposedly mature stage of development and modernization. This is South Korea’s post-compressed modern condition, which appears no less challenging than its immediate post-colonial condition plagued with poverty and hunger, political rifts, and social conflicts and dislocations.