The Logic of Compressed Modernity. Chang Kyung-Sup
Asians’ family life and personhood, comparative social policy and care system, and so forth.
1.2 Compressed Modernity in Critical Modernity Debates
Compressed modernity is a critical theory of postcolonial social change, aspiring to join and learn from the main self-critical intellectual reactions since the late twentieth century as to complex and murky social realities in the late modern world. Such intellectual reactions include postmodernism (Lyotard 1984, etc.), postcolonialism (Chakrabarty 2000; Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2002, etc.), reflexive modernization (Beck, Giddens, and Lash 1994, etc.), and multiple modernities (Eisenstadt 2000, etc.). Postmodernism forcefully argues that modernity has exhausted or abused its progressive potential, if any, only to spawn deleterious conditions and tendencies for humanity and its civilizational and ecological basis. Postcolonialism cogently reveals that postcolonial modernization and development have been far from a genuinely liberating process due to the chronic (re)manifestation of colonial and neocolonial patterns of social relations and cognitive practices in the supposedly liberated Third World. Reflexive modernization in late modern reality, as argued by Beck and Giddens, is a structurally complicated process of social change under the uncontrollable floods of choices that expose modern society and people to more risks than opportunities. The multiple modernities thesis emphasizes a comparative civilizational perspective that helps to recognize variegated possibilities and forms of modernities in the diverse historical and structural contexts for nation-making or national revival. As directly indicated or indirectly alluded to in various parts of this chapter, all of these critical debates on modernity have essential implications for the compressed modernity thesis.
The problem of time–space condensation here was presented as a core subject in David Harvey’s (1980) seminal discussion of Western modernism and postmodernism. In essence, according to Harvey, the accumulation crisis of capitalism and the effort to overcome it led to the expansion of controllable space and the generalization of mechanical time, which ultimately engendered time–space condensation (or, in Harvey’s wording, “time–space compression”) on the global scale. In this regard, Harvey argues, there are fundamental similarities in the objects that modernism and postmodernism respectively try to explain and overcome. While his emphasis on “the annihilation of space through time” and “the spatialization of time” involves the complex functional interrelationships between time and space (Harvey 1980: 270), it by and large focuses on what I present here as time–space condensation. As compared to Harvey’s view that time–space condensation (on the global scale) accompanies the accumulation crisis of capitalism at each stage and the aggressive effort to overcome it, the time–space condensation and compression in compressed modernity at national and other levels involve much more diverse historical backgrounds, factors, and initiators.8
In addition, the phenomena argued by main theorists of postcolonialism (such as cultural “hybridity,” “syncrecity,” etc.) can also be included in time–space compression (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2002).9 If this literary criticism-derived theory is extended to cover social phenomena in general, most authors of postcolonialism seem to acknowledge the status of politically liberated Third World grassroots and intellectuals as concrete historical and social subjects, but still think that their spiritual, material, and institutional lives have not fundamentally overcome colonial and/or neocolonial (Western) cultures and values, but have combined the latter with indigenous elements in diverse ways.10 It is true that postcolonial culture can be both “oppositional” and “complicit” with regard to (neo)colonial order and that, in the former case, colonial (Western) cultures and values, if any, may be conceived as something to be criticized and overcome. Similarly, in the specific aspects of time–space compression in this study, the process by which various cultures and institutions positioned at dissimilar points of the two axes of time and space interact and intermingle is open to a possibility of being dictated by the ideology, value, and will of many people as concrete historical and social subjects. It needs to be pointed out, however, that the breadth of cultures and institutions that are subject to compression here is much wider than that suggested by postcolonialism so as to include even postmodern and global elements. It also needs to be pointed out that the facets of compression here are not limited to hybridity or syncrecity but involve competition, collision, disjointing, articulation, compounding, and so forth.
The diverse dimensions of compressed modernity are emergent patterns of social structure and change that can be analyzed only in concrete historical and societal contexts. Therefore, the formation and transformation of compressed modernity in any nation need to be explained under a systematic and comprehensive examination of its global historical and structural conditions. In so doing, Therborn’s thesis of “entangled modernities” offers a highly useful hint at the social and institutional outcomes of complex interactions and interrelations between international and local agencies of modernity. According to Therborn (2003: 295), “[b]ecause of its modes of historical generation, modernity has to be seen as a global phenomenon” … and requires a “global approach … focusing on global variability, global connectivity, and global inter-communication.” Therborn (2003: 295) goes on to point out two “general processes of the making of modernity,” namely, “the constitutive entanglements of modernity and some tradition, coming out of the infinitely variable incompleteness of every modern rupture with the past, and out of the plasticity of most traditions” and “the geo-historical entanglements, of the very different but significantly interacting and mutually influencing sociopolitical roads to and through modernity.” Many nations’ global historical and structural conditions of modernization clearly demonstrate that geo-historical entanglements – and sometimes modernity-tradition entanglements as well – tend frequently or chronically to induce a compressed nature in the thereby generated modernities. While Therborn’s (2003) thesis on “entangled modernities” is a crucial epistemological progress, it should be carefully complemented by astute attention to the importance 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. This theoretical-cum-empirical necessity is most persuasively argued in Bruno Latour’s (2005) “practical metaphysics” about inexhaustibly diverse ontological manifestations of values, purposes, and resources in the (debatably) modern world. Postcolonial entanglement of modernities, in all instances, has involved critical human and institutional agencies that have, often self-consciously but not always successfully, conveyed, accommodated, abused, modified, intensified, and/or resisted such global structural relations. This should be understood as a crucial part of what John Urry (2003) analyzed as “global complexity.”
This has been the case even when entanglements have involved fundamental civilizational or systemic discontinuities as suggested by Ulrich Beck (Beck and Grande 2010) and Anthony Giddens (1990). Giddens emphasizes the qualitatively distinctive nature of modern social institutions (as opposed to traditional social orders), whereas Beck highlights the discrete characteristics of late or “second” modernity” (as opposed to early or “first” modernity). To the extent that South Koreans, among others, have incorporated West-originated modern social institutions into their local life, the discontinuitist interpretation recommended by Giddens and Beck will be methodologically and theoretically indispensable. However, a more critical utility of the discontinuitist approach consists in the very fact that various versions of Western modernity have arrived in South Korea or elsewhere mainly through political coercions and decisions (that is, as direct effects of international power relations) rather than as evolutionary adaptations. When West-originated social institutions, values, and goals are attained in condensed manners, or when they are compressively compounded with traditional and indigenous elements, their discontinuous – or, more correctly, dissimilar – nature in the South Korean or other context cannot but be responsible for social confusion, conflict, and alienation. Paradoxically, it is also true that such discontinuous nature can become useful for inducing, suppressing, or even deceiving potentially resistant local subjects and interests in strategically determined directions of social change. Abrupt institutional (or ideological) replacement is sometimes much more feasible than gradual institutional (or ideological) reform because local resistance is epistemologically