Chang Kyung-Sup - The Logic of Compressed Modernity

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Chang Kyung-Sup

polity

Copyright © Chang Kyung-Sup 2022

The right of Chang Kyung-Sup to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2022 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5290-0

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021946662

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The dramatic nature of South Korea’s societal transformations 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.