The Logic of Compressed Modernity. Chang Kyung-Sup

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.

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