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 and/or socioecologically more difficult in the former situation.
While the condensed and compressive nature of South Korean or other modernity has been induced and intensified by their particular historical and structural conditions, it needs to be pointed out that modernity in general has an intrinsic dynamism. Giddens (1990: 16–17) indicates three main conditions for such dynamism of modernity: namely, “the separation of time and space and their recombination in forms which permit the precise time–space ‘zoning’ of social life; the disembedding of social systems …; and the reflexive ordering and reordering of social relations in the light of continual inputs of knowledge affecting the actions of individuals and groups.” These complex conditions cannot be reproduced identically in every society, but it is safe to say that they are thoroughly relevant in the South Korean context as well. In fact, such conditions seem to have been intensified due to the transnational superimposition of modernity in South Korea under Japanese domination and American influence and, more critically, due to the South Koreans’ own drive for dependent modernization and globalization. Beck (Beck and Grande 2010) presents “second modernity” as a critical alternative to postmodernity, arguing that various (mostly negative) “side-effects” of first or classic modernity add up to a qualitatively different situation in which the fundamental values of classic modernity are still respected, but have to be pursued with radically different social means and institutions under a cosmopolitan paradigm. Beck disputes “methodological nationalism” in social theory and analysis and instead advocates “methodological cosmopolitanism.” In a sense, compressed modernity is already based upon methodological cosmopolitanism since it directly acknowledges and reflects global processes and structures by which the nature of modernity in late-modernizing societies is critically determined. Therborn (2003) also shares this globalist conception of all modernities.
As discussed in detail later in Chapters 2 and 4, the multiple modernities thesis (Eisenstadt 2000) can be extended to the internal multiplicity of modernities across varying units or agencies of modernity in each national society such as individuals, families, secondary organizations, localities, as well as societal units. Such internal multiplicity on the one hand reflects the varying complexities of time–space (era–place) compression across different units of (compressed) modernity and, on the other hand, induces national modernity to take on an inherently complicated nature. Besides, the emphasis of Therborn’s (2003) entangled modernities thesis on “not
