Post Modernization Summary:

 

Where economies of signs and space function as flows the result is individuation.

 

Either this occurs through the emptying out of the shared meanings of `the we', as the self comes up against an even faster circulation of goods, images, money, ideas and other selves.

 

Or economies of signs and space as flows are part and parcel of the post-material, an informational mode of power/knowledge in which the discourses of the ideoscape and mediascape interpellate selves previously rooted in shared meanings and background practices, and convert these selves into `I's through the process of individuation, normalization and atomization.

 

Where economies of signs and space function instead as information and communication structures, the outcome is a less unhappy mode of individualization - that of reflexivity in which `the I' is empowered to take control in regard to the rules and resources of social structure as well as the monitoring of his or her own life narrative.

 

This invention of community or reinvention of self involved in decisions to join new (invented) communities involves aesthetic (hermeneutic) reflexivity. Aesthetic (hermeneutic) reflexivity means making choices about and/or innovating background assumptions and- shared practices upon whose bases cognitive and normative reflection is founded.

 

`The we' at issue is not just a phenomenon of ethnic identity and new communitarian social movements but is also integrally involved in worklife, consumption and hence the class structure.

 

Thus `reflexive production' is only comprehensible in Germany and Japan in terms of information structures rooted in the `we'. That is, as we pointed out in chapter 4, the `I' of market governance of Anglo-American production systems has fostered low trust and opportunism, and hindered information flow and knowledge acquisition on the shopfloor.

 

 Market governance of labour markets has led in the Anglo-Saxon world to strategic assumptions where capital has opportunistically exploited collectively organized labour when labourmarkets are loose and `labour has exploited capital' when labour-markets have been tight.

 

The outcome of this, in the UK and the USA, was the ultimate revenge of capital on labour and the decimation of union density in the 1980s. The corporatist institutionalization of trust between capital and labour in Germany underlay faster growth and a continued strong presence of unions.

 

It has further been irrational for the atomized `I' of the Anglo-American capitalist entrepreneurs to invest in training, in the knowledge that utilitarian labour-power will only go and work for another firm after he or she is trained. On the other hand, this sort of investment is rational for the `institutionalized we' (as embodied in employers' associations, chambers of commerce and underwritten by the technical colleges) of German capitalists as a group. It is also rational for the individual Japanese firm in so far as its obligational contracting with workers, who work `in' rather than `for' the firm, also constitutes an institutionalized `we'. For them the trust relations between investors and the firm (as well as workers - either as individuals or through works' councils) facilitate information flow to all regions of production systems.

 

What then are the implications for changing class structure of our analyses of these dialectics between agency and structure, between the `I' and the `we'?

 

Marx of course famously and accurately posited that in industrial capitalism class-in-itself or class structure would be more or less determinant of class-for-itself or class consciousness. It has been common for analysts of post-industrialism, of reflexive modernity, to speak of the decline of importance of class structure or consciousness in voting behaviour, the proclivity to join unions, the taking on of a working-class lifestyle and the like. The analyses in this book take this perhaps a step further and suggest an inversion of the Marxist thesis; they suggest that in informationalized and reflexive modernity it is consciousness or reflexivity which is determinant of class structure. This provisional argument can be seen in four ways.

 

First, access to information and communication networks, as conditions of reflexivity, is a crucial determinant of class position.

 

The `wild zones' of very sparse lines, flows and networks tend to be where the underclasses, or at least the bottom third, of the `two-thirds societies' are found. Wild Zones are inner cities, ghettoes, the underdeveloped world, Africa, etc.

 

That is, place in the `mode of information' rather than in the mode of production is the crucial factor in class position. Similarly the unusually densely networked centres of the global cities tend to be where the top fractions, in the corporation headquarters, business and finance and legal services, of today's new informational bourgeoisie are primarily located.

 

Second, where reflexivity is found will determine the shape of class structure. Thus where information structures favour reflexive production through their articulation with production systems - in Germany and Japan, industry is competitive and there is a proportionally quite large (industrial) working class. The deficit of reflexivity in production in the UK and USA has via loss in competitiveness led to a class structure in which the rump of a working class is now quite small.

Concomitantly the persistence of reflexive consumption in the market-driven AngloAmerican world will mean a much larger advanced consumer services sector, including many professionals employed in the expert systems upon which reflexive and individualized consumers are dependent. This will be part of a `swollen' professional middle class in the Anglo-American world by comparison with corporatist Germany and Japan.

 

Third, reflexive production in corporatist countries (Germany, Japan) will continue largely to mean the application of information technology in machine building, while in neo-liberal countries (USA, UK, France) it involves working in the informational sectors themselves. The corporatist countries will continue to have a large `middle mass', of which the highly skilled working class makes up a large part.

 

Neo-liberal nations have a much smaller middle mass - indeed a sizeable portion of the working class proper will work in exporting say Japanese products from inwards investing firms in Britain. Such nations will have exacerbated class polarization of the university-educated information and advanced service sector professionals and a large number of `junk jobs' in the downgraded services and manufacturing sectors at the bottom end of the social stratification ladder. This will itself be further exacerbated by expected increases in immigration, by the so-called `browning' of the USA and western Europe.

 

Disorganized capitalism is an epoch in which various processes and flows have transformed this pattern of a dozen or so organized capitalist societies constituting the core within the north Atlantic rim. The processes and flows which have ushered in such a disorganized capitalism include the following:

the flowing of capital and technologies to 170 or so individual `self-governing' capitalist countries each concerned to defend `its' territory;

 time-space compression in financial markets and the development of a system of global cities;

 the growth in importance of internationalized producer services;

 the generalization of risks which know no national boundaries and of the fear of such risks;

 the putative globalizing of culture and communication structures partly breaking free of particular territories;

 the proliferation of forms of reflexivity, individual and institutionalized, cognitive and especially aesthetic;

 huge increases of personal mobility across the globe, of tourists, migrants and refugees;

 the development of a service class with cosmopolitan tastes especially for endlessly `fashionable' consumer services provided by one or other category of migrant;

 the declining effectivity and legitimacy of nation-states which are unable to control such disorganized capitalist flows;

 and the emergence of `neo-worlds', the kinds of socially and regionally re-engineered cultural spaces (housing tracts, malls, themeparks, zoos, museums, aquariums) which are the typical homelands for cosmopolitan postmodern individuals (see Luke 1992 on the last; examples include the art world, the financial world, the drug world, the advertising world, as well as the academic world parodied in Lodge 1983). Luke summarizes the shifts involved: from place to flow, from spaces to streams, from organized hierarchies to disorganization (1992).

 

Social classes, which are conventionally taken as focussed around place, national spaces and organized hierarchies, are one of the victims of such disorganization. They are simultaneously localized and globalized, transformed by the flows of people, images and information. Classes in the sense of hierarchically organized national entities are rapidly disssolving, at the very same time that social and spatial inequalities rapidly increase.

What then are the consequences of such forms of disorganization for social and political life at the turn of the millennium? Do the flows of social life provide such rich possibilities that apocalyptic terrors of the future are unjustified and inappropriate?

 

The marriage of the computer and the telecommunications revolution results in movements of information at the speed of light and to enormous audiences, and this might be thought to decentralize both knowledge and power and to enable `new sociations' to develop away from the `traditional' institutions of social life (see Hetherington 1990). Wriston argues how:

 

an international communications system, incorporating technologies from mobile telephones to communication satellites, deprives governments of the ability to keep secrets from the world, or from their own people, [hence] power

changes hands [since] the world is watching, and the power of world opinion is

transmitted and focussed and reported by the telecom network. (1992: 575-6)

 

The `de-traditionalization' of the British monarchy is perhaps the clearest example of this. Another instance is the way in which, prior to the Gulf War, Kuwait was transformed from a place in space to be annexed by Iraq into a flow as its assets were transformed into streams of electronic communication on the screens of the world's financial institutions (see Luke 1992).

 

Or alternatively will these flows create nightmare scenarios, of increasingly extensive `wild zones' consisting of

 

collapsing empires (USSR),

 

 imploding nation-states (Yugoslavia),

 

ungovernable First World cities (Los Angeles),

 

tracts of desertification (southeast Africa) and countries dominated by narco-capitalism (Colombia; see Luke 1992).

 

Such wild zones are characterized by a collapsing (or collapsed) civil society, a weakly developed `civilizing process', and flight to `tame zones' for those that are able to escape. Such tame zones are areas of economic, political and cultural security, often with strong boundaries separating them off from the wild zones of disorganized capitalism (see Luke 1992; as well as chapter 6 above).

 

Such divisions can of course be seen within local areas where electronic surveillance techniques keep the one-thirds and the two-thirds societies apart.

 

So there are quite different possibilities envisaged here, of a kind of disorganized decentralization, or an apocalypse now; of a generally benign redistribution of information, knowledge and power, or a terrifying crisis of ungovernability spreading over significant parts of the globe. There are many aspects of these contrasting visions. We will note three, those focussed around information, the state and place.

The growth of information may be seen as liberating or as repressive. On the one hand, the use of new forms of information technology may facilitate the development of small communitarian public spheres. A new logic of place and practical will-formation could develop on the basis of decentralized data banks, interactive communication systems and community-based mufti-media centres (see Castells 1989: 352). New sociations can generate new skills and new loci of power away from the ; traditional institutions of class, family, education, politics, monarchy and so on.

 

Or on the other hand, information technology can lead to new forms of control and erode the critical crafts of reading and writing. What Agger terms `fast capitalism' undermines the power of the book and a kind of power/knowledge disfunction may develop in which even moral and practical knowledge is transformed into cognitive and technical systems which normalize and regulate what was previously private (including the private and critical activity of book reading: see Agger 1989; Webster and Robins 1989: 341). A visual culture is publicly controllable in a way in which a literary culture is not.

 

It has been presumed in the past two centuries in the `West' that societies are coterminous with nation-states and that a democratic state comprises a community which governs itself and determines its own future (Held 1991, 1993).

 

The democratic state presupposed a `national community of fate'. Various recent transformations have rendered such a community (or society) as no longer sovereign (see on the following Appadurai 1990 Crook et al 1992; Held 1991; Jacques 1990; Jessop 1992; Keohane 1984; Sklair 1990).

 

These transformations include, first, the development of transnational practices which transcend individual nation-states through generating immense flows of capital, money, goods, services, people, information, technologies, policies, ideas, images and regulations. Such transnational practices or flows do not simply derive from single countries, nor even from one particular geographical area. Such economic, political and cultural practices are relatively independent of each individual nation-state.

 

Second, these practices do not of course originate from all parts of the world equally. Globalization is really advanced capitalist globalization, since a hegemonic role is played by the north Atlantic rim countries and Japan in the development of these non-national transnational practices. Such transnational practices depend upon particular localized sites for their development and influence (Hollywood, LA, Monterey Park, City of Industry, City of London).

 

Third, national governments are increasingly unable to control crossborder flows generated by these transnational practices. Because of global interdependence there is a decrease in the effectiveness of policy instruments which would enable states to control activities which occur within their borders.

 

The US/Mexico border is a fiction.  In reality the border is a dam that collects vast amounts of Mexican workers on the Mexican side and lets them through as the US Economy needs them.

 

The Border Patrol is simply an illusion of the successful politics of failed border policies and is there for political theatre and to comfort the nativist middle and working classes in the US.

 

Territories are less obviously governed by nation-states, which have tended to reduce the range and type of activities undertaken There has been a marked `hollowing' out of the state.

 

Fourth, within such a highly interconnected global order, many of the traditional domains of state activity cannot be fulfilled without international collaboration. This involves dealing both bilaterally with other states and more importantly with transnational practices.

 

Accordingly states have had to increase the level of their political integration with other states in order to offset the destabilizing consequences of global interconnectedness. Examples include GATT, the IMF, the World Bank, the OAS, the EC and OPEC.

 

Fifth, a putative pattern of global governance has developed, with transnational bureaucracies, international representative organizations and very many international agencies.

 

The rights and obligations, powers and capacities of states have been redefined. The state's capacities have been both curtailed and expanded, allowing it to continue to perform a range of functions, which cannot be sustained any longer in isolation from global or regional relations and processes' (1991: 208).

 

Sixth, as a result a range of different kinds of socio-spatial entities are emerging which are not nation-state societies of the north Atlantic sort. There are societies which are not coterminous with the nation-state; there are nation-states that are barely societies; and there are societies that are not states in the `conventional' sense.

 

No longer are nation-states obvious and legitimate sources of authority over civil society. In the future many different kinds of socio-spatial grouping will emerge which will not fit into the nation-state society framework. And of course away from the north Atlantic rim, the nation-state model has never been dominant.

 

Finally, the Westphalian model of democracy, that the world consists of and is divided into sovereign states with no superior authority, is becoming outmoded and may be replaced with a model of cosmopolitan democracy (see Held 1993). In this the basic building blocks will be groups and associations, produced by a global order' consisting of multiple and overlapping networks of power, and which have access to a cosmopolitan civil society.

 

These are clearly a wide-ranging set of transformations, produced by various global flows. Luard has gone on to suggest that if there are no longer coherent national societies then an `international society' is coming into existence (1990). Two processes have combined to reduce the differences between `societies' and such an `international society'. First, contemporary `societies' are just so diverse in terms of beliefs, conditions, interests and the ways of life found within them, that it is hard to say that they have any common characteristics. Second, there is the apparent reduction in `size' of international society through `time-space compression' of various flows, which greatly enhances people's interconnectedness and their consciousness of this interconnectedness.

 

Such an international society is characterized by the following features:

 

that power is both dispersed yet where found is highly concentrated;

 

that there are relatively few formal relationships between individuals so that the authority exercised by international organizations remains fairly weak and unpredictable;

 

that there is an undeveloped sense of solidarity especially that fostered visa-vis others;

 

that there are few international organizations to which people feel allegiance or loyalty;

 

and that there is little consensus about the society and how it may develop.

 

These features would also of course characterize many `national' societies, such as the contemporary USA or the former USSR. What is important to note is that it is increasingly difficult to identify clearly identifiable and discrete societies, that some hybrid forms of society which are neither national nor global are developing, and that there is an increasing interconnectedness of societies worldwide which render as outdated certain theories of democratic rights.

 

Likewise the potential evolution of the state can be viewed positively or negatively. The modernist nation-state, which resulted in the achievements of both liberal and social democracy and of the `holocaust', is being `hollowed out' (as we saw in the preceding chapter; see Jessop 1992; Bauman 1989). Its powers are being delegated upwards to supraregional or international bodies, downwards to regional or local states or to the private sector, inwards to alternative elements controlling the means of physical coercion, and outwards to relatively autonomous cross-national alliances.

 

Such a hollowed-out state has its powers weakened at the same time that its legitimacy is challenged. This occurs partly because of its shortcomings in the face of the flows previously discussed and especially its inability to control the information flows within its national boundaries, and partly because it has difficulty in justifying its actions as being in accordance with the apparently omnipotent `market' (see Ohmae 1990).

 

So states are faced by a tremendous postmodern complexity.

 

Partly this might be seen positively, as indicating the demise of the kinds of bureaucratically organized states which have waged wars, incarcerated citizens and administered large populations for most of this century.

 

The demise of the nation state might favour the proliferation of local and regional states which could more effectively respond to the wishes of its citizens, a much more localist and pluralist democracy (see Held 1993). Or such developments might be viewed as reinforcing a nightmarish disfunction.

 

The absence of a national context for policy will result in enormous social and spatial inequalities, of ungovernable wild zones next to highly disciplined tame zones, where each reinforces the other, and where there is no strong national authority able to impose more uniform civilized conditions of existence.

 

The absence of national social classes means that there is little to counter such disorganization. At the same time the cosmopolitan participants in various neoworlds can speed between the tame zones leaving other travellers to make out in the wild zones, perhaps encountering each other in `empty meeting grounds' (see MacCannell 1992).

 

Finally, flows impact most significantly on places. How can spatial meanings be attached to or develop within an experience in which `the space of flows . . . supersedes the space of places'? (Henderson and Castells 1987:7; and see Watts 1992). Do places vanish, rendered invisible by the overwhelming rush of capital, images, ideas, technologies and people? Does not this intense mobility of objects and subjects produce placelessness, where only the most superficial of differences stand out against the onward rush of flows? Meyrowitz suggests that many people:

no longer seem to `know their place' because the traditionally interlocking components of `place' have been split apart by electronic media . . . Our world may suddenly seem senseless to many people because, for the first time in modern history, it is relatively placeless. (1985: 309)

 

Alternatively it may be argued these flows are themselves organized, they are not literally undiscriminating, and so places attract and they repel.