Page 108 - Cultural Theory

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••• Giddens and Cultural Analysis •••

its agencies and are no longer matters of routine resort for private or public bodies.
Armies, police forces, and prisons are mechanisms of social control that operate
through the enhanced capacities for coercion that are made possible by the formal
and rational organization of violence that Giddens refers to as the ‘industrialization’
of force and warfare. Surveillance and militarism, therefore, operate closely together,
and it is their specific combination, as nation–states, that defines the political char-
acteristics of modernity.
The building of an autonomous capitalist economy through commodification and
industrialism was not possible without the parallel separation of an autonomous
nation–state through which populations could be pacified and administered.
Modern ‘societies’ are largely co-existent with the boundaries of nation–states. It is
within the boundaries of nation–state societies that economic relations, legal insti-
tutions, and forms of communication and community are concentrated. Modern
societies have been organized around class politics, whereby the ideological hege-
mony of a dominant class is countered by politically organized labour movements
that attempt to defend and protect the position of workers at their place of work and,
through the formation of socialist and leftist political parties, to influence the exer-
cise of state power and build ‘social democratic’ reforms. Central to this is the
demand for civil rights and democracy that Marshall saw as a central feature of mod-
ern citizenship (Marshall, 1949).
Although there is a tendency for ‘national’ societies and economies to coincide
with the boundaries of nation–states, ‘international’ linkages have always been
important. Nation–states have more tightly defined and more strongly defended
boundaries than pre-modern states, and they are elements in inter-state systems that
are marked by endemic international conflict and warfare. Similarly, capitalist
economies are involved in international chains of trade and investment that embed
them in a ‘world system’ of the kind described by Wallerstein (1974; 1980; 1989).
From the middle of the nineteenth century until well into the twentieth century, this
network of international economic relations centred on the City of London and its
myriad banking and merchant enterprises (Giddens, 1984: 319–24, citing Ingham,
1984).
Rationalization also makes itself felt in the cultural lifeworld. Communal relations
are disembedded from local contexts and cast in more universal, abstract forms.
Localities are no longer experienced as bounded and self-contained contexts for
action, and people’s interactions are no longer limited to direct face-to-face relations.
People associate with one another not through the gemeinschaftslich bonds of the
traditional community, but in more abstract societal forms. Individuals can now
engage in ‘action at a distance’, thanks to the techniques of transportation and com-
munication that are made possible by modern science and technology and that are
organized by capitalist enterprises and nation–states. The first breaks with the all-
pervasiveness of direct face-to-face encounters had occurred with the invention of
writing and printing, and the gradual spread of literacy. The introduction of postal
services and then telegraphs and telephones transformed the material basis of these
systems of communication and made it possible for communication to take place

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