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174 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
contemporary form, promotes individuation and difference, and it is this
right to individuation and difference which is left over as the last viable
universal value that is able to provide a normativity in contemporary life.
Promoting Foucault’s return to the question of the subject in his later
work, Touraine turns attention away from a sociology of system and actor
to that of the subject: ‘The recognition of each person’s right and capacity
to become a subject is a universalistic value; as is the right to combine a
commonly shared scientific or technological rationality and a particular
cultural identity’ (136).
Touraine’s turn to a social theory of the subject through individuation,
which he claims is necessitated by the global market’s decomposition of
social norms, shares much ground with the work of Jean-Luc Nancy in
The Inoperative Community (1991) and Georgio Agamben in The Coming
Community (1993). In these texts a philosophical rethinking of community
is attempted in ways which are more suited to the fragmentations of
modernity that are evident today. According to Agamben and Nancy, we
can no longer speak of a transcendent principle or context of community
other than the fact that subjects must be self-active in attributing any kind
of global significance to their experience. To impose and presuppose com-
munity in the name of the transcendent is to disregard it since, as Nancy
(1991: xxxviii) puts it, community cannot be presupposed and the think-
ing of community as essence is the closing off of the political. Community
is realized in the very retreat from an organizing principle, the refusal of
a universalizing essence.
Like Nancy and Agamben, Touraine (1998) does not appeal to a uni-
versalist discourse: ‘while dominated groups used to refer to a meta-
social principle – God, reason, history or the nation – in order to challenge
the dominant group’s power, today the defence of the subject invokes no
higher principle and does not seek to obtain power’ (138). Instead, for
Touraine, the subject only struggles against the (now global) economic
forces which are constantly threatening a reduction of being ‘to a series of
life experiences, resembling the television programmes one sees when
one zaps from channel to channel’ (136), while ‘community’ no longer has
internal conditions but is formed and acts through strategies akin to
Rose’s account of governmentality.

The rise of global communities of practice

The governmentality perspective, which proposes that discursive strate-
gies become increasingly important for the maintenance of nation-state
forms of society, identifies globalization as the basis of the breakdown
between system and actor. Globalization is seen to erode the middle-level
agencies of social integration which were once provided by technocratic
society. 3