Page 86 - Culture Society and Economy

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CAPITALISM ORGANIZED AND DISORGANIZED

‘economies of signs and space’ that have become pervasive in the wake of
organized capitalism do not just lead to increasing meaninglessness,
homogenization, abstraction, anomie and the destruction of the subject.
Another set of radically divergent processes is simultaneously taking place.
These processes may open up possibilities for the recasting of meaning in
work and in leisure, for the reconstitution of community and the particular,
for the reconstruction of a transmorgrified subjectivity, and for hetero-
geneization and complexity of space and of everyday life. 8

This statement has to be seen as a critique of the postmodern nihilism –
Baudrillard in particular – prevalent at that time. Lash and Urry deny
that we are lost wandering in a vale of meaninglessness or, that all that
was solid has melted. They see possibilities for ‘the reconstitution of
community’ arising out of ‘economies of signs and space’ which ironically
arise in the wake of the ‘disorganization’ of capitalism by the Thatcherite
neo-liberal onslaught and the accompanying technical changes in pro-
duction and information systems. These new flexible production systems
of the modern economy – portrayed as based on ‘flows’ and ‘processes’
rather than on ‘structures’ – are presented as pointing a ‘way out’ which
may rescue the age-old ‘subject’ and ‘self’ of the liberal bourgeois imagi-
nation from inner chaos and collapse.
In this sense, although they pose the issues differently, their work is
driven by a more profoundly Weberian problematic than is the case in the
work of Giddens. As was the case with Weber, the issue for them is how
to rescue this subject, this individual, imprisoned now not by an iron cage
but by postmodern chaos and ‘disorganization’ on a global as well as a
deeply personal scale – a chaos created by the latest mutation of the cap-
italist system itself. As is well known, Weber, although profoundly seized
by the bureaucratic transformation of capitalism, clung firmly to rational-
ism, refusing to give ground to the contemporary trends of modernism
and nihilism which had already developed strongly in his time, for example,
in the life and work of Stefan Georg and his circle. Yet Weber’s work
found no satisfactory solution to this fundamental problem – the collapse
of liberalism and the irrevocable bureaucratization of modern capitalism –
leaving one in a state of profoundly pessimistic resignation.
Here in the work of Lash and Urry, as in postmodernism, it is not the
threat to the subject posed by bureaucracy and monopoly capitalism which
is the focus. The decay has become more penetrating, the threat more
menacing than was the case with turn-of-the-century modernism. To con-
ceive of this crisis as a ‘risk’ to society is blissfully absurd since what is
gone forever is precisely the coherent personality capable of rationalistic
calculation in the classic bourgeois manner – those personalities whose

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