Page 87 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

self-interested interactions sustained the traditional Hobbes–Locke–Adam
Smith civil society order. In the case of postmodernism, late twentieth-
century subjectivity is no longer intact and can no longer be healed by
art or psychoanalysis, least of all by a politics of rationalistic calcula-
tions of the Weberian or Giddens sort. In Lash and Urry the focus is
on this corrosion of the very soul. It is the inner psychological disorien-
tation produced by late twentieth-century capitalism which preoccupies
these scholars. This aspect of Lash and Urry’s analysis leads one to
recall Lukács’s commentary on the work of Thomas Mann and the
famous ‘Schopenhauerian attitude’ of Thomas Buddenbrooks or Gustave
von Aschenbach – inner psychological collapse masked by outward
fastidiousness – the so-called ‘ethic of composure’ – a parody of the once
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healthy Protestant ethic, now decaying from within. Except that in post-
modernism and, implicitly in the work of Lash and Urry (though not of
Giddens), the process of fatal psychological decay has gone much further
than anything Tonio Kröger or Hans Castorp could have dreamt of.
Hence also the great emphasis on ‘meaning’ and on ‘the aesthetic’ in the
work of Lash and Urry since it is this loss of inner coherence of the self
which seizes them most. 10
In keeping with this focus on the inner life and their sense of the acute-
ness of the crisis, Lash and Urry argue – apparently differently from Weber
and Lukács – that it is the very collapse of ‘organization’ in late twentieth-
century capitalism that shatters possibilities for individual rationality. One
writes ‘apparently’ because this seems the very opposite of the Weberian
thesis that the weakening of bureaucratic organization, while no longer fea-
sible for technical reasons, were it to occur, would open up fresh spaces for
individual freedom. But this is only a surface difference because the crisis
of the liberal bourgeois subject has gone much further since the days of
Weber: the crisis now is from within. The proliferation of human-created
‘risk’ on a massive and all-enveloping scale is not seen here as an external
threat, as it generally is in the work of Giddens and Beck. The point for
Lash and Urry is that this threat is deeper, it has penetrated to the core of
the modern personality. It is this worm within which is the source of mod-
ernist and postmodernist angst and explains its potency. At the same time,
the technical innovations of flexible specialization which follow and super-
sede this disorganization in their later work are celebrated as offering a
new opportunity for the reconstitution of the self.
But although the threat to subjectivity is different from that perceived
by Weber – more inward, more subjective and therefore more acute and
intense – the goal of Lash and Urry is, broadly speaking, the same. The aim
is to recover some ground for liberal social and cultural life, for ‘reflexivity’

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