Page 89 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

But Lash and Urry, while pursuing their project to rescue the liberal
subject’s autonomy (‘reflexivity’), place themselves in a worse position
than Weber for arriving at a solution. In this connection it is important
to note that Lash and Urry struggle to maintain a critical stance against
communitarianism, in spite of the fact that they are obviously attracted
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to aspects of it, for example, in the work of Charles Taylor. Unlike some
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of Giddens’s work, they are by no means taken in by Heidegger whom
they correctly interpret as an ultra-conservative ideologist hostile in the
very fiber of his being to the liberal values which they hold dear. But this
leads them, in the end, back into deeper pessimism since they in fact
have little faith that communitarianism, especially in the Heideggerian
or, for that matter, Alasdair MacIntyre versions, can accommodate liberal
values of any kind, much less lead in a progressive direction. In a vitally
important passage which many may have missed, they wrote:

This rooted and Heideggerian phenomenon of ‘the we’, which is worlded
rather than global, seems to open up political spaces for the new commu-
nities, including the ‘new social movements’. In its departure from the
subject–object assumptions of the abstract ‘I’, it opens up space as well for
ecological thought. But the Heideggerian anti-discursive world of shared
meanings, background practices and building, dwelling and thinking is at
the same time and proximally the world of racism and ethnic hate. It is not,
pace Adorno and Bauman, only the ‘technology’ of bureaucratic reason
which was responsible for the Third Reich, but also these very rooted
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worlds of shared meanings, habits and shibboleths. .
Lash and Urry thus rightly reject the thinking of those in the anti-
globalization movement, such as Gray, who draw their anti-global inspi-
ration from a deeply held position of conservative Tory localism. So, in the
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end, although Lash and Urry intermittently pursue it, they themselves turn
out to be skeptical of their own technological communitarianism. It proves
to be of dubious value as a solution to the problem of rescuing liberal values.
Lash and Urry sense that the only solution to the preservation, indeed
extension of liberal values, and for an overcoming of the incoherence of
the self is the idea laid down from 1848 in The Communist Manifesto
wherein ‘the free development of each is the condition for the free develop-
ment of all’. But because they conceive of the current process of contem-
porary capitalism as deeply ‘disorganizing’, they fail to grasp the fact that
globalized monopoly capital, while laying the foundation for a new indi-
viduality, at the same time makes its realization impossible. It exploits
this enormous social and individual potential for the private interests
of a tiny minority of individuals. In their highly abstract formulations

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