Page 91 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

added their notion that capitalism today is undergoing a fundamental
disorganization, then it becomes practically impossible for them to grasp
the substance of contemporary social, economic and political processes
and to formulate a credible way out.
The hope expressed by Lash and Urry is that the new ‘information-rich
production systems’ introduced especially in the United States following
the disorganizing neo-liberal reforms will also have an individualizing
and liberating effect. This aspect of the argument in Economies of Signs
and Space is explicitly different from that presented in End of Organized
Capitalism. In their earlier work, Lash and Urry explicitly characterized
the changes wrought by flexible production systems – only then reaching
their full potential – as ‘an integral part of the disorganization of con-
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temporary capitalist societies.’ But in Economies of Signs and Space Lash
and Urry reject their earlier formulation as too one-sided – ‘because of
an overly structuralist conception of social process’. 20 What this point
refers to is the conception of flexible production and the global economy
as based on ‘flows’ rather than on structure – a weakness in their argument
to which I shall return. In Economies of Signs and Space also there is an
emphasis not only on the emergence of flexible production systems but
on the role of the new information industries, and this emphasis was not
present in their first work and points forward to the work of Castells’. 21
They now take the opportunity to argue that these production systems
require a better educated and more autonomous worker with indepen-
dent access to information on a variety of subjects. Thus, a new kind of
citizenry will arise who will be able to circumvent and challenge the
knowledge power of bureaucratic experts. As a result of this greater indi-
viduation of those now caught up in the extension of market relations and
the spread of technology, citizens will now exercise greater individual
judgment – greater ‘reflexivity’. Thus the unintended consequence of
marketization and the spread of technology, flexible production systems
and new global flows of capital – ‘disorganized capitalism’ – will be that
a more informed, critical and demanding citizenry will arise and this can
only mean greater democracy and accountability. They wrote:

This growing reflexivity is in the first instance part and parcel of a radical
enhancement in late modernity of individuation. That is there is an ongoing
process of de-traditionalization in which social agents are increasingly ‘set
free’ from the heteronomous control or monitoring of social structures in
order to be self-monitoring or self-reflexive. This accelerating individualiza-
tion process is a process in which agency is set free from structure, a
process in which, further, it is structural change itself in modernization that
so to speak forces agency to take on powers that heretofore lay in social
structures themselves. 22

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