Page 93 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

conclude their introduction to Economies of Signs and Space with the
following gloomy prognostication which recalls some of their earlier
formulations in End of Organized Capitalism:

Disorganized capitalism disorganizes everything. Nothing is fixed, given,
and certain, while everything rests upon much greater knowledge and
information, on institutionalized reflexivity. People are increasingly knowl-
edgeable about just how little they do know. Such increasingly uncontrolled
economies of signs and space are inconceivable without extraordinarily
complex and ever-developing forms of information, knowledge and
aesthetic judgments. The unintended consequences of reflexivity – that is,
the effect of reflexive agency on increasingly contingent structure – often
lead to yet further disorganization. 24

In other words, the crisis persists, perhaps on an even more daunting and
thoroughgoing basis – indeed, aggravated by the rise of ‘disorganized’
capitalism.
Lash and Urry rightly sense that, indeed, the overall direction of
world economic and social development is laying the only possible foun-
dation for the re-constitution of the coherence of the liberal subject
through the growth of a new international division of labor. They sense,
in other words, the salient paradox of our age – that individuality today
can only have the scope and depth which it has because it is based on an
immense sociality. They sense the limitations in the traditional liberal
concept of individuality as based on the autonomy of the subject from social
ties (conceived of as ‘constraints’) in the sense of the ‘negative’ liberty of
25
Isaiah Berlin, as Lukes points out. But they do not see how they can go
beyond this concept and retain their liberal values. They thus fail to grasp
that, in contrast to the liberal bourgeois conceptions of individuality –
associated with one brand of nineteenth-century liberalism – modern indi-
viduality is unique precisely because of the extensive social relations on
which it is founded and on which it depends.
This adherence to a notion of individuality which derives from one
particular historical experience of liberal bourgeois economy and society
and which has certainly not been tenable since the beginning of the
twentieth century, if not earlier, is at the heart of their difficulty. Indeed,
Lukes points out that this view represents only one particular part of the
liberal tradition – mainly that derived from the British experience. There
is an equally important tradition associated with Rousseau which is pre-
occupied with the issue of the connection between individuality and
sociality – with the social basis of individuality. This line of reasoning is
embodied in Marx’s outlook – not only in his earliest writings but right

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