Page 95 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

through in the light of contemporary developments, these are far from
being ‘two mutually irreconcilable ideologies’ – a kind of structuralist
either–or. 31
The point is to find a way for individuals to gain control over this new
global-social which offers possibilities for a new individuality, on a scale
and of a scope unthinkable to some theorists of liberalism such as, for
example, Locke. Then the autonomy of the individual will not be con-
fined to his or her private life. In combination with the autonomy of
other individuals, it will be extended to the public sphere. It is not the
mutual enmeshing in a global social network of social and economic rela-
tionships per se which threatens individuality. It is the absence of demo-
cratic control over this immense system at its center and the fact that it
remains in the hands of a small minority of privileged individuals and
corporations. In this sense the social crisis is not just a crisis for collec-
tivities of people. The social crisis is simultaneously the root of the crisis
of individual subjectivity as well.
Looked at from this point of view, modern individuality cannot flour-
ish without the individual gaining a control over the determining social
forces which she or he obviously does not possess today. Gaining control
over these immense global social, economic and political forces on which
the individual is inescapably dependent and to which he or she makes his
or her contribution is not for the purpose of asserting some new form of
totalitarian collectivism. On the contrary, the recovery of control over the
social is a sine qua non of rehabilitating the self and an indispensable pre-
condition for securing modern individuality and for restoring coherence
to the subject, but on a broad social basis. The fundamental question, of
course, is how to accomplish this in a democratic manner – both proce-
durally and in terms of substantive outcomes. We have no choice but to
begin this process and the only way to begin is by an honest admission
that all Marxist attempts to achieve social emancipation so far – in par-
ticular the Stalinist-inspired ones – have not only failed dismally: they have
had disastrously inhumane consequences which are the very opposite of
the approach which needs to be taken.
The specific notion of subjectivity to which Lash and Urry hold is also
connected to their reductionist account of the roots of modernism and
postmodernism which Featherstone and others have shown to be unten-
able. This is the line of analysis which explains the spread of postmod-
32
ernism directly as a ‘reflection’ of the development of flexible production
systems. In End of Organized Capitalism Lash and Urry qualify their
analysis by insisting ‘that we are not arguing that there is any one-to-one,
reductionist state of affairs in which postmodernist culture is somehow

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