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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

the final straw. Now not even modernist angst was sufficient to express
the depths of felt despair. Even modernism – especially modernism – was
said to be a ridiculously optimistic metanarrative. A much more complete
decay of subjectivity had occurred and therefore a more totalizing rejec-
tion of rationality was required. Even Nietzsche was insufficient – one
had to cast one’s eyes further back, with the assistance of the compleat
anti-rationalist – Martin Heidegger. 34
Thus, in the case of postmodernism, one is faced with a much more
deeply felt, thorough-going and rooted crisis of despair than reductionist
analyses of ‘reflection’ are willing to concede or able to grasp. As previ-
ously pointed out, the emphasis on ‘meaning’ in Lash and Urry’s work is
an expression of this fact. Nor is this crisis within the reach of such
blithely rationalistic concepts such as ‘reflexivity’ or ‘risk’. This crisis
cannot be ‘managed’ by some skilful modern adaptation of the ideas of
Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Durkheim, Weber, Marx, Freud
or of one or other high priest of the tried and trusty civil society tradi-
tion, national or global. Althusser is dead. Foucault, with his quaintly
inverted French rationalism, seems hopelessly old-fashioned. Nothing
seems meaningful anymore, not even the emptiness of parody, since even
parody assumes a coherent subject. All one can do is nurse one’s fatally
wounded subjectivity. The point therefore is that those who reject the
reductionist and mechanical materialist explanations of modernism and
postmodernism have no confidence whatsoever in such rationalistic nos-
trums. To them this is an impasse which can only be suffered, never
resolved. In this sense, for all their idealism, scholars such as Featherstone,
in the end, have a deeper grasp of the intractability of the pitiless crisis
which monopoly capitalism has created both for the individual and for
global society as a whole.
This leads us to consider what I would characterize as Lash and Urry’s
rootedness in the notion of the nation. This, to be sure, is not a matter of
nationalism or even of the ‘Englishness’ of Christopher Hill, or, of a
writer such as E. P. Thompson for that matter, or of the ‘Welshness’ of
Raymond Williams. On the contrary, Lash and Urry’s work is explicitly
comparative and seeks to go beyond the international to a truly suprana-
tional global. Yet their work takes as its unit of analysis the modern devel-
oped nation–state – be it Britain, Germany, Sweden, Japan, France or the
United States. One can go further – their perspective remains deeply
national (not nationalistic) in so far as an important source of their sense
of the ‘disorganizing’ effect of contemporary global capitalism is its erosion
of the power of the nation–state and its ability to independently regulate
its economic, political and cultural affairs. As was the case with the

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