Page 158 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

In the realm of uncertainty: the global village and capitalist postmodernity 149
e.g., Ahmed 1992). In other words, at the heart of capitalist postmodernity is an extreme
contradiction: on the one hand, its very operation depends on encouraging infinite
semiosis, but, on the other hand, like every systemic order, it cannot let infinite semiosis
go totally unchecked.
So, the capitalist world-system today is not a single, undifferentiated, all-
encompassing whole, but a fractured one, in which forces of order and incorporation (e.g.
those of globalization, unification and ‘Westernization’) are always undercut (though not
necessarily subverted) by forces of chaos and fragmentation (e.g. localization,
diversification and ‘indigenization’). In this world-system there are still dominant forces
(it would be ludicrous to deny this), although there is never a guarantee in advance that
their attempts to impose order—which is what the dominant will always do—will be
successful: think only of former President Bush’s failure to create a ‘New World
Order’—now a quaint idea! Nor does relative failure to impose order mean that the
dominant are any less powerful; on the contrary: it only means that the effectivity of their
resources and forms of exercise of power is uncertain. Stronger still, it is precisely
because of this uncertainty that order is consciously conceived as a task, a problem, an
obsession; a matter of design, management, engineering, policy (Bauman 1991:6). In this
sense, the very insecurity of order in capitalist postmodernity—contradictorily based as it
is on both fixing and unfixing meanings and identities, both the delimitation and the
instrumental expansion of the social—only encourages the dominant to feverishly step up
both the intensity and the range of their ordering practices. But the work will never be
done: in the capitalist world-system the moment of absolute order will never come. Even
worse, precisely because global capitalism becomes ever more totalizing, the task of
order making will become ever more grandiose and complex, the suturing of the
fragments of the system into a totality an ever more unfinishable, Sisyphean labour. As
Zygmunt Bauman puts it, ‘[p]roblems are created by problem-solving, new areas of chaos
are generated by ordering activity’ (1991:14). For one thing, this is how we can interpret
the ceaseless search for better measurement methods and technologies in the ratings
industry, or the frantic, neverending quest for new advertising and marketing strategies to
capture the elusive consumer.
But if the forces of order are continuously deployed without ever achieving complete
order (ultimate closure, a finite and finished totality, totalized structure), then the forces
of chaos are also continuously impinging on the system without ever resulting in total
chaos (inexhaustible openness, unbounded infinitude, unfettered process). Instead,
capitalist postmodernity is an orderly disorder, or disorderly order, whose hegemony rests
on the setting of structural limits, themselves precarious, to the possibilities of random
excess. It is within these limits that ‘resistance’ to the dominant takes place (except in the
rare situations of ‘revolutions’, which are temporary moments of limitlessness). In
Wallerstein’s words:

Universalism [of capitalist modernity] is a ‘gift’ of the powerful to the
weak which confronts the latter with a double bind: to refuse the gift is to
lose; to accept the gift is to lose. The only plausible reaction of the weak
is neither to refuse nor to accept, or both to refuse and to accept—in short,
the path of the seemingly irrational zigzags (both cultural and political) of