Page 245 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

THE MEANING OF NEW TIMES 233

no longer operates along one, singular line or path of development.
Modern technology, far from having a fixed path, is open to constant
renegotiation and re-articulation. ‘Planning’, in this new technological
environment, has less to do with absolute predictability and everything to
do with instituting a’regime’ out of which a plurality of outcomes will
emerge. One, so to speak, plans for contingency. This mode of thinking
signals the end of a certain kind of deterministic rationality.
Or consider the proliferation of models and styles, the increased product
differentiation, which characterizes ‘post-Fordist’ production. We can see
mirrored there wider processes of cultural diversity and differentiation,
related to the multiplication of social worlds and social ‘logics’ typical of
modern life in the West.
There has been an enormous expansion of ‘civil society’, related to the
diversification of social worlds in which men and women now operate. At
present, most people only relate to these worlds through the medium of
consumption. But, increasingly we are coming to understand that to
maintain these worlds at an advanced level requires forms of collective
consumption far beyond the restricted logic of the market. Furthermore,
each of these worlds also has its own codes of behaviour, its ‘scenes’ and
‘economies’ and (don’t knock it) its ‘pleasures’. These already allow those
individuals who have some access to them some space in which to reassert
a measure of choice and control over everyday life, and to ‘play’ with its
more expressive dimensions. This ‘pluralization’ of social life expands the
positionalities and identities available to ordinary people (at least in the
industrialized world) in their everyday working, social, familial and sexual
lives. Such opportunities need to be more, not less, widely available across
the globe, and in ways not limited by private appropriation.
This shift of time and activity towards ‘civil society’ has implications for
our thinking about the individual’s rights and responsibilities, about new
forms of citizenship and about ways of ordering and regulating society
other than through the all-encompassing state. They imply a ‘socialism’
committed to, rather than scared of, diversity and difference.
Of course, ‘civil society’ is no ideal realm of pure freedom. Its micro-
worlds include the multiplication of points of power and conflict—and
thus exploitation, oppression and marginalization. More and more of our
everyday lives are caught up in these forms of power, and their lines of
intersection. Far from there being no resistance to the system, there has
been a proliferation of new points of antagonism, new social movements of
resistance organized around them—and, consequently, a generalization of
‘politics’ to spheres which hitherto the left assumed to be apolitical: a
politics of the family, of health, of food, of sexuality, of the body. What we
lack is any overall map of how these power relations connect and of their
resistances. Perhaps there isn’t, in that sense, one ‘power game’ at all, more