Page 174 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

POST-HUMANISM

time (JIT) stock management, the use of information technology to manage variable
production runs and the large-scale sub-contracting out of domains of
manufacture to horizontally related ‘independent’ companies.
Post-Fordism involves a re-organization of the labour process that includes multi- 151
skilling and the elimination of rigid job demarcation lines to create a more
horizontally organized workforce. For example, quality control shifts from post-
production testing into the very process of manufacturing. This demands that the
labour force take greater responsibility for quality and ‘continuous improvement’
as one of their central tasks. In theory, the expensive labour training required for
multi-skilling leads companies to offer the core workforce greater long-term job
security rather than waste their investment through high worker turnover. However,
even if this is the case for the core workforce, about which there is considerable
doubt, such privileges do not extend to the large periphery workforce upon which
post-Fordism depends.
The concept of post-Fordism does not just refer to the working practices of
flexible specialization but also to a new ‘regime of accumulation’ and an associated
mode of social and political regulation. That is, a stabilizing of the relationship
between consumption and accumulation, or how much companies retain and how
much consumers spend. Such an analysis implies an affinity between the conditions
of production and social/political relations and lifestyles so that post-Fordism marks
not just an economic restructuring but also changes in everyday culture. These
included the customization of design and quality to support niche markets within
the framework of consumer lifestyles. Politically, post-Fordism has been
associated with the rise of new social and political movements and the de-
regulation and privatization of welfare provision against a background of
reconfigured class relations, notably a decline in the traditional manual working
class and its political allies.
Links Capitalism, consumption, disorganized capitalism, New Times, post-industrial society,
postmodernity

Post-humanism Humanism is the philosophical view that understands persons to be
the unique and unified source of meaning and agency. By contrast, post-humanism
is that form of thinking that displaces the idea of the whole person as being the
most significant level of analysis and understanding. In the context of cultural
studies, post-humanism is most associated with structuralism, poststructuralism and
psychoanalysis.
As an approach concerned with structures or predictable regularities that lie
outside of any given person, structuralism is post-humanist in its de-centring of
human agents from the heart of inquiry. For example, in proposing a form of
structuralist Marxism, Althusser argued that human beings were not to be
understood as agents of their own destiny but rather as the products of social
structures and relations as epitomized by Marx’s book Das Kapital (in Althusser’s
reading). In particular, he argues that ideology hails or interpellates concrete
individuals as concrete subjects and thus has the function of constituting concrete