Economies of Signs and Space

Introduction: After Organized Capitalism

Contributors: By: Scott Lash & John Urry

Book Title: Economies of Signs and Space
Chapter Title: "Introduction: After Organized Capitalism"
Pub. Date: 2002
Access Date: October 16, 2017
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd
City: London
Print ISBN: 9780803984721
Online ISBN: 9781446280539
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446280539.n1
Print pages: 1-11
©2002 SAGE Publications Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of
the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.
SAGE SAGE Books
ISBN 0-8039-8471-5 (hbk)

Introduction: After Organized Capitalism

Who now reads Marx? After the decade of leveraged buyouts, global concern for the ozone
layer and above all the collapse of communism in ‘eastern Europe’, is there any writer now
more dated, more of a ‘dinosaur’, than Marx? The 1980s have surely sealed Marx's coffin for
good and confined him and his monstrous works to the dustbin of history. Even if we are not
at the end of history, we are surely at the end of his history, based as it was on the analysis of
the unfolding contradictions of industrial capitalism. That society and those contradictions
have unequivocally gone for ever.

And yet there is another Marx, not so much the theorist of industrial capitalism, more the first
analyst of ‘modernity’. This was the Marx we employed in The End of Organized Capitalism,
the Marx who at the astonishing age of 30 provided analysis of how with modernity ‘all that is
solid melts into air’. And there is a further Marx who may have much to contribute to the
analysis of those changes in social structure that seem to be sweeping all before as we
approach the turn of the twenty-first century. This analysis is to be found in volume 2 of the
now maligned Das Kapital.

These turn-of-the-century changes increasingly play themselves out in the ethereal processes
of time and space. Volume 2 addresses, and is subtitled, The Process of Circulation of
Capital. If production happens at one time and at one place, circulation allows that production
to vary – as commodities are cast adrift and acquire mobility to flow through changing spaces
at shifting times. It is in the first part of this volume that Marx addresses the circuits of capital,
of how one form of capital metamorphoses into another. There are three circuits, of money-
capital, of productive capital and of commodity capital. Productive capital in turn consists of
the means of production or constant capital and labour power or variable capital. There are
thus four types of capital involved in these processes of circulation: money-capital,
commodities, the means of production, and labour power. They move through space and they
work to different and changing temporalities.

Contemporary Marxists have adopted similar analyses. Only they, and this is their originality,
have taken Marx's abstract model of the circuits of capital and have concretized it. They
understand that circulation takes place in real, substantial geographical and social spaces.
And in terms of time, they understand Marx's abstract model concretely. With Marx one might
assume that the same model would apply across the entire history of capitalism. His four
types of capital would always circulate or move in circuits in a historically unchanging manner.

In contradistinction, though, contemporary Marxists introduce temporal variation with

something like the following periodization (it is the one that we adopted in The End of
Organized Capitalism). First, in nineteenth-century, ‘liberal’ capitalism, the circuits of the
different types of capital more or less operated on the level of the locality or region, often with
relatively little intersection or overlap. Second, in twentieth-century, ‘organized’ capitalism,
money, the means of production, consumer-commodities and labour-power came to flow most
significantly on a national scale. The advanced societies witnessed the appearance of the
large bureaucratic firm, vertically and in some cases horizontally integrated nationally. There
was also the replacement of locally based craft unions by industrial unions whose territorial
basis was ‘stretched’ to cover national dimensions. Commodity markets, capital markets and
even labour markets took on significance across the scope of entire national economies.

Third, in the more fragmented and flexible types of production that accompany the

Page 2 of 9 SAGE Books - Introduction: After Organized Capitalism

SAGE SAGE Books
ISBN 0-8039-8471-5 (hbk)

‘disorganization’ of capitalism, this circulation takes place on an international scale. At the end
of the twentieth century circuits of commodities, productive capital and money qualitatively
stretch to become international in terms of increases in global trade, foreign direct investment
and global movements of finance. This has taken place especially in the 1980s. Foreign trade
increased on average by 7 per cent per year while total production of manufactured goods in
the OECD countries grew by 3 per cent per year. Foreign direct investment grew that much
faster, and had a 20 per cent compound annual increase between 1983 and 1988. As for
money capital, the volume of bonds traded internationally rose from $150bn in 1983 to
$460bn in 1989; and the volume of trading on international equity markets rose from $73bn in
1979 to $1,212bn in 1988.

This transformed political economy is both ‘post-Fordist’, in that it succeeded the era of mass
production and mass consumption, and postmodern. Three of the forms of capital – money,
productive capital and commodities – that we just described as circulating through
international space are objects. The fourth, variable capital or labour power, is a subject. Thus
the circuits of capital which Marx described are, at the same time, circuits of objects and of
subjects, which are increasingly difficult to distinguish from each other. And in the shift from
organized to disorganized capitalism, the various subjects and objects of the capitalist political
economy circulate not only along routes of greater and greater distance, but also – especially
with the rise and increasing capacities of electronic networks – at ever greater velocity.

This faster circulation of objects is the stuff of ‘consumer capitalism’. With an ever quickening
turnover time, objects as well as cultural artefacts become disposable and depleted of
meaning. Some of these objects, such as computers, television sets, VCRs and hi-fis,
produce many more cultural artefacts or signs (‘signifiers’) than people can cope with. People
are bombarded with signifiers and increasingly become incapable of attaching ‘signifieds’ or
meanings to them. Like Georg Simmel's neurasthenic flâneur, the first ‘modern subject’,
people are overloaded by this bombardment of the signs of the city, people become blasé. In
this sense, of increased profusion and speed of circulation of cultural artefacts,
postmodernism is not so much a critique or radical refusal of modernism, but its radical
exaggeration. It is more modern than modernism. Postmodernism hyperbolically accentuates
the processes of increased turnover time, speed of circulation and the disposability of
subjects and objects.

Analyses of such postmodern economies and societies have dominated debate on the left
and the right for the last decade. If modernism came to cut away the foundations of the
Western tradition with the death of God, then postmodernism proclaiming ‘the end of Man’
removed even those few foundations that remained. The abstraction, meaninglessness,
challenges to tradition and history issued by modernism have been driven to the extreme in
postmodernism. On these counts neo-conservative analysts and many Marxists are in accord.
In any event not just are the analyses surprisingly convergent, but so too are the pessimistic
prognoses.

Now much of this pessimism is appropriate. But it is part of the aim of this book to argue that
there is a way out. It is to claim that the sort of ‘economies of signs and space’ that became
pervasive in the wake of organized capitalism do not just lead to increasing meaninglessness,
homogenization, abstraction, anomie and the destruction of the subject. Another set of
radically divergent processes is simultaneously taking place. These processes may open up
possibilities for the recasting of meaning in work and in leisure, for the reconstitution of
community and the particular, for the reconstruction of a transmogrified subjectivity, and for
heterogenization and complexity of space and of everyday life.

Page 3 of 9 SAGE Books - Introduction: After Organized Capitalism

SAGE SAGE Books
ISBN 0-8039-8471-5 (hbk)

One reason why so many analysts paint such a uniformly pessimistic scenario for the future is
because of a reliance on an overly structuralist conception of social process. This conception
is prevalent on the political left and right, among structuralists and post-structuralists. In this
book we will endeavour to correct this through focussing upon subjectivity, and in particular
on an increasingly significant reflexive human subjectivity. We shall examine the causes and
consequences of a subjectivity engaged in a process of ‘reflexive modernization’.

Such an analysis was not to be found in The End of Organized Capitalism, which insufficiently
examines these economies of space, of how objects and subjects are amazingly mobile and
that these mobilities are themselves structured and structuring. In later chapters here we shall
investigate the causes and consequences of various kinds of mobility, of migrants moving into
the United States and Europe looking for work, and of the enormous temporary migrations
involved in travel and tourism. Contemporary societies are inexplicable without analysis of the
effects of such massive flows upon the economies, social structures and modes of cultural
interpretation of different societies. It will also be shown that there have been some striking
changes in such migration patterns, including the emergence of post-Fordist ghettoes and
post-Fordist patterns of travel.

But we shall also see that there are changes as well in the nature of not just the subjects, but
the objects involved in mobility. They are progressively emptied of material content. What is
increasingly produced are not material objects, but signs. These signs are of two types. Either
they have a primarily cognitive content and are post-industrial or informational goods. Or they
have primarily an aesthetic content and are what can be termed postmodern goods. The
development of the latter can be seen not only in the proliferation of objects which possess a
substantial aesthetic component (such as pop music, cinema, leisure, magazines, video and
so on), but also in the increasing component of sign-value or image embodied in material
objects. This aestheticization of material objects takes place in the production, the circulation
or the consumption of such goods.

Such aestheticization is instantiated for example, in production, in which, as we shall see, the
design component comprises an increasing component of the value of goods, while the
labour process as such is less important in its contribution to value-added. This is true in the
sense of increased research-and-development or ‘design intensity’ of even industrial
production. And this increased R&D intensity is often importantly aesthetic in nature, as in
clothes, shoes, furniture, car design, electronic goods and the like. Consumer durables
feature as a sort of built ‘micro-environment’, of buildings, rooms, clothes, cars, offices and so
on.

So we hope to show that, after organized capitalism, there is such a distinctive ‘economy of
signs and space’. Contemporary global order, or disorder, is in this sense a structure of flows,
a de-centred set of economies of signs in space. But alongside and against these
asymmetrical networks of flows there is increasing evidence of a radically other set of
developments. There is evidence that the same individuals, the same human beings who are
increasingly subject to, and the subjects of, such space economies are simultaneously
becoming increasingly reflexive with respect to them. Alongside the silent majorities, the
small-screen addicts, the ‘black hole’ of Baudrillard's semio-scape, there are large numbers of
men and women who are taking on an increasingly critical and reflexive distance with
reference to these institutions of the new information society.

Owing partly to an increased pervasion of cultural competencies and partly to a tendential

breakdown of trust in the ‘expert-systems’ of the new order, a growing space enables such a

Page 4 of 9 SAGE Books - Introduction: After Organized Capitalism

SAGE SAGE Books
ISBN 0-8039-8471-5 (hbk)

critical reflexivity to develop. This growing reflexivity is in the first instance part and parcel of a
radical enhancement in late modernity of individualization. That is, there is an ongoing
process of de-traditionalization in which social agents are increasingly ‘set free’ from the
heteronomous control or monitoring of social structures in order to be self-monitoring or self-
reflexive. This accelerating individualization process is a process in which agency is set free
from structure, a process in which, further, it is structural change itself in modernization that
so to speak forces agency to take on powers that heretofore lay in social structures
themselves. Hence for example structural change in the economy forces individuals to be
freed from the structural rigidity of the Fordist labour process. That is, it is increasingly a
prerequisite for structural economic change, increasingly a precondition of capital
accumulation today that the labour force becomes increasingly self-monitoring as well as
develops an even greater reflexivity with respect to the rules and resources of the workplace.
Hence we address in some depth a developing process of reflexive accumulation in economic
life.

This book thus is more than just a global sociology of flows – of migrants, of tourists, of
communications, images, money, information and time. It is just as much an inter-national and
local sociology of reflexivity. Most of the now substantial literature on reflexivity has
understood the phenomenon in an almost exclusively cognitive sense. Much of this literature
has its origins in the sociology of science, in which reflexivity means broadly the application of
a theory's assumptions to the theory itself, or more broadly the self-monitoring of an expert
system, in which the latter questions itself according to its own assumptions. Sociologists of
science of a less committed constructivist persuasion have extended the notion to include – in
place of the self-reflexivity of a scientific community – the increasing proclivity of an
increasingly individualized lay public reflexively to question the assumptions of science and
the expert-systems themselves. Subsequently sociological theory more generally has used a
still very cognitive notion of reflexivity in discussions of how social agents are able increasingly
to monitor and organize their own individual life-narratives and how society itself – via social
science – is even more able to be self-constituting. In the chapters that follow we too devote
considerable attention to this cognitive dimension of reflexivity. In particular, unlike other
analysts, we focus here on economic life, addressing in some detail phenomena of ‘reflexive
production’ and ‘reflexive consumption’.

But running parallel to this phenomenon is another probably just as important development in
late modern societies. And this is an increasing pervasion of, not cognitive, but aesthetic
reflexivity. Whereas cognitive reflexivity has its origins in the rationalist and Cartesian
assumptions of the Enlightenment tradition of modernity, this other dimension of reflexivity is
rooted in the assumptions and practices of aesthetic modernism, in another modernity – not of
Descartes but of Baudelaire, not of Rousseau but of Rimbaud. If cognitive reflexivity is a
matter of ‘monitoring’ of self, and of social-structural roles and resources, then aesthetic
reflexivity entails self-interpretation and the interpretation of social background practices. If
cognitive reflexivity presupposes judgment, then aesthetic reflexivity, hermeneutically and with
Gadamer is grounded in ‘pre-judgments’. If cognitive reflexivity assumes a subject-object
relationship of the self to itself and the social world, then aesthetic and hermeneutic reflexivity
assumes a self which is at the same time a being-in-the-world.

Aesthetic reflexivity is instantiated in an increasing number of spheres of everyday life. In the

economy itself there is an ever growing centrality of ‘design’-intensive production in many
economic sectors. If knowledgeintensive production of goods and services is embodied in the
utility of the latter, design-intensivity is embodied in the ‘expressive component’ of goods and
services, a component having significance from the goods of the culture industries to the

Page 5 of 9 SAGE Books - Introduction: After Organized Capitalism

SAGE SAGE Books
ISBN 0-8039-8471-5 (hbk)

‘managed heart’ of flight attendants. Consumer practices will likewise be grounded in

aesthetic reflexivity, as will the ‘place-myths’ that tourists and travellers construct and
deconstruct. Aesthetic reflexivity is embodied in the contemporary sense of time – in a
widespread refusal of both clock time and any sort of utilitarian calculation of temporal
organization. Aesthetic or hermeneutic reflexivity is embodied in the background assumptions,
in the unarticulated practices in which meaning is routinely created in ‘new’ communities – in
subcultures, in imagined communities and in the ‘invented communities’ of, for example,
ecological and other late twentieth-century social movements. Aesthetic, then, as well as
cognitive reflexivity will be thematized throughout this book.

Economies of Signs and Space, which is an essay, in the sense of an attempt, at an

empirically grounded zeitdiagnostische Soziologie, contains thus both a sociology of flows
and a sociology of reflexivity. As we have just suggested flows and reflexivity can be
substantially contradictory and counteracting phenomena. But this is not the only possibility.
The individualization thesis, presupposed in the phenomenon of reflexivity, has been
registered in Western social theory of the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the United States in
the pervasion of rational choice theory; in Europe through the impact of theories of reflexive
modernization or reflexive modernity; and in Britain in ex-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's
contentious assertion that there is no such thing as society, but just a set of potentially
entrepreneurial individuals in the context of a strongly empowered nation-state. The notion of
individualization is also registered in Jean Baudrillard's apocalyptic pronouncements of the
implosive dissolution of ‘the social’.

We agree in a rather prosaically empirical sense that earlier existing social structures do have
less power in monitoring increasingly autonomous agency than in the past. But we do not
argue that this entails some sort of end to the value of structural explanation tout court. We
propose to the contrary that there is indeed a structural basis for today's reflexive individuals.
And that this is not social structures, but increasingly the pervasion of information and
communication structures. We propose that there is tendentially the beginnings of the
unfolding of a process in which social structures, national in scope, are being displaced by
such global information and communication (I & C) structures. These information and
communication structures are the very networked flows, are the very economies of signs and
space which are the subject of this book. Thus structured flows and accumulations of
information are the basis of cognitive reflexivity. Thus structured flows and accumulations of
images, of expressive symbols are the condition of burgeoning aesthetic reflexivity. Thus the
conditions of both cognitive and aesthetic reflexivity are economies of signs in space.

This said, the book is divided into four parts. Part 1 lays out the two structuring principles of
the book, the networks of flows and the phenomenon of reflexivity. Chapter 2 thus draws on
the work of communications geographers to sketch an economy of flows of information, of
communications, of money and of capital investment. In the first instance what this yields is
an asymmetrical networked set of flows; an institutionally governed set of flows whose hubs
are the global cities. What is sketched in is a configuration of flows of material and post-
material objects moving at ever greater distances and at ever greater speeds. The result
initially of this ‘speed-up’ and ‘stretch out’ is an emptying out of content and of previously
existing meaning of objects and of subjects as well as of the spatiotemporal nexus in which
they operate.

Chapter 3 is the place of a detailed development of the countervailing principle of reflexivity.

This takes place via detailed consideration of the work of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens
on risk, expert systems and individualization. Here Beck's theses are criticized in their implicit

Page 6 of 9 SAGE Books - Introduction: After Organized Capitalism

SAGE SAGE Books
ISBN 0-8039-8471-5 (hbk)

under-socialization, their implicit methodological individualism and Whiggish assumption that

society is a ‘learning process’. Giddens’ argument is criticized in that its core assumption of
‘ontological insecurity’ leads to an instrumentally rational understanding of human conduct
and almost uncritical, virtually Durkheimian understanding of the role of expert systems.
Avoiding a certain cognitivist bias in both Beck and Giddens, we attempt to develop the
aesthetic dimension of reflexivity, via treatment of Marcel Mauss' and Pierre Bourdieu's
effectively pre-cognitive understandings of classifications and the habitus, and via Charles
Taylor's arguments on aesthetic and ultimately allegorical sources of the modern self.

Part 2 opens with Chapter 4 on the structural conditions of reflexivity. We do so via an

analysis of ‘reflexive accumulation’ in Japanese, German and advanced sector (Anglo-
American) production systems. Here we start from the notion, developed by Japanese social
scientists, of an ‘information structure’ which conditions information flow and knowledge
acquisition in given production systems. We point in this context to these three modes of
reflexive accumulation, arguing that information structures are such in the American and
British cases to encourage reflexive consumption, while ‘corporatist’ and pre-modern
institutional governance of information structures in Germany and Japan are favourable to
much more highly modern reflexive production in those countries.

Chapter 5 takes these principles into a more detailed study of the culture industries. I t
highlights a process of vertical disintegration in the film, TV, record, publishing and advertising
industries, the conditions of which are a growing aesthetic reflexivity in both the consumption
and production of images. Here cultural products are now mainly produced external to the
industry's firms, which function predominantly in the finance and the marketing of such
products. That is, culture industry firms are becoming, neither commodified nor more like
businesses, but more like business services. What takes place is an effective de-
differentiation of culture and economy in which the advertising industry, a business service, is
increasingly involved in producing aesthetic artefacts, while the culture firms themselves
become business services.

If chapters 4 and 5 consider the ‘winners’ in reflexive modernity's two-thirds society, chapters
six and 7 address the situation of the ‘losers’, among the ethnic minorities and migrants of the
Western world. Chapter 6 is a socio-spatial analysis of today's ‘underclass’, who inhabit a
space characterized by a deficit of economic, social and cultural regulation. In such spaces
the older organized-capitalist social structures – industrial labour market, church and family
networks, social welfare institutions, trade unions – have dissolved or at least moved out. Only
unlike the spaces of the city centres and the suburbs they have not yet been replaced by the
information and communication structures. The resulting deficit of governance and regulation
is the condition of social disorganization of today's black American ghetto, but would equally
apply to their white equivalents in British council housing estates, as well as partly explain
racism among eastern German youth, where also ‘Fordist’ and communist/statist social
structures have disappeared while the information and communication structures have not yet
arrived. Chapter 7 understands post-organized capitalist migration in a similar context. Special
focus is here on the German case. Here we see that the corporatist institutions, which were
the condition (Chapter 4) of such effective information and communication structures in
production, operate at the same time to exclude ethnic minorities and women from access to
these very information and communication structures, as well as largely to exclude them from
civil society itself.

Part 3 turns to a sustained reflection upon economies of space and time. Chapter 8 i s
specifically concerned with post-industrialism and with the causes and consequences of the

Page 7 of 9 SAGE Books - Introduction: After Organized Capitalism

SAGE SAGE Books
ISBN 0-8039-8471-5 (hbk)

massive increase in the importance of various kinds of services, which are progressively more
design-intensive. We show what the nature of work is like in such services, including its
heightened reflexive element; what the characteristic modes of restructuring are in both the
private and public sectors; and what the consequences are for place of the growth of such
services. Use is made of Esping-Andersen's analysis that there are three different trajectories
of post-industrial spaces. Overall it is argued that consumer services play a more important
role in today's economy of signs and space than has previously been recognized. Such
services are particularly symbol-laden and not simply based on information. People, places
and social groups are all transformed by the endlessly complex flows of such services.

Chapter 9 is by contrast concerned with the nature of time. Through a critique of existing
approaches to the sociology of time it is shown that there are many different ‘times’; that what
has been taken as emblematic of time in nature, clock-time, is in fact a human construction;
and there are many parallels between natural and social times, given that the former is no
longer viewed as Newtonian and Cartesian. Particular attention is devoted to showing how
social time has changed, with clock-time dominant in the period in which organized capitalism
is established and this is now being replaced by time that is increasingly instantaneous and
glacial or evolutionary. The ways in which both these forms of time connect to reflexivity are
examined in detail. Disorganized capitalism thus ushers in a quite distinct configuration of
time and memory.

One aspect touched on in Chapter 9, namely the increasing importance of travel through time
(and of course space), is particularly examined in Part 3. Here we turn to a specific study of
flows which occur on an increasingly global scale. Chapter 10 is devoted to travel. We begin
by arguing that a constitutive feature of the modern world is mass travel and this needs to be
analysed in terms of the category of risk. It is also shown that mobility transforms people's
identities. Special attention is devoted to the growth of a reflexivity about the physical and
social environment and how this results in a stance of ‘cosmopolitanism’, in which ‘legislators’
increasingly give way to ‘interpreters’. More generally, we argue that corresponding to
disorganized capitalism is a de-differentiation between ‘tourism’ and many other social
practices of the contemporary social world. This is analysed in terms of the particular
exchanges involved in tourism, especially that of the exchange of finance for ‘visual property’
and the supposedly ‘aestheticization’ of everyday life.

Chapter 11 considers the issue of globalization directly, in the context of three different
aspects of social life: money and finance, nature and the environment, and global culture and
nationality. In each it is shown that there is a particular configuration of global and local
processes involved. Indeed it is argued that global processes presuppose certain local
configurations, this being described in detail in the case of the growth of global financial
networks. In the case of the environment we demonstrate that the transformed reflexivity
about ‘nature’ has brought in some striking changes in the relationship between it and human
activity. We also examine some of the contradictions involved in the reflexive demand to think
globally and act locally. Some further arguments about the global are considered in the light
of the debate about a supposedly ‘global culture’. Here we see that such cultural forms do not
obliterate national and local difference but may indeed re-emphasize such particular
identities.

A general theme in this chapter and in the final concluding chapter is to consider the
transformed character of citizenship in the light of informational and communicational flows
analysed here – and what this does to conventional notions of citizenship focussed around
the individual nation-state. Indeed we elaborate alternative scenarios that our analysis of the

Page 8 of 9 SAGE Books - Introduction: After Organized Capitalism

SAGE SAGE Books
ISBN 0-8039-8471-5 (hbk)

sociology of flows and reflexivity might imply. Either on the one hand, there is an optimistic
post-industrial and decentralized informational society full of ‘new sociations’ detached from
the ‘traditions’ of organized capitalist societies; or on the other, a bleak dystopia of
increasingly wild zones deserted by the mobile informational and communicational structures
and by the mobile tourists who hurry past to progressively well-defenced symbol-rich tame
zones. Whichever of these looks more plausible – and in all likelihood both are proceeding
side by side – this book endeavours to recast the categories and theories by which to debate
such alternative futures.

The End of Organized Capitalism has been criticized for suggesting that contemporary
societies are disorganized rather than reorganized. In this book we demonstrate, hopefully
more convincingly, that contemporary capitalism is indeed disorganized. By this we mean that
the flows of subjects and objects are progressively less synchronized within national
boundaries. So although there are massively powerful organizations affecting each individual
country there is no reason why these patterns will be synchronized. And indeed different
organizations operate with different times. These range from the instantaneous time of the
computer, and the forms of global electronic communication it presupposes, to the glacial
time of environmental change where individuals are encouraged to consider the impacts of
their actions upon unborn generations of both people and of other animal and plant species.
So individual societies are subject to systematic de-synchronization, and in a way so is the
globe as a whole. Today's world is a ‘risk society’ where humans themselves both have
created global problems and are increasingly reflexive about monitoring the outcomes and
developing at least partial solutions to those problems. And the individualization process so
basic to the risk society is dependent on the decline of institutions and the literal end of a
number of pivotal organizations. So contemporary life is premised upon the social
organization of reflexivity. But of course it is doubtful whether that reflexivity can be organized
so as to regulate and minimize the scale of those risks.

There are many topics which this book does not deal with in detail. This is partly because
even a big book cannot cover everything; and it is partly because what we might have to say
on such topics could be banal. Particular neglected topics include theories of patriarchy, the
revolutions in ‘eastern Europe’, the development of the EC, the burgeoning power of the
Pacific Rim (apart from Japan), developments in the state form, the nature of science and
technology, and the effects of these various processes outside the north Atlantic rim (again
apart from Japan). This is a book about the centre, about the major powers in the new world
order, the new global cities, the migrations into and out of that centre, and the theoretical
insights and empirical materials appropriate to examining that centre.

But this is not a centre which is in control. Disorganized capitalism disorganizes everything.
Nothing is fixed, given and certain, while everything rests upon much greater knowledge and
information, on institutionalized reflexivity. People are increasingly knowledgeable about just
how little they in fact do know. Such increasingly uncontrolled economies of signs and space
are inconceivable without extraordinarily complex and ever-developing forms of information,
knowledge and aesthetic judgment. The unintended consequences of reflexivity – that is, the
effect of reflexive agency on increasingly contingent structure – often lead to yet further
disorganization.

http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446280539.n1

Page 9 of 9 SAGE Books - Introduction: After Organized Capitalism