Cultural Studies

Volume 3, Issue 2

Ien Ang, David Morley, Ien Ang, David Morley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134957910
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This special issue of Cultural Studies from 1989 looks at European Identities. The editor remakes that putting together a 'European Issue' for this journal proved to be a very intriguing task—not least because of the complexity of what 'Europe' means. Europe is not just a geographical site, it is also an idea: an idea inextricably linked with the myths of western civilization, and its implications not only of culture but also of colonialism. Twentieth-century Europe is also a political and historical reality that continues to be marked by the deeply traumatic experiences of World War II and the drawing of the Iron Curtain—a continent whose century-long world hegemony was gradually taken over by the United States on the one side, and the Soviet Union on the other.

ARTICLES

REIMAGINED COMMUNITIES? EUROPEAN IMAGE SPACES, BEYOND FORDISM

KEVIN ROBINS

Very much remains to be done by way of detailed discussions and proposals, but we cannot in any case live much longer under the confusions of the existing ‘international’ economy and the existing ‘nation-state’. If we cannot find and communicate social forms of more substance than these, we shall be condemned to endure the accelerating pace of false and frenetic nationalisms and of reckless and uncontrollable global transnationalism.

Raymond Williams

It is invidious to regard places, communities, cities, regions, or even nations as ‘things in themselves’ at a time when the global flexibility of capitalism is greater than ever…. Yet a global strategy of resistance and transformations has to begin with the realities of place and community.

David Harvey

A question of geography

In the present period, we are involved with processes of political economic restructuring and transformation, ones that I shall go on to describe in terms of a possible shift beyond that historical system of accumulation and social regulation which has been called Fordism. At the heart of these historical developments—and this is the major concern of the following discussion—is a process of radical spatial restructuring and reconfiguration. It is at once a transformation of the spatial matrix of accumulation and of the subjective experience of, and orientation to, space and spatiality. Its analysis, I want to argue, demands a social theory that is informed by the ‘geographical imagination’ (Gregory, 1988).

The image industries are implicated in these socio-spatial processes in quite significant and distinctive ways. I want to explore the nature of current transformations, the breaks and continuities, and to assess the implications of the changing configuration of image spaces. Through the prism of geographical analysis it becomes possible to take up some crucial questions concerning the relationship between economic and cultural aspects of these transformations, to explore the articulations of the space of accumulation and cultural spaces. Exploration of these issues must necessarily work through the nature of any relationship between, on the one hand, the transition from Fordism to some (still putative) post-Fordist social system, and, on the other, the trajectory from modernism (and modernity) to postmodernism (and postmodernity). Following this line of enquiry, issues around the politics of communication converge with the politics of space and place: questions of communication are also about the nature and scope of community. In a world of ‘false and frenetic nationalisms and of reckless and uncontrollable global transnationalism’, the struggle for meaningful communities and ‘actual social identities’ is more urgent than ever: ‘we have to explore new forms of variable societies, in which over the whole range of social purposes different sizes of society are defined for different kinds of issue and decision’ (Williams, 1983:198–9).

Beyond Fordism?

What is the broader context within which the transformation of image industries and markets is taking place? One of the most suggestive and productive ways of looking at the present period of upheaval has been that of the Regulation School of political economists (see, inter alia, Aglietta, 1979; Billaudot and Gauron, 1985; Boyer, 1986a, 1986b; Lipietz 1987), with their analyses of the decline of the social system of Fordism. Within this perspective, Fordism is understood in terms of the articulation of a particular ‘regime of accumulation’, centred around mass production and mass consumption, with an appropriate ‘mode of regulation’. Social regulation is a matter of both the organizational and institutional structures, particularly the apparatuses of the Keynesian state, but also the norms, habits, and internalized rules governing the lifeworld—the ‘architecture of socialisation’ (Billaudot and Gauron, 1985:22)—which ensure social reproduction and the absorption of conflicts and tensions, always provisionally, over a certain period of time. What is being suggested is that Fordism as a mode of capitalist development and, as a historically specific coherence of accumulation and regulation, has now reached its limits. The inherent control problems of Fordism—for example, rising wages and declining productivity, overcapacity and market saturation, competition from low-wage countries, increasing costs for public services (see Roobeek, 1987)— have brought the system into crisis. This crisis, moreover, is structural (rather than simply cyclical), and it is a matter of political, social, and cultural crisis as much as of economic decline and stagnation. Insofar as the resources of Fordism/ Keynesianism have become exhausted, the future of capitalist development demands a fundamental and innovative restructuring of accumulation and regulation (Boyer, 1979).

If the historical nature of Fordism and the dynamics of its crisis are becoming clear enough, the question of its successor regime of accumulation is more problematic and contentious. What lies beyond Fordism? There are many accounts of post-Fordism, increasingly congealing into a new orthodoxy of optimism, which identify a new social coherence centred around what is often referred to as an emergent regime of flexible accumulation. So-called flexible specialization is manifest in new forms of decentralized and disseminated production and in design and product mix aimed at niche markets; demassified enterprises abandon economies of scale in favour of economies of scope; and workers supposedly assume new skills and responsibilities and a new sense of autonomy. This perspective finds its apogee in the work of Piore and Sabel (1984) and of other celebrants of the Third Italy’ and the ‘Emilian model’ (e.g. Brusco, 1982), who see the transcendence of Fordism in terms of a kind of return to feudalism, with the growth of a new class of artisans and the emergence of localized industrial districts. Whilst there are certain important insights here—and I shall return to them below—there are also strongly ideological elements informing this new myth of flexibility (Gertler, 1988). Post-Fordism is, in effect, imagined as anti-Fordism: it is quite simply the inverse of, and antithesis to, the rigid and massified system of Fordism.

This kind of idealized and teleological account is clearly unsatisfactory. Any realworld transition beyond Fordism will inevitably be a great deal more complex, unruly, and uncertain. As Erica Schoenberger (1988:260) argues, this is not a matter of some kind of entropic evolutionary movement from one distinct social system to another; it is a process that ‘promises to be fraught with turbulence and disruption’. Projected futures cannot simply and effortlessly dissolve away the solidity of inherited social structures, infrastructures and relations. The process of transformation is complex and uneven, and it is genuinely difficult to establish whether the present period marks the emergence of a post-Fordist society, whether it should be characterized as neo-Fordist, or whether, in fact, it remains a period of late Fordism. On what basis is, say, flexible specialization classified as a distinguishing feature of post-Fordism? The basis of definition and periodization is, in fact, not at all self-evident. In a complex process of change, we have to ask by what criteria we might identify the components of a new phase of accumulation, and also how we do so without falling into the trap of teleologism. We must be clear that, in so far as the direction of change will be a matter of struggle and contestation, neither the emergence nor the nature of any society beyond Fordism is predetermined or inevitable.

The present discussion is concerned with one major area of change centring around the nature and meaning of space. What transformations are taking place in the social production of space, place, and spatiality, and what new political logics does this set in motion? My contention is that space is of paramount importance in this period of transition and restructuring: ‘the current crisis is accentuating spatiality and revealing more clearly than ever before, the spatial and locational strategies of capitalist accumulation and the necessity for labour and all segments of society “peripheralized” by capitalist development and restructuring to create spatially conscious counterstrategies at all geographical scales, in all territorial locales’ (Soja, 1985:188).

Idealizing visions of post-Fordism pick up on this new salience of space, but they do so only very partially. What they perceive is the transmutation of a centralized space economy into new forms of decentralization and dissemination; they emphasize the increasing importance of localized industrial districts and zones like those first described by the economist, Alfred Marshall, early this century (Bellandi, forthcoming). Reality is more complex and contradictory, however. If the growing significance of neo-Marshallian local economic districts is, indeed, an identifiable trend, then there are also apparently countervailing tendencies towards a global network economy. Manuel Castells (1983:5) has powerfully described how what he calls the informational mode of development, based upon new communications systems and information technologies, is bringing about ‘the transformation of spatial places into flows and channels—what amounts to the delocalization of the processes of production and consumption\ Castells argues that corporate information networks are underpinning the expansion and integration of the capitalist world system, realizing the possibility of a world assembly line, and opening up truly global markets. ‘The new space of a world capitalist system’, he argues, ‘is a space of variable geometry, formed by locations hierarchically ordered in a continuously changing network of flows’ (ibid.: 7). What we are moving towards is a fundamentally delocalized world order articulated around a small number of ‘concentrated centres for production of knowledge and storage of information, as well as centres for emission of images and information’ (ibid.: 6), nerve centres in the cybernetic grids, command and control headquarters of the world financial and industrial system. The consequence, Castells believes, is ‘the formation of a new historical relationship between space and society’ (ibid.: 3).

The elaboration of a new spatial order is a consequence, then, of two contrary dynamics. Such complexity has, of course, always characterized the production of space under capitalism. The historical sequence of capitalist spatialities, which has always manifested itself through the geography of uneven territorial development, has been a consequence of the interplay between centripetal and centrifugal forces, between centralization and decentralization, agglomeration and dispersal, homogenization and differentiation. David Harvey (1985) has identified a fundamental developmental logic underpinning this contradictory process. Capital has always sought to overcome spatial barriers and to improve the ‘continuity of flow’. It remains the case, however, that spatial constraints always exist and persist in so far as ‘capital and labour must be brought together at a particular point in space for production to proceed’ (ibid.: 145). Mobility and fixity are integrally and necessarily related: The ability of both capital and labour power to move…from place to place depends upon the creation of fixed, secure, and largely immobile social and physical infrastructures. The ability to overcome space is predicated on the production of space’ (ibid.: 149). There are, then, forces working towards structured coherence and fixity, but also countervailing forces tending towards the simultaneous transcendence and disruption of immobility and coherence; both are moments of the same total process of spatial development.

How, then, is this spatial logic working itself out in the present period of transition? On the basis of new information and communication technologies, capital can now be described as hypermobile and hyperflexible, tending towards deterritorialization and delocalization. But this is not the only characteristic tendency in the present period. Even if capital significantly reduces the friction of geography, it cannot for that escape its dependence on spatial fixity. Space and place cannot be annihilated. As Scott Lash and John Urry (1987:86) argue, ‘the effect of heightened spatial indifference has profound effects upon particular places and upon the forms of life that can be sustained within them—contemporary developments may well be heightening the salience of such localities’. The increasing mobility of corporations is associated with the possibility of fractionalizing and subdividing operations and situating them in different places, and, in the process, taking advantage of small variations in the nature of different localities. The spatial matrix of capitalism in the period beyond Fordism is one that, in fact, combines and articulates tendencies towards both globalization and localization.

These new forms of spatial deployment very much reflect the changing organizational structure of accumulation, and, particularly, new patterns of combined corporate integration and disintegration. One developmental logic of capitalist corporations is towards both horizontal and vertical integration, extending the monopolistic logic of concentration that characterized the Fordist regime of accumulation, and this on an increasingly global scale. This continuing integrative process is complemented however by certain tendencies towards vertical distingration, towards the fragmentation of organizational elements into separate and specialized but functionally interlinked units (see Scott, 1986). This is generally a matter of externalizing non-strategic, specialized, or, perhaps, unpredictable and variable functions and labour processes—and thereby externalizing uncertainty and risk—on the basis of subcontracting or market links.

These emerging organizational transformations take place in and through space and have significant implications for territorial development. As Erik Swyngedouw (1988:13) emphasizes, vertical disintegration results in the formation of a localized nexus of small units, often centred around one or a few dominant large companies, and involved in ‘close contractor/ subcontractor relationships, continuous information exchange and, thus, spatial proximity’. The consequence of this new dynamic of flexible specialization, with its tendencies towards spatial agglomeration, has been to give a new centrality to local economies (Courlet and Judet, 1986). It is at the level of locality that important new economic and social dynamics are being worked out. It is precisely this aspect of organizational-territorial transformation that the idealizing champions of post-Fordist industrial districts have identified as decisive. They do so in a rather one-sided way, however, disarticulating the local from its global framework. Territorial complexes of quasi-integrated organizations are extremely vulnerable to external disruptions inflicted by globally mobile and footloose corporations: ‘The evolution of flexibility within corporations…means that places are created and used up more quickly for the purposes of production or consumption’ (Thrift, 1987:211).

In a context in which ‘regions “implode” into localities and nations “explode” into a complex global space’ (Albertsen, 1986:4–5), we have, then, an increasingly direct relationship between the local and the global. And as part of this process, it should be emphasized, the role and significance of the nation-state has become ever more problematical and questionable (though no less ambitious). As Raymond Williams (1983:197) argues, ‘it is now very apparent, in the development of modern industrial societies, that the nation-state, in its classical European forms, is at once too large and too small for the range of real social purposes’. The politics of space and place is now a fundamental issue. The question, in the present period, is whether national and nationalist identities can be transcended in favour of more meaningful identities, or whether they will simply transform in regressive and alienating ways. For Manuel Castells (1983:4), the prospects are bleak: ‘On the one hand, the space of power is being transformed into flows. On the other hand, the space of meaning is being reduced to microterritories of new tribal communities’. He envisages a new ‘space of collective alienation’, one in which there is a ‘deconnection between people and spatial form’, ‘the outer experience is cut off from the inner experience’ (ibid.: 7). Castells’ prognosis should not be taken lightly. But does the present situation contain other, progressive and hopeful possibilities?

Image spaces, beyond Fordism?

These processes of socio-spatial transformation are the essential context for understanding the nature and significance of developments in the audio-visual industries. In this section and the next I want to look at the developing relationship between globalization and localization specifically in terms of the logics at work in the audiovisual industries. I want to reorientate the politics of communication towards a politics of space and place. What is the nature of emerging new image markets and image spaces, and what significance do these have for ‘imaginary space’ (Garnier, 1987), the sense of space and the sense of place? The context for the restructuring of image spaces is the very clear crisis of public service regulation, the broadcasting system elaborated under European Fordism/Keynesianism, with its focus on the national arena and nationalist identities. The crisis is likely to be protracted. Thus, whilst it is increasingly clear that technological and economic transformations are surpassing the regulatory capacities of the nation-state, there is, at the ideological level, still an obsessive and regressive ‘desire to reproduce the nation that has died and the moral and social certainties which have vanished with it…to fudge and forge a false unity based on faded images of the nation’ (MacCabe, 1988:29). National ambitions and endeavours will not simply disappear. In this context, none the less, what scope is there for intervention between the global and the local? If there is to b...