Kevin Robins

Forces of Consumption: From the Symbolic to the Psychotic

How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn’t they paralyse us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise? (DeLillo, 1985: 198)

Plan and control

Conclusion“Is closer and closer social control the inevitable price of ‘progress,’ a necessary concomitant of the continued development of modern social forms?” We believe that this is indeed the case. Against those who see the new communications technologies as the basis for a coming “communications era,” and the new information technologies as the panacea for our present “Age of Ignorance,” our own argument is that their development has, in fact, been closely associated with processes of social management and control. The scale and complexity of the modern nation state has made communications and information resources (and technologies) central to the maintenance of political and administrative cohesion.The “Information Revolution” is, then, not simply and straight-forwardly a matter of technological “progress,” of a new technological or industrial revolution. It is significant, rather, for the new matrix of political and cultural forces that it supports. And a crucial dimension here is that of organizational form and structure. Communication and information resources (and technologies) set the conditions and limits to the scale and nature of organizational possibilities. What they permit is the development of complex and large-scale bureaucratic organizations, and also of extended corporate structures that transcend the apparent limits of space and time (transnational corporations). They also constitute the nervous system of the modern state and guarantee its cohesion as an expansive organizational form. Insofar as they guarantee and consolidate these essential power structures in modern society, information and communication are fundamental to political-administrative regulation, and consequently to the social and cultural experience of modernity.The exploitation of information resources and technologies has expressed itself, politically and culturally, through the dual tendency towards social planning and management, on the one hand, and surveillance and control, on the other. In historical terms, this can be seen as the apotheosis of Lewis Mumfords megamachine: technology now increasingly fulfils what previously depended upon bureaucratic organization and structure. But the central historical reference point is the emergence, early in the twentieth century, of Scientific Management (as a philosophy both of industrial production and of social reproduction). It was at this moment that “scientific” planning and management moved beyond the factory to regulate the whole way of life. At this time, the “gathering of social knowledge” became “the normal accompaniment of action,” and the manufacture of consent, through propaganda and opinion management, was increasingly “based on analysis rather than on rule of thumb.” If, through Scientific Management, the planning and administration of everyday life became pervasive, it also became the preeminent form and expression of social control. Planning and management were, necessarily and indissociably, a process of surveillance and of manipulation and persuasion. To the extent that these administrative and dominative information strategies were first developed on a systematic basis, it was at this historical moment, we believe, that the ‘Information Revolution’ was unleashed. New information and communications technologies have most certainly advanced, and automated, these combined information and intelligence activities, but they remain essentially refinements of what was fundamentally a political-administrative “revolution.”Recent innovations in information and communications technologies have generally been discussed from a narrow technological or economic perspective. It has been a matter of technology assessment or of the exploitation of new technologies to promote industrial competitiveness and economic growth. This, in the light of our discussion, seems a partial and blinkered vision. The absolutely central question to be raised in the context of the “Information Revolution” of the eighties, is, we believe, the relation between knowledge/information and the system of political and corporate power. For some, knowledge is inherently and self-evidently a benevolent force, and improvements in the utilization of knowledge are demonstrably the way to ensure social progress. Information is treated as an instrumental and technical resource that will ensure the rational and efficient management of society. It is a matter of social engineering by knowledge professionals and information specialists and technocrats. For us, the problems of the “information society” are more substantial, complex, and oblique.This, of course, raises difficult political and philosophical issues. These are the issues that Walter Lippmann comes up against when he recognizes in the Great Society “that centralization of power which deprives [citizens] of control over the use of that power,” and when he confronts the disturbing awareness that “the problems that vex democracy seem to be unmanageable by democratic methods.” They are the issues that Lewis Mumford addresses when he argues that “the tension between small-scale association and large-scale organization, between personal autonomy and institutional regulation, between remote control and diffused local intervention, has now created a critical situation.” And they are the monumental issues that concern Castoriadis in his analysis of instrumental reason and the “rationalist ideology,” those “myths which, more than money or weapons, constitute the most formidable obstacles in the way of the reconstruction of human society.”Among the significant issues to be raised by the new information technologies are their relation to social forms of organization, their centrality to structures of political power, and their role in the cultural logic of consumer capitalism. Sociological analysis is naïve, we believe, when it treats the new telecommunications, space, video, and computing technologies as innocent technical conceptions and looks hopefully to a coming, post-industrial Utopia. Better to look back to the past, to the entwined histories of reason, knowledge, and technology, and to their relation to the economic development of capitalism and the political and administrative system of the modern nation state.

The iron cage of the information society

Abstract This paper offers an analysis and critique of recent thought about the ‘information society’. It identifies two phases of futurism, the first a technological enthusiasm that characterised the early 1980s, the second, in the 1990s, which emphasises the transformative capacity of information itself. The second phase is examined at some length, focusing on the concepts of ‘symbolic analysts’ and ‘informational labour’ in the writing especially of Robert Reich and Manuel Castells. In current theory, information has been promoted to centre stage of economic affairs. A new intellectual agenda has been created, centring on features such as globalisation, the spread of networks, flexibility, and the crucial role of educated labour. Three key aspects are identified: the death of communism and the triumph of capitalism, the re‐emergence of meritocratic ideas, and the depiction of new class structures based on information. These are queried by empirical analysis of stratification trends and evidence from so...

The Origins of the Information Society

We share with I.T. enthusiasts the view that information — its collection, storage, analysis and transmission — plays an increasingly key role in society. However, we disagree profoundly with the idea that this is a consequence of an Information Technology ‘revolution’ that came about in the late 1970s courtesy of the ‘mighty micro’ and is destined to change everything with which it comes into contact.

Education for what Jobs

The two previous chapters have demonstrated that education is set to undergo decisive changes in the 1980s. The direction in which this change is heading is also clear: schools, colleges and universities are en route to being more closely involved with the ‘real world’ that graduates will be better equipped to play a full part in the wider society. A new mood, backed by funding strategies and organisational rearrangements, is evident in the education system: course design gives greater credence to the ‘needs of industry’, ‘work experience’ has taken on an urgency in curriculum development, and local businesses are invited into classrooms where their views on course form and content are solicited so that the school’s products can better suit the requirements of employers.

The Technocratic Condition, or Schools Cannot Teach what Society does not know

The argument of this book is that the root problem of the education system has nothing to do with an ‘anti-enterprise culture’ and unworldly liberalism. In rejecting this myth (Daniel, 1986), however, we do not believe that present difficulties are simply a matter of a misguided and discriminatory vocationalism, as many critics of the new instrumental progressivism have suggested. The problem is more profound and troublesome. What must be confronted is this, the technocratic imagination which has come to dominate and deform education (and, indeed, society as a whole) and which finds its apogee in the current obsession with computer literacy: nThe technological conception of education took over the schools quite some time ago. Moving in the devices cannot be seen as an innovation; rather, it brings a technical vision to completion. Computers would not have a place in schools had schools not already become possessed by the technical imagination. (Sar-dello, 1984, p. 633)

The New Disciplines

So far we have concentrated, in this part of the book, on the relationship of the education system to the world of industry and business. We have focused on the changing nature of this relationship in the context of a broad shift from a Fordist to a neo-Fordist regime of capital accumulation. In this chapter our concern is with the implications of this transformation for the prevailing power relations in society. The emergence of neo-Fordism, we shall argue, is closely associated with changes in the form and modality of social control. Of course, the control dimensions of education are related to the economy since the latter depends upon an adequate machinery of social discipline and control as its precondition. However, this does not mean that relations of power are simply subordinate to, and functional for, economic needs: we recognise that the relationship is complex and difficult and, indeed, a contentious matter in social theory to which we cannot do justice here. Our aim is, more modestly, to explore changes in the nature of education as a system of discipline and control, and to signal moves towards synchronisation of these changes consequent upon the transition to neo-Fordism.

The English Disease

No one could dispute that Britain has undergone a relative decline vis-a-vis other countries: from occupancy of the premier position in the nineteenth and opening decades of the twentieth centuries, the nation has tumbled out of the top ten richest nations as measured by income per head. To be sure, this is a relative decline and the standard of living of those of us in contemporary Britain is far in excess of that of our parents, let alone that of our grandparents, but no one can be complacent about a situation where the country appears set on an irremediably downward course. The deep recession which we have experienced since the mid-1970s, the reliance on North Sea oil, and the seemingly intractable problem of the economy’s falling competitiveness compared with that of Japan, West Germany and America make for widespread pessimism.

Technological Futures and the Technical Fix

It is surely beyond question that Britain today faces formidable difficulties. At the forefront of public concern is the unprecedented level of unemployment, which is particularly acute among young people. Compounding this are regional imbalances that manifest the problem of worklessness, but which also extend far beyond this as ‘industrialisation’ takes its toll. Coal, steel, shipbuilding and manufacture continue their remorseless decline and with these industries goes a whole way of life. Underlying these trends is a deep-seated international recession which is having the effect of tightening competitive pressures, to which Britain does not seem able to adequately respond. The upshot is an apparently inexorable economic collapse, still further unemployment and bleak prospects for the future. On top of this, such is the internationalisation and integration of economic affairs mediated by gigantic transnational corporations and inter-state agencies, that people commonly sense their destinies — and that of their own nation — as being beyond their control.

The Military Project

In this chapter and the next we want to conclude our discussion by looking at how, in the late twentieth century, the politics of technology have become bound up with the politics of education. Though many readers might expect some ‘positive’ alternatives, we do not forward a list of policies to counter the perspectives we criticise. Such a policy agenda would, no doubt, be worthy and well-meaning, but in the end it would, we are sure, be tokenistic and hollow. How could we, as two individuals, really have all the answers? We do not know the way to the yellow brick road. We can, however, contribute by alerting travellers to obstacles in the way of reconstruction that are profound and formidable, and which, most certainly, will not be overcome by the superficial technical fix dreamed up by I.T. Utopians and futurologists.