FROM POPULATIONS MOBILITIES READING GROUP,
BAUMAN INSTITUTE, SCHOOL OF SOCIOLOGY & SOCIAL POLICY,
UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS
GROUP CONVENOR Professor Adrian Favell
Reflexive mourning
This post
summarises impressions from my zillionth reading of a book that has shaped the
way I approach the social world. Not having received formal sociological
education, save my undergraduate travails into anthropological theory and
subsequent personal investment during and then continuously after my PhD in
multiple the social sciences, meant that I needed a stimulus and concrete human
inspiration to proceed in uncharted territory. John Urry’s work provided this,
amongst other intellectually sophisticated voices. This time I read Economies of Signs and Space in three
phases/acts: first like a Lacanian dreamer, allowing my unconscious to pick what
matters most to me and kill what does not; then as a collector of impressions,
in John’s sociological fashion, to generate a meaningful repository of ideas;
and finally, like a Foucaultian archivist, who does some violence to past
realities. I hope that those who dip into this post forgive me for my custom
and the fact that Scott Lash takes a back seat in this narrative – he too is of
course very important in my current work and I know well that his contribution
to Economies was pivotal. I guess
this post is my own tribute to John. It produces thanatourist pilgrimage in
conjunction with a friend’s posting on Facebook of photographs from John’s
funeral and wake. I am almost sure he would have appreciated the performance.
It is
rather difficult to summarise this 326-page book. Its conceptual, analytical
and empirical span covers as diverse questions as those of (post)modern
subjectivity, contemporary class transformations, the changing structures of
capitalist accumulation, mobilities such as migration, travel, tourism and
technologies, new social movements tied to new concerns such as
environmentalism and the role of locality within global consciousness and
globalisation processes. These are only few of the themes covered in this magnum opus. I would argue that in John’s
case Economies contained the seeds
from which his 21st-century mobilities project grew and budded into
a ‘paradigm’ embracing aspects of global socio-cultural transformations, as
well epistemological frameworks connected to the development of science,
technology and complexity. Poignantly, his latest interest in futures,
concretised in the recent foundation of a centre at Lancaster University
(Social Futures), will not be developed by him. But I would say that, in some
respects, even this centre is laterally connected to the early vision of
interconnected mobilities that he proffered in Economies in collaboration with Scott Lash.
Reminiscing on Economies’ archival roots
Before presenting
some impressions from the book, a note is necessary on the conceptual
background of the project. Like most ‘grand projects’, it did not spring out of
nowhere but was connected to intensive intellectual deliberations over the
status of late 20th-century economic, socio-cultural and political
changes in the UK and globally. I guess here the dreamer meets the romantic
historian in me. But I strongly believe that place and context prove crucial
coordinates in our reading of the book – that more specifically, we should try
to understand its dominant discourses as a reaction to the impact of state and
de-centred, organisational policies on local community, peripheral and central
regions in increasingly globalised contexts. As a follow-up from The End of Organised Capitalism, Economies tried
to respond to critics on the authors’ typification of economic ‘branching out’
of economies by country. The call to consider ‘dis-organisation’ was not of
course to be taken literally, but this is precisely what a shallow reading of The End invited at the time. Gracefully,
Lash and Urry proceeded to develop their thesis further in Economies – but of course the book does a lot more than this, as it
provides a cultural outlook that was missing from The End.
As a self-contained
project, Economies belongs to a
vision of the future in difficult times for the British North, where Lancaster
is located (in which both Lash and Urry were professionally based at the time).
To understand who the authors’ immediate interlocutors were, one may inspect
the short Preface, which is populated by a blend of people who were educated
and/or worked in Northern regions of the country and went on to become
internationally renowned scholars (such densely populated by names prefaces
would become a norm in John’s books). Several of these names belonged to a
Lancaster University sociology reading group on regionalism. One of them is
today my colleague at Leeds. Again, this is crucial for our understanding of
the overall thesis: as the authors themselves acknowledge indirectly in the
latter parts of the book (Chapter on ‘Post-industrial Spaces’), the impact of
Thatcherite policies on the North in the 1980s (largely held accountable for
the rapid de-industrialisation of the region and the rise in unemployment) was
connected at least in Lancaster (also in other parts of the North) to a political
shift to the left.
In reality, Thatcher came into focus in this
picture for Lancaster a bit later but still with a vengeance. Mostly a
pro-Conservative town, which experienced de-industrialisation from the 1960s
and an extensive service growth sector, Lancaster became pro-Labour in the
1980s and 1990s, then also Green (these days we see a shift backwards in local
elections, as if we come full circle). In the 1980s, when the regionalism group
was active (see P. Bagguley, M. Lawson, D. Shapiro, S. Walby and A. Warde
(1990) Restructuring: Place, Class and
Gender. London: Sage, a much-cited book in Economies), the ward was Labour, slowly shifting from manual
working to professional middle class and with an emerging activist ethos tied
to the role of the public intellectual. There is a Frankfurt School ‘undercurrent’
that flows in Lash and Urry’s project that never surfaces in Economies, but, rest assured, it is
flowing freely and generously, with all its pros and cons. This stream
intersects and hybridises with third way voices. Giddens’ critical and creative
use (‘reflexive modernisation’) in the book is not random; nor is the belief in
the emergence of aesthetically-informed social action, which also manages to
counter first generation Frankfurt School distaste for the popular aesthetic
(in cultural industries). The authors were recording what was going on around
them as much as they were reflecting on their own agential role in these new
realities. I would argue that Economies’ overarching
cultural and political discourse matches its authors’ already by that time
established interests: Urry’s early concern with interest groups and revolution
and later investigation into tourism-informed systems of mobility, and Lash’s
earlier industrial/organisational sociology and later more
culturally-orientated focus on social theory, modernity and the new cultural
industries. The ‘shift’ in their collaborative work from purely political to
socio-cultural processes as an economic overlay is filtered through a
distinctively Simmelian reading of Marx’s second volume of Capital in Economies. Where
Kantian aesthetics is used in conjunction with Baudelaire and Baudrillard’s
poststructuralism to criticise Giddens’ ‘cognitive’ emphasis on reflexivity, Economies figures the most obvious (to
me!) innovative fusion of Lash and Urry’s sociological vision. But more on this
below.
Economy, culture and the
moral sphere
In an overwhelmingly
Marxist academia, Economies’
poststructuralist emphasis on cultural, rather than purely political, economy,
was not received well. These days I make the extra mile to teach my students
the difference between the two economies, stressing that the former is not
Marxist but Marxian-inspired only! Economies
innovates on this question but at the time many raised an eyebrow at its
authors’ ‘culturalist’ discourse (an English anti-French malaise, in my
opinion). Another thing that critics shunted aside was an emphasis on moral
economies of mobility (one of John’s colleagues, Andrew Sayer, is a world
expert on this subject). There is a number of key terms employed in the thesis,
some of which return in different parts of the book. The term ‘economies’ in
the title connects to Marxist political economy only to some extent, as the
concern with processes of signification in contemporary markets stresses the novelty
of reflexivity and hermeneutics in contemporary socio-cultural change. Also,
the term ‘space’ suggests the presence of delinking of production and
consumption from social milieus in line with Baudrillard’s dystopianism and
urban sociology’s concern with place socialities. There is, however, also a
less pessimistic note in such transformations, connected to new class
formations: interpretation by the new reflexive subjects, the authors argue, is
pivotal for social change and triggers creative innovation. There we detect the
influence of Bourdieu’s sociology of distinction, rather than of Marx’s; also,
of consumption rather than production practices.
Note how
the book begins with an acknowledgment of Marx’s circuits of production as
central to modernity. The two-tiered capital-flows that the authors proceed to
discuss across different chapters (money, commodities, means of production and
labour power) move through space and work across different temporalities. They
clarify that they intend to concretise (in terms of context, geography and social
practice) what Marx left abstract in his work as ‘production circuits’. Lash and
Urry’s ‘circuits’ exceed those of money and embrace the human plasticity of
social reality: they become constitutive of meaning-making as a creative but
not a priori determined process. I
cannot forgo the feeling that Schumpeter somehow affected their elaboration on
this, but as he does not appear in the bibliography, I note this as my own
suspicion.
There we
have the beginnings of the theory of mobility, which in recent years moved
through prominent critical readers of Marx – most notably, of course, Foucault
and his conception of ‘governance’. Interestingly, Economies says little about ‘power circuits’ in governmental terms
and even less about the biopolitical base of production, accumulation and
consumption. It does stress, however, the role of race and gender in
‘Ungovernable Spaces’ (Ch. 6), but sidelines them in favour of class, poverty
and inequality indicators in the ghetto. If space is important in the central
thesis, time is even more important for the conceptualisation of contemporary
transformations in work patterns and lifestyles. In chapters 9 and 10, which
are dedicated to the analysis of time and mobility, we find the voices of both
authors in unison, considering the temporal dimensions of technology as the
organisation of the social. Though neither Urry nor Lash would become
Foucaultians, again we see parallels with Foucault’s poststructuralist
consideration of economic-come-political structuring of institutions and
organisations. But of course Economies
takes a decisive turn away from all this when it pronounces a post-Fordist
separation of forms of capital as objects
and labour power as subjects. The new
consumer
capitalism order, the authors argue, is based on the continuous
production of signification from objects, with which subjects (who are now cast
as both producers and consumers) struggle to cope.
What is ‘aesthetic’ in
aesthetic reflexivity? (Not the senses! L)
As soon
as we encounter Baudrillard’s dystopia, we are moved to a counter-argument and
one of the book’s core theses: if such proliferation of meaning confuses, it
also opens up possibilities for the reconstitution of community, subjectivity,
work and leisure (a point notably figuring in Urry’s reflections on digital
mobilities after 2000 and in his Mobilities
(Polity, 2007)). This proliferation leads to the heterogenisation of space
and contemporary life, providing the contours of a reflexive human subjectivity.
There is an element of Giddensianism in this argument, but the idea that
contemporary subjects reflect upon phenomena and material objects only
cognitively is replaced in Economies
with the progressive aestheticisation of production and consumption. Aesthetic
reflexivity entails self-interpretation, rather than self-monitoring (as is the
case with Giddens’ cognitive reflexivity), is self-hermeneutic and based on
pre-judgements in Gadamer’s tradition of hermeneutics. Thus,
‘being-in-the-world’, being a cosmopolitan in everyday life, is externalised
and shared with others through expressive practices that at least in socio-economic
terms are manifest in product design. For Lash and Urry design enables
aesthetic reflexivity both at production and consumption ends, but not in a
Thatcherite ‘entrepreneurial individualism’ in the absence of society. Here I
state what I think that the authors want to argue: design makes social cohesion
possible in novel forms (subculturally, ethnically, neotribally etc.)
through the pervasive and exponential use of information and communication
structures. I think (and this is my interpretation) that Hollinshead’s
() recent playful tribute to Urry’s contribution to the social sciences as the
‘harbinger of the death of distance’ can be connected to Economies’ discourse.
There are
more influences the authors acknowledge in the formation of their argument –
Charles Taylor’s take on the aesthetic/allegorical sources of the modern self,
Marcel Mauss and Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘effectively pre-cognitive understandings
and classifications and the habitus’ (Economies,
7). But, as is the case with Bourdieu, they never resolve the conundrum
generated by their passage from the cognitive to the aesthetic: both appear to
belong to the domain of the conscious as hermeneutic products. Bourdieu never
clarified whether habitus is a fully articulated product of the conscious
layers of modernity – nor did he answer to elitist accusations concerning the
material basis of social distinction. Instead, he devised a second term, hexis, to address the embodied and
pre-conscious aspects of habitus. Economies does not fully resolve this gap
either: its authors speak of pre-cognition in aesthetic reflexivity. But one
wonders: how can we reflect before reflecting upon social reality? Another
problem that follows from this black spot is the role of emotion in aesthetic
reflexivity: if affect can be pre-cognitive (but largely useless at least in
production processes), then emotion (the fully articulated feeling, ridden with intentionality) is certainly
a crucial component in production and consumption circuits (hence in the
hermeneutics of the aesthetic). Economies
is full of sporadic references to affect but there is no systematic analysis of
emotion, save some specific references to Hochschild’s Managed Heart that do little to address the question in its
theoretical totality.
In fact,
the emphasis on the significance of aesthetic reflexivity in the production of
expert systems and new knowledge economies errs on the side of the conscious,
so we are left we little to learn about the heart. I hope I am forgiven here,
as this has been part of a long-standing interest of mine, partly inspired by
this book. There is little clarification of Kantian aesthetics in Economies, leaving open a door to those
hostile to the book’s thesis on circuits of production-consumption that places
the visual at the top of an aesthetic hierarchy. Economies’ Kant ought not to be read as a proponent of the sensory
aesthetic – unfortunately, the emphasis on design principles gives the
impression that Kant is misread by the authors, when this may not be the case. Interrogations
of the postmodern nature of aesthetic reflexivity by allegorical means
(allegory transcends theological moralism but remains a moral project, as
opposed to premodern symbolism, they claim) stand at the centre of the less
structured, nearly anarchist, contemporary social formations. But, again, where
is the emotional component in these new configurations? Note also, that new movements
need symbols to communicate belonging rather than fully formed allegories –
but, again, we fall back on a visual evaluation of aesthetic reflexivity. I
would argue that to understand Economies’
postmodern ethos, visual hierarchies should give analytical way to pathial ones – after pathos or emotion – if we are to study
for example the role of our 21st-century individual and communal
belonging.
Structure (in defence of
agency J)
The book
is divided into four parts. Here I have to work a bit in Foucault’s style, to
guess who did what in the overall structure of the work, as well as what each
bit contributes to the overall thesis. Again, I stand corrected by those who
may have more first-hand knowledge on the book’s history. Part I examines theoretically the global economy of flows and the
rise of postmodern reflexivity, with chapter 3 as its best exposition of the
authors’ readings of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens on expert systems and
individualisation.
Part II looks at the structural conditions of reflexivity in chapter
4, through examples of production systems (Japanese, German and Anglo-American).
The model/thesis of Economies is
closely connected to the Anglo-American reflexive accumulation, which is seen
as a corollary of reflexive consumption – in contradistinction to the German
and Japanese highly modern reflexive production. Chapter 5 applies these models
to culture industries (Scott Lash’s main interest at the time) to reflect on
the ways these now function more as service industries. This observation links
to the book’s main thesis: the main aesthetically reflexive agents in
contemporary capitalist environments represent a service class that both
produces and consumes. There is a strong Americanised edge in this aspect of
the argument that I would attribute to Scott Lash. The following two chapters
(6 and 7) read closer to Urry’s classical left-wing education (though work on
industrial structuring in them is probably done by Lash), with a strong
emphasis on the losers of reflexive modernity: migrants, the underclass and
ethnic minorities. Here we see a strong emphasis on the moral economies of
mobility that classical Marxist critics of Economies
ignored.
In Part III chapter 8 looks at the
intensification of design service provision in both public and private sectors
and its consequences. Chapter 9 examines changes in conceptions and organisations
of time (though, personally, I would have liked to see more clarification on
how and if the two connect). The argument is that, especially changing work and
leisure patterns led to the replacement of clock time by an increasingly
instantaneous, glacial or
evolutionary time, leading to reconfigurations of memory. This ‘speeding up’
argument became part of Urry’s later elaborations on mobilities. However, I do
think the chapter places unilateral emphasis on the public domain, leaving
private configurations of time and sociality largely unacknowledged. Clock time
is still very present in the private sphere, where possible, and I fear that
discarding its intimate presence may actually endorse rather unsavoury slides
to social evolutionism. Whereas Economies’
argument on the aesthetic maintains a distinctively neo-Romantic ethos, this
chapter re-rationalises contemporary life, bringing Giddens’ influence back
into focus.
In Part IV Chapter 10 completes the argument
with a focus on travel and the prevalence of risk. The claim that aesthetic
modernisation is followed by a shift from ‘legislation’ to ‘interpretation’
(borrowed from Bauman’s (1987) thesis), both in expert systems and in lay
environments, is also connected to the ‘end of tourism’ and the rise in
combined mobilities. Chapter 11 deals directly with the role of localities and
regions in globalisation processes. The reflexive demand to think globally but
act locally is viewed as the core of contemporary global culture, increasingly
dictating a shift from national to cosmopolitan patterns of civic belonging.
The prevalence of informational flows and post-national networks of mobility
usher humans to postmodern domains and patterns of belonging and action.
Brighter futures in dark
times
And there
you have it: a series of impressions on a book that was inspired by a
collection of dreamers and concretised/written by two future leaders (as both
of them would become). My personal engagement with John Urry – a sensitive,
thoughtful and rather modest person for his status – suggested that, just like
his other books, Economies must have
been a project that spoke first from the heart, rather than the brain, but in a
quiet tone. I am sure his globally spread students and collaborators will agree
with me in one thing: that his intellectual engagement with social phenomena
was always forward-looking, always in favour of opening closed doors and
examining possibilities. His collaboration with Scott Lash yielded great
results, as is the case when two highly creative minds meet. I hope that new
strong leaders like John will emerge in the social sciences, as kind and
creative as he was. I hope that they will also speak about John’s work in
innovative ways, critically or not, in favour of better futures.
REFERENCES
Bauman,
Z. (1987) Legislators and Interpreters.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Hollinshead,
K. (2016) ‘A portrait of John Urry – harbinger of the death of distance’, Anatolia, 27 (2): 309-316.
Lash,
S. and Urry, J. (1994) Economies of Signs
and Space. London: Sage.
