Habermas’s formulation of technology discourse as legitimation discourse carries two arguments: a general argument regarding the depoliticizing ramifications of a technologistic consciousness and a historically specific argument regarding the legitimation of capitalism in its Keynesian stage, or, in our terminology here, in its Fordist phase. This book offers both a revival of the general argument and an updating of the historically specific argument. A revival is needed because the role of technology discourse in the legitimation of contemporary society is no less central and ubiquitous now than it has been in the past. An updating is called for because the historical circumstances that inform Habermas’s thesis have since changed: both capitalism and the dominant technological paradigm have gone through sweeping transformations. It is to these transformations that I turn next.
Transformations in Capitalism
ST<sub>RUC</sub>T<sub>URAL</sub>-T<sub>ECHNOLOGICAL</sub> T<sub>RANS</sub>F<sub>ORMA</sub>T<sub>IONS</sub>
The last few decades have been marked by transformations in capitalism pertaining to how production is carried out, where, and by whom. According to one dominant view—offered by Régulation School theory and neo-Marxian analysis—the restructuring of capitalism has been the result of a crisis in the mode of capital accumulation that reigned in Western capitalist societies since the 1930s and came to be known as Fordism and its substitution by an emerging, more flexible mode of capitalist accumulation, post-Fordism (Aglietta 2001; Boyer 2002). Post-Fordism—the emergence of which is usually dated in the early 1970s—entails shifts from mass production to “just-in-time” production and mass customization (Harvey 1989) and from the large-scale, hierarchized, and centralized corporation that controls all aspects of production to lean, decentralized production with a core company that outsources most facets of production to other small and midsize companies (Castells 1996). The process of production has also become global, involving a global division of labor run by multinational corporations (Sklair 2002). Flexibility has come to dominate the labor process both at the micro level, with workers asked to shift between multiple tasks and ad hoc projects, and at the macro level, involving more flexible and precarious employment schemes (Greenbaum 1995; Castells 1996; Sennet 2000, 2006; Bauman 2000; Jessop 1994). Concurrent with the new regime of accumulation arose a form of social regulation that encompasses not only the mode of production but also “a facilitating shell” (Fraser 2003) of economic, social, and political arrangements, cultural and artistic sensibilities, the world of ideas and bodies of knowledge, everyday life experiences, and the conception of the individual in society. Following Gramsci (1971), we can therefore speak of a post-Fordist society.
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age