INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

For classical theorists such as Max Weber (1978:53), "power"—"the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his will despite resistance"—was conceptualized as hierarchical and unidirectional. Weber defined professional authority as based on established status or institutionalized identity. It involved exclusive claims to title, practice and expertise, and sharply separated those within collegially defended closed social relationships from those barred from the professional status group in question. Weber believed that one feature of professional groups was that they took responsibility for the knowledge they created and attempted to control the social circumstances under which it was developed. Weber recognized that the resources of the state and of formal organization can be used by professionals to expand or to provide administrative support for the scope of collegial authority (see, also, Halliday, 1987; Waters, 1989; Hall, 1968, 1975), but noted that professionals would not typically permit the state or formal organizations to undermine their knowledge-based authority. Recognizing that the relationship between professionals and non-professionals is hierarchical and potentially exploitative, Weber concluded that professional activity should be tempered by a sense of obligation towards laymen made vulnerable by lack of expertise.

Unlike Weber, post-structuralists such as Foucault see power not as unidirectional nor as centered but as a manifold set of forces that are dispersed through contingent, open-ended, and potentially fragmented networks of social relationships. Foucault lacked a conventional theory of professionalism, but, in sharp contrast to Weber, he did not regard knowledge as the product of an individual's or group's disinterested or value-relevant search for truth. Instead, he viewed knowledge as institutionalized by a "regime of truth" that embedded specialized discourse in certain types of social relationships (Foucault, 1980: 131). According to Foucault, both the instigators and objects of knowledge in the cultural sciences (i.e., those who know and those who are known) are best conceptualized as unwitting "vehicles of power." Professional practitioners, for instance, do not self-consciously or deliberately "apply power, " and, as Foucault sees it, "power" should not be categorized as "a phenomenon of one individual's (or group's) consolidated and homogenous domination over others" (1980: 98).

In Foucault's terms, professional experts and practitioners help establish "technologies of government" that pragmatically prove themselves on the basis of their ability to do whatever it is they do. For Foucault, it leads to confusion to hold professionals morally accountable. "Knowledge" cannot be severed from a "politics of truth; " no transcendent or necessary epistemic foundations can be established for knowledge of any kind (neither scientific nor moral). In short—and modern pretensions aside—no "analytic of finitude" will ever be identified that could enable "man" to reflect back to himself anything other than the infinite contingencies of his own "discovered" being (Foucault, 1973: 312-318).

For Foucault (1980: 131), then, power is productive rather than repressive: It "isn't the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves". Power is not one-sided (never the exclusive property of one individual or group). It is something always being negotiated, not something fixed, objective or predictable in terms of its effects. Based in creative and imaginative forms of discourse, it is power, not its absence, that enlightens; power awakens us to possibilities, rather than cutting us off from them. As mentioned earlier, Foucault recognized that power is extended in the cultural sciences through the development of new technologies of government: "Every education system is a political means of maintaining or modifying the appropriateness of discourses with the knowledge and power they bring with them" (Foucault, 1971: 46).

Foucault believed that social scientific knowledge typically develops through the processes of problematization and normalization. For instance, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries "madness" was effectively problematized, thus enabling the medical profession to become the guardians of sanity (Foucault, 1965). Similarly, "homosexuality" as a master or governing identity was problematized in the nineteenth century. Much later, this allowed "gays" to re-invent themselves by means of a strategic discourse that both reaffirmed and opposed the process through which they were made "queer". Here, we see a historical example of the inability of a controlling group (those who defined "sexual pathology" in the first place) to recuperate those who managed to turn their stigmata into the basis for a new, positive form of collective identity.

If the philosophical grounds of Weber's sociology were neo-Kantian, the philosophical basis of Foucault's work was post-Kantian and Nietzschean. In sharp contrast to Kant and to most ethical theorists, Nietzsche not only rejected institutionalized morality as a worthy cultural phenomenon but also uncoupled the idea of morality from the very idea of individual autonomy. According to Nietzsche, philosophers such as Rousseau and Kant merely developed a rationalization of an "old morality" that was laid down on the basis of herd-like agglomeration. Like Weber (who recoiled from Nietzsche's vision of the future, whilst recognizing its prescience), Nietzsche recognized that modernity was destroying this "old morality". But whereas Weber used high minded bourgeois values to mount a heroic and ultimately tragic rearguard action, Nietzsche recognized that all resistance was futile. Modernity itself, Nietzsche recognized, was the very source of nihilism, leading to "the devaluation of the highest values".

For Nietzsche, the rationalizing, differentiating, de-personalizing forces of modernity have taken us to a point where "the greater, more manifold, more comprehensive life" must replace the "old morality" with "supra-morality" (i.e., something beyond herd morality). This does not mean that the individual should eschew sociality (that never is possible) but, rather, that he should "give himself laws" and "develop his own arts and artifices of self-preservation, self-enhancement, and self-redemption" (Nietzsche, 1966: section 262). The basis for identity thus becomes, initially, resistance to what is internalized in oneself and in others. The material may be fixed at any point in time, but the possibilities are open-ended and shaped by power. The consequences are remarkable: what confronts us is not "God", the "General Will", or some "generalized other", but "a monster of energy, without beginning, without end... enclosed by 'nothingness' as by a boundary... set in definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be 'empty' here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces" (Nietzsche, 1967: section 1067).

We argue in this essay that the "standard" Weberian or neo-Weberian account of professionalism (e.g., Weber, 1978, 2:1097-1098, 1241-1260; Durkheim, 1958; Parsons, 1964; Goode, 1957; Freidson, 1986; Larson, 1977; Parkin, 1979; Abbott, 1988; Waters, 1989) is now too outmoded to explain the activities of contemporary cultural specialists in the United States. Among other things, it assumes that modern academic professionals will aggressively guard disciplinary and professional boundaries and govern themselves according to ethical guidelines selected by members of the professional status group in question. Yet, rather than inhabiting an orderly, closed universe that successfully institutionalizes internally developed disciplinary rules, most new specialists today inhabit cultural spheres that are often "interdisciplinary" and comparatively fragmented and fluid. Whereas the "cultural capital" (Bourdieu, 1977; Gouldner, 1979) of the old professional was secured by the exclusivity of collegial organization, the even more intangible capital of the new cultural specialist is likely to be far more contingent, transient, and negotiated in a manner that Nietzsche would recognize. In short, if we wish to analyze the new academic professionals, Foucault is likely to be of more assistance than Weber. Nonetheless, Weber's critical analysis of modernity is still useful to us today because it provides a modern point of comparison to a postmodern present, as well as the description of a road not taken.

WEBER: PROFESSIONALISHM AND MORAL AUTHORITY

In his study of scientific vocation and modern professionalization Weber tried to identify a niche in which the modern intellectual might operate with some integrity. Long before Giddens wrote about the topic, Weber identified modernity as a historical situation that would, of necessity, encourage a reflexive project of the self, leading to what Weber called the chance of becoming "a personality". For Weber, the search for "personality" is a hermeneutic search for ultimate values and for a neo-Kantian autonomous "inner core" of meaning and identity in a world that had become rationalized, impersonal, de-humanized, disenchanted and nihilistic. Weber grasped that the likely human reaction to such a world would be to retreat into anti-rational, anti-modern, fragmented, subjectivist cultural spheres of expression. According to Weber, the search for authentic "personality" strives for historically informed, humanly meaningful, individuated and cognitively rational alternatives to such anti-rationalist impulses.

Weber's neo-Kantianism stemmed from his acceptance of Immanuel Kant's modernist moral philosophy, which suggests that moral law is grounded in the individual's recognition that such law has universal applicability. In terms of Kant's philosophy, each individual should treat every other person as an end, not as a means to an end. Another way of putting this would be to cite Kant's well-known categorical imperative, which states that each one of us should always act in such a way that we can freely will that the moral maxims we construct to govern the rightness of our actions are made universal. Kant's transcendentalism has often been criticized as bloodless and formal. In other words, we may understand that certain actions are morally reprehensible (we would not like such actions to be directed against us), but this does not tell us in substantive terms, how we should act in particular social situations.

By contrast, Weber's historically and sociologically informed scholarship aims to supplement Kant's evangelical and modernist conception of the individual by providing historically embedded, hence quasi-transcendental, grounds for self-understanding. Weber did not believe it is possible for the scholar to lay down the (normative) law, for this would involve a dogmatic insistence in a particular "ethic of ultimate conviction, " or doctrine of ultimate ends. Still, Weber insisted it is possible for the cultural scientist to give some others an account of the ultimate meaning of their conduct—that is, to seek to make the meaning of such others' conduct transparent to them. (By the same token, the cultural scientist can turn him- or herself into a reflective object of knowledge.) For Weber, the methodology of the social and historical sciences must hence be comparative and historical. Such methodology shows divergence and difference; it cannot, of course, pontificate from some absolutist or absolutely transcendental viewpoint.

Weber suggested that, amidst the horrors of modernity, there are two ways in which modern individuals can develop meaningful vocational life strategies. These are (1) by means of "politics" (more broadly, service and leadership within a larger societal community) and (2) by means of "science". Although it is not immediately apparent that "politics" and "science" have much in common, Weber believed these vocations intersected. Let us examine why.

According to Weber, politics as a vocation permits the "personality" to go beyond the narrow concerns of "occasional politics", to hold "a nerve fiber of historically important events" in its hand and seek to further goals related to the specific cultural mission of the nation (1974a: 115; emphasis supplied). In this way, "life has meaning in the service of a cause" (1974a: 84). Weber recognized that "politics is a slow and strong boring of hard boards" (1974a: 128), but he also emphasized that the political leader must be passionate, as well as "responsible" and "proportionate" in temperament (1974a: 115). As he stressed, for the political leader "some kind of faith must always exist. Otherwise it is absolutely true that the curse of... worthlessness overshadows even the externally strongest political successes" (ibid.). Without value-commitment, Weber believed, politics becomes the vacuous and pointless search for power for power's sake.

Weber recognized that those who have chosen politics as their vocation must acknowledge that, in the real world, worthy ends often necessitate compromise, or, even, the application of dubious means. Calling such an orientation an "ethic of responsibility", Weber contrasts it with the aforementioned "ethic of ultimate conviction". In brief, he contrasts the cautious yet passionate bourgeois politician who serves and advances the interests of a people or nation with "crazy" figures such as Lenin or Karl Liebknecht willing to pursue "pie-in-the-sky" political ideals, regardless of the consequences for ordinary people. This raises the question of whether "politics as a vocation" is still possible in an age characterized by special-purpose social movements that appear to have uncoupled the idea of the state from a concept of public good. What would Weber—an old fashioned patriot—have made of the neo-liberalism? What would he have thought of the kind of political leadership that abandons the need to define and defend a particular "people" or nation and replaces this old-fashioned (modern) liberal project with a dogmatic ("ultimate") defense of the mobility of capital, within and across boundaries, regardless of the social and human costs incurred?

In terms of his own ultimate values, Weber concluded that "science" was the highest or most honorable "vocation" a modern individual could choose. Of course, he also recognized that just as all political careers end in failure so, too, from the perspective of the finite individual, the accomplishments of particular intellectuals must also and ultimately be regarded as futile. Scientific accomplishments, for instance, are not meant to be final or complete in themselves but are made to be surpassed and even to be forgotten. Nonetheless, science—including, here, "cultural sciences" such as history and sociology—enable the individual to devote his or her life to an ascetic quest for truth and to an understanding of those values that might ultimately shape the actions of one's fellow citizens.

One limitation of the physical or natural sciences, however, is that in a highly calculated and instrumentalist fashion they mirror and help solidify modern processes of rationalization. Not only do they contribute to the overall process of disenchantment but they also tend to become increasingly narrow in scope as they become more specialized and hence—in modern terms—more "advanced". Although science encompasses hard truths that must be acknowledged (think of Darwinism as an example), they cannot help us to formulate, to recognize, or to embrace values. By contrast, even though, as we have seen, the cultural sciences must reject ethics of conviction, Weber believed they nonetheless have a special role to play in the modern world. This is not because they can tell us the "meaning of life" (they cannot), but because they can force the individual, or help him to grasp, "an account of the ultimate meaning of his own conduct" (Weber, 1974b, 152). But for this to be possible, there has to be some frame of reference (an organically constituted lifeworld) that could relate us to the fate of a "people, " "nation" or "cultural community". If this is absent, "historical reflection" becomes a meaningless phrase because people are unable to recognize that they are a product of a humanly constructed past that has made them what they are.

Here, it is instructive to compare Weber's view of "science as a vocation" with Talcott Parsons' essay on "The Professions and Social Structure", written 20 years later. Like Weber, Parsons always emphasized that the intellectual could never hope to supply followers with the ends of action. Foreshadowing the bloodless and critically unreflective sociology he would later develop in the 1950s and 1960s, Parsons in 1939, however, reduced the domain of academic specialties to the proliferation of functionally specific technically defined spheres (1964: 38). Although there is nothing in Parsons' 1939 essay that specifically contradicts Weber's arguments in "Science as a Vocation", (and Parsons' essay, in any case, is intended to be much narrower in scope), it is interesting to consider Parsons' reconciliation of science as a profession with the process of disenchantment on the one hand and compare this on the other with Weber's attempts to help the intellectual resist the encroachment of de-personalizing forces in all areas of life. Later in his career, Parsons tried to argue that the quasi-transcendental cultural horizons of the societal community would, somehow, establish themselves "automatically" on the basis of their own functionality. In this way, Parsons tried to reconcile his liberal endorsement of American progress with his more Comtean belief that long-standing institutions are more to be trusted than upstart social critics.

Unlike Parsons, Weber acknowledged that it is the task of the modern intellectual to construct "grand narratives" (Lyotard, 1984: 65ff)—albeit ones that are tested by means of comparative and historical methodology and in terms of critical self-reflection. Such narratives do not tell us what we should become; rather, they explain, in empirical and historical terms, how we have managed to invent ourselves. The absence of such a historically informed narrative, Weber recognized, can be socially devastating, for it tends to lead to a proliferation of creatures who believe, at best, that history has come to an end and who, at worst, are indifferent, aimless and rational (in short, the kind of entities for which Debord's "spectacularization" was intended). Obviously, this contributes to a "motivational" crisis (Habermas, 1975: 75)—an inability of the "socio-cultural system to support adequately the state and the system of social labor; " Moreover, because, as politicians are unable to access any serious or binding themes that remind followers of ultimate values, it becomes increasingly difficult to address constituents as members of a "people" or "nation". As Debord in 1968 suggested, when "the running of a state involves a permanent and massive shortage of historical knowledge, that state can no longer be led strategically" (1991: 20; see also Baudrillard 1983).

Whilst identifying both politics and science as worthy and possible vocations for contemporary life, Weber elsewhere in his writings rejects both eroticism and aesthetic expressionism as solutions to the problem of how in the modern world to be a successful "personality" (see, for instance, Weber, 1974c). According to Weber, "erotic relations" are quasi-religious and are particularly appealing in a disenchanted world. They re-enchant by seeming to "offer the unsurpassable peak of the fulfillment of the request for love" (1974c, 347). But, because they are akin to mystical detachment from the world, such relations are transient, disembodied, anti-rational, solipsistic and insular in orientation. In a similar vein, Weber rejects aesthetics (and, with it, the Nietzschean, Simmelian and "postmodern" project of how to be a "personality") because, under the modern conditions of "intellectualism and the rationalization of life", art, in Weber's view, provides nothing other than an individualized escape route from everyday existence and an expression of "subjectivist needs". Like eroticism, art becomes a modern equivalent for the search for religious salvation (1974c: 342). In sum, as far as Weber was concerned, both eroticism and aestheticism are inferior to science and politics because they cannot show how the self might be grounded in practices that are cognitively rational, empirically grounded, historically focused and value-oriented. Instead, both art and eroticism encourage irrationality, having an emphasis on the emotional, subjectivism, and personal escape from a world that has become all too distressingly rationalized, disenchanted and impersonal.

Towards the end of his life, Weber became increasingly pessimistic about the future of Europe: "No summer's bloom lies ahead of us, " he prophesied, "but rather a polar night of icy darkness..." (1974a: 128). Pre-modern individuals, Weber noted, attained "inner-worldly perfection" (i.e., satisfied what they intended for themselves) merely by completing their allotted life span. By contrast, contemporary subjects become "weary of life" without ever having had the chance of being "satiated" by it (1974c: 356). The reason for this is the lack of finitude in contemporary experience—what Durkheim referred to as the "malady of infiniteness" and what Nietzsche called the absence of horizons. But the cause of this lack of finitude is not the absence of domination, but its refinement and extension. The modern individual is trapped within increasingly specialized spheres of competence further and further removed from some ultimate whole, and also is lost within increasingly fragmented and de-contextualized cultural spheres that are anti-rational, emotive, and highly subjectivist.

If modern individuals sense they are lost, postmodern entities are simply overwhelmed and engulfed. Perhaps, then, it was Weber more than any other classical theorist who best understood the contradictions of modernism and most clearly foresaw the horrors of "postmodernism" (He also anticipated why the Parsonsian project was doomed from its very inception.) As Weber (1974c: 356) expressed it, whereas the "cultivated" modern (bourgeois) individual strives for "self-perfection" "in the sense of acquiring or creating "cultural values". The segment (of meaning) which the individual and passive recipient or the active co-builder can comprise in the course of a finite life becomes the more trifling the more differentiated and multiplied the cultural values and goals for self-perfection become. Hence the harnessing of man into this external and internal cosmos of culture can offer the less likelihood that an individual would absorb either culture as a whole or what in any sense in "essential" in culture. Moreover, there exists no definite criterion for judging the latter. It thus becomes less and less likely that "culture" and the striving for culture can have any inner-worldly meaning for the individual.

We can now more clearly understand the nature of the break between the neo-Kantian, Weberian ("old professional") conception of autonomy on the one hand and the Nietzschean-inspired ("new specialist") Foucauldian notion of intellectual power on the other. Modernists such as Weber assumed that it was still possible, though difficult, for reasonable individuals (who, presumably, had internalized the ethical and ascetic values of the high bourgeoisie) to identify what I have called the historical, quasi-transcendental grounds of a common identity that would subsume either a Hobbesian war of all against all or a clash of multiple, individual wills to power. Without this faith in the capacity of the cultural scientist to help formulate such a common identity, Weber would have concluded that an academic career was meaningless.

By contrast, Foucault provides us with a way of thinking about how the cultural sciences provide individuals with nothing other than a means for self- and collective-aggrandizement. These interject the specialist and client into the force field of power and resistance by serving techniques of governmentality and overarching structures of domination. Let us apply the Foucauldian model to some of the tactics pursued by the new cultural specialists. After examining these, we will try to relate some of the particular "trajectories" and "tactics" of the new academic professionals with more overarching mechanisms of domination. Again, we will suggest that the main way of integrating micro-level trajectories and tactics with overarching global structures of domination is through the development of Foucault's "technologies of government". This, approach, we believe enables us to understand most adequately the contemporary development of the "cultural sciences" in the Academy.

THE NEW CULTURAL SPECIALISTS

Compared to academic professionals of a century ago, the "new" academic professionals, not only have failed to locate subjects willing to subsume themselves in generalizing modes of discourse but also have lost the means to ground their own activities in terms of an overarching analytic of understanding. To put this in organizational terms, contemporary cultural specialists find it increasingly difficult to base their claims to knowledge and expertise in exclusive social relationships that are closed to the outside world. Oddly enough, practitioners typically see this as a "positive" or "progressive" development. The "postmodern" intellectual appears to believe that equalizing social relations enables us to know more of what can be known. As a result, students evaluate professors; focus groups determine the policies political leaders should select; and different lifestyles are held to yield different and incommensurable "knowledges" (see Seidman, 1991; 1994). In stark opposition to this kind of thing, as we have seen modern cultural theorists jealously defended collegial boundaries so that the members of the group from which they obtained their credentials, identity and social worth could claim they had something to offer of particular—indeed unique—importance.

New academic professionals today tend to be associated with the New Academic Programs (NAPs). These fall into two broad categories: (1) what we shall call the identity based programs, such as Women's Studies, Afro-American Studies, Chicano Studies, Native American Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, Disability Studies, etc.; and (2) postmodern media studies, i.e., those numerous programs in Communication—particularly in the United States—that often take a largely uncritical view of mass media and popular culture.

The identity based NAPs tend to define themselves as "interdisciplinary" and, often, have strong connections with the new social movements, based on race, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. Typically, they focus on life politics and the "reflexive project of the self" (Giddens, 1991). They also are more concerned with promoting new forms of solidarity and new types of motivation than in pursuing projects favored by the "old left, " based on class or national identity (Ashley, 1997: 70-76).

In contrast, postmodern media studies—which now have overtaken sociology in terms of student interest and enrollment—typically turn attention away from macro-level structures such as nation, state, class, party, institutional organization, etc., and focus instead on mass media, T.V., film, popular culture, communicative and interpersonal methods, aesthetic style and fashion. Whereas the goal of classical sociology was to critique and improve modernity, not just to understand it, postmodern media studies tend to accept extant means of communication at face value and on their own terms. In other words, a critical stance towards what Theodor Adorno (1991) called "the Culture Industry" tends to be absent. Not only are the idea of aesthetic judgment and the distinction between "high" and "low" art abandoned, but, also, the "old" or modern separation between art as something transcendent and life itself is relinquished. Both popular culture and intellectual or academic efforts to understand popular culture accordingly have achieved what Adorno always feared: The sublation of the sense of difference between art and life (Bernstein, 1991: 21). As a result, the gap that opened up in the modern period between the culture industry and the rest of life begins to close.

Postmodern media studies hence tend to focus on the "spectacle-commodity economy", but on its own terms: As "an enormous positivity, out of reach and beyond dispute" (Debord, 1995: 15). If modern sociology at least attempted to modify, reform or humanize the alienated production demanded of the first industrial revolution (and, hence, revivify a degraded lifeworld), many contemporary programs in Media Studies and Communication merely take it for granted that, "with the advent of the so-called second industrial revolution, the lifeworld has been effectively colonized from without and that alienated consumption" must be "added to alienated production as an inescapable duty of the masses" (Debord, 1995: 29). As a result, pop princesses become objects of veneration and worthy topics of study in university seminars. It is instructive to compare this kind of adulation with the views of an "old" Marxist critic such as Debord (1995: 38-40):

Media stars are spectacular representations of living human beings, distilling the essence of the spectacle's banality into images of possible roles. Stardom is a diversification in the semblance of life—the object of an identification with mere appearance—which is intended to compensate for the crumbling of directly experienced diversifications of productive activity. Celebrities model various styles of life and various views of society which anyone is supposedly free to embrace and pursue in a global manner. The admirable people who personify the system are indeed well know for not being what they seem to be; they have achieved greatness by embracing a level of reality lower than that of the most insignificant individual life.

In postmodern media studies, what tends to count are "relevance" to what the student/consumer wants to study and obeisance towards popular modes of cultural hegemony. By contrast, the currencies that matter for the identity-based NAPs are student teaching evaluations (consumer reports), political visibility, number of followers, special-interest politicking (usually on behalf of some "victimized" constituency), success at "lifestyle engineering" and "consciousness raising." To a much greater extent than the "old" professionals, the new cultural specialists are required to advance not just dominant themes of cultural hegemony but also the superordinate goals of bureaucratically and politically oriented administrators. Accordingly, they address "diversity" issues (i.e., contribute to personnel management) or attempt to bring some pop appeal and tuition money to the university as they prepare students for the "real world" of broadcasting, public relations, marketing, media, persuasion and advertising that supposedly typify our new "information" or "postmodern" economy.

In this essay we wish to trace some connections among the interactional strategies of the cultural specialists, the needs of formal organizations and mid-level bureaucracies and, finally, more global forms of economic and cultural hegemony. Our guide here is Foucault (1980:99), who, rather than ignoring the micro-macro link, conducted "an ascending analysis of power" that started with "infinitesimal mechanisms" with their own history, their own trajectory, their own techniques and tactics" and ended with a consideration of history and structure. As part of this strategy, Foucault distinguished among (1) "power" (the ability at an interactional level to overcome other's resistance); (2) "domination" (the institutionalization of arrangements that provide others little scope for maneuver), and, between these two, (3) "government" (the conduct of conduct by means of technologies that produce knowledge about others). Hence, in moving from power to domination Foucault (1980:99) as he put it, traced "how... mechanisms of power have been (and continue to be) invested colonised, utilised, involuted, transformed, displaced, extended, etc., by ever more general mechanisms and by forms of global domination" (see also Foucault, 1991). Foucault, then, recognized that highly rationalized and impersonal structures of domination (e.g. the circuit of capital) can coexist quite happily alongside more flexible, de-centered and local discursive strategies. And, as we have seen, he invites us to investigate how "government", in his terms, articulates power and domination in one "ascending" spiral. Foucult, then, helps us to understand how micro-strategies of power (and—as we shall see—knowledge) can be articulated with organizational or even state agenda.

HEGEMONY AND THE POSTMODERN "CULTURAL SCUEBCES"

During the early nineteenth century, a "rigorous morality" was developed as part of the campaign "to christianize the workers", to "constitute the populace as a moral subject and to break its commerce with criminality, and hence to segregate the delinquents and to show them to be dangerous not only for the rich but for the poor as well... " (Foucault, 1980: 41). As far as economic management is concerned, can we discern analogous versions of morality being produced today by the new cultural specialists? And, regarding cultural forms of hegemony, do intellectual representations now serve to reinforce the idea of a new kind of rootless, mindless, "global citizen" (akin to Nietzsche's "last man", perhaps).

As far as this brief essay is concerned, three changes in the composition and orientation of the U.S. labor force can be emphasized. First, as numerous sources have pointed out, growth in the labor force in the first part of the twenty-first century will depend heavily on the incorporation of female and "minority" personnel; second, numerous surveys have indicated that racial and ethnic groups are at least as polarized today as they were a generation ago; third, the U.S. labor force is increasingly subject to labor arbitrage and to the exigencies of globalized labor and commodity markets. The first two trends suggest that governing groups must pay more attention to the motivational resources of "productive" women and minorities; the second requires such groups to prepare the domestic work force for globalization and a new international division of labor that increasingly will abandon outmoded national programs of "Fordist" investment, recruitment and identity.

Such "Fordist" modes of regulation prevailed from the late 1930s to the late 1970s (see Aglietta, 1976; Harvey, 1989: 125-197). During this period, the health of various industrial sectors in advanced capitalist "Warfare-Welfare" societies was associated with national well-being, and the state brokered a compromise between male-dominated organized labor and an indigenous corporate sector. The essential characteristic of Fordism was an informal agreement among big business and big labor that matched productivity increases in the industrial sector with real rises in wages. By the end of the 1970s, however, while productive gains continued, the industrial wage in the United States began to go into a more than 30-year decline.

The globalization of the economy since the 1980s has meant, chiefly: (1) the increasing mobility and importance of financial capital, together with labor arbitrage; and (2) the detachment of labor from particular or necessary spatial locations. This latter development has significantly undermined more traditional (i.e., modern) forms of working-class culture in areas such as the "rust belt" of the United States, the North of England and South Wales. It also has had the effect of accelerating a detachment of culture in all of its forms from the significance of place. Post-Fordism is associated with a decline in the overall importance of the nation-state—both as an economic and political actor—and, in this regard, it is important to note that such a decline makes it far more difficult for cultural communities within a nation to assert themselves. In the modern period, the identity of such ethnic, religious or racial communities was actually strengthened by their ability to lobby the state and have the nation state recognize them and grant them "their" rights (e.g., French Canadians or, during the 1960s civil rights movement, Afro-Americans in the United States). A relative decline in importance of the nation state makes it increasingly difficult for cultural communities to assert generalizable "rights" because what made such rights tangible in the first instance was the chance to expand the superordinate domain of more transcendent citizen rights. ("Minorities", after all, were so-labeled and brought into existence by the state. No one from the vantage point of a localized or self-reflective, self-constituting lifeworld ever described him- or herself primarily as a member of a "minority" group.)

Globalization detaches culture from the significance of place, and, as a result, it becomes possible to eat Thai food in Belgium and turn San Paulo into the most important industrial city in Germany. Such uncoupling leads to what George Ritzer (2007) has called "the globalization of nothing": to forms that are centrally controlled and largely lacking in distinctive content. Once de-contextualized, though, in a process of "globalization" (Ritzer, 2007: 21-24) once indigenous cultural forms can be re-organized by capital. Taco Bell industrializes "Mexican cuisine" (I speak ironically), and, in a parallel fashion people get used to the idea of having their identities (collective or personal) manufactured or prepared for them as part of a spectacularized and globalized market place of meaning. The phenomenon of globalization connects the cultural activities of new specialists with the economic practices of multi-national corporations (MNCs). As we have seen, the new cultural specialists are the product of "hybridization" (the intersection of local with global culture), "creolization" (the mixing and matching of various fragmentary, often temporary, identities), the absence of hierarchy and the lack of dominant or grand narratives, all of which can be linked to "localization": the integration of the global and the local (Ritzer, 2007: 139). The imposition of the global on the local by MNCs (globalization) is connected by Ritzer with both "neo-liberalism and realist theories of state power relations" (ibid.)

"Time-space distanciation" (Giddens, 1990: 14) creates global networks of communication that can be to be applied anywhere. In this sense, then, "globalization" is less a process by which the many become one than an arrangement by which all cultural modes of expression and purpose are severed from the self-consciously historical or local (globalization). Once this fundamental characteristic of globalization is understood the relationship between cultural and economic hegemony becomes more apparent. As culture—including labor practices and expectations, as well as consumer orientations—are, in Giddens' terms, "distanciated", they more easily can be transformed into something tractable and useful to transnational corporations. As we have seen, globalization "frees" labor from the significance and the constraints of place. Similarly, as corporate business detaches cultural objects from the contexts that produced them (think of "rhythm and blues" as an example) these objects can be repackaged and sold—made freely available, as "world music" for instance—to, of course, a global audience.

What has been de-contextualized can always, later, be re-appropriated as the basis for more flexible and transient versions of identity (hybridization, creolization). To cite some banal examples from the postmodern lifeworld: African-Americans celebrate "Kwanza"—an African tradition that was invented in the 1970s by a U.S. college professor, and Schiller's "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is turned into the official anthem of European bureaucrats. In the domain of capitalist commodity production the Nike swoosh is everywhere—as part of what Foucault called the "capillary" form of power it reaches "into the very grain of individuals"; it "touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions". But it still has been de-contextualized in a way that would immediately have been understandable to Marx (1976: 165).

In Nike footwear, for instance, a definite social relationship between a westernized consumeratti and an exploited feminized Asian proletariat takes on the fantastic form of a relationship between one kind of cultural object (desirable shoes) and another (less desirable shoes). In Marx's terms, the fetishism of commodities could not occur if the "peculiar social character of the labour that produces them" were not obscured. But in this particular example the symbolic value of the cultural object in question—once removed from the basis of its own production—expresses the truth that it is of ultimate value anywhere in the world, whether this be in Chicago, in Manila or along the Orinoco. This, then, is the ultimate goal of global capitalism: that we are free enough to embrace and pursue in a global manner goods and lifestyles desired everywhere. "A history that is the same everywhere", however, amounts "to nothing more than an intrahistorical refusal of history", an "attempt to bury history in culture", to "restructure society without community" (Debord, 1995: 107, 137).

Just as capital once had to standardize methods of production(brushing aside local custom in the process—so, today (reversing the steps in the argument above) "globalization" (or, as Ritzer would have it, "McDonaldization") means that personal and collective identity must be based on that which first is de-contextualized. And not merely—as Marx would have it—"mystified" in terms of the social relations of production. The new cosmopolitan, consuming elite must be made conscious of their place in a new global order. In the profane spectacle, "the totality of the commodity world is visible in one piece, as the general equivalent of whatever society as a whole can be and do" (Debord, 1995: 33). No more do we have the modern, critical, quasi-transcendental understanding of difference, and the glimpse of a common humanity expressed in such variety. Instead, we must take it for granted that MacDonald's means the same both Tulsa and Shanghai; that everyone likes the Disney channel because it portrays themes of universal relevance; that lesbians in Africa suffer from the same difficulties as do those in California.

As Debord (1995: 120) pointed out however, as the capitalist production system unifies space and breaks down the boundaries between one society and the next the resulting unification inevitably will be a process of "trivialization". Just as "the economic management of travel to different places ("tourism") suffices in itself to ensure those places' interchangeability" (thereby defeating the very purpose of the activity in question), the capitalist production system must also promote the interchangeability and dispensability of every product and service. In response to this self-induced problem, mass consumerism must encourage itself to be resisted by diverse sub-cultural forces (gangstas, rastifarians, gays and lesbians, indigenous people, etc.) before it repackages and merchandises these forms of "difference" back to increasingly bored and jaded consumers. In this sense, then, postmodern consumerism capital still parasitically feeds on an autonomous "lifeworld" that it contradictorily must seek to produce and manage. But this contributes only to the totality of the spectacle, which proves itself eager to encourage, promote and merchandise "coolness", controversy and youthful rebellion. Debord (1995: 40-41) described this process well:

Wherever the consumption of abundance has established itself, there is one spectacular antagonism which is always at the forefront of the range of illusory roles: the antagonism between youth and adulthood. For here, an adult in the sense of someone who is master of his own life is nowhere to be found. And youth—implying change in what exists—is by no means proper to people who are young. Rather it characterizes only the economic system, the dynamism of capitalism: it is things that rule, that are young—things themselves that vie with each other and usurp one another's places.

Whereas postmodern media studies acknowledge the omniscience of the media and reinforce a Panglossian acceptance of the banality and pseudo-rebellion of spectacularization, the main task of the identity based NAPs in the U.S. system of higher education is to develop technologies of government appropriate for the new flexible means of production. Among other things, this means recognizing that the First World-Third World, North-South global divide is now as much constitutive of America as external to it. Hence, like affirmative action programs, Afro-American and Chicano programs must help sort between those blacks and Hispanics deemed "educable", i.e., potentially productive, and those destined for careers in the Third World. Women's Studies programs (the new "finishing schools, " as one journalist labeled them) are a little more inclusive; among other things they encourage college-educated women to seek precarious, low-paid but demanding jobs in middle management. Of course, the rhetoric of the NAPs emphasizes the search for identity, rather than relationship to the means of production. Yet behind this rhetoric, as Foucault would have anticipated, the new specialists first problematize the issue of race and gender (not particularly difficult today) and then seek to normalize the new practices that must be interiorized by a rapidly changing labor force. Not surprisingly, college-educated blacks and Hispanics are expected not to embrace but to distance themselves from unproductive lower-class blacks and Hispanics (a new lumpenproletariat), and, in a parallel fashion, college-educated women are required to "restore" "moral enquiry to the university" (Boxer, 1998: 391). Among other things, this requires them to distinguish between the "productive" women in the work force and working the ideological apparatuses and the outmoded "breeders" outside it, unable or unwilling to abort inconvenient and "unproductive" fetuses.

Failing to identity "God" (too patriarchal, in any case), "nation" or "class" as a transcending authority against which the duties and freedoms of various cultural communities might be located, the identity based NAPs invariably are drawn to their version of what they now recognize as superordinate: the "global community". Unfortunately, their analysis of "globalization" tend to be banal in the extreme, mirroring rather than critiquing dominant cultural themes. The fact that globalization is proletarianizing hundreds of millions in S.E. Asia and has already laid waste large swathes of territory in the old U.S.S.R., tends to be ignored. Instead, spectacularization is celebrated. As two Professors of Social Work suggest in a recent scholarly article in a celebration of creolization: "our world has shrunk... societies such as the United States offer the opportunity for every person to become a multicultural person" (Martinez-Brawley and Brawley 1999: 26-27). For these new specialists, the task of the intellectual must be to help "create a better multicultural climate and aid in the transition to the postmodern global community" (1999, 29). They add that: "The world is breaking barriers and moving away from immovable boundaries. Being unidimensional, whether in language or culture, is not only personally limiting, but also bad for business" (1999, 30).

For new specialists such as Martinez-Brawley and Brawley the cultural aspects of globalization are wholly positive. They seem to lack any understanding of how spectacularization overwhelms the capacity of individuals to resist capitalist commodity production in its latest, most lethal incarnation. As we have seen, globalization engenders a type of universalism that the old (or new) left would never have recognized. It is not even liberal or modernist in orientation. Instead, it represents an abandonment of the Kantian transcendental imagination, with its claim to universality and a possible unity of wills. In place of this modern, liberal politic we have pseudo-humanistic pronouncements about a "global community" that is utterly unable to locate those transcending principles that would enable it to recognize something human in what could otherwise be perceived as authentically alien, irredeemably and unashamedly different. Amazonian tribesmen are celebrated for their "wisdom" in locating herbs and potions suitable for sale in the Body Shop. The fact that these tribesmen once inhabited a symbolic universe authentically incommensurable with modern ways of thinking is forgotten.

In short, what cannot be acknowledged by spectacularization or respected by postmodern culture is whatever is genuinely and irredeemably indexical or "diverse" (e.g., an "indigenous" language spoken by a few thousand people, many of which disappear every year). Globalization, of course, means the hegemony of English and the ability of a global elite to communicate with people everywhere. So much for multiculturalism or Martinez-Brawley's and Brawley's (1999:30) assertion that "being unidimensional" is "bad for business". If a national elite behaved with such arrogance we would call it "colonialism" or "imperialism", or some such term. But, we cannot: We lack the language. And, in any case, as the new cultural specialists have taught us, "colonialism" and "imperialism" are outmoded as master narratives. Individuals and groups can be racist or sexist by being insufficiently flexible in their thinking or identity, but a global, statist or structural determination of imperialism and racism has largely faded from view.