RELATED TERMS: Actantiality; Disciplinary Societies and Societies of Control; Remembering;
Introduction: Design practices, political-economic and socio-cultural conditions
Design practices are contextualised by the political-economic and the socio-cultural circumstances in which they are invented and deployed as specific responses that are considered appropriate to those circumstances. For example, design practices may take up different roles in a Fordist political-economy to a post-Fordist one. It is further argued, however, that design practices have the potential to break with those circumstances, to alter the context reflexively.
It is a matter of importance, then, for design practices to grasp the kind of political-economic circumstances to which they are responding in order for them to assess whether it is ‘appropriate’ or ‘responsible’ to take up conventional positions or whether it is more ‘appropriate’ or ‘responsible’ to seek to alter those circumstances for particular socio-cultural reasons. In each case, the invented designs would offer different ‘affordances’, ‘opportunities’ or ‘potentials’
In this characterisation, designs may be understood as ‘technologies, particularly as mnemotechnologies in Stiegler’s sense, whose performativity or actantiality, and not simply productivity, takes place across political-economic and socio-cultural horizons.
Fordism
The term Fordism has gathered many nuanced meanings since first becoming a popular term in the 1920s in the USA and Western Europe. Bob Jessop (1992) seeks to bring some order into this profusion by distinguishing four levels of Fordism. They relate to the labor process, the regime of accumulation, and its modes of regulation and societalisation.
Fordism, as a distinct type of capitalist labour process, refers to a particular configuration of the technical and social division of labor involved in making long runs of standardised goods. Such ‘mass production’ is normally based on a technical division of labor organised using Taylorist time-and-motion management: the production line, with tasks split up into minute repetitive motions, produces homogenous products. It is subject, in its immediate production phase, to mechanical pacing by moving assembly line techniques and is organised overall on the supply-driven principle that production must be unbroken and in long runs to secure economies of scale. The assembly line itself mainly exploits the semi-skilled labour of the “mass worker” while other types of worker, such as craft or unskilled manual workers, foremen, engineers, designers and so on, are employed elsewhere. Such Fordist production ideally involves systematic control by the same firm of all stages of accumulation, from producing raw materials through to marketing. This complex technical division of labor is sometimes related to a complex regional division within or across national economic spaces.
As an accumulation regime, that is, a macroeconomic regime sustaining expanded reproduction, Fordism involves a virtuous circle of growth based on mass production and mass consumption. If it is assumed that the Fordist regime and its reproduction are autocentric, that is,, that the circuit of capital is primarily confined in national boundaries, Fordism’s virtuous circle involves the following: rising productivity based on economies of scale in mass production, rising incomes linked to productivity, increased mass demand due to rising wages, increased profits based on full utilisation of capacity, increased investment in improved mass production equipment and techniques and a further rise in productivity. Various margins of flexibility and/or built-in stabilizers may be necessary in order to keep the circle virtuous despite the inevitable tendencies towards instabilities and disproportions. Not every firm or branch of production must be dominated by Fordist techniques for this mode of growth to occur so long as the leading sectors are Fordist.
Fordism can be said to constitute a mode of regulation, that is, an ensemble of norms, institutions, organisational forms, social networks, and patterns of conduct which sustain and guide the Fordist accumulation regime and promote compatibility among the decentralised decisions of economic agents despite the conflictual character of capitalist social relations. As such, Fordism can be specified through the forms assumed by different moments in the circuit of capital, the ways in which these forms get reproduced, and their articulation with each other. Thus one could explore the distinctive features of the Fordist wage relation; the Fordist enterprise; the nature of money; the nature of commercial capital; and the links between the circuit of capital and the state. Analysis of the mode of regulation is concerned with the economy in its integral sense, the social context in which expanded economic reproduction occurs. It specifies the institutional and organisational conditions which secure Fordism as a national accumulation regime. It is especially helpful in defining the peculiarities of different Fordist regimes.
Fordism may also be analysed as as a generic mode of ‘societalisation,’ that is, a pattern of institutional integration and social cohesion. This may be performed in terms of its overall social impact through explorations of, for example, its general repercussions on other institutional orders, such as the political system or cultural life, and/or other axes of societal organisation, such as its spatial patterning.
In addition to these four different levels of Fordism, their structural and strategic moments can be distinguished. The former refer to the actual organisation of the level in question; the latter to the strategic perspectives and discourses which are currently dominant on that level.
Jessop identifies a number of problems with the notion of Fordism. For example, in the context of the labour process, Fordism as defined by Henry Ford was actually quite limited in diffusion and was never fully realized even in Ford’s own plants in North America, let alone those in Europe. Indeed two common criticisms are that only a small part of manufacturing output is produced in Fordist conditions and only a small proportion of the labor force is employed in Fordist manufacturing. It is also questionable whether there ever was a Fordist regime of accumulation and, if so, how it might be identified? The key problem with Fordism as a mode of regulation is the wide variation in the modes of regulation compatible with Fordism considered as an accumulation regime. If such there is or was, the Fordist mode of regulation has proved so varied that its consequences for societalisation also vary massively.
Post-Fordism
While having reservations about its validity as a socio-historical phenomenon, nevertheless Jessop ventures the following thoughts on post-Fordism, which he assumes is an accumulation regime based on the dominance of flexible production in combination with differentiated, non-standardized consumption. On this basis, he specifies the various levels of post-Fordism.
As a labour process, post-Fordism can be defined as a flexible production process based on flexible machines or systems and an appropriately flexible work force. Its crucial hardware is microelectronics-based information and communications technologies. When linked into electronics-based telecommunications systems, the scope for the post-Fordist labour process to shape the dynamic of the emerging economic system is far greater than was true of Fordism. Post-Fordism evolves in response to crises of Fordism, and includes a new lease of life for flexible specialisation complexes and a key role for new technologies, such as microelectronics, biotechnology and new materials.
An ideal-typical national post-Fordist accumulation regime would be based on flexible production, growing productivity based on economies of scope, rising incomes for polyvalent skilled workers and the service class, an increased demand for differentiated goods and services favoured by the growing discretionary element in these incomes, increased profits based on technological rents and the full utilisation of flexible capacity, reinvestment
in more flexible production equipment and techniques and/or new sets of products, and a further boost to economies of scope. Post-Fordist modes will be more oriented to worldwide demand, global competition could further limit the scope for general prosperity and encourage a market-led polarisation of incomes. In response to the crisis tendencies in its Fordist predecessor, post-Fordism transforms mass production and goes beyond it, segments old markets and opens new ones and is less constrained by national demand conditions.
As a mode of regulation, post-Fordism would involve commitment to supply-side innovation and flexibility in each of the main areas of regulation, for example around the wage relation, the enterprise system, the money form, commercial capital and state intervention. Taken together these forms comprise a distinctive ensemble of regulatory practices.
The post-Fordist ‘mode of societalisation’ is especially uncertain. There are already clear signs of reorganisation in the spatial division of labor in and across national systems. The new sites of production are re-articulated into the global circuit of capital. Only its central nodes, the primary milieux of innovation, can function as locally integrated, agglomerated, self-generating growth poles. Other sites are becoming more fragmented and are being inserted at various lower points in the global hierarchy.
Relationship to Disciplinary Societies and Societies of Control
Kelly (2015) is of the view that Deleuze’s position in ‘Postscript on the societies of control’ represents a cross-fertilisation of his thought with that of Antonio Negri. Negri’s perspective was representative of a broader tendency in Italian Marxism called ‘Autonomism’. Of central importance to Negri and associated Italian Marxists is a particular elaboration of the notion of ‘post-Fordism’. Deleuze does not mention ‘post-Fordism’ by name in the ‘Postscript’, but it corresponds closely to his notion of ‘control’.
Kelly suggests that what seems most genuinely novel in post-Fordism, and most political, is the individualisation of employment contracts, as indicated by Deleuze, which constitutes a break with earlier industrial systems that tended to treat ordinary workers as a mass. For Kelly, this difference can be characterised as a coincidence of post-Fordism with contemporary neo-liberalism. Post-Fordism is a form of working conditions, whereas neo-liberalism is characterised by Foucault as a logic of government. For Jessop, both of these aspects, the labour process and the mode of regulation, are part of Fordism and are therefore of consequence for post-Fordism. Neo-liberal governmentality specifically involves the state orienting itself primarily to fostering markets. Neo-liberalism does not imply, for Kelly, a new technology of power. Rather, it implies a new relation of the state to the economy within disciplinary, biopolitical capitalism.
From the point of view of power, Fordism and post-Fordism are both examples of disciplinary power. Kelly argues that Deleuze implicitly conflates Foucault’s discipline with Fordist production. However, these are distinct: a technology of power versus a mode of production. They have different chronologies but come together to produce particular ‘societalisations’, in Jessop’s term.
References
Deleuze, G. (1992). Postscript on the societies of control. October, 59 (1), 3–7. Available from http://www.jstor.org/stable/778828 [Accessed 21 March 2016].
Jessop, B. (1992) Fordism and post-Fordism: A critical reformulation, in Scott, A. J. and Storper, M. (eds) Pathways to Industrialization and Regional Development. London, UK: Routledge, pp. 42–62. doi: 10.4324/9780203995549.
Kelly, M. G. E. (2015) Discipline is control: Foucault contra Deleuze, New Formations, 84, pp. 148–162. doi: 10.3898/newf:84/85.07.2015.
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