Abstract
In Global Complexity John Urry continues his impressively audacious attempt to rethink the very concepts and methods of sociology in the light of capitalism's global scope. What he dubs ‘the complexity turn in the social sciences’ (38) ambitiously announces the obsolescence of existing sociological debates that have taken as their aim the investigation of bounded and organised capitalist societies. The social sciences, Urry claims, ‘have to start more or less from scratch’ and fashion new concepts to capture the unanchored and convoluted processes of the global. But globalisation, Urry tells us, is not sociology's new target. For the global ‘system’ is less a coherent structure discernible by the sociologist than a tumult of unplanned processes and scattered centres of power. There is no ‘global centre of power’ or ‘global conspiracy’ (86). Sociological categories that assume the existence of an orderly system are but blunt arrows to our intricate globe, which is less a planned system than a complex product of millions of separate local decisions that, like the hypothetical butterfly's flapping wings, occasion adventitious global consequences rather than intended and foreseeable effects. Local tremors like the demolition of the Berlin Wall or the hijacking of four American planes on the morning of 11 September 2001 gather pace along Urry's global networks and flows and generate massive global repercussions.
Thus we might say that Marx's analysis of nineteenth-century capitalism demonstrates elements of complexity, although the ‘emergent’ system he analyses is demonstrably very different from that of today. Compared with the nineteenth-century system organized through the ‘hegemon’ of the British Empire, the current emergent order is structured through multiple interdependent organizations that are collectively performing the ‘global’ (81).
Global complexity teeters on the brink of chaos ‘without a central “governor”’ (96). Our maps are no longer stained red by Victoria's dominion but Urry should, I think, be less sanguine in his conviction that they are not now imprinted with the stars and stripes. America's economic, military and cultural sway is regrettably absent from his study and this deficiency affects the cogency of his ‘complexity analysis’. Among the ‘collectively performing’ organisations that Urry enumerates are the UN, Greenpeace, the World Bank, CNN, News Corp, the BBC and even FIFA: all lumped together as if environmental pressure groups and football administrators carry the same clout as the WTO, let alone the White House or the Pentagon (which do not make it onto his inventory). There is little room either for multinationals that deal in anything other than the media, perhaps because the sweatshops of Indonesia are altogether less fluid and cosmopolitan than images, exchange flows and football teams. Urry prefers to focus on Real Madrid rather than the poor drudges who make their shirts.
The monotonous and tediously predictable fact of exploitation, a constant feature of capitalism since its inception, calls into question Urry's claim that ‘we have almost no guides to appropriate investigation’ (95). For capitalism is surely not as complicated as Urry would have us think; it is not the unplanned product of confused actions but a system, which, whether we like it or not, produces linear effects. Capitalism's pretty uniform history of exploitation and inequality shows that it is willed by agents whose actions are usually predictable and that it generates consequences that are largely foreseeable. To point to causes like the profit motive and class domination is not to collar the usual suspects as if more imaginative detective work is beyond one. When sociology flags up such persistent features it is not fingering ‘a global conspiracy’ but tailoring its categories to the organised system with which unfortunately it is faced.
Urry is, of course, correct to claim that the dauntingly complicated ‘global age’ ‘cannot be “known” through a single concept or set of processes' (15). But to conclude from this that it cannot be known at all, as Urry implies (38), is to throw out the baby of knowledge with the bathwater of conspiracy theory. The principal limitation of contemporary analyses of globalisation is, he argues, their tendency to treat it ‘as too unified and as too powerful’ (40). But unity and power are engendered by the system not by the inelastic preconceptions of those who seek to understand it. Marxist theory, for instance, which sees capitalism as a more or less legible and predictable totality, takes little pleasure in pointing such things out. For the detection of power and homogeneity is not unlike housework: somebody has to do it but we'd all rather not. Most Marxists would dearly like to occupy a less organised and regimented world, as the example of Theodor W. Adorno should make clear. Raymond Williams maintained that, given our diversely endowed planet and the complex gamut of human needs, a transformed society would be more not less complex than our own. Yet it would never have occurred to either Adorno or Williams that we might cure ourselves of an excessively organised planet by wishing it away, for we cannot make organisation disappear, as the miller's daughter did to Rumpelstilzchen, by simply pronouncing its name.
What strikes me as flawed about Urry's attempt to wipe clean the sociological slate is not his conviction that we have witnessed a transition from monopoly capitalism to a more flexible, interdependent and complex system. Rather, his assessment of the novelty of this new epoch and therefore of the inability of existing sociological techniques to investigate it is premised on a wholesale break with organisation and state power. But injudicious remarks about ‘once organized capitalism’ (viii) and the ‘more or less virtual war in 1991’ (85) are not of the kind required to substantiate theses that are very far from uncontested. That capitalism is now predominantly a matter of trade and exchange rather than exploitation and coercion is taken as read, as is the obsolescence of the nation state, a shibboleth questioned by, for instance, Linda Weiss's The Myth of the Powerless State.
Urry elsewhere advocates a ‘mobile sociology’ and here he recommends a similarly cosmopolitan disposition: one should, he claims, combine one's local standpoint with a responsiveness to ‘the complex threats and opportunities of a globalizing world’ (137). Yet perhaps what Urry stands in need of more than anything else is what the Palestinian cultural theorist Edward W. Said has called a ‘travelling theory’. For whereas Urry moves about and spreads the word, Said travels with an open mind. A travelling theory tests its forecasts and assumptions against unforeseen experiences and circumstances and modifies its preconceptions in their light. In Urry's case this would mean, I think, that his assumptions might not survive the rejoinders of societies that are as organised and exploited as ever. For while organisation persists, a ‘complexity analysis’ that neglects this fact is jumping the gun. Global Complexity is a laudable and lucid call for sociologists to keep pace with global developments that is in danger of outstripping those developments altogether. We might be through with organised capitalism but organised capitalism is not yet through with us.