Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND POSTMODERNITY
as the logical outcome of their studies is recommendation, if often implicit, of
particular directions social change ought, or is likely, to take. Moreover, not only
is the accusation made that totalising accounts of social change are but a prelude
to planning and organising the present and the future; the charge is also brought
that these have been discredited by the course of history.
This is rather abstract; so let me provide some illustration. For example,
studies of social change that suggest that the most telling forces of development
are the search for maximum return for minimum investment are, clearly, trying
to identify the predominant rationality to have governed change. It matters not
that for some historical periods and that in some societies this rationality has
not been followed, since it is usually the case that such ‘irrationalities’ are regarded
as aberrations from a decisive historical directionality. Reflection on this approach
to history – one very much in evidence in ‘modernisation’ theory – reveals that
its claim to chart the course of the past tends to carry with it implications for
future and present-day policy. It implies that the rationality of ‘more for less’ will
continue to prevail and, frequently if not always, that planners ought to take
responsibility for facilitating or manipulating events to keep things on track. This
indeed has been an important consideration for many development theorists who
have sought to influence policies towards the Third World on the basis of having
discerned the successful rationality underpinning Western economic growth.
The accusation that these analysts who claim they are able to highlight the
driving forces of change are partial finds support in the frequency with which
their scholarship and the policies that draw upon them are discredited – by,
for example, arguments that they disadvantage the ‘underdeveloped’ world
(one thinks of desertification, acid rain, over-urbanisation, economies that are
dependent on cash crops), or that the ‘more for less’ rationality is one which,
owing to its anti-ecological bias, is threatening to the survival of human and animal
species on ‘planet Earth’, or that the ‘green revolution’ which promised agricultural
bounty by the appliance of modern science has led to social dislocation,
unemployment of displaced farm workers and dependence on faraway markets.
A still more frequently considered example of the failure of grand narratives
is that of Marxism. Reflect that it has claimed to identify the mainsprings of historical
change in the course of the ‘class struggle’ and ‘capitalist accumulation’. In
identifying the rationalities that have governed change, it is evident that Marxist
thinkers see these as being ultimately supplanted by a higher rationality. Their
advocacy, which gains support from their historical studies, was that a new form
of society (communism) would be established that could take advantage of, and
overcome shortcomings in, capitalist regimes.
However, in the aftermath of the disintegration of Soviet communism and of
still more revelations of the horrors of the Gulag, Leninism and Stalinism, Marxist
claims to reveal the true history of social change are discredited. Today Marxism
is regarded as the construct of those with particular dispositions, a ‘language’
which allowed people to present a particular way of seeing the world. It is one
that retains little credibility; as a former Marxist, David Selbourne (1993),
remarks: ‘In the teeth of prophetic failure . . . an intellectual world [Marxism] has
disintegrated’ (p. 146).
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