The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

160 Political-economic capitalist transformationincreasingly organized on a competitive basis. Universities and researchinstitutes compete fiercely for personnel as well as for beingfirst in patenting new scientific discoveries (whoever gets first to theantidote for the Aids virus will surely profit handsomely, as the agreementreached between US researchers and France's Pasteur Instituteover the sharing of information and royalties clearly recognized).Organized knowledge production has expanded remarkably overthe past few decades, at the same time as it has been increasingly putupon a commercial basis (witness the uncomfortable transitions inmany university systems in the advanced capitalist world from guardianshipof knowledge and wisdom to ancillary production of knowledgefor corporate capital). The celebrated Stanford Silicon .Valleyor the MIT - Boston Route 128 'high-tech' industry connectlOns areconfigurations that are quite new and special to the era of flexibleaccumulation (even though, as David Noble points out in Americaby design, many US universities were set up and promoted bycorporate capital from their very inception).Control over information flow and over the vehicles for propagationof popular taste and culture have likewise b come vitalweapons in competitive struggle. The startling concentration of economicpower in book publishing (where 2 per cent of the publisherscontrol 75 per cent of the books published in the USA), the mediaand the press cannot be explained simply in terms of the productionconditions conducive to mergers in those fields. It has a lot to dowith the power of other large corporations, as expressed throughtheir controls over mechanisms of distribution and advertising expenditures.The latter have grown markedly since the 1960s, and eatup even larger proportions of corporate budgets because, in a ighlycompetitive world, it is not simply products but the corporate Imageitself that becomes essential, not only to marketing but also forraising capital, pursuing mergers, and gaining leverage over the productionof knowledge, government policy, and the promotion ofcultural values. Corporate sponsorship of the Arts (Exhibition sponsoredby -), of universities, and of philanthropic projects is theprestige end of a scale of activities that include everything fromlavish brochures and company reports, public relations stunts, andeven scandals that constantly keep the company name in the publiceye.The second development - and this has been far more importantthan the first - was the complete reorganization of the global financialsystem and the emergence of greatly enhanced powers of financialco-ordination. Again, there has been a dual movement, on the onehand towards the formation of financial conglomerates and brokersof extraordinary global power, and, on the other hand, a rapidFrom Fordism to flexible accumulation 161proliferation and decentralization of financial activities and flowsthrough the creation of entirely new financial instruments and markets.In the United States, this meant the deregulation of a financial'system that had been rigorously circumscribed ever since the reformsof te .1930s. h .e US Hunt Commission Report of 1971 was the firstexplIcIt recogllltlOn of the need for reforms as a condition of survivaland growth of the capitalist economic system. After the traumas of1973, the pressure for financial deregulation gathered pace in the1 970s and had engulfed all of the world's financial centres by 1986(L