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that “the alienation of the subject is displaced by the fragmentation of the
subject.” Such a
fluid view of subjectivity mirrors the world of hypertext
media and its predisposition to those with the ability to navigate complex
databases via nonlinear jumps in thought, a mode of navigation conducive to
thinking of the world as an intertextual pastiche of contending interpret-
ations. In this context, increasingly, the notion of the autonomous subject
standing apart from the world he/she observes has come under question, and
in its place lies a greater pluralistic a
fl
erence based on
numerous axes (gender, ethnicity, sexuality, etc.). In contrast to national forms
of identity, which take the nation-state as their point of departure, post-
modern forms are often explicitly internationalist in orientation. Robertson
(1992:23) theorizes that hypermedia environments reinforce “the compres-
sion of the world and the intensi
rmation of cultural di
ff
cation of consciousness of the world as a
whole.” Thus, the postmodern reconstruction of identity is inescapably spa-
tial, albeit not in terms familiar to those for whom the nation-state is the only
realistic source of authority. As Deibert (1997:201) suggests, “the emerging
architecture of world order is moving away from territorially distinct, mutu-
ally exclusive, linear orderings of space toward nonlinear, multiperspectival,
overlapping layers of political authority.”
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Postmodern capitalism and post-Fordism
Central to the emergence of postmodern capitalism was the phase change
from Fordism to the post-Fordist regime of
flexible production that arose in
the restructuring of the 1970s and 1980s (Amin and Thrift 1992; Peck and
Tickell 1994). If Fordism was characterized by national markets, large
fl
rms,
unionized, relatively unskilled labor, mass consumption, and a social contract
in which the state provided for collective consumption (public services) via
taxes, post-Fordism entails many of the opposite features, although one
should be careful of simplistic dichotomies that disguise the similarities
among these systems. Broadly speaking, however, as Fordist production has
dispersed to the global periphery, post-Fordism has taken its place within
the previously industrialized cores of Europe, Japan, and North America.
The regime appeared, not accidentally, at the particular historical moment
when the microelectronics revolution began to revolutionize manufacturing;
indeed, the changes associated with the computerization of production in
some respects may be seen as capitalists' response to the crisis of pro
fi
tability
that accompanied the petrocrises and deindustrialization. Flexible produc-
tion also re
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firms to increase their productivity in the
face of rapidly accelerating, intense international competition, particularly
from East Asia.
This transformation included structures of organization and management
within
fl
ected the imperative of
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fi
rms and greater
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flexibility of relationships among customers, sup-
plier
flexible production
allows goods to be manufactured cheaply, but in relatively small volumes as
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firms, and assembly plants. In contrast to Fordism,
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