and governmental contexts which might give either ‘instrumental’ or
‘value-rational’ kinds of action any kind of solid meaning. Without roles
to protect them, individuals are much more vulnerable when they go out
into society (Gesellschaft), as the links between actor and system become
diluted.
Like Touraine, Rose (1996) contends that ‘“[t]he Social”... no longer
represents an external existential sphere of human sociality’ (329). Rather,
within the modern nation-state, ‘the social’, as a project, is said to be
replaced by what he calls a ‘government of individuation’, a form of sub-
jection and control in which individuals are encouraged to be responsible
for themselves and police their own behaviour and that of others.
For Rose, the development of social ontologies in the present age has
been enveloped by discourses, ways of speaking and thinking which
manage the experience of social reality. This is sometimes called, follow-
ing Michel Foucault, ‘governmentality’. The social only has a unity inso-
far as it is ‘in the name of the social’ that various political pressures are said
to be exerted on populations for the purposes of national governance.
Many of these tendencies have become necessary, according to Rose, pre-
cisely because of the erosion of traditional state power by globalization,
requiring a ‘new spatialization of government’ to manage politics and
economics. This has brought about new kinds of discourses of control, in
which abstract economic processes are mischievously spoken about in
terms of communities of interest.
Such a language reterritorializes populations as groups of specialized
markets within economic relations that ‘do not respect national political
boundaries’ (Rose, 1996: 330). Rose asks: by what terminology are eco-
nomic relations now understood, and how is economic governance posed,
in the era of globalization? ‘Consider the prominence of the language of
community’ (331).
Rose (1996) contends that the language of community has become a
burgeoning terminology of political life and that it has replaced ‘the
social’ as the centre of governmentality (see also Touraine, 1998). The
most notable of these is the globalization of community, in which nation-
ally constituted ‘imagined communities’ co-exist in narrative form. At the
same time, nationalism itself is attenuated as the number of narrative
identifications with community proliferates ad nauseum: terms as wide-
ranging as, for example, ‘the business community’, ‘the sporting commu-
nity’, ‘gambling communities’ – in fact the kind and range of divisions are
almost limitless. The very discursive prominence of community is posited
as proof enough of the reterritorialization of older (mostly geographic
and ethnic) frames of belonging based on what Rose (1996) calls ‘other
spatializations: blood and territory; race and religion; town, region and
nation’ (329).
In the same way as populations are coming to be discursivelydivided
into smaller and smaller distinct communities, they are also, in the oppo-
site direction, ‘called up’ to communion with quite abstract kinds of172 COMMUNICATION THEORYHolmes-06.qxd 2/15/2005 1:03 PM Page 172