> >
> This is touched on in some ways in Empire, which speaks interestingly of
> "Toyotism" rather than post-Fordism. If you are banging on a widget that
> will be bought by several different companies who have already advertised
> them according to various cultural logics and will brand them accordingly,
> you are participating in a new system, one which includes old industrial
> forms just as much as newer communicative ones.
>
>
Toyotism, as you describe it, has been going on in agriculture since the
19th C. Farmers bang on and out agroecological widgets that are bought by
several different companies who have already advertised those things in
different ways to different varieties of consumers according to their
different cultural commitments - think coffee, maize, rice, wheat, flax,
bananas, potatoes, etc... much less all the things made out of them.
For that matter, competitive international sourcing and flexible
specialization is as much a return to pre-monopoly capitalist practices
(with intensified time-space compression) as it is a reflection of anything
like a new mode of cultural production.