International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 11, No. 2, 1997

II. Global Configurations: Two Essays

Networks and the Theory of Modules In the Global Village* Arthur J. Vidich In an earlier study Joseph Bensman and I described a form of a network that we called an interinstitutional power clique.1 We noted that each individual within an organizational (bureaucratic) hierarchy possesses informal and formal connections and ties with others in other organizational hierarchies. The informal connections have their origins in extra-institutional relationships based on such considerations as kinship, membership in fraternal or sororal organizations, old school ties based on graduation from the same educational institution or graduating class, common wartime experiences, common ethnic, migrant, community of origin or religious affiliations, or, relationships established at earlier career stages in offices of other organizations and industries which may be re-invoked at later career stages. The specific characteristic of interinstitutional cliques is that their members' loyalties arise outside the framework of organizational and institutional participation. As networks, interinstitutional cliques have no formal definition of membership but rather share a subliminal recognition of like-mindedness based either on personal attraction or recognition of common personal interest. Such networks have no precise definition of the limits of membership, but rather there are star members and peripheral members who have interlocking memberships in other networks surrounding other star members: star members are those who control resources, jobs and other forms of opportunity for clique members. Thus, the existence of interinstitutional cliques threatens the integrity of the formal organization, violates the hierarchy of command and adds a new dimension to the *A revised version of a paper presented to the conference Teoria E. Ricerca: I! Problema e la Sfida della Sociologia Contemporania, sponsored by the Universita di Cassino, May 21-24, 1997. The paper was also presented and discussed at the Annual Meeting of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Society, Marlboro College, June 1997 and at the Sociology Department's Staff Seminar, New School for Social Research, October 1997.

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study of social structure. Weber's assertion that the integrity of the formal organization is an essential characteristic of bureaucracy therefore cannot be absolute because the principle of interinstitutional power cliques can be as strong as the principle of bureaucracy itself. Our interest in power cliques was related to the question of how economic class interests are translated into social and political action. Even under a Marxian analysis, a unilinear relationship between class and power presumes that classes have a corporate character and are active agents. However, under Marxian analysis classes are distributive phenomenon, that is, collections of individuals responding in roughly the same ways to the same economic situations, and not corporate entities as were the medieval estates. Even assuming that economic interests are a major basis for political action, intervening agencies and institutions in a complex society channel the distributive actions of the individuals that make up the classes. Political parties are one such channeling agency, but many class interests remain unorganized by political parties. Political parties are thus less than the sum total of class agencies. In addition, with the development of the centralized administrative state, major economic decisions (e.g. the award of government contracts) are made by executive agencies and by individuals who are relatively anonymous to the public at large. Such decisions may result in individual and group economic advantages and disadvantages without appearing to be political. Reaching and influencing such decision makers may rest on the exercise of personal influence and it is in this sense that personal influence becomes a factor in understanding the institutional functioning and distributive mechanisms of modern bureaucratic society. This essay applies and extends the concept of clique networks to provide within an historical framework at least a partial explanation for global cultural and economic integration and disintegration. The concept of a global free market system as the determining factor in world economic organization and cultural diffusion, has its origins in ideologies of free-trade and market capitalism. But the free market has never existed in most parts of the world, not the first, second, third or even forth worlds—except perhaps for the black and gray markets. Moreover, the Marxian postulation that the ownership of the means of production and the relations of production became the decisive factor in a class segmented universalization of culture is negated by such factors as nationalism, religion, cultural history and the multitude of varieties of religious rejections of economic rationality. This is true, even if one were to apply a rigid Weberian analysis in which a free market determined class rather than status.2 The Marxian emphasis on class minimizes, or even fails to recognize, the importance of those factors that cut across economic classes. Free-

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market liberalism, on the other hand, overlooks the historic status and interpersonal and cultural interconnections between pre- and post-industrial international aristocracies, upper classes based in business and banking, political leaders, scientists, intelligence agents and the variety of celebrities In the media and entertainment industries, which sustain relations with one another across national boundaries. At the present time after two hundred years of a continuously expanding industrialization and deepening globalization of cosmopolitanism, interpersonal contacts exist across national boundaries at almost all levels of the social and class hierarchy. THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF CULTURE AND LIFE STYLES The original development of an internationally-minded West European culture had its roots in aristocratic feudal Europe when a pattern of intermarriages between these aristocracies included the Houses of Hanover, Hohenzollern, Romanov, Bourbon, Windsor and Habsburg, as well as the aristocracies of Spain, Greece, Italy, and the Scandinavian countries. Among these aristocracies, a multiplicity of interconnections were established between royal families, who, when arranging marriages, could only find acceptable consorts in other aristocratic lineages. Even prior to the French Revolution, but clearly by the 19th century, the royal houses of Europe were surrounded by and penetrated by a court chic that was international in its orientation and playfulness, and which attracted the rising European bourgeoisie and the nouveau-riche Americans and Latin Americans. This pattern had become notably visible in the pre-Revolutionary court life of France, but became transparently visible only in the 20th century. One 20th century example would be the transnational interconnections between Americans and the Cliveden and Bloomsbury groups in England, and their extensions into the Weimarian culture between the two world wars. This interwar international culture focused on leisure, playfulness, sexual experimentation, and the externalization of the personality in the physical activism of horse racing, polo, tennis, golf and flying the early primitive aircraft. Prior to the advent of mass electronic media—radio and especially television—the dissemination of these styles did not penetrate into the rest of the world's traditional aristocracies, into its rising bourgeoisie, or into the newer middle classes, but instead was limited to those who were its significant European participants. In the 20th century, the new wealth made available by the monopolization of oil, and the imposition of a heavy tax on the consumers' use of it, has provided a new affluence for new and old international aristocracies in the oil producing countries of the world. These monopolistic aristocracies

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became part of an international cultural network that imitated styles imported from European sources and that were spread by international travel and the mass media. Thus, the culture of super-rich society has many extensions across international boundaries. Its culture may be carried by its agents to other countries, or its culture may be emulated by nationals in other countries. Though some of these cultural exports may be carried along parallel lines across the respective boundaries of several countries, the content of the culture that is carried may be distorted, in part by the way it is absorbed into traditional domestic cultural styles, and by the newness of the wealth of their carriers. For example, the capacity of a local strata to express international culture can be related to traditional taboos which prevent the open expression of the imported cultural styles on the local scene: Middle Eastern oil sheiks lead a double life, one in Europe and another at home, where they are under the constraints of Islamic laws and traditions. In the United States, still under the influence of egalitarian ideologies, and still retaining remnants of Puritan standards, the monied aristocracies pay homage to traditional values through their philanthropic acts, and either conceal from public view their participation in international cultural values—especially its decadent varieties—or choose to live in foreign countries where the values in question have acceptance. It remained for the electronic mass media to be the great democratizer of the life styles and tastes of the very rich. This has meant not only the possibility, but also the fact, of a new link between movie stars, sports celebrities and international prostitutes.3 When the electronic media became worldwide in scope, beginning in the 1920s, cross-connections could be made to the pre-industrial royalty of the entire globe, including those of India, Pakistan, China, South America, Indonesia, Mexico, and successive waves of new American nouveau riche Mycenae. Under contemporary rules and cultural standards, achievement of celebrity status depends upon gaining public exposure. Talent for playing this game to the quasi-public exposure of the camera lens can now be drawn from all continents and classes. This new world of celebrities includes the older European nobility, titled but sometimes decadent and economically bankrupt. Aristocrats could thus join mass media celebrities on a new international stage, a proscenium brought into the homes of a new world-wide mass middle and lower class audience, eager to view the gods and goddesses of international leisured life styles, and to emulate, if only vicariously, their life-style standards.4 This cultural process, begun in Europe, and with Europe as its center, might have continued unabated, except that the war with Hitler's Germany prevented the Cliveden Set, the Bloomsbury Group, and some of the French aristocracy attached to the ancient regime, from joining too closely with the philistines of National Socialism, so that traditionally established

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cultural networks connecting the cultures of European aristocrats and international literary figures were truncated if not broken by the war.5 In addition, the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, and the Russian invasion of Poland, forced a separation, at least at formal levels, of what previously had been an antifascist international harmony. The German invasion of the Soviet Union forced the United States, Russia and their wartime allies to develop a functional alliance to combat Hitler, regardless of personal tastes, temperament and notions of style and decency. But this Soviet alliance opened up new possibilities for social and cultural connections between old Stalinists and other sympathizers in the United States and England, as well as in the pre-war international community of physicists whose interpersonal connections had been established through their mutual relations with Albert Einstein and Nils Bohr. Some of these American, English, Soviet and Italian physicists could regard the development of the atom bomb as a common effort to contribute to the defeat of Germany and Japan, and therefore, felt no moral compunction about sharing scientific information with one another, regardless of nationality. This scientific network transcended nation-specific interests, even as it was split within itself about which nation a physicists' loyalties were committed to. Despite the functional character and the ambivalence of the Western nations about their alliance with the Soviet Union, a new international cultural network had been created. The American and English ambivalence about the alliance with the Soviet Union was institutionalized in their intelligence agencies. The newly formed OSS, under the leadership of Allen Dulles, recruited its personnel from scions of New England's upper class, who were educated in New England Ivy League colleges, and refugee intellectuals from Europe who were useful for their German connections and understanding of Germany. Ivy League recruits included Yale graduate and Far Westerner James Jesus Angleton, who was given an opportunity to network with such culturally superior English aristocrats as Guy Burgess, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt, whose connections were to both the English upper class gay world and the English aristocracy. This alliance of American and English intelligence services was, for the English, a betrayal of their cultural superiority over the uncouth, ugly American. At the same time the rise in status of the OSS (later the CIA) and the State Department, based upon extraordinary investments in technology and low experience in functional operation, led their operatives to feel that they could dominate and replace their British counterparts. Over time, during the cold-war, the new CIA and American Foundation and philanthropic missionaries of anti-communism ultimately replaced their culturally superior English and European counterparts, dominating them with the superiority of their economic resources and leav-

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ing to the English the field of literary culture in the tradition of Graham Green, Robert Graves, Rex Warner, Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden, to mention only a few. English culture found a way to make its peace with American cultural vulgarity by penetrating more deeply into the American cultural consumers' market.6 Participation in this international culture rests on the possession of a complex of resources, interpersonal connections and international contacts of specific individuals within a domestic or international culture. In such networks any specific individual may be seen as the focal point, or center, of contacts with peripheral others. According to this conception, each individual possesses a network of relations unique to him or her: the modern world of interpersonal relations is made up of an infinity of cross-cutting, overlapping, forming and dissolving networks. Interlinked networks at the international levels of aristocrats, upper and middle classes, scientists, intelligence specialists, media celebrities and cultural producers speak to the development not only of an international culture, but also to forms and principles of international organizational patterns that exist side by side with the formal institutional structures of governments, businesses, religions, universities and military organizations. THE THEORY OF MODULES If we add to the concept of network the idea that some individuals have at their disposal economic resources, as well as connections with others who possess resources and whose claim to status is recognized by others, such an individual is not only the focal point of a network, but is in command of a "module", a unit composed of interrelated individuals who form a relatively permanent network held together both by a mutual recognition of each other's status, and by instrumental usefulness to one another.7 As an entity, such a module also possesses units of ownership of economic resources and/or credit, or access to it. The conceptions of networks, power cliques and resource modules are intervening variables that cut through and across classes, the free operation of markets, and linear conceptions of organizational structures. One source of enabling influence and participation in international culture is to be affiliated with a module within a domestic culture which gives control over the distribution of resources. The obvious, but not unique, example that comes to mind is that of the clandestine use of billions of dollars in resources available to the administrators of intelligence agencies during the period of World War II and the Cold War, which enabled the CIA to operate in almost any country in the world, and to establish infor-

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mal interconnections with groups who were outside the framework of formal institutions. By control of a module, we mean the social and economic dominance of a status group in the internationally connected individuals' country of origin. Such dominance based on a large unit of ownership, control of land, natural resources, cash liquidity, access to credit or command relationships and countervailing power over others who have similar control, ownership and access. Such modules may consist of bankers, investors, extended families, military brotherhoods, ethnically based dissident groups, import-export networks, industrial or commercial business associates, professional philanthropists, or combinations of these. A module is neither a group or a class, but is composed of interconnecting relationships in a country where those so included in these relationships make up a network of control over significant material and ideal values. The composition of such modules need not be stable over time, and need not have a similar base or composition from country to country, nor need the country in which it is located be restricted in the strength of its international influence. Thus, modules in a supper-rich country may have an overpowering influence on the values of the populations of poorer countries and on the economic and political policies that govern them, without appearing to do so. But, by the same token, a module in a small country that has the resources to buy political influence in a large country may influence the policies of that country while remaining invisible. The concept of a module is distinct from that of a network though it usually includes the latter, if a network is seen as a relatively unstable set of interpersonal interconnections that exist outside the constraints of formal institutional rules and obligations: networks may form, add new participants, drop older participants, dissolve or be re-created at another time when the participants see a collective opportunity for revitalizing it. In our terms, a module is also to be distinguishable from such conceptions as formal organizations, bureaucracies, economic and political institutions, etc., that have as their chief characteristic linearity in the hierarchical structure of authority and command. The relationship between linear organizations and modules can be suggested by an analogy with plasma physics. In its original form, plasma theory dealt with clouds of elements in space. These clouds extend over light years, since there is no gravity to pull the elements of the gaseous clouds together. Each cloud is made up of deteriorating elements and is homogeneous in composition, and each cloud, of which there are an infinite number, exerts pressure against other clouds across light years, and various plasmas continuously change their shape and relationship to other clouds. There are gases within gases (not contained in a receptacle), and there are

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no boundaries in space, only a continuously changing convergence-divergence of gases of many kinds. The universe is thus an unstable asymmetry of plasma clouds at different levels of ionization. Plasma theory rejects boundaries and linearity and attempts to describe gases acting on each other. The clouds or masses of ionized gases are not only unbound, but they are different from each other, that is, they are ionized differently. There is no gravity in space to pull the ions together, as if they were bounded in a tube. Thus, in outer space there are relationships that are totally non-linear in character and defy description in linear terms, in the same sense that modular relationships are in a continuous process of deterioration, reformation, combination, separation, re-creation and re-composition with ever changing elements, and without limitations on communication imposed by space (modern electronic communications and world-wide internets) and without boundaries imposed by class identities, formal institutional positions, differences in social status, race, ethnicity, or religion. The theoretical significance for the social sciences of the concept of modules is that it undercuts all social systems and world systems perspectives which are based on linear images. A straight forward linear organization is represented by a conventional organization chart that describes a line organization headed by a Board of Directors responsible for policy, a President of the Board, a Chief Executive Officer and Vice Presidents in charge of various department such as production, sales, engineering, design, finance, etc. The interconnections between levels of organization are assumed to be linear in the sense that policy and directives move from top to bottom, and are thought to be bounded by the hierarchy of authority. By contrast, a modular network in its simplest form develops out of a linear system, such as a hierarchically organized economic, religious, military or state bureaucracy. Modules are a by-product of linear organizations and make it possible for linear systems to function. The connections between modular actors do not follow a linear pattern and have been created over a period of time with or without reference to the linear structure of the organization in which these actors hold positions. Each individual within the organizational hierarchy possesses informal relations with others inside the organization, and formal or informal relations with others in other organizations, status groups, kinship networks, old school ties, club associations and so forth. Thus, within a linear organization, any number of secondary cultures and modular connections that cut across the linear organization may be identified. These cross-cuts form an interorganizational and interinstitutional fabric that exists side-by-side with linear organizations.

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Fig. 1. Chart indicating the relationship between simple linear systems and modular systems.

A simple modular system may be diagrammed as seen in Figure 1 where the linear organization is represented by boxes and the modular system forms itself outside of the linear organization: 1) The formal organizational structure is represented by boxes. Each box is occupied by executives and employees in a chain of command. 2) Every person in the chain of command from the Board of Directors to people at the end of the chain also maintain relations with others outside the linear chain. 3) Connections to others by members of Board of Directors are indicated in the chart by ovals 1 and 2 which represent individuals outside the organization who may or may not be members of other organizations and

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if they are members of another organization, may occupy positions at any level in a hierarchy. 4) The bonding (our term for a relationship that is not defined by the hierarchy) by a Board member to oval 1 does not represent a closed relationship because oval 1 has further bonds to still others and so on and so on. The system of interconnections between the Board member to a network chain of others is "infinite". 5) A Ligature is a connection between two individuals not only bonded to each other but tightly bound to each other by reasons of law, family or institutional history, marriage, by mutual obligations and/or ideal or material interests. Ligatures exist haphazardly without reference to the purposes of a linear organization or as part of the organized hierarchies of two or more organizations. In this manner participants in a linear system have, in addition to their position in a chain of command, informal bonded or ligature relations with others outside the framework of the linear organization. At headquarters, Presidents, Chief Executive Officers, and Board members are in informal relations with counterparts and others in other organizations, domestic and international political leaders, bankers, dignitaries and so forth. These connections are indicated by oval number one (1) emanating from the Headquarters box. The number of such oval one extensions from the formal organizational chart is as great as the number of individuals in the organization as a whole: everyone has a life outside the organization. In addition, each of the individuals represented by oval one (1) has a bond with another individual represented by oval two (2) and so on, to oval three (3) and so on and so on. In addition, anyone represented by any oval may have bonds with ovals that emanate from different divisions within the organization. Each identified secondary contact is unique and presumably the totality of such contacts is almost infinite. A simple modular system is simple because it is based on a development from one linearly organized bureaucracy. When it is understood that bondings exist not only within a single organization, but also to those of all the organizations and bureaucracies that make up the organized world, we introduce the concept of the ligature to indicate stronger and deeper ties that bind two individuals together in an extra-institutional relationship which may even be based on historic ties established by their predecessors: that is, such ties may have traditional foundations. Carried to the extreme bondings and ligatures can have their extensions throughout the world. Seen in this light, the complexity of modular systems approaches that of the world of plasma physics. We know from our own personal experiences in bureaucracies that such interconnections exist, that is, we have friends, relatives, old school ties, associates from earlier career employments in other organizations, etc.,

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whom we may contact with reference to matters concerning a job or opportunity in our present place of employment or when they might possess information useful to us in our formal position, or when they may be recruited for participation in a new project. We can also learn of, and identify, such secondary cultures when, ex post facto, they enter the media, mass culture and the official record: investigations of political, corporate and police corruption, cover-ups by business, exposure of terrorist activities across continents, linkages between political leaders, businessmen, and drug traffickers, and, in revelations about the activities of spies in the international intelligence agencies. The key feature of modular relations are: 1) The connections between them are not linear and they develop over time and through the course of a career. 2) They can be identified as a secondary culture because we learn about them when at times they enter the media and media culture and become part of the official media record. 3) They are made up of discrete individuals who are part of a network, but who do not necessarily know the network connections of those others who are part of ego's network. The individual participant cannot ever know the outer peripheries of his/her own modular participation. We can speak of a complex linear system when two or more linear systems have at some levels common interests or objectives and at other levels diverse objectives and interests. A case in point of such a situation would be the State Department and the CIA, or a combination of the State Department, Defense Department, and the CIA, each having overlapping jurisdiction on a foreign policy issue or situation in which both, or all three, require some co-ordination of their actions. At some levels, each may have parallel formal structures, and at other levels, there may be no organizational bonding. A recent case (1995-96) reported in the New York Times of modular functioning in a complex linear system is provided by the operations of the CIA and the United States State Department during the military conflicts in Croatia and Bosnia. President Clinton had approved the clandestine transshipment of Iranian armaments to Bosnia via Croatia. The State Department and the National Security Office informed Peter W. Galbraith, its ambassador in Croatia of this approval and ordered it kept a secret: the CIA was not made privy to this arrangement. Uninformed of this arrangement, the CIA agent in Zagreb independently discovered the arms shipment and began his own investigation, authorized by CIA headquarters. His investigation at the grass root level led him to the ambassador's office where he discovered the shipments had been approved by

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President Clinton whose office had decided not to inform CIA headquarters. Co-ordination between two linear organizations was accomplished in the field by local operatives at different authority levels in their respective organizations. An underlying assumption of the model of complex linear systems is that the co-ordination of the actions of their actors emanate at the field level. Such co-ordination may concern matters of policy, or the implementation of policy. The implications of such co-ordination include the following: 1) Bondings between organizations at the level of directors are those that represent agreed upon policies, but there also may be failures of bonding due to personality clashes, or to struggles involving claims to jurisdiction. 2) Some bondings fail simply because no two organizations have the same linear organizational and geographical basis, or the same length and place of lines of communication or parallel regional, sub- or local offices. When such parallelism of organizational structure does exist, local or regional offices will backtrack to similar regional, local or sub offices leading to the creation of informal lines of communication to main offices. 3) Informal communications that skip formal bonding will occur as forms of direct communication caused either by the absence of a bonding or other direct links in communications or organizational structures, or in divergence in policies, interests or failure to find agreement at formal levels. As a result of such characteristics of linear organizations, complex modular cultures surround all linear cultures at all levels of national, international regional and local offices of bureaucracies and help to account for intra and interinstitutional co-ordination of policy and administration. ATTEMPTS TO CO-ORDINATE ASYMMETRICAL MODULES Every organization or sub-division of an organization that sends out linear messages attempts to co-ordinate its operations with those of allied interests and intra-phased operations. Given the complexities of intra-organizational co-ordination and communications within any bureaucracy, even linear management of organizational purposes and goals presents complex problems. For example, the United States may attempt to co-ordinate a foreign policy maneuver by advising and seeking advice from the foreign ministries of its major allies. These foreign ministries, of course, reflect separate "national" or economic pressures, and, at times, will resist

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American initiatives. A case in point would be that of the resistance of Germany, France and Japan to the American boycott in the 1960s of Russian oil pipe lines to the West and the East. Or, as another case, the unwillingness of Italy and England to go along with the boycott of Libya imposed by the United States. An example form the point of view of the former Soviet Union, when the dissident movement threatened the Jeruzelski regime, was whether to opt to invade Poland to maintain its own repressiveness or to permit a less than total repressiveness, which, in retrospect, would not work anyway because of the volatility of the Polish situation and the Poles. Thus a situation such as this one that leads to a change in policy or forces a change in policy upsets pre-existing expectations—that repression would continue to work—and results in changes in pre-existing modular arrangements. "Coordination" is thus initially "flawed" because the change in policy does not reach all levels of either the Soviet or the Polish operations. Slippage in communications intensifies new but uncoordinated initiatives, orders and communication-flow into international, sectorial, regional and local areas of operation. The breakdown of a fixed pattern of relations between a multiplicity of organizations, each having a policy finger in the newly created problem, leads to the creation of a chaotic situation—what the press would report as a crisis. This is because no two organizations, or even separate lines of command within a given organization, are likely to have exactly parallel organizational structures (charts) and match each other at the level of the local situs. The "co-ordinating" offices between different organizations may be in different cities or even different countries: for example, the NKVD in Warsaw and the action taking place on the ground in Gdansk, or the CIA operational offices in Italy and the American embassy in Libya. Yet, officials managing such offices are required to remain in touch when "remaining in contact" means going back through, and down, one's own primary chain of command through secondary and tertiary levels, entailing and creating the slippage that is present everywhere in bureaucracies. These slippages compound those that are already based on differences in situs and jurisdiction as well as differences in forms of interest, jurisdiction of command and personal inclinations to take initiatives. It also means that at regional, local and cultural levels of misunderstanding and failure of communication, the linkages, ligatures and bonding to aspects of the local culture is not the same for the principle actors engaged in the action. Thus, central "policy" almost always appears to be implemented in bizarre ways, or appears not to be carried out, or arrived at, in contradictory ways. The phrase "The best laid plans of mice and men oft go astray" by Robert Bums, was quoted by Weber as summarizing the history of Western

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intellectual development and (by implication) the entire process of formal rationalization. While it was undoubtedly true that rationalization, formalization and bureaucratization have been a major thrust in Western history, these irrational processes have always existed at the core of Western industrial civilization. In the past, the irrationalities of linear and modular discontinuities have existed in areas away from the lines of communication established in the 19th century by the location of railway lines, that is, In mountainous regions, in the urban ghettoes of colonized and industrial countries, and in the social and geographical swamps of the world. Today, such discontinuities can result from the sheer size and complexities of bureaucratic organizations and from the availability of too much information and not enough communication. Linearity (rationalization in its various forms) has become a normative mechanism in a sea of irrationality, but the "forms of rationalization" produce, as Weber noted, their own process of irrationality and new forms of discontinuity. This analysis suggests that modular forms and cultures—or if one wishes, plasmas—exist at all levels and world wide in ever changing forms. The linearity is only yeast in what becomes infinite parts of dough, or, to change the image, contaminations of highly diverse cultures producing multiple local, regional and national cultures that defy rational incorporation into any kind of a system, and reveal the limits of bureaucratic rationality. LIMITS OF THE OBSERVER'S ACCESSIBILITY TO MODULAR CULTURES A complex modular culture can become an object of consciousness when, through official or mass media reports we become aware of its existence after it violates a public norm and is publicly reported. We come to know of modular cultures only inadvertly because of this ex posto facto reporting. Hence, our knowledge is never predictive because we have no evidence of the history of a modular culture because it only becomes visible after the fact. But, even given this, the derivative, modular culture at all times is unique, changing and unknown until after the fact of reportage. It is for this reason that modular culture may be investigated by a study of archives, documents and other sources that provide a documentary record of past events:8 The mass media and selective print media provide reports of linear culture and, at times, on some aspects of modular culture. Business and economic news, political and international news, municipal news and the reporting of both normal and deviations from normal news are episodic

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reports of linear culture. Because of both the local and international scope of the media and because of the sheer complexity of the linear events to be reported, the amount of news that can be absorbed by the ordinary person who lives his/her own life and who is more than a receptacle for information can easily reach a saturation point for the capacity to absorb this information. Moreover, beyond this, ordinary news—the senseless murder, dramatic reports of crime, sexual deviancy, the abandoned newborn infant, political corruption among leaders of the society and other information carried by the mass media contributes to the information overload and increases the episodic nature of linear reporting. All of these kinds of episodic reporting mean some reports of modular culture will be deflected and will contribute to our isolation from knowledge of modular culture. This isolation is proportional to the very complexity of linear culture and the "normal" activities of the apparently normal organization of society. Reports of exceptionally sensational events as, for example, of the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, provide levels of information that exceed the ordinary. In this case, the participants in the bombing were themselves a part of an evolving module of culture which gained public visibility because of the bizarreness of their actions. Then, for a moment, the complex interconnections between Islamic militant-terrorists, the CIA, underground police investigative units, Egyptian anti-terrorist police and suppliers of money and other resources became public. In the evolution of this culture in New York, what had up to then been seen as the activities of a fundamentalist religious sect would now be presented to the public consciousness as religiously grounded internationally organized terrorism. For the moment the ethos of that culture became news, but even as the trial of the terrorists' culture was going on, its modular culture continued to evolve outside the limelight with new leadership and adaptation to its new problems, while the linearity of news reporting resumed. The passage of time makes the trial no longer news until a new level of modular culture is revealed in the popular press, in this case in a story in The New Yorker magazine titled "Annals of Covert Action".9 The case in question is that of Mir Aimal Kansi who, in January 1993, in broad daylight, outside the gates of the CIA in Virginia, opened fire with an AK47, and, at point blank range, shot drivers in parked cars waiting to be admitted into the CIA compound. All of the victims were employees of the CIA. In this article it is said that Kansi "may have fit into the CIA sponsored 'jihad', or holy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan—a war that the agency funded lavishly from 1980 to 1989 and then appeared to turn its back on. Today the CIA may be experiencing the consequences of that undertaking".10 The import of this is its possible connection to the bombing of the World Trade Center, because of the connection between Kansi and Ramzi Yousef who

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is thought to be mastermind of that bombing. Both Yousef11 and Kansi are from Bolochistan and "according to Pakistani intelligence sources" were seen in the Spring of 1993 "with Muhammad Islambouli, a key Egyptian aide to Sheikh Omar Abel-Rahman who ...was convicted of 'waging war and urban terrorism' against the United States...". Weaver's essay, as does the testimony given in the World Trade Center bombing case, suggests that the CIA, in its efforts to undermine the Soviet Union's Afghanistan policies, entered into alliance with Muslim fundamentalists, investing more that three billion dollars in an enterprise that turned against it when the Soviet Union abandoned its claims in that country. The multiple connections and interconnections between American intelligence agents and local activists ranging over three continents defines a complex module whose existence constitutes a vast invisible underground culture that coexists with the system of linear reporting of discrete events. To attempt to construct a composite of a total picture would involve not only an examination of existing and erased CIA records, but also hundreds of interviews with participants who would prefer not to be interviewed on this subject, From the point of view of media reporting over time, the two incidents of the bombing and the shootings appear to be independent of each other because the story of one is not connected to the story of the other. To make such connections would require that the reader retain, in his/her head, widely separated reports appearing in different sources, and at different times. For the consumer of information, daily concerns with jobs, personal needs, pleasures, and commitments that enclose one's life, the quality of opaqueness surrounding the evolving culture of terrorism reasserts itself. In New York, cycles can be observed with respect to arson.12 More than 40 years ago the culture of arson was often called Jewish lightning, a phenomenon resulting from the potential insurance value of a warehouse being higher than the current value of the property. Libel laws meant that the term arson was kept out of the press in individual cases, so that it was only voiced in gossip within informal, primary group social relations. Single provable cases, that is, those that were indictable, might bring the phenomenon to public attention, but libel laws prohibited the use in the press of the term Jewish lightning. Over the past 30 years, the culture of arson has changed, so far as we can know from reported cases, to a general culture in which landlords of all ethnic backgrounds respond to rent controls, stabilization, and co-oping, just as do builders and at times government itself, who wish to develop properties, have recourse to the use of arson. From the linear reporting of cases in the mass media, arson is a means by which some Puerto Ricans following a modification of an older cultural pattern respond to loss of face, machismo or defeat in affairs of the heart by torching a nightclub or

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a dance hall. The culture of arson thus migrates and is transformed in a new cultural setting. For a period of time the media reported cases of arson in Flushing, Queens, where pragmatic Korean businessmen evacuated rent stabilized property in order to empty a site in order to capitalize on land value and to build upon the land a high rise apartment or condominium. This shocks the public sensitivity because we learn that the culture of arson has migrated to Koreans who by reputation are honorable, religious, and ethical while also being practical, the shock again being based on an after-the-fact response to a violation of our expectations. This continuing evolving modular culture of arson bespeaks a complexity of culture and an opaqueness of social reality that contradicts linear reporting of the news. New York City and national politics is witness to a new phenomenon in the evaluation of their political cultures. Bribery has been an established practice in New York City, at least since, if not earlier, the days of Tammany Hall, to the reform administration of LaGuardia, Lindsey, Koch (the parking meter scandals) and others. Now we see the emergence of extortion as a substitute for bribery as a new trend in the evolution of modular political culture. The difference between bribery and extortion is in who makes the initial contact and who makes the demand. Heretofore, in New York extortion was thought to be confined to a "non-existent" Mafia. Now we learn from the official linear media that, after the fact, the culture of extortion is a standard feature that operates from the second highest level of New York City politics (an earlier Borough President of Queens and his party chiefs), to the lowest level of ward heeler. The irony of the parking meter scandal is that the mayor, who stands at the highest level of linear culture, was unaware of the modular political culture operating just beneath him. The then-mayor, an honest man, had built his entire career on righteous honesty and indignation. Nevertheless, he accepted millions of dollars in campaign contributions from builders and developers who had received hundreds of millions, maybe even billions, of dollars in credits for site development and construction of high rise luxury apartments and cooperatives. The linear reporting of extortion scandals conceals the fact that New York City (like London and central Paris) is becoming the residential center of speculators, operators and "foreigners" with "too much cash" who need a politically secure haven for their assets. As a corollary to this, some industry is driven out of the city, some of the middle classes move to respectable suburbs and the ethnic and working classes are forced to distant ghettoes and slums where unobserved ethnic and modular cultures can grow and evolve.13 At the national level, it has been known since the beginning of the Republic that political office holding and speculation in real estate as well

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as land and mineral resource giveaways, have been part of the modular culture of American politics. A case made famous by the development of the Union Pacific Railway in the latter part of the last century provides a linear example. Collis Huntington who represented the Pacific Associates (Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker and himself), which achieved a monopoly over the California Railway systems, "referred to Congressional lawmakers "as the hungriest set of men that ever got together". He added, "I am fearful this damnation Congress will kill me". It costs so much money to fix things, he wails. "200,000 to 500,000 each session and there is no end". Yet Huntington felt it was "a man's duty to go up and bribe". Moreover, a senator or a Congressman who was a member of an important committee might "switch" his position on a bill, then ask for solid inducements to switch back,14 coming close to suggesting that Congressmen cannot be bought but only rented from day-to-day.15 In slightly different form, the 20th century equivalent to the 19th century resource giveaways is that of the post World War II highway construction program: local politicians, usually county supervisors, but also other elected officials having foreknowledge of the location of projected highways—especially interchanges—bought crucial parcels of land from unsuspecting sellers and later made their fortunes on appreciated land values after the highways were constructed.16 The practice of lobbying and "paying" for votes is now certainly recognized as part of the system of political influence that centers on the national budget and all legislation affecting one or another group positively or negatively. Yet again the linear reporting on a case-by-case basis of such practices does not add up to a comprehensive picture of the totality of the lobbying culture. Even the case of Senator Robert Packwood of Oregon whose private diary was made public and revealed the direct practice of quid pro quo—votes in exchange for monetary and other favors—has been treated as a special case which, however, in its revelations came close to tainting the whole of Congress, but fell short of doing so by the symbolic act of Packwood's resignation, leaving invisible the multiple interconnected modules of the culture of lobbying. The case-by-case reporting of lobbying by the media and the essentially moralistic attitude held toward lobbying by reporters and investigative journalists reaches the public sequentially over time, so that a total portrait of an established cultural and political institution built up of interconnected modules only becomes a part of political reality during presidential elections.17 Therefore to construct a chart of modular cultures, it would have to be so dense as to be opaque, but this would seem to be the reality. We understand historically, after the fact, and cannot understand predictively. As analysts all we can do is recognize that these processes exist and con-

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tinuously change their cultural situs. On a world-wide scale they do not lead to predictable, continuous change or to total comprehension by any observers. The most we can do is be retrospective historical sociologistsobservers of the process. CASES OF MODULAR AND LINEAR INTERACTIONS: I. The most persistent attempt by a linear organization to adjust to modular organizations is that provided by the Catholic Church, which in its universalism has always had to make adjustments to local cultures while still retaining control of the modular deviations (and from the point of view of orthodoxy, at times, lunacies) that govern some of its local structures.18 Liberation theology in Latin America and the United States was and, to the extent that it still exists, is modular in its local, regional and international levels. Hundreds of interrelations and networks between local priests and nuns in the Western Hemisphere and in Europe were established in seminars and universities: The University in Louvaine may have provided the key institutional setting for bringing the liberationists together in the first place. Each of the modules in various geographical areas was formed in its own specific context, but all in their theological orientation were influenced by the idea of a social gospel, a worldly activism in the name of social justice. Of Protestant origins, the social gospel movement and Protestant evangelicals had thought in their time of religion as having social, political and human secular consequences. One path that led in the direction of a social gospel was initiated in the Reformation by Thomas Munzer. Munzer, who might be called the first social gospeler also became an inspiration for the French Revolution, Marxism and Socialism, continues to have an influence within the Church. It was expressed first during the reformation's influence on state building, nationalism and the attempts at "internationalism" by Protestant missionaries. The linear church has still to deal with all of the unintegrated local cultures that derive from this tradition and must face and confront them in ad hoc ways in almost all parts of the world. A special problem faced by the universal church is one that it confronts in third world countries. Its recruitment in those areas of indigences into the priesthood presents it with another variation of theological deviations from orthodoxy. In part such deviations result from a blending of indigenous cultural beliefs with those of Catholic orthodoxy. A notable example of this is that of the Sri Lankan priest Reverend Tissa Balasuriya who was excommunicated in 1997 because he "deviated from the Catholic faith". Father Balasuriya's heresy is attributed to a critical statement he made in

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a book about the Virgin Mary whom he described as "Mary of the Capitalist, patriarchal, colonialist first world of Christendom" whose "perpetual virginity" makes her "a dehydrated figure who is not quite human".19 He also argues that "Catholic dogma should adjust itself to the social and cultural realities of Asia". In defense of Father Balasuriya, who is also a sociologist, other members of the Ecumenical Association of third world theologians have opposed his excommunication, underscoring at a more formal level the existence of a modular culture within Catholicism which is given its thrust by common interests and interconnections derived from within third world religious experiences. None of these problems of theological deviance from orthodoxy are unknown to churchhouse intellectuals, but responses to these problems are usually expressed with tact and restraint. Admission of the extent of the problem might otherwise equal an admission of defeat. Instead, the hierarchy officially responds to the problem by asserting the faith that (1) "my house has many rooms", and (2) the church is eternal and based on the absolute, eternal sway of the trinity and the promise of absolute salvation. That the church recognizes the problem or modules within it and, that these modules might challenge doctrine, reflects a continuous tension between hierarchy and modularity which only at the level of a relativizing of doctrine reach a breaking point that leads to excommunication. During the peak period of Liberation theology before the ascent of Pope John Paul II in 1978—and in the aftermath of Pope John's 1962 encyclical—the question of whether and how the church would retain an influence that in any way resembles the power of a universal church remained an open one. The depths of this problem were recognized by Cardinal Rattinger who heads the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and by Pope John Paul II, who acted upon this problem by a renewal of church authority within its linear structure, a renewal signaled by changes in personnel and the reassertion of orthodox doctrine. Alternative Protestant derived Christianities and political oppositions have since been purged. Church careers have been aborted and the attraction of other absolute religious ideas and Philistine labor in the gardens of mammon have been made anathema. At the practical level, the organizational weakness of modular cultures within the church, that is, their lack of a central coordinating authority and lack of formal control or independent sources of resources and funding make them particularly vulnerable to the strength of the church's linear organizational apparatus.20 A problem for linearly organized religion is that of drugs—if one sees drugs as a hope of some kind, however temporary, for secular salvation. If one considers the possibility that the amount of money spent on drugs

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could equal or exceed that spent on official religious activities, the competitive struggles for control and management of the methods of salvation is a real one. The hope provided by drugs competes with the hope provided by religious promises of salvation, including the hope once provided Catholics by a liberation theology that promised to change the basis of human social organization. The repression of drugs in Puritanical societies constitutes an effort to save a secularized Protestantism for which this-worldly forms of salvation may compete successfully with other-worldly varieties. The underlying international and geographically interconnected modular culture of drugs is highly profitable and can contribute to undermining an already decadent Protestant society. Drug modules frequently interface with internationally organized crime and, not surprisingly with representatives of official governments (Columbia, CIA, Mexico, Far East, etc.) on a transnational basis. Drug modules also are interconnected transnationally at local levels, as, for example, is the case of local ghetto cultures such as that found in Washington Heights, New York City, with its ties to rural areas in the Dominican Republic and other West Indian areas.21 Ease of air transport across national boundaries and between islands makes possible intermodular transport systems of both the drugs and the transfer of cash between countries in different regions and hemispheres. Official cultures at the state level can be penetrated by modular drug cultures because the costs of political campaigns in democracies is exorbitantly high and the corruptibility of assetless leaders relatively easy. The public exposure of pay-offs to democratically elected politicians and at times their own drug dependency, helps to weaken the moral credibility of governments, whether democratic or otherwise. Efforts by central governments to control the traffic in drugs lack the capacity to permanently damage modular drug enterprises even under ideal conditions of intergovernmental co-operation because of the organizational fluidity of drug modules and their capacity to silence public officials. Yet, despite the inability to erase the drug problem, the need to try is mandated by the need to affirm a drug free public morality and to deny the acceptability of alternative varieties of salvation. The lottery under state supervision is a form of official appropriation of the hopes of the masses and constitutes a right to tax their hopes for secular salvation: a fifty million dollar lottery represents million of hopes generated by the state. The existence of state supported lotteries amounts to a recognition that a civil religion can take on many forms. The role of media, with its thousands of varieties of presentations of illusions for the masses, plays its own part in the competition for the struggle over souls. Mass spectator sports and other varieties of entertainment

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in their full spectrum can appeal to almost any conceivable cultural addiction, according to the tastes of the classes and masses.22 One cause of the creation of modular cultures is the continuous increase of the world-wide growth of populations and the displacement of these populations by the processes of war, immigration and the collapse of state systems. The movements and aggregations of these populations are not controlled or regulated by linear organizations. From this perspective, these demographic changes inflate not only the size of the world's population, but also the variety of cultural mixes of fragments of cultures that intermix with each other. An "infinity of cultures" pile up against each other in vast cities, not only in the urban slums and ethnic ghettoes, the warrens and La Perlas that exist in the South Bronx, Paris, Singapore, Mexico City, Africa, Asia and in the Middle East, but also in luxury coops, middle class ethnic urban ghettoes and fringe developments around cities. This increase of inter-mixing of cultures from all areas of the world—East and West, North and South, developed and underdeveloped—are the cause of multiple modes of stratification, status differentiation and autonomous modular cultures. It is possible that somewhere on the face of the earth an aboriginal native culture may exist, perhaps somewhere in the middle of Irian. All others, even those in the Amazon jungle, have been under the influence of or corrupted by contact with the outside world and have become "multimediated" modules, spinning off into unique combinations of local and mass cultures.23 We cannot know how the "native"—i.e. the pre-contact— cultures of isolated tribes or localities may have functioned because the first appearance of the "other"—missionary, trader, buccaneer or anthropologist—already adds a new element of modular culture connecting two cultures each of which is changed in the interaction. When enough is known about isolated cultures and how to study them—i.e., after contract—they are already in the process of modular segmentation and in the formation of multiplicities of innovative cultural forms. The mass movements of populations on all the continents and islands of the world—whether the result of migrations, ethnic cleansing, refugee displacement of rural to urban settlement or penetration by the agents of one culture into another—result in cultural transfers, breakdowns and losses, recombinations and new modular cultures and is as continuous as the passage of time and occurs side-by-side within linear organized culture. The conflict between linear organizations at all levels of institutional orders and the modular "systems" existing within and between them and cross-cutting them is world-wide in its scope.

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MODULAR AND LINEAR INTERACTIONS: II. Power and Cultural Dominance During the Cold War In any polyglot set of social structures there are modules that can be plugged into and unplugged from any national or international economic or political system. The modules may be similar but not identical to each other. Their precise functioning in a specific situation can be affected by 1) the external structures surrounding them, 2) religious traditions, 3) local and ethnic loyalties, 4) by betrayal of former allies at all other levels in the system or 5) by binding quid pro quo understandings of mutual obligations. During the cold war in any specific country that was not dominated totally by one of the then three principle actors in the world (U.S., Russia, China), there was a class of international couriers to and from the world's political, military, economic, educational and religious organizations. To take the United States as an example, there was at the same time an older conservative class that represented the older American Aristocracy (sometimes called the New England establishment) and newly rich arrivestes in the business and financial worlds who had their counter-parts elsewhere. In addition, in many countries there were revolutionary classes that hoped to achieve independence under their leadership and accepted the aid of China, Russia, U.S., or their principal client agents. Many of these revolutionaries consisted of intellectuals and quasi-intellectuals educated in the Sorbonne, the London School of Economics, the New School for Social Research, the University of Moscow, Harvard, MIT and Stanford who did not make it within the normal paths of domestic politics in their countries. So the international stratification system is made up in part of elements discredited in their own countries and accepted in other countries. Some of the elements that make this kind of stratification possible, besides the early spread of Aristocracy in Europe in the 19th century, are the politics of World War II and the Cold War, international media, and television at the level of presentation of lifestyles and facades. The necessity of fighting World War II and managing the peace by the two victorious enemies resulted in new functional alliances for both the United States and Russia and their client nations which served at best as sounding boards, making the latter's national humiliation less explicit. Russia dominated Eastern and Central Europe and England, and the United States dominated Western Europe inaugurating a new axial cultural and military age. Germany and its earlier cultural dominance—especially its musical, philosophical and sociological traditions—was eclipsed in the immediate postwar period by the United States; for this Germany paid a

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high cultural price for thirty years, and still lacks full confidence in its own traditions because new generations of thinkers and cultural producers cannot free themselves from the bondage of Nazism and the bifurcation of the country. Germany represents a mix of cultural resentment and envy that reflects its inability to pick up the pieces of its own pre-war cultural past. The post-war American client states, England and France, which had achieved prominence in earlier centuries, later began to attempt to assert their earlier status and to reclaim their national pride. In France, this assertion began early with de Gaulle and continued through Mitterrand and up to the present. In England, it began with Bevan, but has not been forcefully reasserted since, not the least by Thatcher who took Ronald Reagan as her model. At a cultural level, the United States has penetrated deeply both France and England. Immediately after the war, both Chinas were relatively liquidated as major contenders. Formosa under Chiang Kai-Shek became an American dependency beholden to the, China lobby and Madame Chiang Kai-Shek's influence over American Congressmen. Communist China, under Mao, following a large-scale and almost totally wasteful expenditure of resources was able to enter the new nuclear age and reassert itself as a balance wheel between Russia and the United States.24 Many third world nations became claques for China, moving in and out of the China orbit. Defining itself as a third way, China excluded itself from either entry into or possible influence upon world culture. The new third world nations were envious of Western economic development and felt dependent on either U.S. military or economic aid or were confined to the alternative of similar aid from Russia or China. They tried to mount a counter-attack in the hope of pluralistically denouncing the United States in the U.N., tending to be sympathetic to either Russia or China, even when muting their criticism of the more brutal colonialism and military adventurism of the often more direct penetration used by the United States.25 Within each world area there were (and are) a series of functional modules that existed within and between nations. We call these status modules because they are not or are less determined by the market or political power. Such modules have their origins in pre-cold war international relations and exist in both the dominant powers, dependent states and the former colonial and so-called developing nations.26 Their function is to mediate between formal policy demands and the actual execution of policy, that is, to uphold the appearances of compliance, but not their substance: i.e. formal compliance to external requirements imposed by Russia and the United States with minimal internal compliance to superpower demands. Thus pro-forma compliance existed while cultural autonomy was informally

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expressed in ways that limited external cultural and political dominance. For example: A) In Poland the Communist Regime attempted to be as repressive as it could to prevent a Soviet invasion. This was a self-imposed repression delicately maintained in order to mediate between Soviet demands and domestic pressures from below, from the Church, intellectuals and some sectors of the labor force. B) Romania accepted the repression and, with governmental pride, all the symbols of communism which, however, gave no satisfaction to the Soviets except for the acceptance of Soviet symbols. A deeply corporate authoritarian regime took its own course despite resistance from below based on Romanian cultural traditions. C) Albania rejected all demands from whatever source of anything which might affirm any connection to the former Yugoslavia, as a result separating itself from all influences from the outside world. D) Parts of Africa became Cuba's major clients and were embarrassed by an excess of Cuban troops or too deep a penetration of Cuban revolutionaries. Cuba's only export commodity, besides sugar, was its troops, fronting for the Soviet Union at a very high cost to the latter. Cuban troops and revolutionaries became an internal burden for those countries which were its hosts. E) The Near and Far East were characterized by the Israeli wars, the Vietnam war and the activities of the world's oil consortia (the businessmen of the ruling families) and revolutionaries in Libya and Iran. Vast oil reserves which could not be absorbed sufficiently by the consumption market produced in the case of Iran and Libya revolutions caused in part by the mobility of oil reserves and the absorption of Western technologies and vice versa. Pseudo-reactionary revolutions were, therefore, based on modern petroleum technology and Islamic Puritanism. In most other respects, Islamic Puritanism has tended to become primarily a domestic virtue and freedom from it is celebrated in London and other parts of the West. The management of oil reserves and marketing practices was carried out almost exclusively at modular levels of interaction between members of middle Eastern dynastic families and the princelings of the world's oil consortia. F) In South Africa, a system of exploitation and extensive poverty grinded against the conspicuous affluence of a small sector of the country, causing the same phenomenon that was present in Iran, that is, the inability of the politicized lower classes to accept the danger of death as a limit on their aspirations. International economic pressures and increasing cultural isolation defeated efforts to uphold the old systems. G) In East and South Asia including Australia and New Zealand, the United States set up a system of extensive and complicated Alliances for

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the purpose of limiting Soviet penetration of the area. These alliances were encumbered by semi-civil war between North and South Korea, Cambodian Khmer Rouge attachments to North Vietnam and Indian efforts to pursue policies of its own. In the case of each country, its position reflected attachments to the major powers or clients of the major powers even as local cultural determinants prevented the effective dominance of the superpowers. Nowhere was this more evident than in the case of Vietnam where local and regional forces denied control to external forces. The force in play in all these dynamics cannot be called linear organizations or economic classes because in the long run political policy and markets cannot operate by themselves. This has been shown to be the case in some nations, mainly Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore which rose exponentially on the basis of credit, politically imposed discipline plus extremely hard and controlled allocation of labor resources. In other cases, the multiple flow of monopoly financing gave temporary advantages to Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Dubai, or on the ability of the United States to cash in on one hundred years of its acquired chic and political stability. A major asset of the Soviet Union was its ability to create certain kinds of constituencies that enabled it to repress national and peripheral movements around its borders. Its then political stability rested on a dedication to Leninism, on alcohol consumption, internal repression and a strong military presence on its borders, though it was also subject to the rising expectations of a better standard of living not only among Russian, but also Soviet national groups and peripheral satellites. Faced with the prospect of internal political dissatisfaction and perhaps internal conflict and violence Gorbachev was led to realize that if the Union was to remain stable and avoid splintering, it must provide durable consumer goods and show some respect for national, ethnic and religious identities and loyalties. Prerevolutionary cultural traditions, nationalisms, ethnic identities and religious world views retained the strength of organizational force despite or because of seventy years of a party dictatorship. The Soviet Union was not able to contain the paradox of communism, that is, of how to achieve efficiency and morale without repression. Perhaps one of the latent aspects of the Strategic Defense Initiative was to maintain the Soviet Union's cost of military expansion beyond its ability to resolve its internal social and economic problems and thus contributed to the destabilizing of the system. The thirty year cold war like the Peloponnesian war left its combatents at different levels of political and economic exhaustion. The collapse and dismemberment of the Soviet Union has engendered a vast international realignment and openings for the creation of new ones across previously

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sealed national boundaries. Unlike the Peloponnesian war, the cold war produced an apparent victor which could assert its political and economic dominance over its defeated enemy, enabling the victor to colonize the former Soviet Union and to accentuate the latter's dependency on international financial institutions and the military strength of the United States. On the other hand, the contradictions of capitalism under American Leadership were and are whether the United States can continue to sustain tremendous military expenditures and luxury for its upper and some sectors of its upper middle classes on the basis of international capitalistic credit and the further internationalizing of capitalism by the sale of its national human and material resouices. Structural transformations of the kind described for the Soviet Union and Asian countries also have appeared almost everywhere in the world. After 1950, most of the Eastern European countries imported a great deal of Western technology and were able to employ it in relatively light, but not heavy industry, while the Soviet Union believing in massification allowed no flexibility of development, resulting as a consequence in a twotiered formal and informal economic structure in which the former could not function without the latter. Japan, in some areas exceeded the United States in improving upon technology and the management of production. On the other hand, Germany has lagged in areas where before World War II it had the advantage. England, originally the leader of the industrial revolution has been unable to expand or to compete in many areas. The international oil companies have invested huge sums in the development of technology to pump oil, but have had difficulties in delivering it safely, and, though they have been able to build entire industrial parks and cities surrounding them, they have had difficulties in managing them. Leads and lags in structural transformations are directly related to the availability or absence of modular infrastructures which have their origins in previous time periods.27 In all of the above variations, some basic modules existed in primitive form. How they got plugged together in any specific instance is decisive. In addition they are dependent upon whether the national and international system has the resources to sustain a new flow between national and international systems which are always subject to being disturbed by: 1) discoveries of new sources of fuel, and control of them and 2) new sources of political disruption and leakage and 3) chaotic disjunctions in international credit and monetary fluctuations. Thus, the units upon which both a comparative institutional and social or economic stratification analysis can be made are everywhere and con-

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tinually in the making, and leads and lags provide continuous discontinuities and dislocations which make all units everywhere discontinuous, being unmade as they are being made. What is now clear in all worlds is that there is an almost unlimited range of economic, political and technical structures manned by specialists in all institutional orders. These include economic and trading managers, agricultural technicians with various degrees of area specialization, military consultants,, communications facilitators, automation experts, masters of artificial intelligence, and robotic and missile specialists. Included in this list is a world of expediters, file processors, communicators, biologists, geneticists, physicists and hordes of low grade service workers who ideally would be trained to be obsequious, well-mannered or able to act out the appearances of same.28 But equally important is the diffusion of oil revenues from initially the Gulf States and now the independent States of the former Soviet Union. Fluctuations in the prices of oil in international markets and a potential banking debacle still threaten the world. The development of the computer allows for the capacity of international transfers of funds at the rate of more than two trillion dollars a day to all segments of the world, not to mention the daily transfer of armaments throughout the world, with a smaller but more dramatic transfer of terrorists and terrorism. Altogether these transfers take place outside the control of linear organizations and make the "system" as a whole more or less unstable. The long term direction of the internationalization of the world indicates a continuous dialectic to nowhere.

ENDNOTES 1. Joseph Bensman and Arthur J. Vidich, The New American Society: the Revolution of the Middle Class, Chicago, Quadrangle, 1971, and revised edition, American Society: the Welfare State and Beyond, South Hadley, MA, Bergin and Garvey, 1987, chapter 5, pp. 87-101, "The Co-ordination of organizations". 2. Max Weber, "Class, Status and Party" in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, 1946, Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 180-195. Eds. Hans. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. 3. Well known cases of the latter include the case of the Perez Jimenez regime in Venezuela, for which the source of supply was New York city and the patrons Venezuelan generals. A more recent case is that of President Omar Bongo of Gabon, as reported in The New \brk Times of April 22, 1995, who was supplied with Parisian prostitutes by Franceso Smalto, an Italian fashion designer. 4. With only a slight change in perspective, Thorstein Veblen's Theory of Leisure Class, Random House, N.Y. 1934 (1989), could be read as a case study of the contemporary life styles of international upper-class society. 5. Early in World War II, Rudolph Hess, making his famous unauthorized flight to England from Germany in the hopes of negotiating a deal with the English against Russia, hoped to use a personal relationship with his English equivalents for the purpose of renewing

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6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

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Anglo-Saxon unity. The literary figures of the period include Christopher Isherwood, T. S. Elliot, Stephen Spender, Ezra Pound and many others, among whom differences in attitude toward acceptance or rejection of Fascism or Nazism led to endless splits and literary confrontations in the postwar period leaving deep marks on the new generation of emerging literary celebrities. Charles Lindbergh's admiration of Hitler and Fascism had similar divisive political repercussions in the United States. An example of this cultural miscegenation is provided by the CIA supported magazine. Encounter, which financed prominent English and American writers and intellectuals through private foundations acting as fronts for the intelligence agency. Network theorists have used such terms as modes and modules to point to the greater significance of a specific individual in the functioning of a network. We use the term module to emphasize not only the existence of an individual as a focal point in a network, but also to stress that the focal point is determined by the possession of ideal and/or material values. Guy Oakes has done this in his book The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and the American Cold War Culture, New York, Oxford University Press, 1994, in which he examines confidential reports on discussions and meetings conducted by President Dwight Eisenhower and his advisors on the subject of how to handle the civil defense program designed to assure the public that a defense against a nuclear war was possible. Reports to the public stressed appearances only while the confidences of the modular group were shielded from reporters. November 13, 1995, p. 59-72, by Mary Anne Weaver. Ibid, p. 62. Officially known as Abdul Basit Mahmud Abdul Karim. In 1993, there were 3,833 cases of arson in New York City and 1,474 in Brooklyn as reported in Brooklyn Bridge, Feb., 1997, p. 16, by Anna Robaton. In the meantime, from the point of view of public perception structured by linear reporting, the mayor in our case in point appeared to be a fool, because in his righteousness and technical honesty, he was unaware of the modular culture of political extortion operating under his nose, but outside of his purview. But, of course, he would be more aware of the modular culture within the slums and ghettoes because his knowledge would be based on reportable cases and "inside" information, that is, gossip. All quotes are from Mathew Josephson, The Robber Barons: the Great American Capitalists, 1861-1901. New York, Harcourt Brace and Co., 1934, pp. 222, 223, 355, and 366. See also Gustavs Mayers, History of the Great American Fortunes, New York, Random House Inc., Modern Library series, 1936 (1907) for innumerable examples of modular groups which, during the construction of America's post-civil war transportation and factory systems, conducted their activities within the framework of publicly invisible networks. Spiro Agnew who, on exposure of his actions as a County supervisor, lost the vice-Presidency during President Nixon's tenure, despite the fact that this had been a common practice among political officials. See Robert Engler, The Politics of Oil: A Study of Private Power and Democratic Direction. New York, the Macmillan Company, 1961, for the case of the national and international oil business connections to politics. For a discussion of tensions between the Linear Structures of the Catholic Church hierarchy and the evolution of ethnic and racial groups' cultural expressions over a period of 150 years in Newark, New Jersey, see James Mahon, Styles of Ethnic Catholicism in the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey: A History of Conflicts and Control, Dissertation, Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science, New School For Social Research, November, 1995. Reported by Celestine Bohlen in the New York Times, January 7 and 15, International Edition, page 1 and A5 and page A7 respectively. Father Balasuriya's book, Mary and Human Liberation challenges such beliefs as original sin and the Immaculate Conception.

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20. Since the beginning of Martin Luther's Protestantism and continuing through the theologies of Calvinism, Puritanism and up to the present day, a similar analysis could be made for the tensions between Protestant Church authority and incessant grassroots and sect pressures to devise endlessly new religious doctrine. In the case of Protestantism, its this-worldly secular orientation inherently contains within it processes of fragmentation by modular cultures. Such continuous fragmentation adds to the theological confusion of the masses and leads to the commercialization of both religious organizations and the institutes of higher learning which have since come to use quantitative membership statistics and monetary standards as measures of success. 21. Robert Jackall, Wild Cowboys: Urban Marauders and the Forces of Order, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1997, for an analysis of the social consequences of drug culture on civic institutions. 22. The setting of events such as the football superbowl, grand slam tennis matches, golf tournaments, political presidential conventions, etc., without the appearance of conspiratorial intentions, bring together already existing modules of businessmen, manufacturers and politicians to make their "deals". To some extent business agreements and arrangements concluded in these settings may have far reaching economic and political consequences and, yet, are not reported in the press. However, an example of the reporting of informal businessmen's and politicians gatherings is that of the Annual World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland where business executives pay $20,000 to attend meetings with their counterparts and with political leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, and representatives of countries throughout the world. As an added attraction for attending business leaders, scientists, experts, authors and journalists are invited to serve on panels and attend other events at the forum without paying the $20,000 in fees. [From the New York Times, "Hobnobbing at very High Levels: Political and Corporate Elite Soak up Big Ideas at Davos", Jan., 28, 1997, pp. Dl and D21], The Davos Forum represents an institutional setting for the creation of new modules or as its director notes "Contacts ultimately mean contracts" in what he calls "an information market". Its larger meaning can only be explained in relation to the end of the cold-war and the emergence of an era of unrestricted global business opportunities and of the enhanced role of corporate leaders in managing the affairs of the world. 23. As described by Phillippe Descola in The Spears of Twilight: Life and Death in the Amazon Jungle (trans. By Janet Lloyd), New York, the New Press, 1996. See also my essays, 'Revolutions in Community Structures" in The Dying Community, ed. by Art Gallaher, University of New Mexico Press, 1980, pp. 109-32, and "Community Structures in World Perspective: Decline and Transfiguration", in Qualitative Sociology, vol. 2, No. 1, May 1979, pp. 45-72, which analyze the processes of penetration and colonialism that have transformed aboriginal cultures and the varieties of community structure in metropolitan society. See also my study of Palau, an Island in the Western Carolines, The Political Impact of Colonial Administration, New York, Arno Press, 1980 (1952, Harvard University Dissertation) where I analyze the cultural and institutional transformations resulting from the successive colonial administrations of the Spanish, Germans, Japanese and Americans. 24. See my essay, "Prospects for Peace in a Nuclear World", Journal of Political and Military sociology, Vol., No. 1, 1980, pp. 85-97. 25. The above analysis is taken from my paper "Political Psychology of Dependent Societies" in papers of the VJth Latin American Congress of Sociology, Caracas, Venezuela, 1961, and from Joseph Bensman's and my essay "The Struggle for the Underdeveloped World", Caribbean Review Vol. 2, No. 3, 1970, which also appears in expanded form in Joseph Bensman and Arthur J. Vidich, American Society, the Welfare State and Beyond, Amherst, MA, Bergin and Garvey, 1985, as chapter 14, "Post-war Efforts to Lead the World," pp. 260-278. 26. The former colonies have in their legacies all sorts of remnants of colonial corporate intrusions going back to Lever Brothers in Belgium, Siemens in Germany, Nobel and Kruger in Scandinavia, King Leopold in Belgium, the Bank of England, etc. Multinationals and specialty companies produce their own modules. The necessity to

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create a class of settlers, suppliers, engineers, administrators, translators and technicians produce within a colony the equivalence of quislings or occupying troops. The need to build indigenous infrastructures to support colonial penetration results in forms of modular stratification that are carried over into the newly defined independent states. The existence of such modules poses problems for new national presidents, chief executives and corporate officials, because 1) they face an ever shifting combination of domestic, international, regional and local interest groups, publics and modular units that require recognition, bribery, kickbacks and preferential taxation policies, 2) they must provide minimal trust to modular interests and assurances to domestic publics about the distribution of new wealth ,3) in the absence of this ability they must repress public opinion in general to the point where it does not lead to mass rebellion, and 4) must accommodate to international economic, capital and military exploiters with respect to markets, trade and stimulation of the fear of enemies. A more expanded treatment of the historicity of modules might be the subject of another study. 27. Specifically, for example, this pertains to the availability of means of transportation and communication. Weber in his study, The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations refers to the "long thin line" of overland trade as opposed to sea trade. The long thin line refers to the overland road systems set up as a wheel emanating from Rome as its hub. Communication by Rome across the spokes fell outside the scope of control from Rome and was limited to local initiatives. What this suggests is that even under modern bureaucracy and rationalization, the lines of communication and command can be long thin lines relative to the modular complexities and diversity that exists everywhere along the long thin line of modern communication determined by highway system and air travel. In the 19th Century before and up to the appearance of the automobile, railway systems determined the scope of penetration of rational bureaucratic administration. In the 20th century highway systems (first rationalized by Hitler in Germany as part of military policy) of modern nations determine access to regions and localities and the areas that are to be "left out." Air transport is limited by the need for landing sites, in the absence of which access to many regions is precluded (hence the folly of the Iran rescue mission by the US under President Carter, a submariner). The use of airplanes in the drug wars depends on friendly landing sites while drug couriers can make and unmake crude landing sites in remote areas. The point is that of finding a way to get to a place that you can't get to by means of conventional transportation. Rational administration is limited to use of conventional means of transport. 28. Such specialists are the products of the world's educational and training institutions, academic exchange programs and international consulting firms. Over the years universities and research centers such as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, MIT, Hiedelberg, Humboldt, British Colonial Schools, Lumumba University and Russian Institutes have been centers for the transnational intermingling of researchers, scholars and academicians who having once met continue to maintain extra-institutional contacts with each other. Scholar exchanges such as those of Rhodes, Fulbright, Marshall and Humboldt have generated innumerable cross-national networks and in the case of the American president, William Jefferson Clinton, who was a Rhodes Scholar, relationships established in England with his cohort of Rhodes Scholars served as a source of recruitment for cabinet members and advisors in his first term of office. The use of short courses in the medical profession and visiting lectureships in academia facilitate the transmission of ideas and scientific practice. Altogether such cross-fertilizations have led to the easy transfer of knowledge and technology of computers, computer chips, atomic energy and bomb-making, robotics and automation, biogenetic materials (seeds, fertilizers and genetic tissue transplants), missiles and new petro-chemical discoveries. Thus modular infrastructures are in a state of continuous tension with those of political, military and corporate managers.