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Suppose we look at the history of the textual mediation of social control in the following broad terms. Imagine three ways in which texts and other semiotic-material artifacts have come to mediate social control, beginning with the primary integrating function of their specific informational con- tent, as in the architectural plans for a medieval cathedral or the Great Wall of China, or the transmission of sacred texts and legal texts that helped to ensure the stable repetition of rituals and formulas as guides to action over timescales of centuries. This was, I believe, the dominant mode of media- tion for a very long time following the invention of writing. But as the scales of human societies grew from unique villages and cities, each of which had unique institutions and texts, to scales on which there was a replication of standardized institutions (the same ritual of the Latin Mass across Europe, the multiple copies of the tablets of Hammurabi to standardize the laws of an empire, the same forms and practices of Chinese magistrates’ courts across vast territories and stable over centuries), a second mode of textual mediation, extending the first mode, became more and more significant. This was mediation by standardized text-form or genre, whether of written texts or other artifacts.

Each of these overlapping modes corresponds, I suggest, to a distinct mode of social regulation in-the-large and social control of individual behaviour at the small scale. In the first case, unique texts and unique insti- tutions regulate particular acts in an ad hoc manner; this is the mode of qadi justice in the Islamic tradition. In the second case, often historically simul- taneous with the first, it is not the unique content of texts or acts alone which matters in social regulation, but the form, type, kind or genre of these acts and texts. The content of the texts and acts still matters, but their

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conformity to standardized, replicated forms and manners also matters, and matters increasingly as social institutions and aggregate human communi- ties such as states, empires or multinational corporations increase in their spatial scales and operate over longer and longer timescales.

But this is not the end of the story. I believe that today we are witnessing a new enlargement in the maximum scales of organization of global society, crossing the boundaries of the modernist nation-state and indeed of all insti- tutions, cross-linking institutions in new ways. Correspondingly there are new forms of textuality and semiotic mediation, whose emergent instances might be represented by such phenomena as hypertext and the World Wide Web. More specifically, we are increasingly making use of modernist forms and genres in hybrid media where the traditional boundaries are regularly crossed by ‘traversals’ as we jump through hypertexts or surf across the Web. This emergent order of textual mediation should correspond, by the general thesis I have been developing here, to new modes of social organization and social control. Critical Discourse Analysis needs to find ways of addressing not just the (still very important) relations between standardized discourses, genres or textual forms and the institutional practices and interests which they sustain, but also this newer, emergent mode of mediation, with all its implications for the emergence of new modes of social control and chang- ing relations among the individual or activity-scale of social coherence, the institutional scale, and the new transinstitutional forms.

There are many examples to help illustrate what this new mode of ‘traversals’ is like in comparison to the older modes of unique texts and standardized genres:

● hypertexts – experienced in time as jumping from one element in one mod-

ern genre or type to another that may be quite disparate; for example, nar- rative to poem to diagram to table to dialogue to video to quantitative graph, and so on (Landow, 1997; Lemke, 2002a) and also linking across top- ics and themes that may have no typical cultural collocations

● web-surfing – which generalizes the simple hypertext across radically dif-

ferent content categories, linguistic registers and institutional domains of human activity, but with some logical connective relations at each juncture or link, and with a sense, like that for hypertext, of a coherent meaning-experience along a whole experiential trajectory

● channel-surfing – the immediate predecessor of web-surfing, in which the

viewer jumps at various rates among the widely different television pro- grammes and genres (adventure to cooking to news to talk show, and so on), again creating a unique and in some sense coherent meaning- making experience, in which the viewer is a more active creator of the trajectory than he or she could be in relation to any single programme

● mall-cruising – an architectural experience, or ‘reading’ of assembled

space, in which, whether as shopper or social visitor, over a relatively

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short span of time, individuals move from food court to clothes mart to movie theatre to furnished public space, again assembling the trajectory of a coherent visit-to-the-mall.

It is not just these sorts of relatively short-term experiences that show the increased signficance of transgenre and transinstitutional traversals of a sort that begins to transcend the organizational and regulatory logic of stan- dardization which so characterizes modernism. There are also instances at larger scales of extension and at longer timescales:

● hybridizing identities – combinations serially and simultaneously of par-

ticipations in and affiliations with more diverse communities; for exam- ple, serial and simultaneous bi- and multisexualities; affiliations to both Black and White racial groupings, to African and Puerto Rican cultures and communities, to being both Asian and European, and to developing and hybridizing institutional and affiliative identities on timescales from months to a lifetime

● career-surfing – younger, privileged individuals today do not look forward

to having a lifetime career in a single institution or social sector, but to lifescale traversals across many careers in many institutions, and even to mixing and alternating roles such as engineer, musician and student on shorter and shorter timescales, even within the same day or week; it no longer makes sense to identify with a single career, profession or institu- tion because meaningful life occurs in the traversals across multiple social formations as modernism once defined them

● corporate chameleonism – multinational corporations today are more often

networks of diverse enterprises, with no single ‘core’ business; they are constituted as looser aggregates, capable of more rapid and opportunistic change on short timescales; they may have no stable structures or prin- ciples; their organizational coherence is achieved through personal links and empty or hyperreal signifiers (styles, brands)

● transdisciplinarity – intellectual and academic work is increasingly shifting

from relatively stable professions and systems of organized practices and methodological and professional canons to simultaneous and serial mix- ing and hybridization across more diverse disciplinary communities and practices on shorter timescales (that is, mixing even in the same sentence or procedure, rather than only across a long career)

● globalized urbanism – networks of institutions and material structures

within urban ecosocial systems are increasingly becoming liberated from local functional constraints as these are balanced against opportunities for global networking and use is made of the richer diversity of urban net- works/resources that results; urban subgroups (such as diasporic commu- nities) can link into global transurban networks, thereby increasing local urban diversity, permitting change on faster timescales and gaining freedom from local constraints.

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Traversals and their textualities are parasitic on modernist genres and typologies; their heterogeneity is only defined relative to the different mod- ernist categorizations of their units. But this is precisely the heart of our postmodern fascination, especially in popular and youth culture, with ‘bor- der crossings’, with a greater freedom to mix the unlike, to create hybrids and perform hybridity. It is not just the mixing of unlike that increases our semiotic resources, it is the mixing of contraries; it is finding ways of being two things that in modernist terms you cannot both be (for example, racially both Black and White, or gendered as both masculine and femi- nine). The traversal mode undermines binary categories and laughs in the face of a modernist logic that excludes the middle, the tertium quid, the mis- cegenated monstrosity. It is a defiance of social control by purity of type. Even as social dynamics generates new discouses and registers shared across individuals and communities, the possibilities of traversals correspond to a hybridizing potential to take these discourses not as bounded, discrete wholes to remain inside of, but as elements to play with and to make new and more unique meanings and lives with.

In the emergent era of traversals, newer forms of social organization have only a stylistic unity, rapidly changing and opportunistic memberships and goals, and fluid roles and structures (see the literature on ‘new corporations’ and postmodern ‘virtual organizations’; for example, Gee et al., 1997). Social control is shifting to become directed at producing short-term styles of mixing traditionally separated modernist modes of behaviour, retaining them only as empty signifiers disconnected from the no-longer-determinative social institu- tions that used to give them direct reality, and at shortening the timescales for persistence of any particular stylistic pattern, disposition or institutional loy- alty or membership. It is mediated by congeries of texts originally from differ- ent discourse communities and registers that are juggled together for the purpose, or by the net effects of participation in highly heterogeneous social networks across a span of relatively shorter as well as longer timescales.

Traversals again require a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach in our theories and how we apply them. It is not just that texts of very different gen- res (for example, fictions and scientific accounts; advertising and artistic pro- ductions) become interlinked in hypertext webs, or that we witness the playful hybrids of postmodern architecture (for example, structurally integrating Bauhaus and Beaux Arts elements), but that in lived traversals every meaning- ful form that may be encountered in a day of life may be seen as contributing meaning to a whole that transcends all divisions of disciplinary specialization. How is this possible? Until relatively recently, the overall functioning of society required the separation and mutual insulation of modernist institu- tions, the relative purity of their genres, confinement of individual career- trajectories to single institutions or at least institutions in the same economic and cultural sectors, and individual identities that were categorically assign- able to discrete genders, ethnicities, sexualities, and so on. What has changed

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I believe are the relationships among levels of organization. With the emer- gence of new global social and economic networks that are transnational and transinstitutional (cf. Appadurai, 1996; de Castells, 1996) there are now higher levels of relatively stable social organization which permit a greater degree of plasticity and lability at the level below. This is a general feature of naturally evolved complex systems with hierarchical levels of organization (Lemke, 2000a,b,c). An intermediate level filters noise and reorganizes variety from the level below it as information for the level above, and at the same time a higher level provides the relatively stable dynamical context within which variety is permissible at the level below. So long as there is something going on at the level below to provide the constitutive input to organizational pat- terns at the higher level, that higher level is relatively fault-tolerant toward how the input is provided or by which subsystems.

One of the most interesting features of the emergence of a higher level of organization in a complex system is that because of the filtering and buffer- ing effects at this new level, the levels above are less sensitive to individual events and detailed variation at levels below the emergent one. Only varia- tion at the level below which is transduced as significant variation (mean- ing) for the levels above, by the emergent level, counts. As a result we may picture higher levels as becoming more fault-tolerant with respect to lapses and failures in processes at lower levels.

We can for example imagine that at the level of global economic organi- zation, it is necessary to have a certain volume and rate of circulation of global capital, but exactly which institutions are contributing how much at any given moment to the net average rate of flow matters relatively little. Similarly, with the emergence of supranational organizations such as the institutions of the European Union, the international monetary and finan- cial institutions, or the internet, local and regional interests can be pursued in much more radical ways than could be permitted by nation-states when they themselves were the highest level of social and economic organization, which all lower level institutions had to rely on for a stable working envi- ronment. When the stability of the nation-state and its national-scale insti- tutions was paramount, greater regulation of local and regional-scale interests and institutions was necessary. With the emergence of the transnational orga- nization of global society and its economy, the regulatory stability of the nation-state is no longer so critical and a greatly increased variety and autonomy at the subnational level is to be expected.

Very generally, I am proposing that the modernist modes of social control and their associated standardized bureaucratic genres, which are still in exis- tence and still necessary on some scales, are no longer as critical to the sus- tainability of the global ecosocial system as they were a century ago, and that it is the opening up of the modernist closure of institutional social formations (in the sense of Chandler and van de Vijver, 2000) which creates the space of possibility for hybridity, traversals, and so on.

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