[PEN-L:11618] Castells evaluated

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Manuel Castells. End of Millennium. Volume 3, The Information Age: Economy,
Society and Culture. Boston and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. xiv +
418 pp. Tables,
maps, notes, bibliography, index. $27.95 (paper), ISBN 1-55786-872-7.

Manuel Castells. The Rise of Network Society. Volume 1, The Information
Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Boston and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,
1996. xvii +
556 pp. Tables, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $27.95 (paper), ISBN
1-55786-617-1.

Manuel Castells. The Power of Identity. Volume 2, The Information Age:
Economy, Society and Culture. Boston and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,
1997. xv + 461 pp.
Tables, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $27.95 (paper), ISBN 1-55786-874-3.

Reviewed by Samuel Collins, Department of Sociology, Anthropology and
Criminal Justice,
Towson University.

Published by H-USA (September, 1999)


FINDING THE EVENT HORIZON ALONG THE BLACK HOLES OF NETWORK SOCIETY

Despite the steady growth in the locutionary incidence of "information,"
"information society" and "global economy," these ideas--however
prevalent--are notoriously difficult to pin down theoretically and
methodologically (Webster 1995). In fact, what seems most remarkable about
"information society" is not "the emergence of information processing as
the core, fundamental activity" of capitalism, but the ways in which
already extant, twentieth-century inequalities continue into the present.
Understanding those continuities and may be more important than delineating
the discontinuities.

But, despite the danger in easy invocations of novelty, the "information
age"--whatever it may turn out to be--may prove useful in re-framing our
ideas of modernity and identity by re-focusing our analysis on loci of
culture and political economy. At the same time, we must avoid the opposite
side of the dyad, where the "information age" is construed as an absolute
break with the past. Rather, the truth of the "information age" lies in an
emergent combination of fast-paced, vertiginous change and persistent
inertia. Demonstrating this complexity means walking a cautious line of
social theory and illustrative example. This Herculean labor has been
undertaken by Manuel Castells, a sociologist whose work in urban studies
has been extremely influential in all areas of the social sciences. In
1998, he finished a three-volume opus, The Information Age: Economy,
Society, and Culture, that he describes as "an empirically grounded,
cross-cultural theory of the Information Age" (Castells 1998: xii).

The trilogy begins with The Rise of Network Society, a syncretic
masterpiece that builds on many of Castells's earlier insights (Cf.
Castells 1989). The second installment, The Power of Identity,
contextualizes the "culture wars" of the late twentieth-century in the
changing political economy, while the third, End of the Millennium, extends
those arguments into a cautious, not altogether surprising, cultural
futurology. It is safe to say that few others could have attempted the
scope of this work and that this paean to the information age is the only
one of its kind. Remarkably, Castells is largely successful in his
evocations of contemporary political economy and identity, a testament to a
lifetime of teaching and scholarship.

But the "information age" not only signals reconfigurations in production,
social relations and culture, but also knowledge. In the fin-de-siecle
"information explosion," we find a hyperbolic surfeit of information in
some areas and a disingenuous "information blackout" in other areas. If we
do not reflect on the power/knowledge machine in the coming (or coeval)
"information society," than we simply reproduce the systematic
mystifications wrought in the ideological crucible of advanced capitalism.
It is here that Castells founders: not in his own careful empiricism, but
in his over-credulous acceptance of sources and pundits who are more
symptoms than analysts of information society. However, as I will argue
below, Castells's mistakes are (unintentionally) illustrative of the same
network society he analyzes; his oversights and missteps are part and
parcel of the "information society."

As an anthropologist specializing in the United States, I will confine many
of my criticisms to Castells's analyses of that geographic area.
Importantly, though, this is no triptych to American exceptionalism.
Castells takes great pains to separate the "information age" from "America"
and his analysis wanders the globe, touching on examples in every
continent. Given both the size of the U.S. economy and its continued
imperialism, any study of the "information age" would not be complete
without some accounting of U.S. hegemony. However, that said, Castells's
work does not privilege the "American" as a sine qua non site of meaning in
the information age, hence the deictic "we" and "our" are especially
problematic--and de-centering. For Castells, the advent of what he calls
"network society" involves changes in every aspect of life, from our
grossest material existence to our most inchoate notions of civil society,
nation and self.

Our world, and our lives, are being shaped by the conflicting trends of
globalization and identity. The information technology revolution, and the
restructuring of capitalism, have induced a new form of society, the
network society. It is characterized by the globalization of strategically
decisive economic activities: by the networking form of organization; by
the flexibility and instability of work, and the individualization of
labor; by a culture of real virtuality constructed by a pervasive,
interconnected, and diversified media system; and by the transformation of
material foundations of life, space and time, through the constitution of a
space of flows and of timeless time, as expressions of dominant activities
and controlling elites. (Castells 1997:1)

In the information age, information--however construed--becomes the most
important input and output of the economy. Since "information" is both
transformative and opportunistic, it colonizes all areas of experience.
Hence, the "information age" is also social and cultural in addition to
material.

INFORMATION AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

It was possible, in previous decades, to insist that the U.S. economy was
not really dependent on world trade. Even in the 1990s, some economists of
a more isolationist bent have suggested that, since exports only account
for ten percent of the GNP, international trade is a distant second to the
domestic market. But this is an increasingly untenable argument, given the
interdependency of financial markets worldwide and the dependency of U.S.
manufacturing on international networks of production and investment.

In fact, there is little doubt that there has been a significant shift from
what might be called a "world economy," dating, as Eric Wolf, Emmanuel
Wallterstein, and Fernand Braudel have reminded us, from the advent of
mercantilism in the late sixteenth-century to the end of World War II, and
a global economy structured around simultaneity and, as a corollary, the
massive integration of national economies. The first--the world
economy--emphasized linkages, trade, domination and colonial relations
between "centers" and "peripheries." Through lines of colonialism,
imperialism and unequal trade, even the most far-flung cultures were
connected to European, Asian and American metropoles. However, the
situation is fundamentally different in the "global economy." As Castells
writes, "it is an economy with the capacity to work in real time on a
planetary scale" (Castells 1996:92). Castells cites statistics showing
sharp increases in international trade and investment, suggesting an
increase in the permeability of national borders to capital (Castells
1996:94). As economies become more "transparent" under neoliberal economic
policies and restructurings, international and Foreign Direct Investment
become more important as sources of growth and productivity.

But this process, as might be expected in an era of untrammeled, "creative
destruction," has been extremely uneven (Berman 1982). Some regions have
tightly integrated, prosperous markets, such as China's emergent Pearl
River Delta (Castells 1996:405). Other areas--already dominant in world
markets--have maintained and even diversified their networks (in
production, finance, etc.), particularly historically dominant metropoles
in the United States, Europe and Asia. One thinks of Saskia Sassen's
"global cities": London, Tokyo and New York (Sassen 1991). Finally, many of
the old inequalities have been compounded in this era of advanced
capitalism. That it to say, while a North-South, developed/underdeveloped
division can no longer be assumed, clearly the same cannot be said of
Africa and Latin America, where economic conditions at all levels have
worsened under the yoke of neoliberal policies imposed by the IMF. Much of
Africa and significant parts of Latin America are being progressively shut
out of these regional networks in such a way as to render whole nations
irrelevant to the global economy.

Thus, the structure of the economy is characterized by the combination of
an enduring architecture and a variable geometry. The architecture of the
global economy features an asymmetrically interdependent world, organized
around three major economic regions and increasingly polarized along an
axis of opposition between productive, information rich, affluent areas,
and impoverished areas, economically devalued and socially excluded.
(Castells 1996:145)

Therefore, while any analysis of U.S. manufacturing would be incomplete
without including distribution and manufacturing networks in Mexico and
Asia, other areas (Bolivia, Ecuador), are rendered increasingly irrelevant,
particularly as the terms of trade in primary products continue to
degenerate. But the key difference between this and conventional
underdevelopment theory a la Andre Gunder Frank is that "economically
devalued" and "socially excluded" areas can exist alongside integrated,
regional centers organized into the "space of flows."

What Castells calls a "variable geometry" is most commonly associated with
"post-Fordism," combining (after David Harvey, Michael Piore and Charles
Sabel) a "flexible accumulation" with, among other things, fundamental
shifts in the organizational practices of space and time (Harvey 1989;
Piore and Sabel 1984). This combination of 1). relatively fixed relations
of inequality between developed and marginalized economies and 2). variable
development that favors the rapid growth of selected regions (e.g., New
Industrialized Coutries (NICs) in Southeast Asia) is also true of what
Castells terms the emergent "international division of labor," a
combination of increasing inequality and variability. For example, networks
strewn across national borders allow both "flexible production" and
corporate mobility around sources of cheap labor. But, more important than
the growth of flexible production is the advent of flexible organizations
that are capable of changing strategies and schedules with sudden shifts in
global markets (Castells 1996:439). In order to accommodate rapid,
continually disruptive change, corporations supplant "vertical
bureaucracies" with "horizontal corporations" (Castells 1996:164).

One of the key components of "post-Fordism," then, is the "crisis of the
corporation," a phenomenon by no means synonymous with the death of the
large corporation. From Microsoft to the chaebol's continuing dominance in
Korea, the big, monolithic corporation is still an important (if not
growing) force in the global economy. But conventional, "stove-pipe"
arrangements of corporate hierarchies are ill-suited to the rapid changes
required by the network society and, as such, have given way to more
horizontal corporations that, moreover, traduce corporate boundaries and
incorporate networks of small to medium businesses as suppliers, clients an
consultants. Like the organization of production in network society, the
organization of the corporation seems to evidence the same tendencies
towards combinations of "fixed architecture and variable geometry," with
large corporations organizing for maximizing flexibility and innovation
while still working to increase their market dominance.

Labor has an uneven relationship with this "new flexibility." As Noam
Chomsky and others have continually stressed, labor--unlike capital--is not
free to move across borders. While capital may pursue international
networks and increased international trade, labor is more constrained and,
as the state concedes more and more to capital's wishes, more fragmented
(Davis 1986).[1] This fragmentation is compounded by an emergent division
of labor that systematically denigrates work and workers historically
represented by unions.

What I call the newest international division of labor is constructed
around four different positions in the information/global economy: the
producers of high value, based on informational labor, the producers of
high volume, based on lower-cost labor, the producers of raw materials,
based on natural endowments, and the redundant producers, reduced to
devalued labor. (Castells 1996:147)

While there is little to suggest (a la Stanley Aronowitz) the imminent end
of manufacturing, or even the deskilling of labor in the classic, Braverman
sense, there is nevertheless an increasing devaluation of much of the labor
force. At the top of the hierarchy sit the "wired" digerati, symbolic
manipulators of the information age and, at the bottom, a growing segment
of undervalued--though, importantly, not deskilled--labor. Following global
networks of production, labor is likewise differentiated across borders and
within places; information-era technocrats live (and work) alongside
marginalized workers. The increasing Gini coefficient evident in the United
States is even more poignant in American cities, where, in the midst of
simultaneous processes of gentrification and abandonment, the privileged
top-fifth of the population can be found living next door to the lowest
fifth (Marcuse 1985).

(Full review at http://www.h-net.msu.edu/)



Louis Proyect

(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)