The space of flows and timeless time:
Manuel Castell's "The Information Age"
Simon Bromley
Manuel Castells's trilogy The Information Age* has been widely heralded as one of the most significant works of substantive social theory to appear for several decades. Its three volumes have been described by Anthony Giddens as `perhaps the most significant attempt that anyone has yet written to come to terms with the extraordinary transformations now going on in the social world', and the work as a whole has been compared favourably to the great achievements of nineteenth-century social theory - Marx's Capital and Weber's Economy and Society. It will take some time to digest and fully assess this vast work; whether or not these commendations and comparisons are justified remains to be seen, but Castells surely deserves praise for the sheer ambition, scope and imagination of the enterprise.
Castells believes that we are witnessing a fundamental transformation in the na
ture of modern societies - the emergence of the network society - and The Information Age seeks not only to provide a theoretical account of this new, global order but also to substantiate this argument by means of a concrete examination of the main social processes and institutions which comprise the network society and to investigate these developments on a worldwide basis.1 The network society is a social order embodying a logic which Castells characterizes as the `space of flows' in contrast to the historically created institutions and organizations of the space of places which characterized industrial society in both its capitalist and statist variants.2 The central focus of the work is thus the organizational logic of society, understood primarily in terms of the spatial and temporal patterning of social practices. Of course, this argument is not new. Giddens, for example, has argued that the world is increasingly moving towards a situation where `the consequences of modernity are becoming more radicalized and universalized than before', and in both The Consequences of Modernity and Modernity and Self-Identity he has attempted to trace the instituti
onal, cultural and personal consequences of these dramatic changes.3 Similarly, Scott Lash and John Urry have charted the disorganization of capitalism as it becomes ever more global, increasingly organized in networks of electronic flows, and the rise of individual and institutional reflexivity in response to this.4 Likewise, Ulrich Beck has examined the reflexive modernization within contemporary societies that brings about a transition from the industrial to the risk society.5 Castells draws freely on these (and other) contributions, but, as we shall see, he develops the argument in novel directions.
A second major theme of The Information Age concerns what Castells refers to as the `power of identity'. For alongside the rise of the network society, partly in response to it and partly constituted by a logic that is external to it, Castells argues that there has also been a `widespread surge of powerful expressions of collective identity that challenge globalization and cosmopolitanism on behalf of cultural singularity and people's control over their lives and environment'.6 Once again this is not a particularly original argument in itself: there are obvious parallels (as well as contrasts) between Castells's counterposing of the old and new social movements and Giddens's treatment of `emancipatory' and `life' politics, not to mention the ever growing literatures on reflexivity, new forms of identity and the cultures of social movements. But the detailed nature of Castells's treatment of new social movements, his attempt to relate their development to the new logic of the network societies, and especially the scope and depth of hi
s empirical investigations into such a broad range of social and political developments represent a major achievement.
Finally, Castells has important things to say about the relationships between globalization and the nation-state. Broadly speaking, he endorses what is probably now the conventional wisdom: namely, that both the legitimacy and the power of nation-states are being eroded and undermined by processes of globalization. Many others have also suggested that if industrial capitalism was basically organized and national in form, then post-industrial capitalism is essentially disorganized and global.7 But Castells casts his diagnosis within the terms of his theses on the rise of the network society and the power of identity, seeking to show, through an impressive global comparative analysis, the different ways in which the nation-state is transformed in different contexts. Caught between the global if uneven logic of the network society, on the one hand, and the local and particularistic assertion of the power of identity, on the other, he argues that the dominant institution of industrial society - the nation-state - is called into question, as are those social movements - most notably the labour movement - which once organized on its terra
in in order to occupy and control it.
Informational capitalism and the origins of the network society
Castells begins his account of The Information Age with his theory of The Rise of the Network Society. In fact, two rather different discussions of the network society can be found in Castells's work, and these are not always differentiated from one another, and then related to each other, as clearly as they might be. Castells offers both a genetic account of the origins and social causes of the rise of the network society and a structural examination of the new social logic which its emergence instantiates. Let us consider, first, the genesis of the network society. The historical and social development of the network society, according to Castells, is rooted in a new, global socio-economic structure of informational capitalism. To characterize this socio-economic structure, Castells argues, we must focus on both its (capitalist) mode of production and what he terms its (informational) mode of development or technological system. In this respect, Castells's work can be read, in general, as an attempt to integrate the insights of Marxist theory with the work of such theorists of (post-) industrial society as Daniel Bell and Alain
In the modern world there have been two major modes of production, capitalism and statism. Castells understands capitalism in broadly Marxist terms. Considered as a mode of production, capitalism is based on the commodification of labour power, the private ownership of the means of production and hence the private appropriation of the surplus, with production organized for exchange subject to the demands of accumulation. Statism (Castells's term for the mode of production dominant in the state socialist or communist bloc) is based on the partial decommodification of labour power and state control over the means of production and appropriation of the surplus, with production oriented towards maximizing the power of the state over society and the determination of social objectives by the state. Castells takes for granted that much of the logic of contemporary global society is capitalist: capitalist restructuring in response to the worldwide economic crisis of the 1970s played a central role in shaping the development of societies, both nationally and globally, including the formation of the informational mode of development itself; the purpose of this capitalist restructuring at the most general level has been to escape from those social, cultural and political controls placed upon the economy in the era of essentially nationally based industrial capitalism; and
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