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[RRE]Review of castells trilogy 2/2
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to the innovation and diffusion of information technology,
his self-styled 'circumspection' (Vol. 3, p. 359) on political
matters can leave the impression that not much can be done at
the level of public policy to alter the forward momentum of
technological change. Indeed, he even claims that the specific
origins of the latest wave of the IT revolution in Silicon
Valley, California, has anchored the revolution's subsequent
development (Vol. 1, p. 5).
This last point reveals the rhetorical bind in
which Castells finds himself. Whereas most forms of
technological determinism support the planning impulse,
innovations in microprocessing have tended to subvert it. This
is probably the clearest infrastructural change that has
occurred since The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. The
benchmark figure here is Jean-Francois Lyotard. In The
Postmodern Condition (1979), Lyotard reversed Bell's generally
Keynesian economic vision, which had situated computers in an
increasingly observant administrative state designed to curb
the excesses of advanced capitalism. In contrast, Lyotard
presented such panoptical surveillance as disruptive of what
he envisaged as knowledge's naturally fragmented and
fluctuating state. Indeed, the dominant image of this revised
'knowledge society' soon became the market, or a 'parallel
distributing processing unit', to quote the corresponding
model of the brain. Thus, computers are themselves envisioned
as many personal terminals connected together in a network
rather than all to one mainframe generator. Indeed, Lyotard
predicted that even computer languages would be valued less
for their algorithmic powers than for the conceptual spaces
left open by their 'incompleteness' or 'undecidability'. The
significance that Castells assigns to Silicon Valley in his
narrative is not unreasonably seen as supplying the material
substratum for the conceptual space originally charted by
Lyotard.
But if Castells pays lip service to Bell, he is
completely silent about Lyotard. Indeed, these omissions are
deliberate, as Castells explains at the very start of The
Network Society that he wishes to return to the phenomenon of
informationalism without writing a 'book about books' that
would wrestle with all the ideologues who have mediated the
public's understanding of the emerging information age. No
doubt some readers will welcome Castells' independent-
mindedness, while others such as myself regret that he did not
engage more directly with what Alvin Gouldner called 'the
dialectic of ideology and technology'. The most immediately
striking feature of Castells' decision is the fact that he was
in a position to make it. This testifies not only to his own
eminence but, of equal importance, to the resources at his
disposal that allow him to add analytic and synthetic value
to the empirical work of others. In the grand 19th century
tradition of social theory, Castells' own output consists
largely of summarizing, rearranging, and labelling large
bodies of research. Castells' advantage over his classical
forebears is that much of the original work he cites was done
by his own students and colleagues, which (presumably) permits
him some first-hand knowledge of how the data is collected and
reported. In that sense, Castells literally has a better sense
of what he is talking about than Marx, Weber and Durkheim, who
went on little more than intuition when deciding whether to
trust the testimony of their sources.
However, there is a cost to Castells'
comprehensiveness that some may associate with the sin of
hubris. Although Castells may be in a position to ignore prior
theorists and confront informationalism 'in itself', his
readers may not enjoy that luxury. Their views may be an alloy
of ideology and fact, as far as Castells is concerned, but
unless he takes that into account, his pristine vision of
things is bound to be misinterpreted -- as it probably was by
Yeltsin's advisors. Castells' reliance on the concept of
networks hardly helps matters here. Castells stresses
informationalism's tendency to reduce social norms to a
recognition that several parties may realize their goals by
temporarily acting in a concerted fashion, which in turn
defines a specific network (Vol. 1, p. 171 ff). But stripped
of tables and jargon, this sounds like the definition of
normativity put forward by the Austrian school of economics
which provides the intellectual foundation of contemporary
neoliberalism. Such Austrians as Friedrich von Hayek and Fritz
Machlup drew a sharp distinction between dispersed and divided
labour, the former varying across spacetime and the latter
not. According to Austrian thinking, the idea that labour is
optimally 'divided' makes sense only if the design of a
factory is projected on society at large (i.e. the difference
between the economic vision of Adam Smith and the sociological
vision of Durkheim). In that case, skill corresponds to a
relatively fixed sense of social status. However, in a purely
capitalist order unfettered by feudal vestiges of status and
hence open to a competitive labour market, 'skill' becomes
nothing more than scarce locally relevant knowledge, the value
of which may change with market conditions. In that case, your
knowledge is most valuable if it complements that of others in
your immediate situation, thereby enabling all of you to
collaborate in activities that will benefit each of you
differently.
The fate of labour in Castells' network society
differs from this perspective only in the role assigned to
computerization in easing a change in one's interests and
sense of situational relevance. And, of course, the Austrians
did not anticipate the robustness of social movements who use
the network infrastructure to promote more long-term interests
that often go against those of the dominant networkers. To be
sure, these are significant differences, but are they likely
to be noticed, given Castells' drive toward maximum
comprehensiveness? Consider how Castells handles the
deepening of global class divisions resulting from the
polarization of 'info-rich' and 'info-poor' (Vol. 1, p. 220
ff). For the first two volumes, Castells accentuates the
positive side of this development. The growing number of
highly skilled workers in most nations -- including those of
the Third World -- leads him to conclude that, gloomy
forecasts notwithstanding, informationalism does not impose
any additional barriers to social mobility and may even remove
some traditional ones, especially as defined by the boundaries
of nation-states. Certainly, informationalism must be credited
with the rapid economic growth experienced by certain parts of
India and East Asia. However, the transnational nature of
networking also means that the rich are more than ever capable
of shutting out the concerns of the poor in their own
countries, as their interests are increasingly tied to the
efforts of fellow elites in other parts of the world. Castells
catches this point -- an extension of dependency theory -- in
Volume 3.
However, what Castells completely misses is
that the overall increase in high-skilled labour means that
the value of being highly skilled declines, which in effect
makes any given member of the 'elite' more dispensable than
ever. Matters are hardly helped by the accelerated drive for
technological innovation that is generally celebrated by
Castells. That merely threatens to render obsolete the very
idea of skills that can be profitably deployed over the course
of a lifetime. In that respect, informationalism's openness to
'lifelong learning' backhandedly acknowledges the inability of
even the best schooling to shelter one from the vicissitudes
of the new global marketplace. Education, though more
necessary than ever, appears much like a vaccine that must be
repeatedly taken in stronger doses to ward off more virulent
strains of the corresponding disease -- in this case,
techologically-induced unemployment. If there is an adaptive
group in this environment, it is those who endure the entire
gamut of the educational system without taking it too
seriously. Not surprisingly, informationalism's entrepreneurs
are drawn precisely from this group. It would seem that the
time is ripe to reinvent Thorstein Veblen's critique of the
'learned incapacities' of the academic class.
Finally, on a methodological note, while Castells
disavows the futurologist's mantle, by contemporary social-
scientific standards he is remarkably comfortable with the
practice of extrapolating from current trends. Indeed, most
of the criticisms nowadays lodged against Durkheim's original
use of statistics in his classic Suicide could equally apply
to The Information Age. He does not draw undue attention to
the methodological shortcomings of aggregate data; rather, he
dutifully reports official claims about the meanings of the
various indicators, barely warning the reader of the
incommensurability of national standards lurking beneath his
own generalizations. This would not be such a problem had
Castells not devoted nearly a tenth of his pages to charts,
figures and tables that inevitably create the illusion of
quantitative depth to his claims. At most, these data merely
redescribe in superfluous detail what he already claimed by
less mathematical means. Indeed, given that Castells makes
much of the alleged decline of the nation-state as a political
agency, it is odd that he fails to apply the implications of
this claim to his own preponderant reliance on cross-national
data sets. If the 'network society' is indeed the 'space of
flows' bounded by global financial markets and pockets of
local resistance, both of which are in their own way
'privatized', then publicly available statistics compiled by
the United Nations, the European Union, the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank are prima facie little more
than the effects of hypothetical processes for which Castells
provides no direct statistical demonstration. Under the
circumstances, Castells allusion to a 'triangulation' of data
sources (Vol. 1, p. 26) as taking up the methodological slack
merely conceals his inability to justify his preferred causal
explanation. Put it this way: someone already inclined to
plough through Castells' trilogy probably does not need to be
persuaded that popular support for mainstream political
parties has declined over the past generation or that an
increasing percentage of the gross national product of many
countries has been devoted to service sector activities. In
short, virtually all of the non-verbal trappings, which
distinguish Castells' work from that of other social
theorists, could be dropped without much cognitive loss.
The sheer magnitude of ambition and achievement
of Castells' trilogy has led Giddens in his THES review to
compare The Information Age to Max Weber's unfinished
masterwork Economy and Society. Marx's three-volumed Capital
also has also been invoked (by Castells' former Berkeley
collaborator, Peter Hall) as a reference point. Moreover,
Castells himself invites comparisons to both (Weber in Vol.
1, p. 195 ff; Marx in Vol. 3, p. 358). It would be
presumptuous to assess such comparisons now, not least since
Marx and Weber were themselves dead before their own works
acquired classic status. Nevertheless, some remarks are in
order about changes in the material conditions that enable
someone like Castells to emerge as a potential successor to
Marx and Weber in the 'grand theory' sweepstakes at the end of
the millenium. Here we must return to that institution whose
absence from Castells' 'encyclopedic' account of our times is
most conspicuous: the university. Castells' example
demonstrates that the social sciences have caught up with the
natural sciences in requiring considerable economic capital in
order to accumulate what Pierre Bourdieu calls 'symbolic
capital'. As economists might say, the 'entry costs' for grand
theorizing have become so high that most people are shut out
from the outset. To put it in Castells' own terms,
universities are increasingly divided into the 'info-rich' and
the 'info-poor', and Castells clearly belongs to the former,
which is tantamount to the theorizing class. Aside from his
access to underlabouring graduate students and colleagues,
Castells has acquired an ability to travel to most of the
places he talks about, which cannot be reciprocated by most of
the residents of those places. No doubt many of them would
like to know how informationalism has affected his practices,
but their inability to find out constitutes an epistemic
asymmetry that enables Castells to enjoy the materialist
equivalent of a transcendental standpoint on the world's
affairs.
All the more interesting, then, that Castells
turns Marx's Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach on its head by
saying that philosophers of the future should interpret the
world differently rather than trying to change it (Vol. 3, p.
359). Interpretation turns out to be much more expensive than
action in the information age. Thus, the reader should presume
only a false modesty when Castells says, 'Theory and research,
in general as well as in this book, should be considered as a
means for understanding our world, and should be judged
exclusively on their accuracy, rigor, and relevance' (Vol. 3,
p. 359). Given the costliness of judging Castells by the first
two criteria, I suppose that we shall have to concentrate on
the third, and here Marx's Eleventh Thesis may still come in
handy.
Steve Fuller
University of DurhamSteve Fuller is Professor of Sociology & Social Policy at the
University of Durham. The latest installment in his research
programme, social epistemology, is Science (Milton Keynes and
Minneapolis: Open University and University of Minnesota
Presses, 1997). He would like to thank Bill Dutton, Brian
Loader and Sujatha Raman for very useful comments on an
earlier draft of this review.
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