Brave New World
I
For most of our cluttered history, the human mind has outrun its paltry products: Philosophy, religion andmetaphysics overmatched the simple machines and worldly things that the mind had made, so the mind made do with God, poetry and eternity as its subject matter. In the Age of Enlightenment, so limited was the accumulated knowledge of our species and so expansive the hubris of the French philosophes that they could dare to press all they knew into the bold systemic project of a single Great Encyclopedia (1755). Half a century later, affecting to stand at the end of a modern era we now know had scarcely begun, Hegel could claim to merge the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history into a single vast and integrative phenomenology that encompassed all that was our consciousness and our world together.
Those were times when all theory was grand theory; when knowledge, like Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog, was one single great thing rather than a billion bytes and bits organized into discrete disciplines among which scholars move today at the risk of being called dilettantes or futurologists. Indeed, our current intellectual world is one in which the products of consciousness outrun consciousness itself and thinking machines create an often unintelligible world of processes and flows beyond understanding or control. Who then today would dare try to assimilate and encompass all knowledge? Grand social theory died with Talcott Parsons or perhaps Max Weber, if not Hegel. Encompassing history disappeared with the death of Toynbee or perhaps Gibbon, if not Voltaire.
Hence postmodern skepticism and postmodern despair: the trivial (and trivializing) ambitions of the deconstructive critic in place of the grand (and ennobling) aspirations of the creator. At the very moment in human history when new revolutionary communications technologies and an informational economy demand synthetic understanding, the anarchic world they produce seems immune to understanding. At best we deploy brute categories like power and interest; at worst, we retreat into subdisciplinary specialties in which we will not be required to address the dark interstices where fields join and reality begins.
So what is one to make of this magnificent throwback, Manuel Castells, this Voltaire of the information age, who has ventured a three-volume systemic account of our postmodern civilization under the title “The Information Age”? What do we make of a scholar who, rather than running from this confounding epoch’s complexities, embraces them, insisting scholarly analysis can still root itself in reason, in meaningful social action and in transformative politics? Castells, this orphan child of a vanished Enlightenment, actually believes in “the hypothesis that all major trends of change constituting our new confusing world are related, and that we can make sense of their interrelationship.”
Is Castells an anachronism, a Cartesian fossil reanimated by some vestigial Hegelian zeal come to life in the rotting garden of postmodernity? Can he actually make some sense out of an increasingly senseless world? His biography is too good to be true, leaving the impression that--rather than being a professor of sociology at UC Berkeley, which he is--he may actually be a committee of scholars united under a pseudonym. When he writes about Paris in the fateful year of 1968, it turns out he was an assistant professor at the University of Paris at Nanterre. When he surveys with sharp acumen the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent anarchy of Russia, he uses personal “field research” from places like Zelenograd, Novosibirsk and Sakhalin. His insights on Japan grow out of a guest professorship at Hitotsubashi University in 1995, while his ruminations on Europe arise from his participation in the European Commission’s High Level Expert Group on the Information Society, 1995-97. Mexico he understands from “twenty-five years of personal experience,” the Philippines from the life of his grandmother, who grew up there.
This is sociology as anthropology, nearly every domain lived personally, none fashioned from books and data alone. Castells needs all the experience he can get, for his aim is to explicate, relate and render intelligible such diffuse fields of data as are represented by identity politics, productivity, micro-engineering, feminism, the environmental movement, global labor, the Minitel, the Fourth World, religious fundamentalism, war, virtual time, the transformation of gender politics, the end of patriarchalism, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Asian economy, the crisis of democracy, the marginalization of Africa, European reunification, the globalization of child exploitation, of syndicated crime and of arms trafficking and (his permanent subtext) the growing dominion of information technology. His canvas is truly global, with detailed country accounts of the United States, Mexico, Europe, Russia, China, the Pacific Rim and Africa.
II
The three ambitious volumes of “The Information Age” comprise, however, no mere compendium of data sets and literatures (though they deploy enough of these to satisfy the most fastidious empiricist). Castells wants to theorize his subjects in a fashion that yields understanding. His organizing structure is the dialectic between what Hegel might have called objective reality and subjective consciousness, between what I have less grandly portrayed as the struggle between “McWorld and Jihad”--a contest that in Castells’ description mimics the “split between abstract, universal instrumentalist and historically rooted, particularistic identities,” what he sees as the “bipolar opposition” between the self (traditional identity in its manifold, local forms) and the global network society (the new order arising out of technology’s global dominion).
Castells’ trilogy encompasses a conceptual account of this epic struggle between the forces trying to transform consciousness and those resisting the transformation. It is a battle between, on the one hand, those trying to hold onto the vanishing traditional social forms under which we are governed by nation-states, we produce and consume in an economy that creates material goods and industrial jobs, and we live within the confines of traditional identities (familial, tribal, ethnic and religious) and, on the other hand, those forging radically new social forms out of a new networked reality in which we are uprooted from trading time and place and plunged into a fluid and virtual stream of flows. In this stream the economy is reorganized around the production and distribution of information, power becomes at once both “immaterial” (a matter of soft cultural codes rather than force or economic power) and globalized (no longer the special possession of sovereign states), social classes are redefined and economically polarized, identities are compromised and lost and our sense of concrete temporality and fixed place, hence our essential security--social, familial and personal--is put permanently at risk.
The most striking consequence of the new global network society for Castells is its corrosive effect on equality and social justice, traditionally the preserve of vanishing sovereign states that are today confronted by plural sources of authority and are too often “bypassed and overwhelmed by information flows.” In Castells’ blunt words, in the new postmodern economy, “entire countries around the world and large segments of the population everywhere are becoming irrelevant . . . [and] thus are being socially excluded.” It is not (as Jeremy Rifkin and others including me have recently argued) that robotization, automation and the information economy mean “the end of work”; on the contrary, (and Castells has the data to prove it), “there is no systematic structural relationship between the diffusion of information technologies and the evolution of employment levels in the economy as a whole.”
Nonetheless, technology does “profoundly transform the nature of work and the organization of production,” eroding full-time employment and clear-cut occupational patterns and creating new Information Age social cleavages between “informational producers and replaceable generic labor.” Such producers are of “discardable individuals whose value as workers / consumers is used up, and whose relevance as people is ignored.”
This emerging social system is the class mirror of a new culture of “real virtuality . . . a system in which reality itself is fully immersed in a virtual image setting, in the world of make-believe, in which symbols are not just metaphors, but comprise the actual experience.” Left behind by real virtuality, groups desperate to avoid marginality create “perverse connections” to the global economy aimed at “satisfying forbidden desire and supplying outlawed commodities to endless demand from affluent societies and individuals.”
Such reality-shattering shifts in the social fabric obviously cannot occur without provoking powerful reactions. As I paired the globalizing forces of “McWorld” with a resistant twin “Jihad,” so Castells portrays a multifaceted resistance to the network society--embodied in but not limited to identity politics. “The rise of the network society calls into question the processes of construction of identity during that period,” Castells writes, “thus inducing new forms of social change. This is because the network society is based on the systemic disjunction between the local and the global for most individuals and social groups . . . . [T]herefore reflexive life-planning becomes impossible, except for the elite inhabiting the timeless space of flows of global networks.”
Many of the forces resisting globalization are not only identity-based but profoundly reactionary, as was the late fundamentalist prophet Francis Schaeffer, whose bleak millennial vision Castells quotes: “We have come into an electronic dark age, in which the new pagan hordes, with all the power of technology at their command, are on the verge of obliterating the last strongholds of civilized humanity . . . unless we fight!” Yet others resist globalization progressively, in social movements rooted in political emancipation (the Zapatistas in Mexico), environmental salvation (the Green movement) and the war on patriarchalism (feminism).
Castells applies this dialectic of globalization and resistance to each of the world’s major regions and in doing so offers new explanations of how the Soviet Union was brought to ruin, how the Pacific Rim has become so privileged, how the Fourth World has been marginalized, how life in the United States is being transformed and why those who oppose the changes have been drawn to specific forms of resistance, both progressive and reactionary.
To take one example, Castells’ analysis of the new role of children as warriors and victims in much of the world is both striking and deeply moving. In his grand theory, nothing is ad hoc or contingent. “There is,” Castells writes, “a systemic link between the current, unchecked characteristics of informational capitalism, and the destruction of lives in a large segment of the world’s children.” Their exploitation “is linked to global Internet pornography, global sex tourism and global labor competition.” Thus “the network society devours itself,” losing “the sense of continuity of life across generations, so denying the future of humans as a humane species.”
Yet though globalization and information networking have a homogenizing and often destructive impact, Castells is a dialectician in the best sense. He works to show that the new uniformities imposed by global information technology are necessarily colored and particularized by the contexts in which they emerge. Forces of tradition that resist technology’s march are constrained to use technology (for example, anti-technology militia men using the Internet to forge global alliances), while forces of technological modernization often find that their own particular cultural contexts can modify outcomes for their own people.
No work as ambitious as this can be without flaws. Aside from irritating if inevitable tendencies to repetition, scholastic density and hence inaccessibility--an ironic inattention to informational communicativeness in a book all about the new communications--Castells’ substantive flaws are of three sorts: in the fast-changing world he would capture, trends sometimes outrun and defy his analysis; in his attempt to bring every trend under his dialectical theory, he ends up in certain contradictions that undermine his theories; and the theory itself suffers from an abstract, futurological quality (masked by a false claim of prescriptive neutrality) that at times removes it from the real-life challenges most of us face, even in an increasingly “informational” world.
III
Amazingly, although it is the work of a lifetime, “The Information Age” was written in just a few years (successive volumes being published in 1996, 1997 and 1998). Yet some of its observations already seem antiquated. “Time flows” fly, and in this extended season of Asian (economic) flu we no longer celebrate “the spectacular process of capitalist development in the Asian Pacific.” Castells would presumably be less ready today to use Japan as evidence for the beneficent influence “of networks external to the corporation” on the success of the information economy. Or, to take a second example, like Japan, the Internet is changing even faster than the global economy and is no longer just a tool used “mostly at work” or one in which “politics is a growing area.” Andrew Kohut’s latest Internet survey suggests the opposite.
Castells still seems caught up in the magic of the electronic frontier, writing about it a few years too early to notice that the Internet has come today to look (among other things) like just one more crass instrument of hard-sell consumer capitalism. Or, to take a third example, government trust issues have changed radically in recent years. Castells could not today deploy statistics about plummeting confidence in leaders of the kind 1993 provided for him (when President Bill Clinton had a 39% approval rating and John Major a 23% rating). Today Major is long gone and Tony Blair is wildly popular, while Europe enjoys center-left governments far more popular than their late conservative predecessors; and as for Clinton, not only has he survived but he has been propelled by what should have been a series of catastrophes to record levels of popular support (above 60% for two years running, right through the impeachment hearings).
It might seem mere carping to mention such developing flaws in Castells’ vast body of evidence, but his basic arguments for the emergence of the network society turn in part on his analysis of the Japanese economy as an unmitigated success, the Internet as a postmodern instrument of decentered power and the decline of trust in leaders as a powerful indicator of the reduction of democracy to a mere “shell” of its former self. Changes in empirical data necessarily undermine Castells’ argument, if not fatally.
Evidence can be reinterpreted of course, (in Volume 3, Castells takes a view on Japan more in keeping with its economic downswing), but fundamental contradictions are more difficult to deal with. Though Castells’ account of the global network society is relatively consistent, his portrait of the resistance to it suffers from a confusion bred of competing conceptual themes. By lumping together several mutually antagonistic alternatives to a globalized network economy, he obscures powerful differences among them. His major candidate for resistance is identity politics, which for the most part he associates with traditional forms of religion, ethnicity and the family, all implicated in patriarchalism. Yet feminism and gay politics are also candidates for resistance to homogenizing globalization; however, they are patently anti-patriarchal, very much like the global network society to which they are nominally opposed. All alternative movements are “communes of resistance [that] defend their space, their places, against the placeless logic of the space of flows characterizing social domination in the Information Age,” and all reject “the new idolatry of technology.” Yet some movements are Luddite, and some brashly use the new technology against itself; some reinforce the patriarchalism from which the global network liberates us, and others are themselves anti-patriarchal. When allies against the network society are themselves enemies of one another, when environmentalism and feminism appear as adversaries of the globalism that has helped create them, dialectic turns to mush and the question of “what is to be done” becomes pretty confusing.
There is also a degree of confusion in Castells’ otherwise welcome inclination to show how universal tendencies of the network society are modified by particular cultural contexts. For example, Castells asserts, in Russia a too rigid and totalistic statism obstructed the growth of the informational society and helped bring down the Soviet Union, while in Africa the villain was anarchy--a “disintegration of the state” that induced patterns of “violence, pillage, civil wars, banditry and massacres [that] reduced to shambles much of the [state’s] institutional capacity to manage crises and reconstruct the material bases of life.” We can appreciate the cultural modulation but at the same time wonder what impact it has on Castells’ generalizations about the “collapse of statism” in the face of networking.
IV
Finally, in light of his own prudent and contextualized analysis, it is at times difficult to buy into the premises of Castells’ theory at its highest and most general level. Take this passage, typical in its theoretical grandiloquence and inaccessibility: “Linear, irreversible, measurable, predictable time is being shattered in the network society . . . [because of] the mixing of tenses, to create a forever universe, not self-expanding but self-maintaining, not cyclical but random, not recursive but incursive . . . timeless time, uses technology to escape the contexts of its existence. . . .” For all of us? Hardly. On the Net? Maybe. With overpowering consequences for every realm? Not likely. But what then does the passage really mean? And how can Castells, so committed to transformative politics, insist throughout the three volumes that he has “forbidden [himself] normative prescription and political admonition”?
All social science prescribes in the manner in which it conceptualizes its data and theorizes its propositions. And Castells is no positivist pretending to empiricist “objectivity.” Why then at the end of Volume 3 conceal the attractive prescriptive ardor with which he opens Volume 1, where he commits himself to the possibilities of linking rational understanding and transformative politics? And, committed to transformation, why is there so little on the politics of resistance and transformation? Nowhere is his sociologist’s apoliticity more evident than in Castell’s shyness about treating with democracy, civic education, citizenship and civil society as ways to deal with the baneful consequences of the global network. By restricting himself to “movements,” some rooted in identity politics, others in progressive emancipatory environmentalism or feminism, he pushes aside precisely that domain most likely to be able to accommodate the new globalism to social justice and civic community. The most pernicious feature of the new network society is that it is out of control and beyond the reach of rational human purposes and common human goods. The remedy is its democratization.
Despite these objections, the three volumes of “The Information Age,” taken together, remain a truly stunning achievement. Castells comes as close to being our owl of Minerva (Hegel’s canny philosophical spectator who “takes flight only at dusk”) as we are likely to have--a scholar who, with remarkable mastery, has brought his experience over a lifetime to bear on astonishingly diversified data sets, pulling them together into a compelling account of the complex relationship between the progressive and reactionary, the globalizing and particularizing forces that are transforming our perplexing world.
In hooping together the anarchic forces of our time and showing how they may affect equality, the welfare state, democracy and social justice, Castells defies the Information Age by arguing (my terms, not his) that our information is useless unless it can be made over into knowledge, our knowledge trivial unless it can yield wisdom. The great vice of the age of information is that it is complicit in destroying synthetic knowledge and thus wisdom. In substituting data for purpose and in believing that facts are surrogates for values, informationalism and its anarchic products actually imperil our identities, corrupt our democratic institutions and destabilize the economic foundations of our tenets of social justice.
From the time of the Enlightenment, a cunning dialectic of irony has made emancipation through technology the condition for new, invisible forms of servitude. Castells has captured the dialectic brilliantly and restored to us the possibility of human liberation--through, but also in spite of, our technological progress. His project is thus imbued with what for our times is a rare nobility animated by a spirit that refuses to be drowned by its own creations and governed by a mind that would persuade us that reason can still temper and contain (if not fully master) its own infinite informational fragments and its infernal globalizing systems.