Castells’ The Power of Identity – But First, Some of His Earlier Work Too

For this particular blog post, I thought I would share with the class an annotated bibliography-type entry of Manuel Castells’ The Power of Identity, the second installment in his Information Age trilogy after The Rise of the Network Society. His CV verges on the ludicrous, so I’ll spare everyone extensive details (I figure you know who he is anyway), but suffice it to say I think it’s worthwhile to share a bit about his research as he’s made a compelling, perhaps natural transition from urban sociology and planning to globalization and the network society. (For now I’ll just encourage you take one of his two seminars in Annenberg; one’s “Globalization, Communication, and Society;” the other on the Network Society. I’ve taken the former and plan on taking the latter. Because, people.) [NB: I’m reading from the first edition of The Information Age trilogy (1996, 1997); pages might be different but the content is not.]

His 1977 The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach is regarded to be the first fully articulated neo-Marxist critique of the socio-political, economic, and spatial organization of cities. His position here (and where he introduces Henri Lefebvre here to English-speaking audiences) is this: space itself is a social construction. The spatial environment is not the root cause of behaviors; rather it is a reflection of the socio-political and economic conditions. The urban structure, then, is the articulation of the economic system in space. The urban symbolic distinguishes between the signifier and the signified; the city and especially its center are indeed symbolic. See? Way Marxist.

In The City and the Grassroots (1983), he relaxes his Marxist stance and focuses on devising a theoretical framework for understanding what causes social change. He still asserts the city is a social product, adding that its innovations generally arise from grassroots efforts, the most successful among them, “urban social movements.” He finds the most successful urban movements articulate all of the following goals: (1) organizing around use-value, “collective consumption use value” (in opposition to capitalism and production); (2) searching for cultural identity, “community” (in opposition to technocracy); and (3) achieving decentralization and self-governance, “citizen movement” (in opposition to statism). Urban social movements to Castells are more than symbolic—they are symptoms of societal contradictions and can potentially overcome such contradictions.

As we know from “The Culture of Real Virtuality: the Integration of Electronic Communication, the End of the Mass Audience, and the Rise of the Interactive Networks,” Castells believes the new spatial logic is in fact one of flows, not places, and that the three foundational realms of the new social structure are space, time, and technology. Spaces of flows manifest from the small, elite, interpersonal networks’ projection of interests and preferences into the macro-level networks on the global scale. Castells stresses that since capitalism and information have collapsed to becoming the same thing, spurring a transformation from modern capitalism into informational capitalism, the network society story is not, in fact, one about classes. There is not a global capitalist class but “an integrated, global capital network” (1996, 474). The network society underscores a qualitative change in the human experience: “culture refers to culture” (1996, 474).

And so we approach The Power of Identity (1997). In the 2010 edition’s preface, Castells asserts the tensions and violent outbreaks emerging from identity building have been the most pronounced since the volume’s first publication. Quite so. Using a series of empirical examples, the most relevant among them the close cousins American Christian and Islamic fundamentalist movements, he proposes an identity-building typology: (1) legitimizing, effectuated by dominant institutions to rationalize power and establish civil society; (2) resistance, wherein actors in devalued positions produce communes or communities; and (3) project, wherein actors develop a new identity and transform the overall social structure, creating subjects in the process. Castells hypothesizes that subjects are no longer built from civil societies but by expressions of “communal resistance” (1997, 11). He explores a social theory of contemporary nationalism, averring that in it nations are separate from the state (indeed, the nation-state is weakened in the information economy); nationalism is neither linked to the formation of the modern nation-state nor directed by elite interests; and since nationalism is more reactive than proactive, it’s more cultural than political.

Castells further hypothesizes that ethnicity is “not the basis for communal construction of meaning in the network society because it is based on primary bonds that lose significance” (1997, 59). Territorial identity-making functions as the lynchpin for local community-making in that it is so deeply connected to sense of belonging, all the more important in this increasingly deterritorialized world. Cultural communes are: (1) defensive identities that act as refuge/solidarity, (2) culturally-constituted, and (3) reactions to prevailing social trends. Castells then enters a discussion about globalization’s and informationalism’s social movements, saying they must be understood on their own terms, and that they can be radical, conservative, both, or neither. In addition, he believes Alain Touraine’s (1956, 1966) typology is indispensable for understanding them. Touraine’s framework foregrounds a social movement’s identity, named adversary, and social goal; identifying each allows one to comprehend, perhaps predict, a particular movement’s processes.

Next he hypothesizes that the crisis of patriarchalism is another key element of the Information Age. Feminism and the gay rights movement (which he covered in some detail in The City and the Grassroots, as well) has come about with the transition of the economy, the revolutions in biological sciences, and the rapid diffusion of ideas in globalized culture from the 1960s onward. The crisis of the patriarchal family comprises a total reconfiguration (and shrinking) of the nuclear household in its manifold forms. Of course, the fundamentalist project identity movements consider the reformation of patriarchalism to be essential and attempt to block, through policy, violence, or usually a devastating cocktail of the two, anything they perceive as a threat to such reformation.

His position on the “powerless state” echoes much of what we have already discussed in class. “Globalization/localization of media and electronic communication is tantamount to the denationalization and destatization of information, the two trends being inseparable for the time being” (1997, 259). Multinational cooperation requires an “irreversible sharing of sovereignty…and…entrenchment of nation-states” (1997, 268).

Finally, not buying into media imperialist theory, Castells asserts that while the political realm is played out in the media, control of the media does not translate to political control. Still, he’s not so rosy. “Mediacracy” is “not contrary to democracy because it’s as complementary and plural as democracy ([which is to say] not much)” (1997, 317). Since the nation-state can’t sustain both national citizenship and singular identity, we’re seeing the “penetration of the political system by symbolic politicos, single-issue mobilizations, localism, referendum politics, and ad hoc support for personalized leadership” (1997, 349). Power still matters, of course: “the new power lies in the codes of information and in the images of representation” (1997, 359). Again, “the message is the message” (1996, 368).