why do you think his work is empty?
frances
-----Original Message----- From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Thursday, April 22, 1999 10:11 AM Subject: Castells
>[Am I the only guy who finds Castells stuff to be virtually empty? - Doug]
>
>San Jose Mercury News [no date given]
>
>Brave New World
>Jack Fischer
>
>It was a moment for a university professor to savor. When Manuel
>Castells rose to address a packed room in Davos, Switzerland,
>earlier this year, his audience wasn't struggling graduate
>students, but the global elite.
>
>Professor Manuel Castells uses exhaustive field research and the
>sophisticated tools of a social scientist.
>
>The gathering was the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum,
>and participants included billionaire businessmen like Bill Gates
>and financier George Soros, government officials from Al Gore to
>Yasser Arafat, and international leaders like U.N.
>Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the International Monetary Fund's
>Stanley Fisher.
>
>For the 57-year-old professor of sociology and planning at the
>University of California- Berkeley -- one of a handful of
>academics worldwide invited to address the exclusive groupäit was
>confirmation that his work is finding an audience far beyond
>college campuses.
>
>Castells is emerging as perhaps the first grand interpreter of the
>Information Age. An array of digerati -- from William Mitchell,
>dean of planning and architecture at MIT, to Stewart Brand, a
>founder of the Global Business Network consulting firm -- is
>recommending Castells as the person to read for a comprehensive
>vision of the forces driving the new age.
>
>"In a sense, it doesn't matter whether he's right or wrong on
>every specific issue because he has raised the level of discourse
>so much," says Mitchell, who also has written about the
>Information Age. John Seely Brown, director of Xerox's Palo Alto
>Research Center, says Castells addresses "the issues we must come
>to terms with to move forward in a responsible way."
>
>Last year, Castells completed what is likely to stand as his
>magnum opus, a 1,400- page scholarly trilogy titled "The
>Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture." The work attempts
>to do for the emerging era what Karl Marx and German sociologist
>Max Weber, author of "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
>Capitalism," did to explain the rules of the Industrial Age.
>
>The trilogy -- which brings to 17 the number of books Castells has
>published -- deploys a region-by-region analysis of three decades
>of economic and cultural data in an attempt to craft a coherent
>picture of the forces driving civilization at the end of the 20th
>century.
>
>Among its key observations are that flexible, ever-shifting
>electronic networks, like the international currency market and
>the Internet, already have emerged as the dominant organizing
>principle of the new age, trumping individual governments and
>corporations. And, Castells says, the way these networks function
>has profound implications for everything from national sovereignty
>to how people form their identities.
>
>Castells pinpoints three major forces he believes have reshaped
>society, transforming institutions and creating instability for
>individuals: the countless global electronic networks, the
>worldwide countercultural movements of the 1960s, and a
>restructuring of capitalism in the 1980s. One result has been that
>individuals, cut adrift from traditional rules of local society
>and from the security of stable economic support, are forced to
>craft identities on their own, with one foot in the local physical
>world and the other in the global virtual world.
>
>Castells says the new age holds the potential for vast increases
>in productivity and fulfillment, but also is creating a more
>volatile and ruthless world. In it, those with nothing of value to
>contribute to the networks are discarded. Whole regions, like much
>of Africa, are consigned to "informational black holes," and
>global criminal enterprises, like those emerging in Russia,
>proliferate unchecked.
>
>Relationships
>
>In the end, the importance of Castells' work lies not in any one
>of these observations, but in his ability to show relationships
>among so many seemingly disparate phenomena. And unlike such pop
>futurists as Alvin Toffler, the author of "Future Shock," whom he
>dismisses as superficial, Castells uses exhaustive field research
>and the sophisticated tools of a social scientist.
>
>Castells says his own hopes for the work go well beyond scholarly
>debate.
>
>"People are lost," he said during an interview in his Berkeley
>office. "They sense it, but they don't know what it is. For many,
>many people there is no connection, no understanding, between what
>happens in their lives and what's happening in the world. What
>I've tried to do is provide enough data and interpretation for
>people to understand. ... Understanding is the first step to
>transforming."
>
>Not surprisingly for the author of such a sweeping
>interdisciplinary work, Castells has attracted critics. Some, like
>Mitchell Kapor, founder of Electronic Frontier Foundation and
>Lotus Development Corp., have tried to read Castells but given up.
>"It may be profound," Kapor says, "but it's certainly opaque."
>
>Even some academics find the information trilogy short on
>synthesis and long on collecting data.
>
>"What he's done is put a lot of ideas together in one place," says
>Professor Martin Kenney, a member of the faculty of Applied
>Behavioral Sciences at UC-Davis who has studied the information
>age and read Castells' trilogy. "Bringing a lot of things
>together has always been his strength. Whether he weaves them
>together into a whole is something each reader will have to decide
>for himself."
>
>Conversely, Kenney says, when Castells does draw conclusions, they
>can be so aphoristic that their precise meaning can be elusive.
>
>Kenney flips randomly to a page of Castell's first volume, "The
>Rise of the Network Society," and reads, "I propose the hypothesis
>that the network society is characterized by the breaking down of
>rhythmicity, either biological or social, associated with the
>notion of a lifecycle."
>
>"What does that mean exactly?" Kenney asks. "Does he mean we're
>not going to die? Are people not going to have children? I don't
>think that's what he's saying, but that's the kind of thing that
>comes out."
>
>For his part, Castells says he has been disappointed there has not
>been more criticism of the work. What criticism there has been, he
>says, has referred to the relative difficulty of reading the work
>and of his adamant refusal to offer prescriptions.
>
>As he e-mailed me when I asked him about critics, "As stunning as
>it sounds, I am not aware of any major criticism in published
>reviews, and I am aware of dozens of reviews in many countries. In
>fact, it is a little bit disappointing, since I am sure there are
>many weaknesses in the work, and I would like to debate it more."
>
>As to his refusal to offer solutions, he wrote, with
>uncharacteristic tartness. "I still have no prescription for our
>leaders. After all ... we pay them to find solutions to our
>problems. I do not understand why we [academics] should both find
>the problems, and the solutions. Indeed, most political leaders
>only need experts to rationalize what they want to do anyway."
>
>The ultimate arbiter of Castells' trilogy, of course, will be how
>it fares over time. Over the short term, the work is garnering
>increasing attention. Last month, for example, Harvard
>University's Institute for International Development invited
>Castells to address a closed session of the Harvard faculty. This
>week he is reaching beyond academia again, this time into
>mainstream media to address the American Association Society of
>Newspaper Editors annual meeting, in San Francisco.
>
>Social theorist
>
>In retrospect, it seems Castells' entire life was preparation for
>his work on the Information Age.
>
>The son of a tax collector and conservative functionary for the
>Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, Castells arrived at the
>University of Barcelona at age 16 to study law and economics, but
>was quickly swept up in leftist politics and the growing cam pus
>opposition to Franco. By 1962, with friends being arrested and
>tortured, Castells fled to Paris without completing his studies.
>
>In Paris, the 20-year-old political exile enrolled in the Sorbonne
>and completed the equivalent of a master's degree in public law
>and political economy. Then, at the University of Paris, he began
>work on a doctorate in sociology and found himself studying under
>some of the world's leading sociological theorists, including
>Alain Touraine and business sociologist Michel Crozier. He met a
>fellow scholar who would become a lifelong friend, the future
>president of Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Years later,
>Castells and Cardoso, along with Stanford economist Martin Carnoy
>and UC-Berkeley political scientist Steve Cohen, would collaborate
>on a book about the global economy in the information age. They
>remain close friends.
>
>Castells presciently wrote his doctoral dissertation on the
>strategies the fledgling French high-technology industry was using
>to decide where to locate facilities. His approach, which he would
>use in all his work, was unconventional for French academics at
>that time. In a culture that favored reading and ruminating on the
>great thinkers, Castells was intensely empirical. He recalls
>teaching himself the computer languages BASIC and FORTRAN and
>spending hours hand-punching computer cards to manipulate data
>about the high- tech companies.
>
>Carnoy, a professor of education and economics at Stanford, says
>his friend's scholarship is uniquely positioned somewhere between
>the American and European models of social science. Americans, he
>says, favor deep empirical study on a narrow topic, while the
>Europeans rely less on field research and are more inclined to
>broad pronouncements.
>
>"The Americans ... see him as a social theorist -- and that's a
>great strength," Carnoy says. "He has an amazing capacity to go
>some place, like Singapore, and 'get it' -- understand the
>essential issues shaping it."
>
>After earning his doctorate, Castells became, at 24, the youngest
>professor at the University of Paris and found himself at ground
>zero of the birth of the French countercultural movement. The
>student uprising at Nanterre, which Castells says began in one of
>his classrooms, was to French student politics what the Berkeley
>Free Speech Movement was to U.S. students.
>
>At the time, Castells considered himself a Marxist and radical
>libertarian who shared many of the concerns of the students, who
>were only slightly younger than he. Today, Castells calls himself
>a social democrat, and describes Marxism as an analytical tool,
>albeit one of limited usefulness in the emerging age.
>
>The real importance of Castells' experience of the student
>movement may be that it helped focus some of his research over the
>years on the impact of such social movements worldwide.
>
>Capitalism in crisis
>
>Along with global electronic networks, Castells views the
>collective changes wrought by social movements like the 1960s
>counterculture, feminism, environmentalism and the decline of the
>traditional family as the second of three major phenomena shaping
>the new age.
>
>In his view, all these social movements emphasized individual
>freedom and created a cultural climate that challenged prevailing
>assumptions and fostered innovation.
>
>"The Silicon Valley culture -- iconoclastic, individualistic, even
>somewhat selfish, distrustful of government and bureaucracy --
>owes more to countercultural movements than people usually think,"
>Castells e- mailed me. "Innovation and entrepreneurialism, daring
>to think in radically different way -- so important for innovation
>in the information age -- are to some extent rooted in these
>movements, even if most people in high tech are politically
>conservative."
>
>The third major force, in Castells' view, was the restructuring of
>capitalism in the 1980s. He says it spelled the end of the
>industrial age of capitalism and the beginning of what he calls
>informational capitalism, or "informationalism."
>
>The 1970s had been a time of low gains in economic productivity
>combined with high inflation -- dubbed "stagflation" by
>economists. In a 1976 book, Castells disagreed both with the
>traditional economists, who dismissed the difficulties as a
>routine business cycle, and with Marxists who said, for the
>umpteenth time, that this was capitalism's demise.
>
>"I argued that it was a real crisis, not just something temporary,
>but that it could be fixed by changing the economic model," he
>said. "That's exactly what happened, and a new form of capitalism
>was created."
>
>The new economic system, in Castells' view, is the combined result
>of deregulation of industry, the disappearance of trade barriers,
>and vast improvements in global trading networks made possible by
>high technology.
>
>Castells sees this new informationalism as largely defined by the
>global networks, endlessly shifting and reconfiguring in pursuit
>of new business opportunities. It was the inability of the Soviet
>Union to adapt to these highly decentralized networks, Castells
>writes in the third volume, that caused it to fall behind
>technologically, and led to its demise.
>
>Castells says the three major forces he identifies as driving the
>new age together have profound implications for individuals.
>
>When people can begin to exist in both local and virtual worlds,
>they find themselves abandoned by the institutions from which they
>derived their identities: traditional society, which was mortally
>weakened by the countercultural movements, and their employers,
>who view them as instantly expendable in the quest for higher
>productivity and profits. The fact that people can't rely on their
>employers or their local communities to define and support them
>has left them on their own as never before -- a world of
>individuals, he says.
>
>And that, in turn, has created broad feelings of insecurity, he
>says. In extreme cases, Castells believes, the resulting pressures
>on individuals have led to such diverse phenomena as the rise of
>U.S. militias and religious fundamentalism around the world.
>
>After a stint as a visiting professor at the University of
>Wisconsin in the 1970s, Castells returned to Paris, but he grew
>restless and moved to UC-Berkeley to chair a department of urban
>sociology.
>
>Somewhere in these years, Castells and his first wife, a
>television journalist, ended an unhappy marriage. A daughter from
>the relationship, now 35, works for the European Union in Italy as
>an environmental economist. Castells met his current wife, Emma
>Kiselyova, in 1984 while conducting research in the Soviet Union.
>Today Kiselyova-Castells is a part-time researcher at UC-
>Berkeley's Center for Slavic Studies and the Institute of Urban
>and Regional Development. She and Castells occasionally
>collaborate, most recently on a book about the role of information
>technology in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
>
>Since embarking on the Information Age trilogy in 1986, he has
>used faculty appointments and stints advising governments around
>the world -- from South America to Singapore -- as a way to travel
>the world to gather field research for the books. In 1991, for
>example, he chaired an international committee of academics that
>advised Boris Yeltsin during Yeltsin's first term as president of
>Russia.
>
>With the trilogy now completed, Castells seems intent that people
>begin to explore the issues it raises.
>
>He doesn't believe that technology alone necessarily sets the
>course of events, and is deeply concerned that world leaders, both
>governmental and corporate, are abdicating their responsibility to
>try to shape the emerging global age. Intervention is needed not
>only to tame volatile world financial marketsäwhich do not not
>operate under uniform international rules -- but also to channel
>the bounty of the new age to benefit most of the world's people,
>he says. Markets, Castells said, by way of elaboration, do a lot
>of things good, but sharing the wealth they create among broad
>numbers of people is not one of them. Nor, he says, does the
>proliferation of electronic networks necessarily offer the promise
>that access to them will be widely shared among the world's
>people. Both will require leadership of the emerging technocracy.
>
>"The technology elite could play an extraordinary role, of being
>the critical bridge between the new system of production and
>innovation and the new civilization we are creating." The stakes
>are high he believes.
>
>"With the crisis of traditional institutions around the world,
>we're each on our own," Castells said. "It's a dangerous state of
>affairs. There's no example in history in which individuals
>without institutions can survive."