Castells

[christian a. gregory]

castells wrote a not uninteresting take on the crisis of the 70's back in 79
or 80. i also thought "the informational city" was interesting in many ways.
but this new stuff about "the power of identity" and "the information age"
reads like uninteresting post-structuralism warmed over business press
readings of social science. it has also been used--a la folks like alan
liu--to justify treating "displacement" as the signature of the age. in this
case, linguistic displacement winds up being treated as being the model for
the displacement of vast swathes of world population due to famine, war,
corporate reorganization and so on. and since language is constitutively
"dis-placed" blah blah blah there's no real interest in understanding any of
the agencies that prompt other kinds of movement. it's actually closer to
some bad pomo social science reconstruction of the analytics of *dasein*
than a new marx or weber. but maybe i should try reading more than 100 pages
of it. i tried but couldn't stomach it.

christian