Chapter 31: A New Society

In this chapter, Castells explains how the Information Age is evolving into a network society with new means of power, production and experience.

Castells begins the chapter talking about a change from traditional capitalism to one he coins "informational capitalism". With this new form, Castells sees changes ahead for the way class relationships occur and they way in which production and labor will be carried out.

He speaks of generic labor (limited skill base) vs self-programmable labor (educated/limitless potential) Unlike the self-programmable laborers, the generic laborers can be easily replaced with machines, hence the reason they are usually the first to go.

Along with labor/production being transformed, so to is capital. Castells has three levels to explain how capital works under "the network enterprise". First level relates to "the holders of property rights"; shareholders, families, and the entrepreneurs. Castells mentions the latter as being key to the future of informational capitalism. The second level, "managerial class" is basically the ones in charge of the capital when the holders of the property are absent. Lastly, "global financial markets" are where the business goes down. Thanks to technology, informationalism brings about the "annihilation of space and time by electronic means." In other words, capital is always in motion and new ventures always being sought after. Institutions around the world are jumping on the global financial networks to boost revenue and seek out potential earnings.

Next, class relationships are discussed with regards to the social stratification theory. The new system will cause the top and bottoms of the social classes to greatly expand creating greater "polarization" among them. Basically, those who are less educated and cannot hold their own will lose their "safety net." Castells also mentions "social exclusion" and how life crises lead the person/worker on a "downward spiral of social exclusion, toward what I have called the "black holes of informational capitalism," which is difficult to escape." Going along with this idea, a Marxist way of looking at these new class relationships is looked at..and I think it is safe to say we all know his deal. I kind of got the whole survival of the fittest notion when reading this chapter.

Castells brings a good point; politics has become a theater and it's the media's job to spread the power. (I believe) the bottom of p.320 helps relate this point quite clearly. "Cultural battles are the power battles of the Information Age. They are primarily fought in and by the media, but the media are not the power-holders. Power, as the capacity to impose behavior, lies in the networks of information exchange and symbol manipulation, which relate social actors, institutions, and cultural movements, through icons, spokespersons, and intellectual amplifiers." After reading this, I could not help but think of Fox News and CNN.

Moving on, Castells talks of how an end to patriarchalism and the emergence of an egalitarian family structure will mean the dawn of a new system/society. "Rebuilding families under egalitarian forms is the necessary foundation for rebuilding society from the bottom up." I read that a couple of times because I think it makes a great deal of sense. Down the road this would mean the end of gender roles/norms, as they would not make any sense in a society where men and women are looked at as exact equals.

The new network society Castells speaks of exists in a "real virtuality." From what I gathered on this part, it seems as though culture/the way things are done, is being, like everything else, transformed. "This virtuality is our reality because it is within the framework of these timeless, placeless, symbolic systems that we construct the categories, and evoke the images, that shape behavior, induce politics, nurture dreams, and trigger nightmares." Interactions between others occur on an individual "self" and "net" basis now.

In order for the network society to work, a new form of politics based on changing culture attitudes must arise. "Culture as the source of power, and power as the source of capital, underlie the new social hierarchy of the Information Age."

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Chapter 28 - Whose Imagined Community?

Chatterjee is giving a summary and critique of Benedict Anderson’s previous chapter, which is Imagined Communities. In order for you to understand what is being said in this chapter you need to read the previous chapter. And in case you didn’t read it because it is the end of the semester and you have lots of work to do, I will try to give you a little info on it and follow it with Chatterjee and Whose Imagined Community. Anderson is talking about the origin and spread of nationalism. He says that since World War II every successful revolution has defined itself in national terms and because of this “has grounded itself firmly in a territorial and social space inherited from the pre revolutionary past”. Anderson says nationalism is difficult to define and analyze, so he proposes the following definition of the nation: “it is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign”.

Anderson says it is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. This made me think of all the communities on the Internet, myspace, facebook, and of course the new tweeter communities, among others. They are imagined communities were the people never meet each other yet they consider themselves a type of fraternity. Anderson says these imagined communities are limited because of boundaries, and outside of these are other nations. Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation…the nation is always conceived as a deep horizonal comradership. What Anderson tries to figure out is why so many members are will to die for their imagined community. Why die in war, suicide bombing, genocide, etc.? He gives an example of the unknown soldiers grave and how that tomb is saturated with ‘ghostly national imaginings. He believes this answer lies in the roots of nationalism. And that nationalism has to be understood by aligning it with the large cultural systems that preceded it. He says the novel and the newspaper are the "basic structure of two forms of imagining which first flowered in Europe in the eighteenth century. He explains the simple novel plot, basically what we see over and over again, yet this shows the novelty of this imagined world that has been conjured up by the author in his readers’ minds. He gives another example of how an American will never meet, or even know the names of more than a handful of his thousands of other Americans, or even know what they are up to, but he says that “he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity. Anderson goes on to explain the imagined linkage to community of newspaper readers and their relation to the people and events they are reading about. Even after explaining all this Anderson goes back to why people are ready to die for these inventions. He says “it is doubtful whether either social change or transformed consciousness, in themselves, do much to explain the attachment that people feel for the inventions of their imaginations – or, to revive a question raised at the beginning of this text…. Why people are ready to die?” Chatterjee says, “nationalism is now viewed as a dark, elemental, unpredictable force of primordial nature threatening the orderly calm of civilized life.” And that nationalism was entirely a product to the political history of Europe and “there may be in the recent amnesia on the origins of nationalism more than a hint of anxiety about whether it has quite been tamed in the land of its birth.” Chatterjee says it is great that Anderson has brought attention to nationalism with his writings, but Chatterjee’s objection is “whose imagined community” is he talking about? “If nationalism in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain ‘modular’ forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine?” Chatterjee cannot reconcile Anderson’s thought, because of the evidence on anticolonial nationalism. He says is it not totally Anderson fault because we have all taken the claims of nationalism to be a political movement much to literally and much to seriously. He agrees with Anderson’s example of “print capitalism” which provides the new institutional space for the development of the modern “national” language. But, he says in his country of Bengal, the East India Company and the European missionaries first printed books in the 18th century, and in the 19th century the English “displace Persian as the language of bureaucracy and emerges as the most powerful vehicle of intellectual influence on the new Bengali elite.” So the language became a zone over which the nation first had to declare its sovereignty and then had to transform in order to make it adequate for the modern world. He goes on to discuss his community and the changes in it because of European influence and how the Europeans criticized Indian tradition as barbaric and focused on teaching religious beliefs and practices. Sound like America to me. Chatterjee goes on to discuss nationalism more and makes a good point. “If European newspapers in India were given the right of free speech, could the same apply to native newspapers? Ironically, it became the historical task of nationalism, which insisted on its own marks of cultural difference with the West, to demand that there be no rule of difference in the domain of the state.” So why are our nations imagined? Who imagined them into being? Are they really our nations or someone else’s imagined communities? Chatterjee says “If the nation is an imagined community and if nations must also take the form of states, then our theoretical language must allow us to talk about community and state at the same time. I do not think our present theoretical language allows us to do this.

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Responce to Alan's Presentation

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ch 31-A new society- manuel castells

Manuel Castells begins by saying that in order for a new society to emerge, transformations must be visible in the relationships of production, power, and experience. Castells splits the production, power, and experience into categories to better understand what is expected in each.


• Relationships of Production (pg 315): productivity and competitiveness are the commanding processes of the informational/global economy. In order to maximize production, companies must be flexible, innovative, and competitive. Labor is the main function for production. Labor is used in order to produce. There are 2 kinds of labor: 1) generic, 2)self-programmable. Labor stems from education and skills. Going above and beyond have skills, education gives people the ability to relearn ways of their tasks. It allows them to gain new skills since production is always changing and improving. This is self-programmable labor. On the other hand, generic labor does not require workers to gain additional knowledge about what they are doing. They learn their task, and stick to it. Which is why much of the generic labor has been replaced by machines.
The informational/global economy is considered capitalist. This is because production and profit are key. There are 3 different levels talking about who the capitalists are.
1. The holders of property rights: these are shareholders of companies, family owners, and individual entrepreneurs.
2. Managerial class: these people control capital assets on behalf of shareholders.
3. Global Financial Markets: profits from these markets turn into a search for higher profits. People are always in search of bigger and better and more money profiting investments. By having wins and losses in the market, it keeps a dynamic equilibrium. All capitalists are dependent on their investments. Castells says: “Global financial markets, and their networks of management, are the actual collective capitalist, the mother of all accumulations.” (pg. 317). “..global financial networks are the nerve center of informational capitalism.” The network movements determine pretty much everything in relation to it, such as stocks, bonds, and currency. By other factors impact the market, such as computer-enacted strategic maneuvers, crowd psychology, and unexpected turbulences.
There are consequences on the social class relationships, which will be defined into four sections.
1. tendency to increased social inequality and polarization: this is the simultaneous growth of both the top and bottom of the social scale. Three features impact this growth:
a. a differentiation between self-programmable and generic labor.
b. individualization of labor—this gets rid of the weakest people in the work force because people are not working collectively, but competitively.
c. the gradual demise of the welfare state- this removes the safety net for people who are not well off.
2. Social exclusion: by this Castells means “..the de-linking between people-as-people and people-as-workers/consumers in the dynamics of informational capitalism on a global scale. He goes on to say that there are many occasional and temporary jobs created for production, but are often discontinued. Because of this, people frequently go from having a job one day, to not having one the next. This can have many negative consequences on the individual and their family since their employment is not stable. Many people begin to fall behind and are no longer qualified for many job positions. So, those people who are constantly trying to avoid being poor and needing welfare cannot seem to get ahead.
3. Who are the producers and who appropriates the products of their labor?:
4. Truly fundamental social cleavages of the Information Age:
a. Internal fragmentation of labor between informational producers and replaceable generic labor
b. Social exclusion of a significant segment of society
c. The separation between the market logic of global networks and the human experience of workers’ lives.

• Power Relations (pg 319): I have no clue what half of this stuff he talked about means but—“The main transformation concerns the crisis of the nation-state as a sovereign entity, and the related crisis of political democracy..” (pg. 319). “The new structure of power is dominated by a network geometry, in which power relationships are always specific to a given configuration of actors and institutions.” Power relationships are always changing. Power is very fundamental in an informational society. Power lies in the networks of information exchange and symbol manipulation. Apparently, in the long run it does not matter who has the power because the role of holding power becomes so widespread and rotating. Places will hold the power for some time, and then another place will be the most powerful. Culture and material resources fuel the desire of power.

• Relationships of Experience (pg 321): Patriarchy is the root of relationships of experience. The family is a main issue for this category. There are many women as single parents and their struggles have spanned across the world, even though men have started to become more involved in their children’s lives. Castells says that men are now more willing than ever to make the sacrifices needed in order to support and assist their family. Castells believes that rebuilding families is the key ingredient for building society. The author calls the new society “ the network society” since it is made up of networks of production, power, and experience. Not all places follow the ways of the network society, but all are influenced in some way or another by it.

• The new Avenues of social change (ph. 323): “it appears that our societies are constituted by the interaction between the “net” and the “self,” between the network society and the power of identity.

• So basically, there are many factors influencing the new/network society. People are excluded if they do not have the skills and education to keep up with the ever quickly changing work force. By production, power emerges. Power is transferred from place to place depending on how they profit and succeed economically. Production and Power influence families and those people who are trying to move up in the world.

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Chapter 26 Multicultural Citizenship
I found the first half of this reading to be very easy to understand, however the second half is hazy to me. Kymlicka early on in the reading points out how generalizations on what multiculturalism is can be misleading. I believe that defining the term “multiculturalism” can be extremely difficult. Basically what I think multiculturalism to be is where many different cultures exist in one large society. The nation in which the groups of cultures live, practice their own traditions while coexisting with other cultures. As defined by dictionary.com, “Multiculturalism is the preservation of different cultures or cultural identities within a unified society, as a state or nation” (Dictionary.com).

Kymlicka points out how there is two broad patterns of cultural diversity. As stated by Kymlicka, “In the first case, cultural diversity arises from the incorporation of previously self-governing territorially concentrated cultures into a larger state. These incorporated cultures, which I call ‘nation minorities’, typically with to maintain themselves as distinct societies alongside the majority culture, and demand various forms of autonomy of self-government to ensure their survival as distinct societies” (Kymlicka pg. 270). The second pattern of cultural diversity is when immigrants move to a different country and basically assimilate to the larger society’s culture, customs and values. In the second pattern, it is not the individual’s goal to continue carrying their past ethnic identity alongside with the newer identity.

It is described how there are also different ways cultures have been integrated into a country. The first way in which a culture can be incorporated into another country is when a culture is conquered by another and by colonizing settlers. Kymlicka provides a good example of how cultures were involuntarily mixed with another country. Kymlicka describes, “For example, there are a number of national minorities in the United States, including the American Indians, Puerto Ricans, the descendants of Mexicans living in the south-west when the United States annexed Texas, New Mexico, and California after the Mexican War of 1846-1848” (Kymlicka pg. 271). This is an example how a culture that was once recognized as sovereign, was then controlled by another country by colonization.

Cultures have not always had the luxury of practicing their traditions freely. Before the 1960’s, any immigrant migrating to Australia, Canada and the United States were expected to assimilate their customs to what the “norm” of that country they were moving to was. This idea of assimilating different cultures into one large one was called ‘Anglo-conformity’. One of the cultures that suffered the most from this ‘Anglo-conformity’ was the Native Americans. The reason for assimilation was because the government believed it was vital for political stability. This form of assimilating all cultures into on completely contradicts the idea of the ‘melting-pot’. By the 1970’s the model of ‘Anglo-conformity’ and assimilation was disregarded. What happened was the government was under too much pressure by all the immigrants because they wanted back the right to be able to practice their born culture. Soon after, the government gave into the immigrant’s demands to allow different cultures to coexist.

This change in 1970’s was a huge turning point allowing all cultures to be allowed to practice their old customs that were once outlawed for many years. Kymlicka talks about how there are two types of cultural pluralism. The first type of cultural pluralism is multination which means the culture became immigrant when they were colonized. The second type of cultural pluralism is called polyethnic. Polyethnic is a type of immigration that is by choice when one person or a family decides to move to another country. The United States and Canada can both be looked at as multinational and polyethnic.

Individual rights and collective rights
I found this section of the reading to be somewhat difficult. I really did not understand what was being said because the author assumed the reader already knew what he was talking about.
I actually looked up what individual rights and collective rights meant and found a more clear definition. Individual rights and collective rights is defined as, “A prominent issue in human rights is the between collective rights and individual rights. Collective rights protect a group of people, while individual rights protect the individual.” Kymlicka goes on to talk about how individual rights vs. collective rights are unhelpful. He then goes on to talk about two different kinds of claims ethnic or national groups might make. The first claim is going against its own members of the ethnic group and the second claim is against the larger society. It is thought that both claims help protect the ethnic communities.

There are also two types of destabilizing impact. As stated by Kymlicka, “Internal dissent (e.g. the decision of individual members not to follow traditional practices or customs), whereas the second is intended to protect the group from the impact of external decisions (e.g. the economic or political decisions of the larger society)” (Kymlicka pg. 274). Kymlicka then goes on to talk about how polethnic rights could be used to impose internal restrictions. This would then give minority groups the legal power to impose their old traditions on its members. As stated by Kymilcka, “Ethnic groups could demand the right to take their children out of school before the legally prescribed age, so as to reduce the chances that the child will leave the community; or the right to continue traditional customs such as clitoridectomy or compulsory arranged marriages that violate existing laws regarding informed consent” (Kymlicka pg.276)

Kymlicka then goes on to talk about how it is vital for individuals to take pride in their community and their culture. If individuals lose pride for their culture, it will disappear and other cultures will take over and change it. Cultures need to be preserved or else they will disappear.

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Ch. 24 Mary Kaldor-Global Civil Society: An Answer to War

The global context of social, political, and economic transformation were taking place within different parts of the world. They came to surface after 1989. It is said that the reasons for the transformation of the global context is because of the reintegration of civil society in the 1970’s and 80’s in Latin America and Eastern Europe. Globalization is somewhat of a new concept within the civil society realm since 1989. Civil society is no longer restricted to the borders of the territorial state. Civil society is linked with a rule-governed society based largely on the consent of individual citizens rather than force. Yet, the fact that civil society was territorially bound meant that it was always contrasted with coercive rule- governed societies and with societies that lacked rules.

The undermining territorial distinction between civil and uncivil is a result of the end of the Cold War and growing global interconnectedness. These new developments have opened up new possibilities for political emancipation. This also brings new risks and great insecurity. A question dealing with a global civil society is that the global civil societies are in the process of helping form and re-form the global system of rules and underpinning the overlapping inter-governmental, governmental and global authorities. However, the new form of politics is both an outcome and an agent of violence that spills over the borders so there it is no longer possible to contain war.

Interpretations of the Global
Globalization refers to the spread of global capitalism and an assortment of political views. It is suggested that the spread of global capitalism is leading to a single global community and the dwindling nation-state. There is some debate on the specific definition of globalization, but by reducing the term globalization to global capitalism, we grant the unstoppable logic of market forces. A second definition of globalization is the growing interconnectedness in all fields- political, military, economic, and cultural. This version of the definition is the notion that people’s lives are ever more shaped by events that take place far away. Technology is an important element of this definition and the ways in which changes in technology, especially in air travel and new forms of information and communication technology, have led to the narrowing of distance. The new technologies have created new horizontal communities of people.

According to Paul Virilio, this has changed the forms of social differentiation: the ‘haves’ and the ‘have not’s are the sorted out between those who live in the hyper-real shrunken world instant technology and those more disadvantaged than ever, who live in local villages, cut off from worldly forces. The growing political interconnectedness, expressed in the growth of international organizations is changing the character and role of states. States are losing their autonomy in making and enforcing rules. The power to shape regulatory frameworks and policies affect their societies and their membership of various regional or global arrangements.

Lastly, a third definition to globalization refers to the emergence of a common global consciousness on a world scale. This is an increasing awareness of the entirety of human social relations as the largest constitutive framework of all relations, although all of these remain in complex and overlapping ways within global society. This definition places more emphasis on human agency and defines the global as something more than spatial. The key factor is the way in which global conflict has constructed a shared communal memory. The wars in the 20th century produced global consciousness. They shaped the experiences of all people around the world creating huge international and transnational communities of struggle. The 20th century is not just seen as a century of war, but a century in which there was a dramatic increase in peace oriented concepts and institutions as well as in the development of human rights norms. The spread of global capitalism resulted in the burst in the nature of international political relations that is a result of the end of the Cold War.

A starting point of globalization is the reactions against the state in the 1960’s and 70’s. In the post-war period, the state was more interventionist than ever before, reaching out into nearly all aspects of everyday life not only in the totalitarian societies, but in the Atlantic regions as well. The reactions to the state took a couple of form. The neoliberal reaction is the argument that state intervention in the economy had overreached itself and created inflexibility that suppressed the market against innovation and efficiency. Believers of the free market came to power in Western Europe and North America in the 1980’s and helped to provide the situations to accelerate spread of global capitalism. The other was the democratic reaction, the opposition to paternalism, authoritarianism and war. The new social movements that came into concern about global issues was to inform the waves of democratization in Southern Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa, and eventually Eastern Europe and was to provide the basis for global civil society. Whereas the neoliberals were concerned to limit and roll back state power, at least in the economic arena, the new social movements were more concerned about accountability and participation.

Changes in the Patterns of Governance
Liberation and deregulation at the national level actually involves reregulation at a global level as transnational companies attempt to create the conditions for a global market. Pressure from social movements and NGO’s also promotes interconnectedness. What has changed after 1989 was the opening up of both states and inter-governmental organizations to NGO’s and other citizens groups operating in the global arena on a scale different from what went on before. Inter-governmental organizations merely reflect the inter-state system, in which the primary actors are states. The key characteristic of the modern state was its control of violence within a given territory. Domestically, the modern state provided security for its citizens both through force and supervision and through the extension of the rule of law. The modern state emerged as part of an inter-state system in which sovereignty was mutually recognized and war, waged according to certain rules could be justified. The first wave of accelerated interconnectedness depended on the stability provided by the inter-imperial order. States controlled large amounts of territory and provided a framework within which international regulatory agencies could function. The second wave of accelerated interconnectedness depended on the stability within the borders, but a fundamental break within the inter-state system. The bloc system became the border power containers, which means that the integration of military forces meant that members within the bloc had no longer the capacity to wage war unilaterally. This provided the outline for the development of systems of multilateral agencies regulating global economic relations. Therefore, civil society needs a framework of security; hence the growing pressure or an international framework of law to be applied in local situations where the state unravels. What is seen now is not so much the authority based on territory, but the authority based on issues. Civil society is a voluntary principle that is open to all individuals that offers the possibility of participation and deliberation at global levels.

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22- David Harvey; the condition of post moderninity

Post Modernity is embraced as the general rejection of all that was modernity (mass production and unified presentation and common solidarity), but in completely rejecting all of that it has done little more than flip the structure on its head- thereby embracing the categories that were set before them and validating all they seek to reject.

I think I might be missing something critical with Harvey, but I’m just gonna go ahead and write my criticism as if I know what I’m talking about. I had a lot of trouble digesting Harvey. Not only because it’s a complex read, but more because he seems to assess postmodern theory from its most extreme platform. While I think it’s necessary to look at extremes - it’s about as useful as saying all feminists are lesbian separatists and all Catholics think they’re the only ones going to heaven. For most of the article I got the sense that Harvey equated Pomo thinkers to little more than teenage anarchists without a clue, pot stirrers without a point. Harvey opens by saying that pomo is an expression of social conditions. In my book this is true of most art/architecture/theory. What makes pomo different is that it embraces and mimics the subcultures. Pomo embraces the "other". Pomo rejects modernism in that modernism tried to create a universal solidarity focused on functionality. Pomo itself prefers to focus on individuals and aesthetic. However by othering the dominant structure doesn’t pomo succeeding in doing what it condemns modernism for?

Harvey assesses both Modernism and Post Modernism as a reaction to social conditions, particularly capitalism. Modernism made aweful cookie cutter box shaped houses out of fiscally friendly, but solid materials. Yeah they’re ugly, but at the same time they solved a pressing issue of the time- affordable mass housing. Pomo embraces a more aesthetic method, but if these methods can only be taken upon by the rich (making a crazy artistic house or building is expensive) then aren’t you just buying into the system you’re trying to subvert? Harvey points out that the anarchy embraced by post modernism is mostly an illusion.

I get the feeling that Harvey is all but calling Pomo subversive to the point of stupidity. He seems to feel that pomo desires to invalidate the structure when I always interpreted it as simply questioning the structure; Should the structure fall in the face of said questioning- all the better. (The difference is subtle but I think important.) Harvey is also annoyed that Pomo has no unified political face, but I thought instability was the point?

It is only toward the end that I start to get at Harvey’s basic argument (or perhaps it is merely that I only then start to see some validity). Post Modernity only succeeds in flipping the social structure (the way that lesbian separatism merely flips the patriarchal gender structure) rather that truly subverting it. And when it turns the structure on its head it does little more than embrace the categories that have been established before them. Harvey closes on the note that Pomo has the right idea (in that it seeks to change that which is contradictory) but it fails to materialize change in a meaningful way.

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