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End
of Millennium. By Manuel Castells, traduit de l'anglais
par Jean-Pierre Bardos as Fin de millénaire (Paris:
Fayard, 1999) 490 pp. 30.25 euros, paper.
This
is the French translation of the third volume of Manuel
Castells' trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society
and Culture (1996-98). It fell by chance from the heaven
of reviewable books. In the meantime the man himself has
come to earth close to where I write from (he has taken
a chair in the Universitat Oberta de Catalonia). These are
two good reasons for noting the existence of Castells.
The
volume in question deals with the way information technology
may be related to several global aspects of the closing
twentieth century. The collapse of the Soviet Union is analyzed
in terms of a bureaucratic system that was unable to make
the transition to an age of information networks, consequently
burying itself under its own authoritarian centralism and
top-down rigidity. Similarly, the boom-then-crisis of the
Asian economies is explained in terms of information, as
the requirements of flexible networks could not be met by
authoritarian modes of top-down organization. At the same
time, says Castells, capitalism entered its global phase
precisely because it was able to develop decentralized flexible
networks and incorporate innovation into its very modes
of production. This, however, was no heroic triumph of the
technological. Informational capitalism values only that
which can produce flexibility and innovation: it excludes
vast sections of humanity (Africa, urban poverty, child
labour), which simply find no place in its networks. Further,
within the globalization process, the underside of information
is skilfully exploited by mafias, who manipulate open borders,
raise the social value of security industries, and thereby
have profound effects on relations of class and power. Informational
capitalism ushers in an era of the individual who is afraid.
As if
that were not bleak enough, the volume includes an epilogue
that seeks to make sense of this world, bringing together
conclusions from all volumes in the trilogy. Here we learn
that the global capitalism of flexibility and innovation
leads to a divide between "generic workers" (who
can be replaced by machines) and "self-programming"
workers (who can adapt to new technologies and operate independently
of company structures). This is turn leads to new requirements
not only in education (we must learn to learn, which has
long been clear enough) but also in the individualization
of work, which in turn produces the weakening of organized
labour, the deterioration of the welfare state, and consequently
a crisis in the nation-states now unable to guarantee the
welfare at the basis of the democratic social contract.
As all that crumbles, so does the patriarchal family: the
new role of women calls for the reinvention of the most
basic social institutions, and everything else as well.
A tremendous
pessimism reigns over Castells' closing millennium. Despite
the occasional calls for "reinvention", he seems
to locate no particular principle of hope. Even the spirit
of May 1968, which Castells experienced as a student at
Nanterre, is analyzed as having contributed to the innovation
and individualism required by networking capitalism. That
dream is still there, as are the Marxist tools of analysis,
but neither the dream nor the ideologies are showing a way
forward. True, a few positive adjectives are spared for
European unification, which is seen as being broadly in
tune with flexibility, decentralized networking, and the
variable geometries of information society. Yet the future
of Europe's identity lies, for Castells, in the defence
of the welfare state and of territorial cultures, at a time
when the forces of technology would be moving the other
way. This, in sum, might be the place where a certain leftism
can regroup and resist the way of the world. But the sociologist
has not sufficiently forged the arms that might make resistance
possible, unless it is simply por cojones.
Castells'
is a wide-ranging narrative in which "networks"
and "information" are characters. The characters,
however, are no more than that. They can move in many ways,
they have their good and bad sides, and only in extreme
hindsight could they be construed as explanations in themselves.
How is it possible to resist global capitalism? Castells
intimates the only answer possible: by using the liberating
forces of information technology to achieve, at last, the
aims of the Enlightenment. But aren't those same forces
the ones shaping the tendencies to be resisted? And if so,
what kinds of causation are linking this story together
anyway?
Such
questions quietly undo a few seams. Consider, for example,
the counter-argument that the European system has survived
a millennium because it has long had a weak centre and has
always incorporated flexibility and innovation. The novelty
of our age may thus lie not in the technology of information,
but in the way that technology has marginally favoured the
export of Western modes of social organization. Such a scenario
would leave Castells at once lamenting the West and seeking
some kind of future in European resistance. One senses a
need for alternative spaces, for better modes of sociological
proof, and perhaps for a few more active characters.
©
Anthony Pym 2002
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