Manuel Castells: The Theory of the Network Society

Beginning with the late 1960s, advanced industrial societies experienced an extended crisis of capitalism, well acknowledged by academics for decades, that is still causing substantive changes in living and working arrangements across the globe. One problem of researchers interested in studying these changes was the dearth of new ideas about restructured social organization. Some theorists embraced the cumulative intellectual project of social science, such as Anthony Giddens and Henri Lefebvre, by building on previous theoretical traditions, in the first case, Weber, in the second, Marx, advancing new conceptions of society as they went along. Another group, of which Castells is the best known representative, took snapshots of trends at one time and wrote books proclaiming the advent of an entirely new stage of human development. By the end of the twentieth century, we received accounts heralding the “risk society,” the “credential society,” the “global city” and “disorganized capitalism,” as some examples. Castells’s contribution to this grand, or grandiose, theorizing was the “network society. ” The fact that “fast capitalism” made many of these predictions obsolete by the time these books were published did not deter the output of academics who abandoned the cumulative project of sociology by offering their own opus as the new starting point of future inquiry. Felix Stalder has written a book on Castells that straddles an unresolved dilemma. On the one hand, it is part of a series on “Key Thinkers. ” Consequently, he is obligated to celebrate Castells’s work in this context. On the other hand, Stalder is a scholar who recognizes the piece by piece weaknesses of the former’s contributions and reluctantly calls these to the reader’s attention (see also Jan van Dijk, 2001). The result is a volume that fails to satisfy because the premise that Castells is a “key” thinker is undercut by Stalder’s many discussions that point out why he is wrong or misleading. Not enough mention is made by Stalder of research directly inspired by Castells efforts, and too many ideas about the analysis of society, space and technology, first contributed by others, are simply stitched into his narrative as if they were Castells’s own. The best example of the latter is Stalder’s account of the new theory of space, in chapter 5, which repeats almost verbatim Henri Lefebvre’s key dialectical theory while never pausing to credit him so that an uninformed reader can easily be led into believing that this major conceptual advance is attributable to Castells. Clearly Stalder, a lecturer in Media Economy at a university in Switzerland, venerates Castells trilogy of volumes on the network society. Yet, he goes to the unprecedented length, in chapter 6, of addressing the glaring fact that Castells, throughout these three books, never clearly explains what the “network” concept underpinning his new phase of society actually is. Selectively using his own reading of literature on networks, Stalder launches into an extended discussion defending the concept that any reader would rightly require Castells, as the author, to have clarified himself over the course of his trilogy beyond all misunderstandings. Most devastating is Stalder’s charge, in chapter 7, that Castells completely ignores any recognition of the role of power in his theory of the network society. It is not just that, for Castells, neither Michel Foucault nor Henri Lefebvre exist, but that he has situated himself intellectually so far away from both Marx and Weber that he occupies a true reductionist extreme in social theorizing, one that returns to the technological determinism of 1950s Human Ecology bereft of class and power in a retrograde modernism that focuses on the putative glories of new information processing. Already, Castells’s linkage to genetic engineering as a promising component of his new “mode of development” (a concept repeated by Stalder that has absolutely no basis in political economy), is recognized as the new Frankenstein Monster of the future.