Page 108 - Culture Society and Economy

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NETWORK SOCIETY THEORY

flows’ – using as an example the Barcelona International Airport,
designed by Ricardo Bofill. Castells wrote:

No cover-up of the fear and anxiety that people experience in an airport. No
carpeting, no cozy rooms, no indirect lighting. In the middle of the cold
beauty of this airport passengers have to face this terrible truth: they are
alone in the middle of the space of flows, they may lose their connection,
they are suspended in the emptiness of transition. They are literally in the
hands of Iberia Airlines. And there is no escape. 2

This juxtaposition of the banal and the high-flown is typical of Castells.
We are here in the presence of an eclectic romantic communitarian ethos,
supported by a mass of empirical data, and spiced with a plebeian anar-
chism which now abhors, now admires, capitalism and globalization.
It is not hard to demonstrate that Castells, although superficially influ-
enced by Weber, has little faith in the rationalistic paradigm and is not a
part of the liberal Harrington–Hobbes–Locke civil society tradition to
which Weber himself belonged. Indeed, his frequent resort to metaphori-
cal language which annoys many writers, for example Henwood, springs
3
precisely from this profoundly romantic anti-capitalist orientation which
drives his entire work. It is this irrevocable attachment to the local which
leads Castells to assert what amounts to the primordial priority of ‘iden-
tity’. For him it is self-evident that ‘Identity is people’s source of meaning
and experience’ – without qualification. That class, trade unions, politi-
4
cal parties, civic associations, the market, business organizations, corpo-
rations, the Protestant religion – rationalistic forms of organization and
consciousness of all kinds – have been and continue to be the dominant
sources of ‘meaning’ in bourgeois society for hundreds of years does not
move him. It is as if Adam Smith, Hegel and Weber, not to mention Marx,
never lived and wrote.
Castells’ Continental European anti-rationalism, although obscurely
expressed, is unmistakable. This is the meaning of the elaborate discus-
sion at the beginning of The Power of Identity in which he attempts to dis-
tinguish between ‘the process of construction of meaning on the basis of
a cultural attribute, or related set of cultural attributes’ and ‘roles, and
5
role-sets.’ ‘Culture’ in this sense is an original and deep-rooted Blut
und Boden – ‘the construction of identities uses building materials from
history, from geography, from biology’ – while ‘roles’ spring from ‘the
institutions and organizations of society’ and ‘depend upon negotiations
between individuals and these institutions and organizations’. In other
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words, ‘Identity’, which springs from ‘culture’ is Gemeinschaft; roles and

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