Page 109 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

institutions are Gesellschaft. The first is the domain of ineffable, primordial,
Catholic sentiment; the second the domain of self-serving calculation –
Protestant and bourgeois to the core. The first is Germania Sacra, the
second, la perfide Albion. This is the outlook which led Castells to write
the following:

Identities are stronger sources of meaning than roles, because of the
process of self-construction and individuation that they involve. In simple
terms, identities organize the meanings while roles organize the functions …
I also propose the idea that, in the network society, for reasons that I will
develop below, for most social actors, meaning is organized around a
primary identity.’ 7

This ‘primary identity’ is anchored in a sense of ‘place’. Castells observes
ambiguously that ‘Places are not necessarily communities, although they
may contribute to community building.’ This is true in the sense that he
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wants to preserve the option of locating the given ‘community’ at the
local, regional or national level as the need arises – but never at the inter-
national level. His entire definition and discussion of ‘place’ rest on ‘iden-
titarian’ assumptions. According to his definition ‘A place is a locale whose
form, function and meaning are self-contained within the boundaries of phys-
ical contiguity’ – a definition which Henwood finds vague and useless.
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However, to dismiss this definition is to miss the depth of Castells’ com-
munitarianism. The operative word here is ‘self-contained’. The notion is
of a social group with a certain self-sufficiency and autonomy from the
rest of society – living within self-contained boundaries imbued with deep
emotion. Thus, in discussing Belleville – a suburb of Paris – Castells
attempts to show how, despite many changes over the centuries, Belleville
has retained its distinctive identity:

Its dwellers, without loving each other, and while certainly not being loved
by the police, have constructed through history a meaningful, interacting
space, with a diversity of uses and a wide range of functional expressions.
They actively interact with their daily physical environment. In between
home and the world, there is a place called Belleville. 10

Thus a ‘place’ is to be distinguished from a mere ‘space’ in that the former
is a ‘meaningful interacting space’ which ‘history’ has infused with ‘mean-
ing’. A ‘space’, on the other hand, is simply an arena for calculating, self-
seeking activity by the egoistic bourgeois. This terminology reflects a
profound cultural conservatism in which ‘meaning’ arises strictly from the
past – from ‘history’ in that specific sense of the archaic. Meaning never

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