Page 113 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

Likewise, the claim that the forms of association and consciousness –
‘identity’ – which capitalism introduces and propagates in the world are
fundamentally different from pre-capitalist forms, is rejected. The argu-
ment is made that, contrary to its presumptuous rationalistic metanarra-
tive, civil society depends on its own kind of primordialism just as much
as communitarianism does. Its claims to generate a ‘consciousness’ – based
in the rational interests of the individual or of groups – are rejected as
hypocritical and false. It ‘generates’ simply an ‘identity’ rooted in its own –
equally non-rational, equally primordial – dogma of individualism and self-
seeking. To that extent civil society forms of thought and association are no
different from any other ‘identity’ – in fact, they are worse, since they seek
to ‘normalize’ (crush, pulverize) the only form of ‘identity’ which is truly
genuine – the communitarian one. From this viewpoint, all is ‘identity’
much as Weber tended to argue that all was ‘domination’ – which did
not, however, prevent him from believing that some forms of domination –
liberal rationalism – were superior to others. Indeed, it is striking that one
of the few lengthy quotations of Weber which appears in what is, in many
ways, a Weberian-inspired work, is the well-known apocalyptic passage
from The Protestant Ethic. Here, Weber – in full Nietzschean flight – broods
over the irresolvable crisis of bureaucratic capitalist civilization. 18
Yet, notwithstanding his deeply felt sense of crisis, Weber remained a
determined advocate of his own brand of liberalism and for a public life
governed by an authoritarian but rationalistic ‘ethics of responsibility’
rather than by a ‘prophetic’ and unaccountable ‘ethics of conviction’. 19
In Castells, the strong emancipatory claims of rationality and
democracy – the English, American, French and, especially Russian
revolutions – are rejected as simply Enlightenment ‘ideology’. The fact
that bourgeois ideology – liberté, égalité, fraternité – obscures the domi-
nation of society by the bourgeoisie is taken as grounds for the danger-
ous implication that there is no content whatsoever in these democratic
and rationalistic claims. From this viewpoint there is not much to choose
between capitalism and Soviet-style state socialism since both suffocate
the local community, both are guilty of ‘the confinement. of power to the
state and its ramifications’ and of ‘an over-imposed, undifferentiated, nor-
malizing identity’. One also senses here what could be called ‘communi-
20
tarian anarchism’ – the vision of an ideal world as one composed of a
collection of semi-autonomous congealed identities.
The upshot of this particular concept of ‘legitimizing identity’ – not
‘legitimizing consciousness’ – is the downplaying of liberal rationalism of
any kind. This leads to the notion that ‘identity for resistance’ which
Castells explicitly identifies with Etzioni’s ‘communes’, ‘may be the most

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