Page 115 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

expect, the difference which Castells draws between his concepts and
those of Giddens turns precisely on the issues raised above. In the first
place, Giddens’ line of thought is deeply individualistic in the standard
manner of the Anglo-Saxon civil society tradition. Castells had already
rejected this individualism in his discussion of the work of Touraine. This
work was necessarily problematic for him since Touraine not only is indi-
vidualistic in his analysis but he also places the individual in opposition
to both the market and the community. Consistent with his communi-
tarianism, Castells points out that while Touraine’s ‘subject’ was the
individual, his was the ‘collective social actor’. 25 Giddens too is con-
cerned with how the individual uses his or her rationality to negotiate the
‘risks’ of the modern world. According to Giddens, ‘reflexivity’ is the key
tool which the individual uses to sustain rationality in the challenging
circumstances of the globalized world. Castells quotes Giddens’ statement
that:

The more tradition loses its hold, and the more daily life is reconstituted
in terms of the dialectical interplay of the local and the global, the more
individuals are forced to negotiate lifestyle choices among a diversity of
options … Reflexivity organized life-planning … becomes a central features
of the structuring of self-identity. 26

In other words, for Giddens, as already pointed out, the bourgeois self
retains its coherence. It has the weapon of ‘reflexivity’ in its psychologi-
cal arsenal and deploys it with skill to effectively win its battles in this
globalized world. But for Castells no such coherence is possible for the
vast majority of the population under the conditions of global capitalism.
With a characteristic rhetorical flourish he insists that ‘reflexive life-
planning becomes impossible except for the elite inhabiting the timeless
27
space of flows of global networks and ancillary locales’. Giddens’ ratio-
nalistic optimism will not work. For Castells what is required instead is
‘a redefinition of identity [which is] fully autonomous vis-à-vis the net-
working logic of dominant institutions and organizations’. 28 There then
follows what one would have to describe as a hymn to communitarianism
and identity politics:

The search for meaning takes place then in the reconstruction of defensive
identities around communal principles … I propose the hypothesis that the
constitutions of subjects, at the heart of the process of social change, takes
a different route to the one we knew during modernity, and late modernity:
namely, subjects, if and when constructed, are not built any longer on the
basis of civil societies, that are in the process of disintegration, but as the
prolongation of communal resistance. 29

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