The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 3 vols ‐ Vol. 2: The Power of Identity

Citation

Jones, C. (2002), "The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 3 vols ‐ Vol. 2: The Power of Identity", Information Technology & People, Vol. 15 No. 1, pp. 74-86. https://doi.org/10.1108/itp.2002.15.1.74.2

Parenthesis, n. 1. An explanatory or qualifying word, clause or sentence inserted into a passage with which it has not necessarily any grammatical connexion, and from which it is usually marked off by round or square brackets, dashes, or commas. 2. An interval, an interlude, a hiatus. 3. The upright curves ( ) collectively, used to include words inserted parenthetically (Oxford English Dictionary).

(It would probably be impossible to produce a comprehensive review of a work the size of Manuel Castells’ The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. This work, Castells’ magnum opus, runs in excess of 1,500 pages across three volumes and itself offers a comprehensive outline of the transformations of economy, society and culture associated with the emergence of the “information age”. So there will necessarily be some bracketing involved on the part of any reviewer and here, so as to make this task manageable, we will set aside the goal of comprehensive commentary (at least for now) and focus on a single stylistic feature of Castells’ work: specifically, his use of parentheses. Hopefully this might offer an angle from which to approach this work, and if granted some patience we will bracket discussion of what are presented as the central theses of this book and instead discuss what might initially appear to be somewhat trivial grammatical concerns. We will open with some comments that could be read as a set of “theses on the parenthesis”:

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  Parentheses constitute an “outside text”. Parentheses provide a procedure for positioning a comment beside, outside, around, or in some other way “external” to the thesis. One obvious form of parenthesis is the common punctuation mark which sets a comment that is grammatically (and often conceptually) unrelated to the main text in some form of containment (within “brackets”, for example). Parentheses produce a space in which one can add additional detail that might otherwise cause difficulties to the steady flow of an argument: they allow one to contain danger, by acknowledging (but not engaging with) details that might get in the way of the smooth passage of a thesis. Hence, a parenthesis is more than a typographical or punctuation mark. It marks an assemblage of strategies of enclosure and exclusion (in an argument, but equally in the world).

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  Parentheses invite reading. Parentheses present options to a reader, first of all by forcing the reader to decide whether to read the material in parentheses or to leave it to one side and read on. As such, parentheses can clarify a thesis by adding specificity to an argument, but equally, they can add detail that is not essential to the argument; material that disrupts, complexifies or contradicts the thesis. When we lay certain remarks within parentheses we invite a decision as to whether, and how, to read those comments enclosed in parentheses.

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  Parentheses are unavoidable. A thesis is always caught in some kind of relation to an outside, to those things which might be invited in and shown hospitality but are only invited to a certain inside, a restricted and constrained inside. If it is impossible to avoid parentheses, then we should stress that our goal here is not to expose the fact that parentheses appear in Castells’ work (“look here, parentheses!”) but rather to outline the specific operation of specific parentheses. Beginning from this simple typographical (or other) mark we can enter into questions of selection, choice, argument and thesis as these relate to Castells’ work in particular and to representations of the information age more generally.

Let us begin with one of the parentheses that appears early in this work, near the end of chapter one of volume 1. Explaining the encyclopedic extent of his project, Castells remarks “The broad scope of my analysis is required by the pervasiveness of the object of such analysis (informationalism) throughout social domains and cultural expressions” (I, p. 26). Here the parentheses around the word “informationalism” do not indicate an “aside” but rather serve to explain or clarify the thesis. Here, rather than enclosing a trivial or minor passing remark, parentheses serve to focus on this specific object and in doing so these parentheses do not diminish but rather draw attention to the object (informationalism) of the work that we have before us.

But parentheses can work in a number of ways, and do not always bring parenthetic material to the centre. In a number of other places they seem to indicate what could be considered marginalia. For example, when Castells suggests that the information age, while still in emergence is already a concrete actuality, he asserts that “many societies (and all major societies) are already informational” (I, pp. 20‐21). These parentheses seem to be doing something different from bringing the margin to the centre. What do these parentheses mean? Such a phrasing, such a use of parentheses, seems to beg some rather difficult questions about what would count as a “major society”. To begin with, how would we identify a particular society, or set of societies, as being “major” (and by implication another set of societies as “minor”)? These are clearly not quantitative questions that could be resolved by counting up populations and mathematically determining the “majority” of a country (although we could note that Castells often does appeal to numerical representations to adjudicate on certain questions). Here there is something else going on, and maybe we can consider this a little further by looking at some other instances in which Castells appeals to “the major”.

For one example, we could consider Castells’ discussion of the transformation of work and employment, where he claims that “two main features of the predominant organizational form (the network enterprise) are internal adaptability and external flexibility …” (I, p. 258). Again, what is of interest to us is the status of these parentheses. Are we to think that “the network enterprise” (which is outlined in detail in chapter three of volume 1) is now “the predominant organizational form” in the information age? Is this the case everywhere, or only in “major” societies? When we speak of “the predominant organizational form” in “all major societies”, what happens to those at the margins?

Despite his claims about the prevalence of the information age, Castells notes that “Indeed, for two‐thirds of workers in the world, employment still means agricultural employment, rooted in the fields, usually in their regions”(I, p. 251). When discussing the role of mechanisation and automation that result from the application of information technologies to work, Castells counters claims that information technology has implied the deskilling of the labour process as a result of Taylorist forms of control, arguing that:

What tends to disappear through integral automation are the routine, repetitive tasks that can be precoded and programmed for their execution by machines. It is the Taylorist assembly line that becomes an historic relic (although it is still the harsh reality for millions of workers in the industrializing world) (I, p. 258, emphasis in original).

Once again, what is the status of these parentheses? What do they mean here? What do they do? Is it fair to say, in the current global context, that the “harsh reality for millions of workers in the industrializing world” is a “minor” point, one that can be relegated to a passing remark, safely enclosed in parentheses?

Fortunately, perhaps, these questions do not lend themselves to simple answers. While we can see Castells bracketing many of these issues, they rarely disappear totally. Although there is a tendency to bracket these global relations Castells also recognises some of the most troubling consequences of the information age, so there is no question here that Castells’ book is simply uncritical or that it brackets all issues which might not paint the information age in a positive light. Indeed, Castells explicitly positions his work as being critical, and of resisting common sense interpretations of the information age. As he puts it, “the purpose of my inquiry, as for this book in general, is analytic: it aims at raising new questions rather than answering old concerns” (I, p. 217). Castells is highly critical of (certain) orthodox explanations of the information age, and seeks to avoid the economic and technological determinism which is so common in discussions of the emergence of the information age. His account of national differences in the rise of informationalism clearly documents the cultural embeddedness of economic relations, and in doing so may contribute to efforts “to break the ethnocentric approach still dominating much social science” (II, p. 3). Most of volume 2 is concerned with an account of the rise of new social movements which have tried to construct identities resistant to globalisation, and chapter two of volume 3 sets out to explicitly deal with issues of poverty and social exclusion in what Castells calls “the fourth world”, offering a discussion of inequality, polarization, poverty, misery, individualization of work, over‐exploitation of workers, social exclusion and perverse integration (III, p. 69ff.). This work is not simply uncritical, and indeed, phrases such as “the globalization of human misery” (I, p. 131) do not seem to be falling off the lips of our political leaders.

When one reads many of the things that are written about the rise of the information age, processes of bracketing are often so extreme that they effectively eliminate almost all of the troubling aspects of the economy, society and culture of today. Here we are not suggesting that Castells simply reproduces these silences, which is why we spoke not of erasure or silence but of a certain tendency towards parentheses in Castells work. Still, we may want to reflect on the possibility that the work of these parentheses in Castells could potentially be even more problematic than if these issues were erased entirely. By acknowledging the problematic nature of the information age (but positioning these problems in a minor key, in parentheses) Castells may appear to be moderate, sensible, mature, even “balanced”. But amidst this balancing, we can identify some of the ways in which parentheses can so often imply an absent presence – both presence and absence, both recognition and unwillingness to recognise the marginal.

Although we have already gone much too quickly we could add, by way of conclusion, that we are not taking Castells to task simply for using parentheses, which, as we have said, is probably unavoidable. Rather, we have tried to draw attention to the operation of specific parentheses, and indicated how these grammatical conventions are related to broader processes of selection and exclusion in representations of the information age. Castells’ parentheses are, of course, “only examples”, and we could have chosen others from Castells or from elsewhere. But perhaps these parentheses and some of the thinking about and around them might contribute in some minor way to thinking about how we might read a work such as Castells’.

These comments will undoubtedly seem all too hasty, and will certainly fall well short of the hopes of a comprehensive review of such a “major” book. But they should probably be read in the minor key in which they are intended. They are of a different order, perhaps, from the major writing of Castells. If they have sought to disrupt then they have sought not to disrupt Castells but to disrupt potential readers of Castells by reading him against, or rather across the grain: reading his work against itself, against some of its perilous acts of balancing. But then again, it is possible that questions of how we read (whether reading a work like Castells or reading the world more generally) are not so “minor”. Perhaps questions of reading are issues for another day, which will have to come after this one which is so trapped in the enclosed and bracketed space of a “book review”. So we will set these issues to one side – which may mean bringing them to the centre – and will finish here by closing these parentheses. Like this.)

This is a joint review of The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Volumes 1‐3.