File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1996/96-11-22.061, message 101


Date: Fri, 22 Nov 1996 16:00:28 +1000
From: rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au (Rob Schaap)
Subject: M-I: Re: Castells and stuff


Fair enough, Doug.

What I liked about the quote (and I'd not heard of Castells) is that it
points to (a) the dependence of corporate capital (which, as your article
pointed out is debt-ridden to Ponzian degrees after its orgy of defensive
integration, and is now huge and complex beyond precedent) on
communications; (b) the global presence of corporate capitalism's otherwise
very 'local' (in that it is the product, as you say, of a place elsewhere)
communication/information; (c) the problematic nature of necessarily
state-authored and state-enforced regulation of transnational capital; and
(d) the necessary diversity (and implicit mutual incommensurability?) of
local 'resistances'.

I did not, and would never, invoke 'placeless power' as a mystification of
the Wall St/Washington fulcrum - and btw, I have already sunk the slipper
(as a gratuitous aside in my EP Thompson summary) into Foucault's
politically useless 'conception' of 'power'.

As for communication as a notion, well, you've put your finger on it. 
There was a time when 'information' meant the process of data, reader and
context getting together in the instantiation of meaning.  Well, economists
can't commodify such an amorphous notion, so they collapsed 'communication'
into 'information' and 'information' into 'data'.  For the purposes of
creating/managing demand (an idea I like in Galbraith's stuff), capital
goes on to identify data (with its measurable commodifiable properties now
assured) with 'knowledge' and even 'wisdom'.  So, a commodity form is
produced by discourse alone (I'm sure Foucault would like that, even if
he'd not like my grounding that discourse in the mode of production) and
human agency is extricated from the notion of communication.  

As both community and the self are constructed in communication - and, as
I've said before, as citizenship is itself a necessarily communicative
practice, this means that human being is commodified and the normative
foundation of the State ('democracy') is commodified.  A beautiful
contradiction surfaces as the 'tension' between State and Capital proves to
be much more a definitive opposition.  And the 'winner' is Capital - which
is defeating the locus of its legitimacy and protection as we write - a
pyrrhic victory, no?

Admittedly and necessarily superficial as I put it here - but surely
there's some 'flesh' on it now?

Thoughts?  Rob.




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