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. --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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