http://funredes.org/mistica

MISTICA: Re: Castells en Bilbao

From: Rafael Capurro ([email protected])
Date: Mon Feb 10 2003 - 19:12:40 AST

Hola,

Disculpen por seguirle la ola a Castells.
Hace un tiempo lei una muy buena recension
de su opus magnum que publico un colega
h�ngaro, miembro del International Center
for Information Ethics (ICIE): http://icie.zkm.de
Lamentablemente dicha recension ha desaparecido
de la red, pero... en su momento le hice un
comentario que les adjunto (perdon porque sea
en ingles...), *por si las moscas* como decimos
en Uruguay :-)
Por supuesto que la/mi conclusion se puede
*aplicar* a la situacion actual: en orden a cambiar
las cosas en LAC (y en otras partes) hay que
comenzar por interpretarles de modo diverso.
Asi es como el *marxista* Castells llega a la
hermeneutica (politica). Pero por supuesto que
si uno se queda solo en la interpretacion... (o
en la informacion...o en la interpretacion de
la (sociedad de la) informacion...)

salut

Rafael

The following is an extract from a comprehensive book review of our
colleague and ICIE-Member J.C. Nyiri who has set up a Virtual University.
"Manuel Castells' celebrated three-volume book The Information Age -
Economy, Society and Culture (...) is difficult to interpret. It is too
long; it often uses metaphors instead of providing clear-cut arguments; and
the author, a Frustrated Marxist, seems most of the time reluctant to speak
in his own voice. (...) I will then concentrate on a single phrase of
Castells - "space of flows", his most famous phrase - and try to uncover
its meaning by tracing it, in a kind of backward narrative, to its first
occurence in his work, in the essay "Crisis, Planning, and the Quality of
Life" written in 1982. (...) This is the book (The Informational City,1988,
RC) in which Castells, for the first and the last time, can actually bring
himself to believe that the new information technologies might have a
politically liberating potential. (...) What characterizes the Information
Age, Castells in this book (The Information Age, RC) again points out, "is
not the centrality of knowledge and information, but the application of
such knowledge and information to knowledge generation and information
processing/communication devices, in acumulative feedback loop between
innovation and the uses of innovation". (...) The idea of a network is, in
The Information Age, significantly extended and extensively discussed. Thus
Castells introduces the concept of the network enterprise; speaks,
summarily, of the network society; refers to the network of European
regions; and coins the phrase we have referred already, that of the network
state. (...) Castell's analysis on nations and nationalisms constitute a
major topic which was absent in his earlier work. These analysis are
decidedly non-Marxian. There is a sentence towads the end of The
Information Age, almost on the very last page: "In the twentieth century,
philosophers have been trying to change the world. In the twenty-first
century, it is time for them to interpet it differently." This is, of
course, an inversion of Marx's Eleventh Feuerbach Thesis. A chilling
inversion, that must have cost Castells many a sleeples night; and, at the
end of day, has resulted in making heavy, and often superfluous, demands on
his readers." I would like to add the following comment. In a dialogue with
Richard Wisser in 1969 (published in: G. Neske, E. Kettering, Eds.:
Antwort. Martin Heidegger im Gespr�ch, Pfullingen 1988, pp. 21-28) Martin
Heidegger cites Marx's Eleventh Feuerbach Thesis "When this sentence is
being ited and followed one overlooks that a world change presupposes a
change of the world representation and that a world representation can only
be achieved through a sufficient world interpretation. This means: Marx is
basing on a very specific world interpretation in order to claim for his
"change" and consequently this sentence is without foundation. It gives the
impression as if it were definitely against philosophy but at the same time
the second part of the sentence presupposes in an implicit manner the claim
for a philosophy.")

Este archivo fue generado por hypermail 2.1.3 : Mon Mar 08 2004 - 12:18:16 AST