Abstract
The dramatic events that irrupted in 2011 were heralded by many as a sea change in political participation and activism, not least in a flurry of analysis and commentary published in the midst of events – from Paul Mason’s (2011) Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere to Alain Badiou’s (2012) The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings and Hardt and Negri’s (2012) Declaration. This contribution from Manuel Castells shares much with these texts, with Mason’s enthusiastic and optimistic narrative (though admittedly rather less breathless than the journalist’s account) and with Hardt and Negri’s focus on emotional subjectivity. But while Mason and Badiou include – and in the latter case even celebrate – the more riotous and periodically violent events of Athens and the UK ‘summer riots’, Castells rejects the transformative possibilities of violence and focuses on those cases that appear more hopeful, including less well-known examples such as Iceland’s ‘Kitchenware Revolution’, as well as the more prominent cases of Tunisia, Egypt and other ‘Arab Uprisings’, the Indignados and Occupy.
Castells doesn’t claim to offer a comprehensive empirical analysis, although his account is grounded in observation and documentary evidence, but instead interprets events through the prism of his prior work. The various movements are explained as part of the network society, but with a greater emphasis than previously on the nature of the relationship between online and offline space. The combination of ‘free communication’ on social media and the occupation of urban space, he argues, ‘created a hybrid public space of freedom’ (p. 23).
This hybrid space is convincingly theorised as one where the ‘autonomy’ offered by self-communication prevents the ‘defiance’ of reclaiming urban space from losing momentum and coherence as ‘discontinutous activism’, while the latter prevents the former from resulting in a form of withdrawal from mainstream culture and society. He argues, not uniquely, that the Internet is especially important in the initial mobilising stage, then ‘once the movement has extended its reach from the space of flows to the space of places, it is too late to stop it’ (p. 66). However, offline social networks are recognised as important, as well as those online, and mainstream media to an extent, with Al Jazeera attributed a role in amplifying online communication, preventing the analysis from drifting too far into cyber-optimism.
He defends his assertion of technological effects from accusations of technological determinism, with evidence that access to digital networks ‘had a significant effect on the intensity and power of these movements’ (p. 104), distinguishing (though not always carefully) social causality from empowerment and amplification. More contentiously, he asserts that social networking sites (SNSs) operated as ‘spaces of autonomy’ and that the Internet more generally is safe ‘free public space’ has obviously since been thrown into question by Edward Snowden’s revelations about state surveillance of digital space. Castells may be right that online communication is difficult for governments to control, but that is clearly only one part of the picture. His characterisation of the Internet as autonomous space also understates the power and influence of capital on the architecture of the Internet (Lessig, 2006), the benefits for capital of our use of them (Dean, 2010).
Indeed, the stirring rhetoric, especially of the introduction and conclusion, inevitably involves some generalisations that are not entirely supported by the more specific analysis. In places, he overstates the unity of the various groups and causes within the network (in Britain ‘occupations of squares and the defence of the public sector by trade unions and students joined hands’ (p. 3)), and the rejection of mainstream media as universally ‘distrusted’, given that he later acknowledges that most occupations had Press Relations committees. I would also argue that the emphasis on the importance of generating a sense of ‘“in and out,” an “us versus them”’ (p. 10), doesn’t take full account of the purposefully permeable boundaries at Occupy sites, inviting visitors and passersby in and creating confusion about who is part of the occupation, a supporter of the movement or an outsider (‘member of the public’).
Given the origins of the Occupy movement in the United States and the international prominence of Occupy Wall Street (OWS), it is perhaps churlish to object that Castells generalises the experience of OWS as representative of the Occupy movement as a whole, whereas there was a great deal of variation in experience. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that Occupy London Stock Exchange (Occupy LSX) – which Castells did also visit – had a less combative relationship with the police and other authorities, and the ‘health and safety’ reasons for eviction (the equivalent of ‘public health’ in the United States) were broadly ridiculed, even in the conservative press, because of general hostility to such regulation. One of the most interesting features of the Occupy movement was the way in which some iterations of it frustrated those assumptions about internal solidarity requiring a certain exclusivity and sense of difference, and it would have been interesting to see how Castells (1997) would apply his categories of resistance and project identities to the Occupy movement.
Castells often refers to ‘community’ in relation to these movements, but in the concluding chapter, he specifies that the unity of values implied by ‘community’ is a goal of these movements rather than a description, preferring to portray them as characterised by ‘togetherness’. While this idealisation of community would seem to be in tension with the equal focus on the autonomy of the individual, he attempts to resolve this through the concept of individuation, as opposed to liberal individualisation, which sees individual agency as not only instrumental but also engaged in voluntary solidarity with others. At the same time, there is a Habermasian attachment to deliberation and faith in the possibility of inauthentic, uncoercive agreement on values, which implies a Kantian exclusion of particularistic attachment from the public sphere.
However, as might be inferred from the title, Castells offers against liberal orthodoxy a positive account of political emotion – especially outrage and hope – making a convincing (neo-Aristotlian) argument that fear is a political tool that can only be overcome by outrage at injustice. He draws on the theory of affective intelligence to explain how individuals are motivated to act – with anger, and especially outrage, overcoming fear to transform anxiety into enthusiasm and hope – and the role of identification with others in building a movement out of those emotions. In particular, he gives a persuasive account of the hope generated by the inspirational example of Tunisia transforming the fortunes of Egyptian activists.
On the other hand, his focus on emotion can imply a narrow definition of political legitimacy that excludes much of civil society as complicit with the discredited political system. Although he criticises violent spectacle for pandering to mainstream media news values, but his own discourse of spontaneity and emotional authenticity arguably does the same thing – it reflects a mainstream media suspicion of political opinion as ‘ideology’ that is intrinsically suspect and inauthentic because not rooted in emotional response to personal experience.
The book does, however, grapple with the frequent criticism of these movements – especially the European and US protests over the financial crisis and its iniquitous consequences – that they are undermined by their failure to resolve the problems they identify. Castells’ primary argument is that the practice of occupying public space, their inspiring use of direct democracy, their interaction through trust not instrumentality, is in itself a powerful message, and one capable of changing people’s minds and changing dominant culture.
He points to the effectiveness of these practices in overthrowing dictatorships as a powerful explanation of how networks of counterpower can operate to disconnect the various networks of power (economic, political, military, ideological, cultural) from one another, or at least to isolate one from the others enough to destabilise it. In terms of a more long-term political effect, however, for the networks of counterpower to prevail over the networks of power embedded in the organization of society, they will have to reprogramme the polity, the economy, the culture or whatever dimension they aim to change by introducing in the institutions’ programmes, as well as in their own lives, other instructions, including, in some utopian versions, the rule of not ruling anything. (p. 17)
In this, he seems to see a range of political objectives and solutions and the role of defining them to lie with the movements themselves, but his analysis (especially of the Icelandic case in Chapter 2) suggests that he favours a republican, Rousseauian form of participatory democracy, which accords with his focus on community.
Perhaps inevitably, events since publication have shown some of Castells’ optimism to be misplaced. Although the obvious example is the Egyptian coup that ousted the democratically elected president, in that case he acknowledged that the future looked uncertain, due to western hostility to the Muslim Brotherhood. More significantly, however, questions hang over those cases described as the inspiration for and prelude to the revolutions. The optimistic interpretation of the election of a moderate Islamic leader in Tunisia is based on a favourable comparison with Erdogan in Turkey, yet the latter has since been involved in his own brutal repression of protest (and suppression of social media). The Icelandic example does offer an inspiring example of effective participatory democracy in terms of the drafting of a new constitution, but with its implementation still in doubt, it looks ever less likely of having the hoped for revolutionary impact.
Nonetheless, this is an accessible and very readable account of a fascinating social and political period, and a useful introduction to Castells’ ideas. It offers some interesting insights as well as a compelling narrative of hope for social change.