Comment on 5 February post

The discussion questions and comments are based on reading Stalder's book, looking at the Feenberg et al. work on May 1968, and consulting books by Lefebvre and bits of Castells magnum opus. I have printed off some articles from the Stalder bibliography that I hope to review before class, including a Castells article where he starts to respond to his critics.

My conclusion for the moment about Castells "tendency" is that he feels snake-bit by Marxism and by Progressive thought in general. As someone who grew up in Catalonia and later crossed swords with Soviet-influenced Marxists, I can imagine his deep suspicion of anything remotely connected to the Soviet-led Communist movement, even the Eurocommunism of the 1960s. And its not hard to see that he would be pretty bugged by the liberal state under General de Gaulle and others. So his progressive actors are reduced to single-issue political activists, and even with them he seems to have no preference for a side.

What I learned as a union representative, talking to union activists who also had experiences organizing for the SDS etc. in 1960s, is that action has to be multidirectional. So it is important to be an advocate for your own key issue, but it is also important to write letters to the editor, attend meetings of representative bodies, vote, run for office if possible or necessary, to engage in public demonstrations and nonviolent civil disobedience, and work within the workplace, community organizations, and political parties, in an oppositional mode if need be. Asserting one's mere existence may contribute in some mystical sense, but is not quite adequate to the case.

I'm disappointed by the anti-intellectualism of his conclusion to End of Millennium. While intellectuals may not have authority in the sense that Hegel or Kant or Rousseau or Voltaire did in their day, surely they have a role in creating the language of the day and contributing to the discussion. When an author creates a 1500 page document like Castells, even if he conceives of it as an observation-based work contributing to the pedagogy of the oppressed, he has to assume that most of the readers will be scholars or academics like himself. Who is he jivin'?

From my vantage point, I connect this attitude of surrender with the psychology of the US in November and December 2000 which has led to our current predicament. What the concept of the "spaces of flows" demonstrates is that you neglect a traditionally-contested space like the management of elections by states, your opponents will take over that space, and limit your ability to reenter it.

An example that illustrates this point even better is the rise of Rush Limbaugh. The phenomenon of highly-partisan radio talk is a direct result of the FCC abandonment of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. Rush got on the air with his current show in 1988, and the rest is history. AM Radio has become an almost complete wasteland except for the talk on WHA-AM, and how many parallels does that have outside the state?