Reading Notes of the Power of Identity (Second Volume of the Information Age)
Preface to the 2010 Edition of The Power of Identity
xvii This volume explores the construction of collective identities as they relate to social movements and power struggles in the network society.
Xxi The analysis presented here does not refer to the continuing presence of religion as a basic feature of societies around the world in the twenty-first century, but to its decisive role in nurturing the construction of resistance identities against the dominance of market values and the so-called Western culture in the process of globalization.
Xxiii Data show time again that the more the world becomes global, the more people feel local. The proportion of “cosmopolitans,” people who feel they are “citizens of the world,” remains at barely 13 percent of people surveyed worldwide… People identify themselves primarily with their locality. Territorial identity is a fundamental anchor of belonging that is not even lost in the rapid process of generalized urbanization we are now experiencing. [Sense of Place]
Xxxv In fact, the diversity of human experience and historical trajectories is not reducible to markets, technology, and liberal democracy… When one-dimensional globalization was imposed from the central nodes to the entire system by enforcing the logic of financial markets and multinational networks of production and trade, people around the world resisted and counteracted, finding their forms of resistance in the materials of their cultural specificity.
The networks are global, but the narratives, values, and interests are diverse, and globally produced and distributed, albeit asymmetrically, around the world.
Xl instead of understanding the new world, and finding new ways of dealing with its issues, the US decided to use its military superiority, based on technological excellence, thus to use its military superiority, based on technological excellence, thus on its advance in the technological revolution, to adapt the world to itself, to its interests, to its ways of thinking and being, rather than the other way round.
Chapter 1: Communal Heavens: Identity and Meaning in the Network Society
P7-10 Since the social construction of identity always takes place in a context marked by power relationships, I propose a distinction between three forms and origins of identity building: 1) legitimizing identity; 2) resistance identity; 3) project identity.
Legitimizing identity generates a civil society.
Identity for resistance, leads to the formation of communes, or communities, which may be the most important type of identity-building in our society.
Project identity produces subjects.
P11 The network society is based on the systemic disjunction between the local and the global for most individuals and social groups. And, I will add, by the separation in different time-space frames between power and experience. Therefore, reflexive life-panning becomes impossible, except for the elite inhabiting the timeless space of flows of global networks and their ancillary locals.
Subjects, if and when constructed, are not built any longer on the basis of civil societies, which are in the process of disintegration, but as prolongation of communal resistance.
P13 In defining fundamentalism, in my own understanding, as the construction of collective identity under the identification of individual behavior and society’s institutions to the norms derived from God’s law, interpreted by a definite authority that intermediated between God and humanity.
P17 Thus, Islamic identity is (re)constructed by fundamentalists in opposition to capitalism, to socialism, and to nationalism, Arab or otherwise, which are in their view, all failing ideologies of the post-colonial order.
P29 The construction of Christian fundamentalist identity seems to be an attempt to reassert control over life, and over the country, in direct response to the uncontrollable processes of globalization that are increasingly sensed in the economy and in the media… (It also) was the reaction against the challenge to patriarchalism in the 1980s and 1990s.
P30 The age of globalization is also the age of nationalist resurgence, expressed both in the challenge to established nation-states and in the widespread (re)construction of identity on the basis of nationality, always affirmed against the alien. This historical trend has surprised some observers, after nationalism had been declared decreased by a triple death. [Such as globalization of economic, political institutions…]
P45 Yet the full recognition of nation identity cannot be expressed in the full independence of the new states, precisely because of the strength of identities that cut across state borders. This is why I propose, as the most likely, and indeed promising future, the notion of the Commonwealth of Inseparable States; that is, of a web of institutions flexible and dynamic enough to articulate the autonomy of national identity and the sharing of political instrumentality in the context of the global economy.
P55 Two phenomena appear to be characteristic of the current historical period: first, the disintegration of pluri-national states that try to remain fully sovereign or to deny the plurality of their national constituents… The result of this disintegration is the formation of quasi-nation-states. Secondly, we observe the development of nations that stop at the threshold of statehood, bur force their parent state to adapt, and cede sovereignty. I label these entities national quasi-states because they are not fully fledged states, but win a share of political autonomy on the basis of their national identity.
P64 What is consistent with my own cross-cultural observation, is that people resist the process of individualization and social atomization, and tend to cluster in community organizations that, over time, generate a feeling of belonging, and ultimately, in many cases, a communal, cultural identity. I introduced the hypothesis that, for this to happen, a process of social mobilization is necessary. That is, people must engage in urban movements (not quite revolutionary), through which common interests are discovered, and defended, life is shared somehow, and new meaning may be produced.
This production of meaning is an essential component of cities, throughout history, as the built environment, and its meaning, is constructed through a conflictive process between the interests and values of opposing social actors.
Urban movements were becoming critical sources of resistance to the one-sided logic of capitalism, statism, and Informationalism. This was, essentially, because the failure of proactive movements and politics… and political oppression had left people with no other choice but to surrender or to react on the basis of the most immediate source of self-recognition and autonomous organization: their locality. Thus, so emerged the paradox of increasingly local politics in a world structured by increasingly global processes. There was production of meaning and identity: my neighborhood, my community, my city… But it was a defensive identity, an identity of retrenchment of the known against the unpredictability of the unknown and uncontrollable… people stuck to themselves.
P69 Religious fundamentalism, cultural nationalism, territorial communes are, by and large, defensive reactions. Reactions against three fundamental threats, perceived in all societies, by the majority of humankind, at this turn of the millennium. [Again globalization, against networking and flexibility, against the crisis of the patriarchal family.]
This form of identity-building revolves essentially around the principle of resistance identity. Legitimizing identity seems to have entered a fundamental crisis because of the fast disintegration of civil society inherited from the industrial era, and because of the fading away of the nation-state, the main source of legitimacy.
P124 The social origins of the al-Qaeda leadership and cadres are not an expression of the popular classes. They are, by and large, professionals… They are familiar with advanced technology, and the use it skillfully to benefit of the cause. They are not traditionalists in this sense. They are hypermodernists. The propose an alternative path of social development, around a different set of principles, in direct contradiction with the rules and logic of capitalist globalization and modernization based on Western values.
P136 Thus, while the Chechen conflict goes back to the nineteenth century, the connection with the al-Qaeda network intensified it, and transformed it into another node of the global network of terror against the oppressors of the Muslims. It is this dual character of local struggles and global networking that is the essence of al-Qaeda’s strategy in the post-Afghanistan war situation.
P147 The anti-globalization movement is a network movement, in which the unit is the network. It is a global movement, and its global nature represents a qualitative transformation vis a vis the struggles against capitalist globalization.
P156 Networking, and particular Internet-based networking, is not just an instrument of organization and struggle, it is a new form of social interaction, mobilization and decision-making. It is a new political culture: networking means no center, thus no central authority.
P160 Perhaps this combination between powerful nodes rooted in open societies, and networks that reach out through a planet in which most people suffer oppression and poverty, is the distinctive trend of the movement as a social movement challenging globalization on behalf of the whole of humankind.
P164 New communication technologies are fundamental to the existence of these movements: indeed, they are their organizational infrastructure.
Chapter 3 The Greening of the Self: The Environmental Movement
P181 Struggles over structural transformation are tantamount to fighting for historical redefinition of the two fundamental, material expressions of society: space and time. And indeed, control over space, and the emphasis on locality, form another major, recurrent theme of various components of the environmental movement… Thus, the emphasis of ecologists on locality and on the control by people of their living spaces, is a challenge to a basic level of the new power system [the network society, the space of flows]. 【环境运动背后伴随着的是本地居民要求对本地空间的重新控制，比如”Not in my Back Yard” movement，反映流空间和地方空间的矛盾，网络社会运行规则与个人体验和意义的矛盾】
P182 What is challenged by environmental localism is the loss of connection between these different functions and interests under the principle of mediated representation by abstract, technical rationality exercised by uncontrolled business interests and unaccountable technocracies. Thus, the logic of the argument develops into yearning for small-scale government, privileging the local community and citizen participation: grass-roots democracy is the political model implicit in most ecological movements.
Along space, control over time is at stake in the network society, and the environmental movement is probably the most important actor in projecting a new, revolutionary temporality.
P183 Clock time, timeless time and glacial time.
Clock time, characteristic of industrialism, for both capitalism and statism, was/is characterized by the chronological sequencing of events, and by the discipline of human behavior to a predetermined schedule… Timeless time, characterizing dominant processes in our society… This perturbation may take the form of compressing the occurrence of phenomena, aiming at instantaneity, or else by introducing random discontinuity in the sequence… In our societies, most dominant, core processes are structured in timeless time, yet most people are dominated by and through clock time.
The notion of glacial time implies that “the relation between humans and nature is very long-term and evolutionary… I propose the idea that the environmental movement is precisely characterized by the project of introducing a “glacial time” perspective in our temporality, in terms of both consciousness and policy.
P184 Through these fundamental struggles over the appropriation of science, space and time, ecologies induce the creation of a new identity, a biological identity, a culture of the human species as a component of nature.
P186 Thus, the science of life versus life under sciences; local control over places versus an uncontrollable space of flows; realization of glacial time versus annihilation of time, and continued slavery to clock time; green culture versus real virtuality.
Most of the success of the environmental movement comes from the fact that, more that any other social force, it has been able to best adapt to the conditions of communication and mobilization in the new technological paradigm… By creating events that call media attention, environmentalists are able to reach a much broader audience than their direct constituency. 【杭州行体悟：think globally, act locally. 空间的影响？global idea on local space】
P188 Through these networks, grass-roots groups around the world become suddenly able to act globally, at the level at which major problems are created.
Chapter 4 The End of Patriarchalism: Social Movements, Family, and Sexuality in the Information Age
P193 The patriarchal family, the cornerstone of patriarchalism, is being challenged at this turn of the millennium by the inseparably related processes of the transformation of women’s work and the transformation of women’s consciousness.
P194 Why now? I propose the hypothesis that the reason lies in a combination of four elements: First, the transformation of the economy, and of the labor market, in close association with the opening of educational opportunities to women. Secondly, there is the technological transformation in biology, pharmacology, and medicine that was allowed a growing control over child bearing, and over the reproduction of the human species. Thirdly, against this background of economic and technological transformation, patriarchalism has been impacted by the development of the feminist movement. The forth element inducing the challenge to patriarchalism is the rapid diffusion of ideas in a globalized culture, and in an interrelated world, where people and experience travel and mingle, quickly weaving a hyperquilt of women’s voices throughout most of the planet.
P218 The massive entry of women into the paid labor force is due, on the one hand, to the informationalization, networking, and globalization of the economy; on the other hand, to the gendered segmentation of the labor market taking advantage of the specific social conditions of women to enhance productivity, management control, and ultimately profits.
P225 So What are the main factors inducing the explosion of women’s employment?
The first, and most obvious, factor concerns the possibility of paying less for similar work.
P228 I want to emphasize that, in most cases, women are not being deskilled, or reduced to menial jobs, but quite the opposite. They are often promoted to multi-skilled jobs that require initiative, and education, as new technologies demand an autonomous labor force to adapt, and reprograme its own tasks. This is in fact the second major reason for hiring women, at a bargain price: their relational skills, increasingly necessary in an informational economy where the administration of things takes second place to the management of people.
But there is something else that I believe is probably the most important factor in inducing the expansion of women’s employment: their flexibility as workers. Indeed, women account for the bulk of part-time employment and temporary employment, and for a still small but growing share of self-employment… The flexibilization of work as major features of the informational economy, it seems reasonable to argue that there is a fit between women’s working flexibility, in schedules, time and entry and exit to and from the labor market, and the need of the new economy. This fit is also a gendered condition. Since women’s work has traditionally been considered as complementary to men’s earnings in the family, and since women are still responsible for their household and, above all, for the rearing of their children, work flexibility fits, as well, the survival strategies of coping with both worlds on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
P232 This process of full incorporation of women into the labor market, and into paid work, has important consequences for the family. The first is that more often than not a woman’s financial contribution becomes decisive for the household budget… Furthermore, the ideology of patriarchalism legitimizing domination on the basis of the family provider’s privilege was decisively undermined. Why could husbands not help at home if both members of the couple were equally absent for long hours, and if both were equally contributing to the family budget? The questions became more pressing with the increasing difficulty for women of assuming paid work, home work, child rearing, and management of husbands, while society was still organized on the assumption of the vanishing full-time housewife. With no proper child care, no planning of the spatial connection between residence, jobs, and services, and deteriorating social services, women were confronted with their reality: their beloved husbands/fathers were taking advantage of them.
P234 In all cases, through equality, difference, or separation, what is negated is women’s identity as defined by men, and as enshrined in the patriarchal family.
P259 Thus, the question arises: can feminism exist without feminist consciousness? Aren’t the struggles and organizations of women throughout the world, for their families (meaning, mainly, their children), their lives, their work, their shelter, their health, their dignity, feminism in practice?
Yet, overall, developing countries’ explicit feminism is still, by and large, elitist. This would leave us with a rather fundamental split between feminism and women’s struggles that would also have a North/South connotation.
P260 On the other hand, through their collective action, women around the world are linking their struggle, and their oppression, to their everyday lives.
P264 While sexual liberation is at the heart of gay and lesbian movements, gayness and lesbianism cannot be defined as sexual preferences. They are, fundamentally, identities, and in fact two distinct identities: lesbian and gay men.
P292 With fewer children, women working, men earning less and in less secure jobs, and with feminist ideas floating around, men face a number of options, none of which is the reproduction of the patriarchal family, if this analysis is correct.
First is separation; A second alternative is gayness.
P293 Yet, for most men, the most acceptable, stable, long-term solution is to renegotiate the heterosexual family contract. This includes domestic work sharing, economic partnership, sexual partnership, and above everything else, full sharing of parenting… While considerable progress has been made in this direction, egalitarian parenting has still a long way to go, and its growth is slower than the rise of separatism for both men and women.
P294 The main victims of this cultural transition are children, as they have become increasingly neglected under current conditions of family crisis… Since support from the welfare state is dwindling, men and women are left to themselves in handling their children’s problems, while losing control over their lives… By saying so, I am certainly not espousing the neo-conservative argument that blames feminism, or sexual liberation, for the plight of children. I am pinpointing a fundamental issue in our society that must be addressed without ideological prejudice: children are being massively neglected, as documented by social scientists and jouranlists.
Chapter 5 Globalization, Identification, and the State: A Powerless State or a Network State?
P313 Since firms, because of information technology, can locate in many different sites and still link up to global production networks and markets, there follows a downward spiral of social costs competition. [Which is the case in industrial societies.]
P314 These is, however, a somewhat more complex relationship between productivity, competitiveness, and the welfare state, emerging in the knowledge-based economy.
P315 Thus, What we observe is the emergence of two sharply contrasting models: one, the American knowledge economy model, using the massive import of highly skilled labor (over 200,000 engineers and scientists per year in the 1990s) as a source of productivity and innovation; the other, the Finnish, and to some extent Northern European, model of investing in home-grown, human capital, and improving standards of living that strengthen the social sources of productivity in the new, knowledge-based economy. In both cases, what is clear is that the welfare state, in order to survive in a globalized, interdependent economy, needs to be connected to productivity growth to create a virtuous circle by a feedback loop between social investment and economic growth.
In sum, if productivity increases in a given economy are small, its welfare state cannot sustain competitive pressures in the global context… The more a society relies on mobility of capital and immigration to produce knowledge labor, the less the role of the state. On the other hand, reliance on the welfare state and strategic development policies aimed at increasing productivity and competitiveness requires a more active role for the state. This is, however, a new form of state intervention that refers, on the one hand, to the link between the welfare of society and the generation of wealth in the economy, and on the other hand, to the capacity of the state to position its economy in the global network of competition and cooperation.
P335 Only 15 percent of the people surveyed feel close to their continent or to the world as their primary identity… the most widely diffused primary territorial identity is local/regional… Pure localists/regionalists, that is those who identify only with their locality or region, represent about 20 percent of the people interviewed, a figure ten times greater than the pure cosmopolitans. There is, however, a trend toward increasing cosmopolitanism among the younger, more educated, and more affluent groups of the population. [The evidence that people experience locally.]
P341 What the power of technology does is to extraordinarily amplify the trends rooted in social structure and institutions: oppressive societies may be more so with the new surveillance tools, while democratic, participatory societies may enhance their openness and representativeness by further distributing political power with the power of technology.
P342 The real issue is somewhere else: it is in the gathering of information on individuals by business firms, and organizations of all kinds, and in the creation of a market for this information… Rather than an oppressive “Big Brother,” it is a myriad of well-wishing “little sisters,” relating to each one of us on a personal basis because they know who we are, who have invaded all realms of life.
P356 What really matters is that the new power system is characterized, and I agree with David Held on this, by the plurality of sources of authority (and I would add, of power), the nation-state being just one of these sources.
P363 Thus, the stability of the network state depends on assuming the loss of individual sovereignty for every node of the network, including the most dominant of these nodes… the crisis of the network state would then develop into a crisis of global governance itself, as individual nation-states would again retrench into the defense of their specific interests, to be negotiated case by case, and context by context, with other stats and political actors. [which is the current situation]
It is an open question whether a globalized world can be governed by a disparate collection of national interests… In order to fulfill their national interests, nation-states must be de-nationalize, and internationalize… However, this cosmopolitan system of governance could only be the result of the rise of a cosmopolitan culture in civil societies around the world.
P364 In sum, the actual operating unit of political management in a globalized world is a network state formed by nation-states, international institutions, associations of nation-states, regional and local governments, and non-governmental organizations.
P366 Thus, the more states emphasize communalism, the less effective they become as co-agents of a global system of shared power. However, the more they triumph in the planetary scene, in close partnership with the agents of globalization, the less they represent their national constituencies. Whey they give exclusive priority to their national interests, as is the case with the American superpower, they destabilize the networks on which they ultimately depend for their survival and well-being.
Chapter 6 Informational Politics and the Crisis of Democracy
P375 Yet, the critical matter is that, without an active presence in the media, political proposals or candidates do not stand a chance of gathering broad support. Media politics is not all politics, but all politics must go through the media to affect decision-making. So doing, politics is fundamentally framed, in its substance, organization, process, and leadership, by the inherent logic of the media system, particularly by the new electronic media.
P402 The nation-state, has lost much of its sovereignty, undermined by the dynamics of global flows and trans-organizational networks of wealth, information, and power. Particularly critical for its legitimacy crisis is the state’s decreasing ability to fulfill its commitments as a welfare state because the integration of production and consumption in a globally interdependent system, and the related process of capitalist restructuring.
The state could only shift the source of its legitimacy from representing people’s will and providing for their well-being, to asserting collective identity, by identifying itself with communalism to the exclusion of other values and of minorities’ identities. This is indeed the source of the fundamentalist, nationalist, ethnic, territorial, or religious states, which seem to emerge from the current political crises of legitimacy.
P403 Captured in the media arena, reduced to personalized leadership, dependent on technologically sophisticated manipulation, pushed into unlawful financing, driven by and toward scandal politics, the party system has lost its appeal and trustworthiness, and for all practical purposes, is a bureaucratic remainder deprived of public confidence.
P414 Whatever the future, we are witnessing the fragmentation of the state, the unpredictability of the political system, and politics focused on single issues… Political democracy, as conceived by the liberal revolutions of the eighteenth century, and as diffused throughout the world in the twentieth century, has become an empty shell.
P415 Embryos of new democratic politics are numerous, and diverse around the world.
The first one is the re-creation of the local state… When electronic means (computer-mediated communication or local radio and television stations) are added to expand participation and consultation by citizens new technologies contribute to enhanced participation in local government… There are obvious limits to this localism since it accentuates the fragmentation of the nation-state. But, the most powerful trends legitimizing democracy are taking place, worldwide, at the local level. 【有趣的现象：大多数新的运动都采用了信息技术，但是他们也是在反对新技术带来的社会变化】
Conclusion: Social Change in the Network Society
P419 Bypassed by global networks of wealth, power, and information, the modern nation-state has lost much of its sovereignty
P423 Resistance and projects contradict the dominant logic of the network society by engaging in defensive and offensive struggles around three foundational realms of this new social structure: space, time and technology.
The communes of resistance defend their space, their places, against the placeless logic of the space of flows characterizing social domination in the information age… They use information technology for people’s horizontal communication, and communal prayer, while rejecting the new idolatry of technology and preserving transcendent values against the deconstructing logic of self-regulating computer networks.
P428 It is this decentered, subtle character of network of social change that makes it so difficult to perceive, and identify, new identity projects coming into being.