Castells, Communal Havens: Identity and Meaning in the Network Society Flashcards
How does Castells define identity?
people’s source of meaning and experience
b. must be distinguished from what a society traditionally called roles (worker, mother, smoker, churchgoer)
c. organizes the meaning
Where does Castells locate identity?
a. Sources of meaning for the actors themselves, and by themselves, constructed through a process of individuation
b. Dominant institutions, they become identities only when and if social actors internalize them and construct their meaning around this internalization
c. Identities are located within ones’ self and constructed in a context marked by power relations
Know and understand Castells definition of Meaning.
a. Symbolic identification by a social actor of the purpose of his/her action
How is meaning organized in the network society?
a. around a primary identity (identity that frames the others) that is self sustaining around time and space
How do identities become meaningful?
a. individuals, social groups, and societies processing all these materials (building materials from history, biology, geography, productive and reproductive institutions, collective memory and personal fantasies, power apparatuses and religious revelations), and rearrange their meaning according to social determinations and cultural projects that are rooted in their social structure, and in their space/time framework
What is Castells hypothesis concerning the construction of identity?
a.who constructs collective identity, and for what, largely determines the symbolic content of this identity, and its meaning for those identifying with it or placing themselves outside it
What are the three forms and origins of identity?
a. Legitimizing Identity - introduced by the dominant institutions of society to extend and rationalize their domination vis a vis social actors, the theme that is at the heart of Sennet’s theory of authority and domination, but also fits with various theories of nationalism
b. Resistance Identity - generated by those actors who are in positions/conditions devalued and/or stigmatized by the logic of domination, thus building techniques of resistance and survival on the basis of principles of different form, or opposed to, those permeating the institutions of society, as calhoun purposes when explaining the emergence of identity politics
c. Project Identity - when social actors on the basis of whichever cultural materials are available to them, build a new identity that redefines their position in society and, by doing so, seek the transformation of overall social structure. This is the case, for instance, when feminism moves out from the trenches of resistance of women’s identity and women’s rights, to challenge patriarchalism, thus the patriarchal family, thus the entire structure of production, reproduction, and personality on which societies have been historically based
What is the relationship between project identity and communal resistance?
a. subjects, if and when constructed are not built any longer on the basis of civil societies, that are in the process of disintegration, but as prolongation of communal resistance
b. While in modernity (early or late) project identity was constructed from civil society (as in the case of socialism and on the basis of labor movement), in the network society project identity, if it develops at all grows from communal resistance
c. This is the actual meaning of the new primacy of identity politics in the network society
d. Project identity grows from communal resistance
How does Castells define fundamentalism? What does this mean?
a.the constitution 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 intermediates between God and humanity
(this means to have a common religious identity you would share with all the people a specific behavior or common identification given by someone in power of that religion who interprets God’s law)
