Manuel Castells

Manuel Castells: Trajectory of a world citizen
Last week I attended a lecture by the world famous social scientist Manuel Castells. In the process I discovered that his involvement in radical even revolutionary change as well as in academic pursuits was very much on par at least with my own ambitions ever since I was a student in Lund 1968.
About a week ago I attended a lecture by the now famous Professor Manuel Castells at our university. It was well attended and no wonder, Castells is one of the five most quoted social scientists in the world right now.
At this occasion (he is a resident scholar in this part of South Africa for some weeks) he had been persuaded to talk about his own intellectual journey and as he said at the beginning, this I am going to do now and never again. In short, he must be quite a private person, but nevertheless quite remarkable.
He did not deny that he has been endowed with a brilliant intellect but instead he said that he had passed the first exams and degrees at a very young age because his family had pushed him so much.
He asked himself why he entered the kind of life he did. Two things he said had been decisive to him. First of all, growing up in Franco’s Spain he could not but devote his life to social and of course political change. Secondly, also perhaps a result of having grown up in Franco’s Spain, he said that he wanted to maintain his freedom, whatever that might mean. But he quickly qualified this by saying that to become a professor did not seem a bad idea because the whole thing about academic life should be to defend, at all costs, freedom of opinion and expression etc.
Castells in fact have two tracks in his trajectory both of which are stuck intimately together. The one is a revolutionary zeal to change the world; the other is the pursuit of academic achievements.
These two are constantly interacting and while he talked I discovered that I had a history of a similar kind, just not as brilliant and conspicuous. He was thrown out of Spain because of protests against the Franco regime. That is why he ended up in Paris. While he was busy with his doctorate there he also was caught up in the student protests of 1968, which started in Paris and soon enough spread over the world.
It was in fact a remarkable time. And, as he underlined, it was not just a protest against the lack of means as such. The fact that many workers joined hands with the students made the political leadership very nervous. People did strike not just to achieve certain material results, they took time, while striking, to sit down and discuss issues about life, in political, social, philosophical and theological terms, it was in fact a time of great renewal; the current society would have to change in its foundations.
His activities during the student uprising in 1968 led to another expulsion. He had to leave France as well. Without even remembering all the turns and twists I at least recall that he took up academic positions in Latin Amcerica, Chile as well as Brazil, and much later he was appointed professor at wellknown universities in the US. At present he is at South California University. Part of his trajectory is also that from having been thrown out of two Latin countries in Europe he ultimately has become a global person in the true sense. He now teaches and supervises at universities in several continents simultaneously, he advises governments in various parts of the world but as he noted, he never charges anything from giving such advice as that would impinge negatively on his academic freedom. Having worked within fields like urban sociology he has come to pay more and more attention to problems around communication and power, especially with regard to the emerging global network society.
Another thing that impressed me was that he thought his students more important than giving advice to governments. After all, he said, it is through the students that I get paid.
Listening to Castells together with perhaps 500 other scholars and students, I could also sense a familiarisation and proximity to my own life. As he talked I could identify with this constant flux between serious study and actual participation in what must be social change.
It just so happened that during the spring term of 1968, the time when the student protests flared up around Europe, I was the full time secretary of the Student Chirstian Movement at Lund University together with Göran Bexell who was chairperson (Göran remained in Lund and has been theology professor there as well as Rector of the university for the last six years until last year). This was an unforgettable time. Many students were heavily involved in various student activities. At the SCM headquarters we had full house many a time and from January to end of May our statistics told us we had had more than six thousand participants in various programmes.
We wanted to change the world, yes. Soon; the SCM activities were of two kinds: debates and presentations of social and political issues on the one hand and worship, meditations and retreats on the other. We mirrored very well what was going on in the wider student community and we were convinced that our Christian faith would take us the whole way. The radical left had really caught the wind and few worried about that, I also not as long as I did not have to subscribe to any kind of doctrinal Marxism. In the heat of the student uprising most of us agreed that there were things to learn and apply from the radical left.
I wanted to go further than just be part of the Christian fellowship at Tomegapsgatan, our headquarters, so I joined the socalled “U-gruppen (Development Group) at Lund’s University”, which in May 1968 hade more 4000 members, the most prominent leader being Staffan Lindberg, a sociologist specializing on India.
The Christians also had their leftist group under the leadership of Per Frostin, later in the 1990s professor in theology at Lund, but he tragically died in cancer soon after taking up this position as professor. At that point in 1968, Per was a radical Marxist and Christian and I was quite critical about his opinions. Later we came much closer also in terms of ideology and he was in the end one of the few theologians from the West who could appreciate and evaluate Black Theology in South Africa and other liberation theologies, to which many of writings bear witness to this day.
I know that it may sound very presumptuous of me to say that listening to Manuel Castells reminded me of my own involvement in the very same movement; let’s admit that it was on a different scale but nevertheless and I am in some ways returning to the same things again these days (emphasising the need for Liberation Theology for example). My reader may think what she or he likes to think but it is a fact that my own life in many ways also has been forged by these two convictions: I am here to change the world for the better and I am a person with some freedom endowed in me (which I believe God has instilled in me despite all talk of the Fall of sin and the human incapacity to do good). Far from being a determinist I believe that every human being has a space somewhere, both in terms of physical space as in terms of time, where there is a precious freedom to choose and take responsibility.
Manuel Castells’ trajectory from Barcelona to Paris and then to the rest of the world reminded me of that.
In addition he admitted that he had found South Africa to be a place where he could contribute and share his insights and thereby giving hope to a place full of divisions, contradictions but also of incredible potentials for great things.