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8 Taylor
Gemeinschaft are used to distinguish between feelings of belonging to an abstract
society and a more intimate community respectively. New Web-based social
movements have arguably produced a hybrid combination of both affinities. Their
sense of belonging is abstract in the sense that it often refers to a sense of solidarity
stretched by global distances, yet group solidarity is also nurtured by those same
global communications that serve to reinforce awareness of the particularities of
local struggles.
Social movements have become exactly that – movements - but often of
socially relevant information rather than actual physical bodies of people (although
the two categories may be combined in Web-facilitated protest events such as
World Trade Organization demonstrations). Such new groups may be usefully
understood as the affective groups Maffesoli (1996) describes as neo-tribes. In
contrast to capitalism’s “iron cage of rationality,” new affective relationships are
built upon a non-logical emotional basis, and in a more proactive version of
Baudrillard’s inertly fatal masses of postmodernity. For Maffesoli, such neo-tribes
have a certain “underground puissance”: ‘The rational era is built on the principle
of individuation and of separation, whereas the empathetic period is marked by the
lack of differentiation, the “loss” in a collective subject: in other words, what I shall
call neo-tribalism.’ (Maffesoli 1996: 11) The new neo-tribes do not fit easily into
the classificatory categories of the system that would absorb them: ‘Their outlines
are ill-defined: sex, appearance, lifestyles – even ideology – are increasingly
qualified in terms (“trans”, “meta”) that go beyond the logic of identity and/or binary
logic.’ (ibid: 11) These new social movements ironically use the binary-based
circulation systems of capitalism for their own non-binary purposes that in another
semantic irony can perhaps be understood best in terms of a web.
FROM NETWORKS TO WEBS
The terminals of the network society are static. The bonding, on the
other hand, of web weavers with machines is nomadic. They form
communities with machines, navigate in cultural worlds attached
to machines. These spiders weave not networks, but webs, perhaps
electronic webs, undermining and undercutting the networks.
Networks need walls. Webs go around the walls, up the walls, hide
in the nooks and crannies and corners of where the walls meet …
Networks are shiny, new, flawless. Spiders’ webs in contrast,
attach to abandoned rooms, to disused objects, to the ruins, the
disused and discarded objects of capitalist production. Networks
are cast more or less in stone; webs are weak, easily destroyed.
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