Visions of community for community OR

Originally presented at the Meaningless Meanings seminar, Gray's School of Art, Aberdeen (June 2013). In political, social and cultural discourse, the term ‘community’ is wielded and appealed to as a central concept of democracy, conjuring a sense of common experience and mutual interest. However, it frequently passes without critical scrutiny or inquiry into its essential value. Its authority, meanwhile, is compromised by a capacity to serve purposes on alternate sides of any given debate. It is an adaptable term, delineating social, geographical, religious, political, professional or even online groupings; in each case, however, it implies a consciousness of collective identity not necessarily experienced by members. Community also carries a misleading implication of solidarity and singularity of outlook. Any community must, by definition, be formed of individuals, but in many discussions the independence and diversity of individual viewpoints become subsumed in the homogeneity of community characterisation. Presented as fundamentally integrated, harmonious and indivisible, community carries a positive moral charge into policy and academic literature. In its many compound uses, from ‘community care’ to ‘community theatre’, it connotes local commitment and cohesion, opposing only discord and isolation. With nothing substantive to push against, though, does the idea of ‘community’ provide any firmer basis for social action than a banal suggestion of ‘goodness’? This paper proposes that the term ‘community’ can be better understood by exploring how and in whose interests it may be opposed, either directly or indirectly, in positive and possibly persuasive ways. It argues that this approach offers a differentiated and more value-specific sense of what it is that is proposed or defended when community is invoked as a concept. Revisiting an obsolete definition of the term which opposes ‘the commons’ to ‘the privileged classes’, it traces activist uses to fault lines in democratic representation which are more suggestive of difference than commonality, and explores tensions between community and the individual.

2001

I will attempt to present a new inquiry that begins with Georges Bataille and follows through Jean-LucNancy and Giorgio Agamben who all attempt to redefine community against its tendency of totalitarianism. They also mostly, belong to a generation of French thinkers who, following Marx, were attempting to define the superstructure in as much in explaining how the capitalist means of production defines and affects a society where profit acts as its primary driver. Bataille had lived through the horrors of the Nazi occupation of Europe and saw parallels with capital in defining society as well as the reported totalisation of the anti-capitalist USSR. His project was to create a plane where conflict would be theoretically impossible. He was not positioning a solution, but a recipe for the possibility of a life without certain devastating conflicts. Specifically, war, but also leaving open the possibility of the hope of what a community could bring, without any expectation that it will bring it. The foundations of such a community would rely on a simple premise. That the heart or basis or essence of a community is heterogeneity. Later in this essay I will attempt to apply some of the ideas expressed in relation to Northern Ireland.

1999

Traditionally, historians have preferred to rely on "common sense" approaches to the meaning of community, but such definitions, emphasizing the ideas of a shared place and a static, self-contained entity, are simply inadequate for historical research and writing. Three elements are fundamental to understanding the historical significance of community: community as imagined reality, community as social interaction, and community as a process. An interdisciplinary approach to this question takes into consideration the thinking of social scientists and humanists on the importance of space and networks in social life. The historical study of community, one that embraces both cultural and spatial perspectives, has much to benefit from and much to contribute to this ever-growing and evolving body of work. As they have done with such concepts as "the family" and "the nation", historians must make "community" a problem to be studied, discussed, and debated. * John C. Walsh is a student in the Tri-University Doctoral Progam at the University of Guelph. Seven High is a doctoral student in the Department of History at the University of Ottawa. We owe much to Chad Gaffield, who, in his role as teacher, challenged us to think critically, creatively and later cooperatively about the concept of "community". We are grateful to all the various people who have taken the time to read drafts, discuss ideas, and provide helpful comments:

2006

People, Place and Policy Online

The book is divided into two parts, roughly speaking covering theory and theory-inpractice respectively. Part One explores the concept of community generally, and specifically what community might mean and how it might operate under capitalist p. 54. Book review-Understanding Community: Politics, policy and practice

Polish Sociological Review, 2016

1.Roberto Esposito in his book Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community powerfully stated that:Nothing seems more appropriate today than thinking community; nothing more necessary, demanded, and heralded by a situation that joins in a unique epochal knot the failure of all communisms with the misery of new individualisms. Nevertheless, nothing is further from view; nothing so remote, repressed, and put off until later, to a distant and indecipherable horizon (Esposito 2010: 2).Frankly speaking, I share Esposito's scepticism on the prospects of establishing community today on par with his reservations towards re-inventing a new form of community. In fact, I am compelled to say that to me no idea is more worrying, unsettling, problematic and doubtful than that of community. In fact, it is in particular the question of a political community and even more so the calls to establish one that concern me most in political discourse. I am equally puzzled and caught unaware when I ...

ethic@ - An international Journal for Moral Philosophy, 2013

Three decades after it arose, the contemporary Communitarianism and the questions it raised still appear to be worthy of serious attention. In an attempt to confront this legacy, the first part of the present essay seeks to propose a redefinition of the concept of community. It does so by setting itself two key phenomenological questions, which are both devoted to the concept of sharing. The first question asks how something can be shared amongst multiple beings who are divided by emotional, ethical, religious, linguistic and ethnic differences. The second and no less fundamental question, in turn, asks what people have to share in the first place. The second part of the essay invokes a familiar Kantian distinction in order to sketch out and discuss a proposed 'semantics of sharing'. This semantic model is intended to clarify and enrich the questions surrounding the 'integration of the self', which constitutes one of the most central aspects of the human being's need for sociality.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2006

As the realm of the community has grown increasingly important in the contemporary political economy, the theoretical debates surrounding community have also grown in importance and volume. Too often this literature has been either celebratory or dismissive; either romanticizing the concept and thereby elevating it to primary rank as the focal point of societal initiatives, or objecting to its regulated limits and contradictions and thereby dismissing its importance and political utility. There are important contributions being made by both those who dismiss community and those who celebrate it. But for those interested in understanding the potential for emancipatory social change in the contemporary political economy of neoliberalism there are also severe limitations imposed by these perspectives. After critiquing these literatures and debates, we put forward an understanding of community that is neither dismissive nor celebratory, but instead argues that communities need to be understood as simultaneously products of both their larger, and largely external, contexts, and the practices, organizations and relations that take place within them. Thus, communities, because of their central place in capitalist political economies, can be vital arenas for social change. But they are also arenas that are constrained in their capacities to host such efforts.